JK's kitchen

  'worth making basically whenever you have the oven on.' Carrots (about 1kg, chopped for roasting) 3 Onions (Peeled, chopped into quarters) Harissa paste  (Quantity will be up to your taste and the exact product you have, they vary wildly) Garlic (as much as you like, I've never taken a bind bit of notice when someone tells me how much to use. Vegetable stock  (home made or from a cube) Cumin seed (teaspoon) Salt (to taste) Pepper (to taste) oil.  Oil up and your carrots, onion and garlic and toss them together with the cumin seeds before roasting them until they are a bit brown and roasty.   Bend the roast stuff together with the garlic, harissa paste and stock. you're looking for something quite smoothe here  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Serve with croutons (Possibly flavored with za'atar)  

'a hearty summer pasta' This one doesn't have much of a story to it. I've been making a cream cheese based pasta sauce for years, I think that pairs well with peas and other tender green things.  I happened to have some slow roast tomatoes in the fridge from cooking something else. These two things work really well together.  Ingredients Leeks (diced fairly finely) Courgettes (also diced) Peas (frozen)  cherry tomatoes (roasted very slowly over a couple of hours)

 'It's not posh I promise' ok I know its a soufflé and mostly you see them made by extremely high strung cartoon chefs and deflated by loud noises. and I know French food is often seen as fussy and intricate. My experience of French food is quite different.  My mum traveled to France as a young woman and waiting at a ferry terminal for a bus to Dijon looked for a cookbook for French foods to cook at her friends farm house. she had the good fortune to pick up an unfussy volume of what was mostly French peasant cuisine.  We still eat meals from it (including our now traditional Christmas eve boeuf bourguignon).  growing up we used to have cheese soufflé to use up odds and ends of cheese or to 'tart up a salad' mom makes it now with absolutely no measurements of any kind. serve this with French salads (we have a remoulade, a cucumber crème fresh salad, and a grated carrot, cumin and parsley salad here) This is based on the recipe that is in moms cook book, I've bas...

 "Imagine if French onion soup was comfort food" So I have a cast iron skillet.  I love having a cast iron skillet mostly because of making caramelised onions it takes forever and you could definitely make caramelised onions in a different pan but it just feels nice in a cast iron. This dish is rich and indulgent, it takes a long time to make but it isn't complicated or difficult so treat yourself to a nice meditative hour caramelizing onions and living in the simplicity of cooking.    Ingredients  Onions (brown, sliced finely as many as you can fit in your pan) Orzo Pasta  Vegetable stock (use a good one) Cheese (Cheddar, Parmesan, Pecorino) Parsley (Finley chopped)  A lemon (zest and juice) Garlic (one clove, micro planed) Butter Oil (something neutral) Black pepper Salt  Put some oil and butter into a skillet and melt the butter before adding your heap of finely sliced onions. cook them on a medium or low flame stirring constantly for at least ...

 "A Summer Stew" This dish takes me back into a part of my history that feels almost dreamlike.  It takes me to the tiny kitchen of an artists house in Tatabanya (a small city built around a mine, about an hour away from Budapest). I had gone with my friend Tibi to meet his father, look at some art and accept some hospitality (my friends mother was also in the house but she was asleep on the sofa after having worked in the hospital for more than eighteen hours) I remember the small kitchen, not being allowed to cut the tomatoes or peppers, the smell of the paprika and caraway. I remember Tibi's dad shouting at the excess of liquid in the pot then laughing at me trying to figure out what was wrong (we didn't share a language).  It was the kind of good natured chaos that made me feel at home.   Ingredients  Hungarian wax peppers (not the red ones, not the green ones, if you cant get the pale ones don't bother making this it will be too sweet and cloying I've ...

 "It's been sweltering."  This is absolutely not how you plate this to eat it but it does look pretty right? Some days its too hot to cook but that doesn't mean you don't want something good to eat. the problem is that even in England, where the heat is rare but genuinely oppressive, turning on the oven or standing in front of the hob seems like an exorcise in machoism. In these cases you can absolutely reach for a sandwich or you can do something that hits a little harder and feels more like a meal. thes crostini take me back to sundrenched lunches in Naples.  Crostini  Bread (A baguette is my preferred choice but go for good bread over the correct shape. the bread is the meal more or less) Olive oil Garlic  (one clove, peeled) Drizzle your bread with olive oil then put it under the grill until it's toasted to your liking.  While the bread is still warm rub garlic over the toast. (trust me the flavor is very present and this is a good way to cheat your way...