King Slaw

Like coleslaw? Love King-Slaw.

The traditional shredded root and leaf salad is always good, but every now and then you need something that hits a little harder, leaves a kick on the tongue. It works like this.

A handful of currants, dunked into a spoon of good vinegar. Why currants? Because the cupboard was bare of sultanas, of course. Finely grated carrot. Cabbage, shredded as finely as is humanly possible. White cabbage, of course, or green if like me it's what you have sitting in the fridge. And then the Kingdom:

• A spoon of mustard. Colemans, if you can. If not, anything yellow.
  
• A half spoon of hot curry powder. Or less. Enough for a zing and no more - don't break the slaw!
• A small spoon of runny honey. Greek, if you please.
• Salt, pepper (freshly ground), and
  
• big spoons of mayonnaise. Enough to juice it up.
  

Add to that a handful of pine kernels, mash it all together, and leave to relax. A good slaw has sat for some time - overnight may be better, if you're in no rush.

And that's it. Take a plate and lay down the slaw. Sprinkle with paprika and curry powder, and drizzle with anything fancy-looking (oil works). There it is - King Slaw, fit for the proverbial.

Sunday's best

There is no such thing as the right breakfast. Eggs Benedict may rule the roost, but sometimes a good fry-up is the only recourse for a growling belly. Or a Frühstück, if you're in a Germanic frame and umlauts are rolling off your buds.

I was idling through the paper, while trying to decide what variant I was angling for, when I saw a picture of some cheese and honey. Cheese and honey? Then I remembered the slab of Taleggio in the fridge. Salty and magnificent on its own, drippy and fascinating in an omelette, and - right then and there - perfect toasted with honey. Even better with the remains of my fridge.

And there it was. Boiled eggs, hard as bullets, decent bacon, and good crusty Italian loaf toasted with the taleggio cheese, and the whole lot drizzled artfully with honey. Of course, the obligatory pickled piquillo on the side (until they run out), a Sunday Supplement and a mug of builder's tea.


OK, so I may have gone overboard with the eggs, two would have been enough, but the hangover was enough for three.

Motor-oil sauce

If you can't stand the heat...

Finding myself with a surfeit of leery red bird-eye chillis, I was minded to replenish my supply of hot sauce. I still had half a bottle in the fridge, which by now was at least three years vintage and over time had lost in heat and gained in sweetness. The sauce, in short, had had its chips.

I'm very particular about my hot sauce - as are most sauce afficionadoes. A friend keeps one cupboard stocked end-to-end with his favourite brand - that sauce being so hard to source. For me, the heat has to be countered by sweetness, sharpness and a richness of texture. Excessive fire is optional (but a good option indeed). So. To business.

A couple of finely chopped shallots are sweated off in a dash of light oil. Garlic is added - three or four cloves to a bottle - and ginger, equally chopped. Fried lightly, and then the chillis are thrown in, chopped up and all. Salt, and pepper, lots of that.

If you want more flavour and less heat, de-seed fifty percent of the peppers and use more of them. If you want more heat, add a scotch bonnet or two - that'll add a bit of a kick. If you're a freak, use those big peppers which aren't so hot, but, really, if you're doing that what are you doing making hot sauce?

This whole lot is loosened up with some vinegar, and then blended to a saucy consistency. Here's where things went strange - I discovered that Billy, my trusty hand blender, was leaking a strange smelling liquid. Whether it leaked into the sauce or not I couldn't tell - the heat masked any unwarranted scents.

Having done that, slip in enough sugar to make it all sharp-yet-sweet, and simmer until it thickens up nicely. Shove it into an unlabelled bottle, and there you go. Motor-oil sauce - hot sauce flavoured with the juice of a blender's engine.




A little maturity always helps - you may want to shelve it for a month or two before uncorking.


I have been thinking also of hot sauces made with green chillis - I was inspired by the notion of flavouring a green chilli sauce with freshly distilled wormwood. Thujone and Capsaicin are potentially a marriage made in heaven. Sadly I didn't have the time to fabricate a still; I'm not sure if my Wormwood will still have any leaves by the time I engineer something suitable.

The Bros. Cray

Swinging through Borough Market at lunchtime,

I just couldn't resist buying a handful of these little critters - mostly because the fishmonger had let one of them loose, and it was ambling amiably across his mackerel. I did ask what to do (as a crayfish novice), but the advice was ill-forthcoming and monosyllabic:

"What are they?"

Crayfish.

"How do I keep them?"

Fridge.

"How do I cook them?"

Boil'em.

"Just like that?"

Yep.

So I fridged them, took them home in my backpack, and then decided what to do next. I'd only ever eaten crayfish in Pret sandwiches before, and they were just tails, so it was quite the novelty to have these lively buggers running about in my kitchen.

I was minded to make a hot aioli type affair with some mindblowing pickled piquillo peppers I'd also picked up that day (I realised that after 'tasting' them at the stall religiously for three months, perhaps I ought to oblige and buy some), but the first attempt failed at the oil hurdle. Organic sunflower oil is disgusting.

And a little simple salad of shredded endive (chickory, if you wish), spring onions (scallions, if you wish), and coriander (cilantro, if you wish). Sweet. Dash of sesame oil, squeeze of lemon, and there you go. And then to the crayfish.

Ohh-Crayyy... What next
Well, I caught them (difficult - they are masters of the reverse gear and had scooted backwards into all sorts of crannies) and despite idly musing about engineering a little 'death slide' which would chute them directly into the pot, I dispatched them as humanely as humanly possible and, as the 'monger suggested, boiled'em.




Boiled'em, halved'em, cleaned'em*, and ate'em. The strange thing was that having had them so recently running about the worktop, even when cooked I was expecting them to wriggle about.




And how were they? Well, one thing I forgot was that shellfish are generally eaten with specialist tools. I had to fish in my toolbox for a pair of pliers, and set to with those and a few bamboo skewers. Messy business. Messy - but well worth it. Not much meat on them though, good thing I also stuffed some aubergines with a mix of rice, tomato and spiced meat, and racked those up for after.

* I'm too novice to know if the gloopy bits are good-to-eat or good-to-kill.