Smoked Salmon and Spinach Lasagne

I'm normally a bit daunted by chefs' books but Chefs at Home, a collection of recipes from some of Britain's best loved chefs which has been put together in aid of Hospitality Action, a charity that supports the restaurant industry, is full of the kind of food they actually make for their families.

This one is from Tom Kitchin who writes: "This comforting pasta bake is easy to prepare and always popular. The recipe is based on a Scandinavian dish that my wife Michaela has been making for years. It’s absolutely delicious and has the added advantage that it can be prepared in advance, ready to bake and serve when required."

Serves 4

100g unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing

100g plain flour

950ml whole milk

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

½ teaspoon grated nutmeg

½ leek, cut into thin strips

400g baby spinach

2 garlic cloves, crushed

8–10 lasagne sheets

500g smoked salmon, cut into 2cm squares

250g cheddar, grated

50g parmesan, grated

4 dill sprigs, chopped

salt and freshly ground black pepper

green salad, to serve

Melt 75g of the butter in a heavy-based saucepan over a medium heat. Add the flour and cook out for 1–2 minutes, then slowly add the milk, stirring as you go. Cook for 8–10 minutes, stirring continuously without letting the sauce boil too hard, until thickened. Once thickened, add the mustard and nutmeg.

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/Gas mark 4 and grease a lasagne dish with butter.

Melt the remaining 25g of butter in a saucepan, add the leek and cook for 2–3 minutes to soften a little. Season with salt and pepper, then add the spinach leaves (a handful at a time is easier) and the garlic and cook for a further 2–3 minutes, until the spinach has wilted. Drain off the excess liquid.

Spread some of the sauce over the bottom of the dish and place a layer of lasagne sheets on top. Top with some of the leek and spinach mixture, then some smoked salmon. Sprinkle over some cheddar and parmesan. Repeat the process, finishing the top layer with sauce, a few pieces of salmon, and grated cheese. Bake for 45 minutes, until golden and the lasagne is tender. (To check if the lasagne is cooked, insert a fork – if there’s no resistance, it’s ready.)

Sprinkle the dill over the top and serve with a fresh green salad.

What to drink: I'd go for a rich full-bodied white like an old vine chenin blanc, a godello or a grillo with this

Extract taken from Chefs at Home: Delicious Family Recipes from the UK’s Leading Locked Down Chefs (£26, Jon Croft Editions)

Photography ©Kris Kirkham

Spiced Paneer, Spinach and Pea Grain Bowl with Mint Yoghurt Sauce

The big trend for cookbooks this year is vegetarian food and no-one is better able to hold your hand and give you inspiration than my pal Elly Pear. This delicious weekday recipe, which can be rustled up in 20 minutes, comes from her new book Green.

Elly writes: The spicy cubes of fried paneer cheese are strong competition, but I reckon it’s actually the sauce that is the star of this show. Inspired by Indian restaurant yoghurt sauce (perfect for dipping shards of poppadum into while you neck a cold beer and deliberate over what to order), it was one of the most popular things I’d made in ages when I first served it up. Everyone loved it. I was then tempted to put it on everything, of course. For a real feast, this dish goes particularly well with Cauliflower and Spinach Pakoras (also in the book)

Serves 4

2 tbsp coconut oil (coconut is best for flavour, but any oil is fine)

2 x 225g packs of paneer, cut into 2cm cubes

1 garlic clove, peeled and grated or crushed

2cm piece fresh root ginger, peeled and grated or crushed

1 tsp cumin seeds

2–4 tbsp tandoori curry paste (according to taste)

250g frozen peas, defrosted

4 tbsp boiling water

2 x 220g pouches of mixed rice and grains (I use brown rice and mixed grains)

130g baby leaf spinach

Lemon wedges, to serve

Red chilli slices, to serve

Naan bread, to serve

For the yoghurt sauce

250g Greek-style yoghurt or plain coconut yoghurt

1 tsp ground turmeric

2 tsp lemon juice

3 tsp mint sauce

1 tsp caster sugar (or to taste)

2 heaped tbsp finely chopped

fresh coriander

½ tsp flaked sea salt

Heat the coconut oil in a large frying pan over a medium–high heat. Add the paneer cubes to the pan and fry until golden, in batches if necessary. Allow the paneer to form a crust on each side of the cubes before turning them over.

