Those cauliflowers with their crisp, bright creamy curds look so enticing on the market stall at this time of year.  They beg to be bought and transformed into something both appetising and full of goodness.

So often they disappoint .  That bright white face displayed among all the cheery autumn colours of carrots and pumpkins, and the deep forest green of spinach and cabbage turns a sullen shade of oatmeal the second it’s introduced to a pan of boiling water.  Leave it there a moment too long and it’s watery, tasteless and almost slimy.

But there are recipes in which it shines. On a miserable winter’s day after a few hours out in the cold, you can’t beat a plateful of good old cauliflower cheese made with lots of decent sharp-flavoured cheddar. You can get away with Cantal Entre Deux, but not the ready-grated Emmenthal that seems to be the default cooking cheese round here.

My next favourite is Rose Elliot‘s cashew nut korma – very mild indeed as far as curries go, but tasty and more-ish.  I’ll adapt the vegetables to what I have in the house, but I’m always sure to include cauliflower.  It’s a recipe I try to make a day ahead, because that way, the ingredients sit together in the pan and get very well acquainted overnight.  By the time we eat them, they’ve become good and harmonious friends.  And I get to use two of the chillies I’ve been carefully growing all summer.

There’s a bit of a theme emerging here: it’s all about comfort food.  Perhaps because this week’s been unremittingly horrible.  It’s rained and rained, the wind has blown, and then it’s rained some more.  A fresh crunchy salad involving fine slices of cauliflower, enlivened by finely chopped herbs and a bright dressing simply wouldn’t hit the spot.  Here’s the last suggestion,  from Nigel Slater’s Tender, Volume one.

A mildly spiced supper of cauliflower and potatoes

That potato and cauliflower dish bubbling away

Serves 4

Ingredients:

3 large onions
Rapeseed oil
4 cloves garlic
Ginger: a thumb-sized lump
1 tbsp. ground coriander-a tablespoon
2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp.cayenne
1/2 tsp. ground turmeric
3 tomatoes (or 1/2 tin)
600 ml. water
3 medium potatoes
a large cauliflower
Handful unroasted cashew nuts
6 green cardamom pods
1 tbsp. garam masala-a tablespoon
150- 200 ml. crème fraîche
coriander-a small bunch

• Peel the onions, chop one of them roughly, then let it soften with a tablespoon or two of oil in a deep pan over a moderate heat.
• Halve and thinly slice the others and set aside. peel the garlic cloves, slice them thinly then stir into the softening onion. Continue cooking, without browning either the onion or the garlic.
• Grate the ginger.  These days I freeze ginger when I buy it, and grate from frozen. It’s so easy to deal with this way. Add to the onion and garlic.
• Stir the ground coriander, cumin, cayenne and turmeric into the onion. Let them fry for a minute or two, then roughly chop the tomatoes and add them to the pan.
• Add the water and bring to the boil.
• Season with salt and a generous grind of black pepper.
• Cut the potatoes into large pieces (as if for boiling) and add them to the pan. lower the heat and leave to simmer for fifteen minutes before breaking the cauliflower into florets and adding to the sauce.
• Quickly toast the cashew nuts in a small non-stick frying pan until golden, tip them into the pot, cover with a lid and continue to simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes.
• Meanwhile, fry the reserved onions in a little oil in a shallow pan till deep, nutty gold.
• Whilst they are cooking, crack the cardamom pods, scrape out the seeds, crush lightly and add to the onions.
• Continue cooking for five minutes or so, then, when all is gold and fragrant, remove and place on kitchen paper.
• When the cauliflower and potatoes are tender to the point of a knife, stir in the garam masala (the spices in it are already roasted, so it needs very little cooking) and the crème fraîche. Simmer for a minute, then serve topped with the reserved onions and the roughly chopped or torn coriander leaves.

I knew it would end in tears. I should have listened to Nigel.

Malcolm’s favourite cake in all the world is coffee and walnut cake. So why not indulge him for his birthday? I made one a while back, and it was just as it should have been – rich and indulgent, with a moist crumb, but not too sickly sweet. How could I have forgotten that it was Nigel who delivered, as he invariably does, the Tips That Matter? I turned to another book, a BBC book for heaven’s sake, which is normally pretty reliable. My instincts told me it was wrong. The size of tin relative to the mixture, the heat of the oven – everything. But I decided to go for it in every particular: you don’t argue with the Beeb.

And of course I shouldn’t have done. The two layers were too thin to rise into a satisying mound of comforting coffee-infused sponge, the quantity of icing advised would have filled and decorated enough cakes to fill the WI stall at the farmer’s market. I was unimpressed. Malcolm’s being too polite to say so, but he did venture to point out that Nigel is King in this house, and his recipes should always be first port of call.

Here’s his recipe. I’ve just this minute compared it with the one I made. And would you believe, the two are all but identical?  Extraordinary.  Jut reading a recipe by Nigel seems to make it succeed.

