With more of us spending time indoors during the winter and while working from home, your oven can duplicate tasks: preparing dinner and heating your kitchen in the process. You don’t need a slow cooker when your oven can do all the work for you, from tender candied vegetables to rich, luxurious custard.
Turmeric and coconut baked
cauliflower
As Anna Jones points out, whole roasted cauliflower
has experienced a renaissance in the restaurant scene over the past few years
.
Not only does a whole burnished cauliflower look stunning, but roasting it brings out its natural buttery, slightly nutty flavors with cauliflowers in plentiful supply right now. It is also a profitable dish.
Herby cabbage and potatoes au gratin with gruyère and ricotta
Cabbage has an unfair reputation because many of us suffered the horror of being served flabby, gray doughs during childhood
.
However, like cauliflower, roasting cabbage until it develops a light charcoal highlights another dimension to flavor. Yotam Ottolenghi combines this with caramelized garlic to elevate the traditional potato gratin. It is served only as an indulgent meal or as an accompaniment to a roast.
Carrots cooked in butter, red wine, bay leaf, star anise and cinnamon
Gill Meller set off with a clear vision when she developed this recipe: “I wanted to create something similar to those carrots you find in a meat stew after hours of simmering, only without the meat.”
Three hours may seem like a long time to cook carrots, But the alcohol bath and low oven temperature will ensure that the carrots remain spicy and tender.
Baked Braised Lamb
Rogan
A classic of Indian restaurants, this rogan josh is the perfect centerpiece for a dinner, swapping the usual diced lamb for a whole lamb cane cooked until the meat comes off the bone.
Most spices are easily purchased at your local supermarket or Indian grocery store, But it’s worth looking for black cardamom, which unlike the more commonly known green cardamom, has been dried over an open flame and imbues the curry with a deep, smoky flavor.
“
host duties and cooking at dinners is always a stressful task, but with careful preparation, most of the work is done for you with these crowd-friendly tacos at Samin Nosrat
.
If you start early, your slow-roasted pork will be tender when your first guest arrives. Prepare the salad, tortillas and condiments and leave the assembly of the tacos to your guests.
Chicken roasted in milk, bay leaf and nutmeg
Milk and chicken sound like the beginning of a horrible cooking experiment, but the science behind this pairing in Diana Henry’s recipe results in the lactic acid in milk softening the meat
.
As a bonus, the milk creates a creamy sauce that will keep your roast chicken even juicier.
It may seem counterintuitive, but “dry pasta really goes into the sauce uncooked,” writes Yotam Ottolenghi about this
pasta oven.
Their recipe calls for paccheri, a tube of pasta that looks like a swollen macaroon, but can substitute any large, robust pasta, such as rigatoni
.
A hot sauce and a spicy rocket add shine to the finished dish.
Portobello mushrooms with chili oil and butter bean puree
A “hot bath of oil and aromatics” perfectly describes where I would like to see the rest of the Australian winter, but as Yotam Ottolenghi explains, “it is a total transformation from something soft and humble into something rich and luxurious.”
The fleshy texture of portobello mushrooms lends itself perfectly to being cooked over low and slow heat and the ideal choice to change things up. If you’re stuck in a meat-and-mash rut.
Baked custard
with roasted rhubarb
Using only a few modest ingredients: milk, cream, eggs and sugar, cooking this dessert slowly in a water bath results in the most velvety and unctuous cream.
As pastry chef Ravneet Gill warns, “be prepared.”
Recipe for roasted quince and
rice pudding
Roasting quinces is the ultimate form of cooking witchcraft. Once cooked, these hard, inedible, astringent yellow lumpy fruits are transformed into soft, yielding, shiny garnets. Served with a nursery classic, rice pudding, it has the perfect comfort food for winter.
Ben Milgate and Elvis Abrahanowicz dessert will ensure that your home is not only warm, but filled with an intoxicating aromatic gug.
