Passions stirred: Nigel Slater's favourite recipes This week I put a bag of knobbly Jerusalem artichokes to good use, serving them roasted as a side dish to the ham, to add interest to the accompanying parsley sauce. Artichokes and parsley have an affinity with pork and with each other - I like to add bacon and the chopped herb to the roasted tubers, and snippets of crisp smoked streaky often find their way on to the surface of a bowl of parsley-freckled artichoke soup. Any large lump of ham will do for slow cooking in water (I sometimes use apple juice). A "hand" of pork, which comes from the top of the front legs and is what the French call jambonneau, is a sound cut for those who want to cook theirs on the bone. A piece of rolled and tied leg is easier to carve for a large number, but a cut cooked on the bone shouldn't give any trouble after an hour and a half on the stove - the meat should fall away. This is an unapologetically old-fashioned dish, and the best accompaniments are those of a gentle nature: a quiet, cossetting sauce, some floury steamed potatoes and possibly some mild mustard, either in the sauce or on the edge of the plate. Ham with artichoke and parsley sauce recipe The whisk Anyone who cooks regularly will have their favourite piece of kit. As someone who takes the aesthetics of cooking equipment a little too seriously (it's only a potato peeler, for heaven's sake), I guard my kit carefully, taking great care with much-loved tools whenever they accompany me on a trip or when someone else uses them. I still wince over losing the "perfect" bottle opener. To pick one favourite is almost impossible - like choosing your favourite pet or child - partly because uses are so specific. I do, however, have a particular soft spot for my whisk. Apart from its ability to turn limpid egg whites into a proud pavlova, and egg yolks and olive oil into wobbling mayonnaise, or to beat the lumps out of a cheese sauce, my whisk is a thing of beauty. The handle is rolled copper, the head has fine spokes of great flexibility, and the whole thing has a perfect weight and balance. The generous size of the balloon of spokes seems to get air into a mixture better than any other whisk I have used. Chicken tarragon mayonnaise recipe Brown rice and pedantry I am no kitchen pedant. But I suspect that I am not the only one whose heart sinks just a little when I am presented, in a restaurant, with someone's oh-so-original take on a classic. Take risotto. If I order a risotto, then I want a plate of warm, slowly oozing short-grain rice that has been continuously stirred with stock and enriched with butter and Parmesan until the grains are swollen and creamy. I do not want something that can stand up in a castle shape or be presented as a round patty. I don't want it as a smear on the plate, as if someone has been careless with the rice pudding, nor do I want it cut into a cake. All of this is to say that the little dish I made for supper tonight may look like a risotto but it isn't one. Yes, the recipe involved lovingly stirring short-grain rice with stock until the grains were creamy, and it happily took more than a fistful of grated Parmesan and plenty of butter into its plump little belly. At a quick glance it may even have resembled a vegetable-speckled version of the classic risotto milanese. But no, my supper is something of a hybrid, with a texture that is nuttier, chewier and rather more interesting than the classic recipe. Made with short-grain brown rice, sold in wholefood stores as brown risotto rice, it was stirred for a good 45 minutes with a wooden spoon before being served in a pool of savoury, herb-flecked sauce. It was utterly, fabulously delicious, cheap and extremely nourishing. But it was not, absolutely not, a risotto. Brown rice, courgettes and mint recipe On the squeezing of a lemon A warm lemon will yield more juice than a cold one. So it is always better to store lemons at room temperature rather than in the fridge. More importantly, a ripe or even a slightly overripe fruit will give up more juice than one so hard that you can barely squeeze it. Many lemons are sold unripe. A ripe lemon is often a deeper yellow, and it yields gently under pressure. I roll my lemons on the work surface before juicing them, pushing down on them firmly with the palm of my hand. I seem to get even more juice that way. The standard domestic glass lemon squeezer, the one that has a moat to catch the juice and tiny beads that hold back the pips, works well enough. The deeper, stainless-steel versions are good, too, letting the juice fall through into the base. Yet I find that a wooden lemon reamer gives the best results of all. Its simplicity is appealing - it is a pointed ridged cone with a beech or olive wood handle - and I like the fact that it has been made by hand rather than by machine. Some are made from one piece of wood rather than two (the handle is often made separately from the ridged cone). But what sets it apart from the others is its simplicity and, in some cases, its beauty. Of course, the pips escape into the juice. You simply fish them out with your fingers. Lemon tart recipe Toasting nuts I take shortcuts in the kitchen, though fewer than I might, but some things are worth every moment of our time. Roasting nuts is one of them. The difference in flavour between an almond, hazelnut or chestnut that has been roasted and one that hasn't is extraordinary. The smell alone is probably worth it, but the effect is most noticeable once the nuts are mixed with sugar, as in a praline, or when chocolate becomes involved. If you need to put it to the test, toast a handful of almonds in a shallow pan, no oil required, then bury them in melted chocolate. Now do the same with untoasted nuts and compare. The most successful way to toast a nut is to put it, shelled and skinned, in a frying-pan over a moderately hot flame. Let the nuts toast for five minutes or so, shaking the pan regularly, so they colour evenly. Once they are a pale hazelnut brown, tip them out of the pan so they cool without further cooking. You can grill them if you prefer, letting them colour lightly under a grill. Nuts burn in a heartbeat. The oil that makes up so much of the nut has a very low smoke point, which is why nut oils such as walnut and hazelnut tend to be used in salads rather than for cooking. Once they are burnt, they turn bitter. A warm honey brown is what we are after. Chocolate and toasted-nut tart recipe