Winter Warmer: Curried Sweet Potato Soup with Goats Cheese and Creme Fraich Dressing

I know, right, a soup recipe. Anyone can make a soup. Veg, stock, a stick blender and you're set, from raw ingredients to dinner for as many as your pot can handle in less than an hour. That's its charm and also what makes it feel a little ordinary. It's the meal you eat curled up on the sofa with a film you'd never admit to enjoying in public. That's all well and good but if you've a guest or two and no cash for flashy ingredients this will be an elegantly rustic dinner with sufficient polish you'd happily scarf it down in your local bistro for a mark up.

Serves 4

4/5 sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped to to an even size
1/2 an onion or 1 banana shallot (which I used) finely diced
1 carrot, peeled and finely diced
1 celery stick, finely diced
1 heaped tsp hot madras curry powder (or medium, or mild as your taste specifies)
1 level tsp smoked paprika
1 ltr good stock. I used chicken but I admit vegetable bouillon would be just as tasty and healthier.
Handful parsley, chopped, four pinches to one side for garnish
50g soft goats cheese (I went with Capricorn, having removed the rind. It's easier to beat into the creme fraiche)
2-3 tbsps half fat creme fraiche

Before any of this I made up a batch of dough for six Fougasses according to the recipe in Richard Bertinet's excellent book Dough. If you really want to learn how to make bread then this gentleman's writing answered all my stupid questions without once patronising me- not bad for a seasoned pro. I let the dough rest to double in size while I made the soup. Homemade bread in pretty shapes for dunking: show-off step 1.

Heat some oil in a large saucepan and toss in the soffritto of onion, carrot and celery. I should note here that the soffritto element of this doesn't have to be finely diced as the end product will be blitzed but the finer the base the quicker it will cook off and you can add your sweet potato. Stir in the spices and parsley and let the vegetables sweat with the lid half on for about 10 minutes.

Pour in the stock, bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer. Leave simmering on a low hob for 30 minutes, or when the sweet potato is cooked through. Put your oven on to its highest heat for the bread. Blitz the soup with a stick blender and mind out for spatter. Actually never mind, if you're making fougasses you're probably covered in flour anyway. I always am. Keep the soup hot and, shape the fougasses (good luck with that, mine looked like spaceships) and bake according to the good book.

While the bread is on, whisk the goats cheese into the creme fraiche with some vigour. Put the bread on a nice, decorative board with some decent butter (mine this time came from my first visit to Ruby and White. Gosh darn it they're good). Show-off step 2. Ladle the soup into bowls, top with dressing, top the dressing with the remaining parsley and if you really want to make it look pretty drizzle a little extra virgin olive oil on top of that.

Dust off the worst of the flour and join your friends for dinner. And remember, ye who cooketh, washeth not up.

More Peasant Food, thanks to C & T Licata and Son

I don't know if you've twigged this yet, but if there's any one style of cooking I truly love, it's Italian. Italian cuisine is the perfect food for those on a restricted budget: it knows when to take cheap cuts and slow cook them with pulses till all is unctuous and savoury, it knows when to throw the freshest, brightest ingredients together for a crisp finish with no unnecessary cooking to muddle things. All in all it is the style of cooking I always lean towards, as my father toward classic english cooking (his ultimate dinner: steak and kidney pudding) and my mother toward French peasant (the very thought of her chicken casserole is enough to send me hurtling to the nearest train station). Their cooking makes me think of the home of my childhood, while Italian cooking brings sweet memories of the homes I have since made for myself.

The very first dish I cooked successfully from scratch was a risotto with baby leeks and mascarpone and it tasted like being a grown up. The next was baked polenta topped with mozzarella and parma ham. But for me the apex of Italian food, that which as had me hooked since I was a fussy child, is pasta. Perfectly cooked, with a little bite, silky from a splash of the starchy cooking water, this ingredient needs almost nothing to make it sing. I am putting up this dish as a shout out to everyone across the world who subsists on pasta, for every bloke who dusts off his mum's spag bol recipe for a girlfriend and student who buys a new pesto jar every week (been there) and the fussy child given plain as plain can be spaghetti and butter in restaurants. I ordered this dish in a tourist friendly restaurant in Venice and the memory of it has lain dormant in my mind ever since. On my last day off I was in C & T Licata and Son, saw a bag of orechiette and was halway there. On my way to the till I passed a fridge with some spicy Calabrian sausages and the dish just came together in my head. I must note here that if you're not a huge fan of spicy sausage then a very good butchers or a herby lincolnshire would make a happy replacement, better still an intensely garlicky Toulouse sausage.

Orechiette with Broccoli and Spicy Sausage.

serve four, generously

500g pack of dried orechiette
1 head of broccoli, florets cut off with a sharp knife, stalk chopped roughly the same size as the florets
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
roughly 200g parmesan, grated
1 generous tbsp garlic puree
4 Italian sausages (entirely optional, the pasta is superb with the sauce if vegetarian)

Cook the broccoli. Bring a pot of salted water to the boil, add the chopped stalk and cook for roughly 2 minutes. Then add the florets and cook until just cooked, when a sharp knife pierces it with ease. Drain and set to one side while you put the pasta on (I had to do this as I only have one large saucepan, feel free to put both on simultaneously). Then put the broccoli, stalk and floret, into a food processor and blitz to a coarse paste.

Put a frying pan on a medium to high heat. Add a splosh of olive or rapeseed oil and a generous knob of butter. When the butter is frothing add the chilli and garlic puree and fry a little. It will smell like everything you ever liked about Italian family restaurants, but don't get carried away. Add the blitzed broccoli and fry, stirring only very occasionally. The smell just gets better as you go.

When the pasta is almost cooked cooked, remove a big mug of the starchy cooking water, if not a bit more, then drain the pasta. Add a splash of the cooking water to the sauce base and stir it in, enjoying how silky and creamy it's becoming. If it even starts to get dry, add more water. This is not like pesto, it is a sauce. Add the pasta and let it finish cooking in the broccoli sauce, then stir in the parmesan.

Heat a second pan then fry off the sausage meat, removing it from the skins and stirring with a wooden spoon. If you fancy deglazing the pan with a little wine then feel free, why waste those lovely caramelised bits left behind?
Serve the pasta in bowls, spooning the sausage on top. There should be enough even to feed four hungry blokes, with plenty of that meaty kick they often require. If there are any vegetarians I'd serve it on its own as it stands alone very well, but a little wilted spinach would be another dimension.