Blood oranges, chicories and stew

(And happy anniversary Catherine Is Under Pressure)

I am having a very welcome break from my normal routine at the moment. My time is being divided between home and recipe testing and schlepping across London to shoot my new pressure cooker book. Moving the recipes from my own kitchen out into the world is always exciting and a little bit scary and I’m always a bit in awe of the team of people who manage to make my food look as good as they do. It’s also nice being around other people for a change - it suddenly makes things a bit more collaborative and the book is always better for it.

Mixing things up a bit came at just the right time, shaking me out of the rut that is my usual start to the year. January is always a horror, but now we are well into February, which can still be a bit on the gloomy side but it is a) shorter and b) the month my son is born and c) you really start to notice the light creeping back in and signs of growth (Mimosa! Snowdrops! Cherry Blossom already! Three Cornered Leek!) so it feels much more of a new beginning and more optimistic than miserable old January.

Which is partly why February last year felt the right time to start Catherine is Under Pressure, and we have now reached its first anniversary. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the first year of writing a newsletter has gone and how I keen I am for it to continue. There are still plenty of topics I want to cover on the how tos of pressure cooking – more occur to me all the time. I am going to continue posting seasonal recipes and have a few other ideas up my sleeve.

I have also come to the conclusion that now is the time to ask you all to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This newsletter has been 100% free so far. But I realised pretty early on that writing these posts is quite time consuming and I need to be able to afford to devote more time to them, rather than claw out a few hours here and there around my other work. I have been really surprised – and very grateful – by the number of people who have already pledged to pay and the messages which have gone with them. Thank you all! I hope a few more of you might be persuaded to do so too. Rest assured that most of the newsletter – including anything about how to use pressure cookers – will continue to be free. I will be putting some of the recipes behind a paywall and running a fortnightly “Ask me Anything” for paid subscribers too. A couple of incentives – if you sign up for a year, you will get a 25% discount until the end of the month. And anyone who wants to fork out for a Founders Subscription will get a signed copy of my new book when it comes out. I am also going to try to work out some in person/on line events around pressure cooking so watch this space.

Now I’ve got that out of the way, onto the food part of this post! Another thing I love about February is the joy of buying blood oranges and all those bitter leaves which tend to be imported from Italy this time of year. If your palate is feeling a bit jaded, they are the best way to perk it up a bit. They make a perfect light lunch together and I often make the meal a bit more substantial by adding beans if I have any ready cooked in the fridge.

It is still a time of comfort foods, of course and I am eating a lot of potatoes and cheese, but at the weekend I made a comforting pot of beans, deliberately quite plain (just herbs and garlic added to the pot as they cooked), knowing that I was going to earmark them for a mellow backdrop to the sour/bitter flavours of the Italian leaves and blood oranges.

So, first here’s a quick “how to” on the beans. There are so many ways and combination of ways to cook a pot of beans. I am going to do a big post on this at some point when I have all my timings sorted out – at the moment I am experimenting with a new method which really minimises the fuel consumption.

So – you can soak the beans the old fashioned way (overnight in salted water) or the quick way outlined in Modern Pressure Cooking (cover in water, add salt, bring up to high pressure, cook for 2 minutes, leave to stand off the heat for 5 minutes, release any remaining pressure and drain), or you can cook straight from the packet.

Then you can cook in water, stock, or any other ingredients, some of which may slow down the cooking process (eg., tomatoes) – and again, for how long depends on the type of bean, whether or not you have soaked it, and whether you want to cook it the faster, less fuel efficient way, or the slower, more fuel efficient way. The latter basically means that you use the pressure cooker as a hyper efficient “hay box”. After using either of the soaking options (the overnight soak out of preference), I put in the pressure cooker with fresh salted water, bring up to high pressure, cook for 1 minute only and remove from the heat. I then leave to stand so the beans continue to cook slowly, off the heat. For how long depends on the beans and whether I have added any inhibitors (tomatoes, vinegar) to the pot. So these butter beans had 1 minute at high pressure, plus 30 minutes off the heat. Alternatively, just cook them for 6 minutes at high pressure, remove from the heat and leave to drop pressure naturally - but make sure you open up the lid as soon as the pressure has dropped so they don’t overcook. I don’t usually cook butter beans without doing some kind of soaking first - they are a bit temperamental and the soaking gives you a bit more control.