This takes about 10 minutes, but it stops the paneer from breaking up and also adds a lot of important flavour and texture. Remove from the pan and set aside.

Lower the heat to medium–low then gently fry the garlic, ginger and cumin seeds for 1 minute. Return the paneer to the pan, add the curry paste, stir and fry for 1 minute over a medium heat. Add the peas along with 4 tablespoons of boiling water and stir everything together.

If you have a microwave, you can speed things up a little by warming the pouches of rice and mixed grains according to the packet instructions. If you don’t have a microwave, never fear. (Neither do I!) Simply add the rice and grains to the pan, separating them with your fingers to break up any clumps as they tumble in.

Add the spinach to the pan, toss it all together, then cover with a lid and cook for 2–3 minutes until the spinach has wilted and everything is piping hot. Meanwhile, make the mint yoghurt sauce. Place the yoghurt in a small bowl and stir in all the other ingredients.

Divide the rice and grains mixture between 4 bowls. Serve with lemon wedges, red chilli slices and naan bread, alongside the bowl of mint yoghurt sauce.

What to drink: Elly mentions a cold beer in her introduction which sounds spot on. A fruity rosé would also be good.

Green by Elly Pear (Curshen) is published by Ebury Press (£22.00). Photo credit Martin Poole.

Spinach & agushi curry

I recently chaired a panel on women in food at the Abergavenny Food Festival which included the wonderful Zoe Adjonyoh. I hadn't seen her book Zoe's Ghana Kitchen before but discovered it was full of the most delicious recipes, many of them vegan.

There's also a really brilliant section at the beginning of the book showing and explaining the more unfamiliar ingredients she uses.

Here's one of the recipes that particularly appealed to me.

Spinach & Agushi curry

Serves 4-6

Here’s my twist on traditional Kontomire or nkontomire stew – a delicious vegan spinach curry, to which you can add extra steamed veg of your choice to make it into a more substantial meal.

1 tablespoon coconut oil

1 small onion, thinly sliced

2 teaspoons curry powder

1 teaspoon chilli powder

350ml (12fl oz) uncooked Chalé sauce (see below)

100g (3½oz) or about 2 heaped tablespoons agushi (dried ground melon seeds, available in West African and Caribbean shops and also online )

8 guinea peppers, crushed (also known as grains of paradise - optional)

juice of 1 lime

150–300ml (5–10fl oz) water or good-quality vegetable stock, if required

200g (7oz) baby leaf spinach

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

Grilled plantain (optiona)

4–6 ripe plantains

1 tablespoon ground ginger

½ tablespoon dried chilli flakes

sea salt

coconut oil (melted) and olive oil, for drizzling

Heat a large, heavy-based saucepan and add the coconut oil. When it has melted, add the onion and sauté over a medium heat for a few minutes until softened, then add the curry and chilli powders and stir well. Stir in the chalé sauce and simmer over a low heat for 20 minutes.

Gently stir in the agushi, using the back of a wooden spoon to break down any lumps that may form – the sauce should start to turn creamy and resemble scrambled eggs. Add the guinea peppers, if using, and the lime juice. Leave to simmer over a medium heat for a further 10 minutes. If the sauce becomes too thick, add the water or vegetable stock a little at a time to loosen it. The colour of the stew will have changed from pink to a mustard colour.

Stir in the spinach and sea salt and black pepper, then simmer gently until the spinach has wilted.

Meanwhile, prepare the grilled plantain, if making. Preheat the grill to medium-high. Using a sharp knife, peel the plantains by cutting the tips off each end and slicing through the skin lengthways (avoid cutting into the flesh), then use your hands to remove the skin. Cut the plantains in half lengthways. Rub with the ground ginger, chilli flakes and sea salt, and drizzle with coconut or olive oil. Grill for 12–15 minutes, turning over halfway through. Serve alongside the spinach curry.

Chalé Sauce

This basic recipe is based on my dad’s everyday cooking sauce. He would whip this up and then literally throw in any type of meat, fish or protein, but it was always tasty.