It’s rare for me to follow recipes to the letter.  Like Nigel Slater, I tend to adapt, substitute, tinker.  So what I’ve learnt from this is that instincts are there to be heeded.  If a recipe seems wrong, it probably is.  For you, anyway.  On that particular day, at least.

The failed coffee cake. It can’t be all that bad. We’ll eat it.

Hallowe’en.  Pumpkin season.  Every fruit and veg stall in the markets here will have  red kuri, ‘le butternut’, or acorn squash at the very least, and there are those dedicated to selling nothing but the rich variety of squash, pumpkin and gourd you can grow here.  Kalba gave me this butternut squash some 3 weeks ago, grown in their own garden.

The butternut makes a bid to take over the fridge

It weighs in at more than 7 kilos.  More than a stone!  We’ve been chomping our way through it, but see how much remains.  What’s worse: Malcolm has just owned up to not caring for pumpkin very much.  How could he not like it?  That comforting sweetness works so well with the saltiness of bacon, the heat and colour of chillies and oriental spices, or the fatty unctuousness of cheap cuts of meat and sausages.  Well, his loss.  Here are two of my current favourite dishes, both courtesy of Nigel Slater, from Tender, Volume 1, you may not be surprised to hear.

A recent BBC photo of Nigel Slater

Pumpkin laksa

Nigel says this is for a cold night.  Well, it is.  But it’s also a fine thing to dish up on a hot day after a gruelling few hours physical labour.  It looks complicated, but it isn’t.  Take a deep breath and read it slowly: tackle the pumpkin, then the spice paste; the rest just falls into place.

Ingredients

350g. pumpkin, unskinned

coriander and mint leaves to finish.

For the spice paste:

red bird’s eye chillies, 3-4

garlic- 2 cloves

ginger, a thumb sized lump

lemongrass, 2 plump stalks

coriander roots, 5 or 6 coriander leaves, a handful

sesame oil, 2 tablespoons

For the soup:

chicken or vegetable stock, 600ml

coconut milk, 400ml

nam pla (thai fish sauce), 2 tablespoons

tamari, 1-2 tablespoons, to taste

the juice of a lime

100g dried noodles, cooked as per packet and drained.

• Peel and seed the pumpkin and cut the flesh into large chunks. Cook in a steamer or a metal colander balanced over a pan of boiling water until tender. remove from the heat.
• For the spice paste, remove the stalks from the chillies, peel the garlic, peel and roughly chop the ginger and lemongrass. Put them all into a food processor with the coriander roots and leaves and sesame oil and blitz until you have a rough paste.
• Get a large, deep pan hot and add the spice paste.  Fry for a minute, then stir in the stock and the coconut milk and bring to the boil.  Allow to simmer for seven to ten minutes, then stir in the nam pla, tamari, lime juice, pumpkin and the cooked and drained noodles.  Simmer briefly, add the coriander and mint noodles over the top, and serve in deep bowls.

And now for something completely different…..

Pumpkin and Apple fry-up:

either to accompany a meaty supper, or as a main dish in its own right.

Ingredients

a little butter

80g. fatty bacon

medium onion

650g. pumpkin flesh

400g. apples (Nigel says a desert variety.  Mine were very tart, and I thought all the better for it)

a lemon

caraway seeds, a pinch

• Melt a slice of butter in a shallow pan, cut the bacon into short strips and let them colour lightly in the butter.
• Peel and roughly chop the onion, add to the pan and allow to cook with the bacon until translucent but not browned.
• Cut the pumpkin flesh into manageable pieces and add to the pan, turning from time to time till golden in patches and almost tender.
• Core and roughly chop the apples, but don’t peel them. Stir them into the pan and leave to putter gently until they are on the verge of collapse. Avoid stirring too much, which is likely to mash the softening pumpkin.
• Finely grate the zest from the lemon and add it to the pan with the juice, the caraway seeds and a little salt.
  

  But wait! Isn’t this what pumpkins are supposed to be for? My son obviously thinks so, and took this photo to prove it. Though he’s a dab hand at cooking too.

PS.  Some of you have been asking about Danger Mouse.  Well.  He’s not a mouse – too big, too cuddly.  He’s not a hamster, as we at one point thought.  Long tail.  He’s not a dormouse.  Wrong sort of tail.  And he’s not a rat.  Too small, too cuddly.  However, he’s continuing to be part of life here.  He rises at about 8.30 p.m. and organises his furniture behind the skirting boards, shoving stuff about quite noisily.  Then he knocks off and has a nap till we’ve gone to bed.  During the night he dismantles  the latest humane trap, and eats the bait.  In the small hours he may come and scurry round the floorboards under the bedroom.  Then he goes to bed until the next night.  If he ever goes, I think I shall miss him.