Caramelised Endive (or any type of bitter leaf), with Blood Oranges and White Beans

This will serve 2 for a lunch and is easily doubled. It will work with any kind of bitter leaf. The supermarkets all sell Belgian endives which I love in their own right (my favourite comfort food is an endive gratin), but you could also do this with Treviso Tardivo, or a chioggia, or a rosa, and many more besides. There is nothing to stop you adding a grating of cheese, or a sprinkling of chilli flakes, or mashing a tin of anchovies into the beans.

treviso tardivo

rosa del veneto

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil

2 endives, trimmed and quartered lengthways or any other kind of chicory

1 tsp honey

Zest and juice of 1 blood orange

250g cooked beans, with a little of their cooking liquid, warmed through

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

For the dressing:

Juice of ½  blood orange

1 tsp olive or any kind of nut oil

2 tsp sherry vinegar

A scattering of fresh herbs (any you like)

Heat your pressure cooker and add the olive oil. When it is hot, add the chicory, cut side down. Cook for a couple of minutes, until they have taken on plenty of colour (this should happen very fast), then flip over and drizzle with the honey. Season with salt and pepper. Mix the sherry vinegar with the juice of one of the blood oranges and the zest. Pour this over the chicories.

At this point, there will be a lot of steam. Give the cooker a quick shake and get the lid on as fast as possible. You should find it will come up to pressure very quickly, sometimes it will be virtually instant. Cook for 2 minutes, then fast release.

Divide the beans between a couple of bowls, top with the chicories. Add the chopped garlic and stir it quickly around the in the pan juices. Combine with the dressing ingredients, then drizzle over the chicories and beans. Add herbs.

A Variation

You can do exactly as above, but turn it into an even lighter salad. Simply plate with a few spoonfuls of goat’s curd, or any creamy cheese (mozzarella or burrata also good), then add a handful of shoots or microleaves (I buy from Westlands at the farmers market). You can of course add a sprinkling of grain or lentil or anything else you fancy.

And now a classic casserole….

I am very into listening to audiobooks when I am working in the kitchen and have just finished listening to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, read by Jenny Agutter. I hadn’t read it for years and found it as fresh and funny as I did the first time. And greatly appreciated the many references to food. There is a point where stew is being served “for comfort” and it made me think about stew and how most of my dishes are either casseroles or braises or soups, rather than stews and how perhaps I should make more stews. So I bought stewing venison at the farmers market and made this on automatic pilot so it still ended up more casserole than stew. But if you wanted a stew, just cut everything up much smaller and cook for 10 minutes instead.

A quick word on venison. I appreciate that for many reasons it is something people are wary of. I asked about game in general and venison in particular on one of my little WhatsApp focus groups recently and overwhelmingly people said they wouldn’t eat it. I think this is a shame – I don’t want to go into a lecture about it but it is such a good option, environmentally, it’s healthy and the deer are going to be culled anyway, so we may as well eat them. Also, it tastes very good! I buy venison shoulder which has a little more fat to it and so works well in stews and braises of this sort.

And if you don’t want to make this with venison, it is good with beef too.

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil

500g venison shoulder or similar, stewed

1 tbsp plain flour

6-8 shallots, left whole

3 sticks celery, cut into chunks

3 carrots, cut into chunks

4 garlic cloves, sliced

1 tsp juniper berries, lightly crushed

½ tsp allspice berries, lightly crushed

3 bay leaves

250ml red wine

100ml stock (chicken or beef)

150g blackberries

1-2 tsp crème de cassis or mure (optional)

Heat your pressure cooker and add the oil. Toss the venison in the flour and season with salt and pepper. Sear the venison on all sides, then remove from the cooker. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook for a few minutes until starting to take on some colour. Stir in the garlic, juniper berries, allspice and bay leaves. Stir for another minute, then pour in the wine.

Bring to the boil, stirring until the base of the cooker is completely deglazed, then add the stock and return the meat to the cooker. Season with salt and pepper. Close the lid and bring up to high pressure. Adjust the heat so it is just high enough to maintain the pressure, then cook for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave to drop pressure naturally.

Add the blackberries, crème de cassis or mure if using and simmer for a couple more minutes.

I served this with a quick potato dish – potatoes were roughly chopped, par boiled in the pressure cooker (unpeeled) for just 2 minutes, fast release, then mixed with single cream, loads of cheese, a couple of grated garlic cloves and baked in the oven for 15 minutes. You could do this as a gratin in the pressure cooker too – just strain off the cooking water, mix in the cheese and cream and melt very gently on a low heat. Stick it under the grill or use an air fryer lid for a bit of brown. And finally, a big pot of greens, steamed in a splash of water for zero minutes, fast release, with perhaps a little butter. If you were making all of these in the pressure cooker and you have one pressure cooker, I would cook, the stew first, transfer to a casserole or saucepan to keep warm, then do the potatoes, then do the greens.

That’s it! And now I am wracking my brains to remember everything I have used my pressure cooker for recently. So many thermos meals and now have a week off because of half term. Pastas and fried rices and noodles. There has been lots of reheating of things from the photoshoot, lots of potatoes and greens. Beans, greens and chipotle chicken for birthday tacos. Lilly (my step daughter) made a black bean soup with lots of pepper and nigella seeds which was very nice.

Thank you for reading!