You can just blend the ingredients and store the uncooked sauce for later use, or cook it and then leave to cool – either way it saves time when making many of the recipes in this book. I make a big batch of this at least once a week – you can easily double the quantity if you want to make a bigger batch, although it’s not necessary to increase the Scotch Bonnet unless you like it extra-extra-hot!

400g (14oz) can tomatoes or 250g (9oz) fresh tomatoes

30g (1oz) or 2 tablespoons tomato purée

1 onion, roughly chopped

5cm (2-inch) piece fresh root ginger, grated (unpeeled if organic)

1 red Scotch Bonnet chilli, deseeded

1 tablespoon dried chilli flakes

1 teaspoon sea salt

3 garlic cloves (optional)

To cook

1 tablespoon sunflower oil

1 onion, finely diced

1 teaspoon curry powder

1 teaspoon extra-hot chilli powder

Makes 500ml (18fl oz)

Place all the ingredients except the ‘to cook’ ones in a blender and blend together until you have a fairly smooth paste. This is your uncooked chalé sauce.

For cooked chalé sauce, heat the oil in a heavy-based saucepan, add the onion and sauté over a medium heat for a few minutes until softened. Then add the curry powder and chilli powder and stir thoroughly to coat the onion evenly. Add the blended tomato mixture and simmer gently for 35–40 minutes.

Use straight away, or leave to cool then store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days, or freeze for future use.

What to drink: Zoe has a number of delicious-sounding drink recipes in the book - I'm liking the sound of Sobolo or sorrel juice with this dish. Otherwise you could go for something like a dandelion and burdock or even a lager but I don't think it's a wine kind of dish.

Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen by Zoe Adjonyoh, is published by Mitchell Beazley £25 www.octopusbooks.co.uk

Image credit: Nassima Rothacker

Fridge- or freezer-foraged cheese, onion and parsley pie

This is the kind of recipe (or rather idea) that I used to put on my old blog The Frugal Cook. But as I’ve given up on it (I know - I shouldn’t have done) I’m posting it here.

It stemmed from having bought a massive bunch of parsley in our local French supermarket for 85p about which I subsequently had a lively discussion on Twitter as to whether you could buy the same amount in a UK supermarket for the price. (I still maintain you can’t!)

Anyway having bragged about how much I’d bought I felt obliged to use up as much as possible and decided to create a makeshift supper combining it with some ingredients that had been lurking in the freezer since our last trip to France at Christmas.

Although this is inspired by the Greek pie spanakopitta - not least because I mistakenly thought I had some feta lurking in the freezer - it can basically be made with whatever you have to hand but you basically need some kind of herbs or greens, some kind of onion and some kind of cheese. And pastry of course!

Serves 4

2 tbsp olive oil

20g butter

1 bunch of new season’s onions (about 300-350g) or a bunch of spring onions or a large sweet onion

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

a big bunch of flat leaf parsley (about 200g, I’m guessing) or a similar quantity of spinach or other greens, washed and roughly chopped. Include some stalks if they’re not too tough.

About 175g feta or other sheep cheese (I used Manchego and a bit of Cantal). Basically whatever you have in the fridge.

1 egg, beaten

A sheet of ready-rolled or a block of puff pastry, thawed (about 250g although the pack I used was a circular tart base that weighed 230g)

Preheat the over to 220°C. Heat the oil in a frying pan, then add the butter. Once it starts foaming, tip in the chopped onions and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the crushed garlic, stir and take off the heat. Leave to cool for 5 minutes then tip in the chopped parsley or greens and the grated cheese and half the beaten egg. Season with pepper and a little salt, depending how salty the cheese is.

Unroll the pastry onto a floured table or board, rolling it out a little more if you can. Work out how you’re going to make your pastry parcel, spoon the filling onto the middle of the pastry sheet or circle and fold over the sides, brushing the exposed edges with the remaining beaten egg to help it stick together.

Brush the surface of the pie with egg then cut three slits in the top. Bake for about 10-12 minutes then turn the heat down to 190°C and cook for another 10-15 minutes or so until nicely browned. Remove the pie from the oven and rest for 10 minutes then serve with warm steamed asparagus (as I did) or a salad.

What to drink: I think this is more a white wine dish than a red. We drank Picpoul but any other crisp dry white would work. Assyrtiko if you want to keep the Greek theme going.