Rillettes is about as old-school a dish as you can get – and a tragically hard-to-find one. It gets right to the heart of what’s good: pork, pork fat, salt, and pepper. Kick off a meal with rillettes and you don’t have to wipe the plate rims, garnish the entree, or remember to keep your elbows off the table. Rillettes is something you serve friends – and people you already know you like.

I miss Anthony Bourdain already.

He was my kind of cook, and he cooked my kind of food – big, gutsy, quietly sophisticated, a generous nod to tradition and never, ever, ever straying far from the very central point of cooking and eating.

Flavour is everything, and it has to taste good.

I found Kitchen Confidential explosive, a glimpse into another world, written by a man who struck me as a punk, poet, and artisan rolled into one. It felt dangerous and authentic, raw and unfiltered. It still does. It still has a power to grab me and to drag me into all those many American kitchens.

Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook has featured proudly on my shelves for a long time. I use it often. It’s a go-to for French cooking, full of authentic recipes written with care and love, the chef’s methods, techniques and sometimes, short-cuts thrown in for good measure.

I’ve taken it from its shelf this week, sadly and defiantly, and I’ve re-read large parts of it. Bourdain wrote like a prince, his turn of phrase was elegant and at times beautiful. His death came too soon, and it’s a great loss, but his work remains, and I’m grateful for that, because it’s genuine, authentic and it has more clout than all of those bad boy celebrity chefs rolled into one.

Bourdain was the real deal. Never forget that.

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Last year, we went to Sicily.

It was wonderful, a beguiling and fascinating place, riven with history, fiercely hot, passionately intense and honest. We swam in the sea from makeshift pontoons made of scaffolding, drove around the mountains and hills, stood in awe in the middle of a Roman amphitheatre, facing the spectacle of the Mediterranean, and we ate well.

We ate very well.

‘Eating well’ isn’t too difficult in Italy, because food is a serious business, and eating is the reason for living. One day, we tracked down a restaurant in a small town in the hills that had been enthusiastically recommended by a very trusted friend, and ate one of the most memorable lunches I’ve ever experienced – three courses from a blackboard, a different menu to yesterday, one which changed constantly as things sold out, a kitchen that cooked entirely based on what was good that day, with no compromises whatsoever.

This was typical. Everything we ate on Sicily had something about it, something good, right down to the quick slice of pizza or arancini here and there as a snack. Of course, this is all a heady combination of place, circumstance and experience, but Sicilian food was absolutely excellent, especially from the street, from the little cafes and takeaways – fresh, lively, inventive, cheap food. [click to continue…]

There are several non-negotiable traditions in our family, and chief among them are Sunday morning waffles with maple syrup.

Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less. Waffles and maple syrup. Ever has it been, ever shall it be.

I fiddled around with a variety of recipes when we started out on this weekend ritual. I wanted to replicate Belgian waffles, but the whole thing was too involved for lazy Sunday mornings … yeast, stiffly beaten egg whites … just too much  faff. I wanted/needed a recipe that could be knocked together in minutes almost robotically, with nothing to actually think about.

This is that recipe. It’s an understated thing, hidden at a dark corner of the BBC’s food website, self deprecatingly titled ‘awfully good waffles’.

It really is very good. Reliable, simple, forgiving and very quick.

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I started cooking tonight’s dinner this morning at about half past eight, before anybody else was awake, and most importantly, before any of the neighbours had hung any washing out to dry.

Short beef ribs take a long, long time to cook, and they’re at their very best when they meet a little smoke. So, I made this introduction early on a Saturday morning, alone in the back garden, burning the dew off the grass with a serious pile of fire and a lot of oak scented smoke.

Beef ribs are everywhere at the moment, but the best place to get them is the market. The butcher had two great hunks of meat, each with two substantial ribs and a good ten centimetres of flesh, proud slabs of meat from an animal that had worked hard and eaten well. I bought both, about five kilos, about twice as much as I needed, and not cheap at about £25 for the pair. One piece fed four very well in the end, with plenty left over for late night fridge grazing and sandwiches.

The beef needs some flavour, so I sprinkled it liberally with a couple of tablespoons of a general multipurpose Cajun spice rub I make frequently and store in a jar. This is a magic standby, capable of transforming meat and fish into fiery, tasty goodness. It’s worth making a batch and keeping it to hand – the uses are endless.

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