Welcome to February
Comfort for me means soft socks.
It means heavy duvets, cats snuggling in nooks, and cwtches under cold blue skies. It also, most satisfyingly, means pies – too-much-is-neverenough kinda pies. And our cover star, this issue, ticks all kinds of comfort boxes for me. Beef shin is slowly cooked with butter, onions and red wine (hello!) until it’s so tender that a winter cough could risk its collapse. It’s topped with Marmite-y, cheesy cobbler, whose generous bottom acts like a dumpling, while the top goldens to a crisp crust. Get. In. My. Belly.
We’ve also got crumble (boozy apple, you’re welcome), an oozing cheese toastie, fiery, lip-tingling, chopssmacking Sichuan, cakes (brown butter or rhubarb and ginger) and we’ve got roasts. More specifically, six new ways to roast a chicken. Now, you may think that your roast chook is the best. I’ll put a case forward, as I have done before in these pages, for my mum’s – she seasons it, shoves lemon quarters, garlic and garden herbs inside, and bakes it in an old terracotta chicken brick. But I guarantee you that these will be a contender for your new Sunday favourite – from one that’s pepped up piri-piri-style (like a certain fast-food joint), to another that’s basted in a masalaspiced butter and served with fragrant lemon rice.
And, as if that wasn’t enough to see you through what’s left of winter, don’t forget we’ve Pancake Day to look forward to, which we’ve dutifully accounted for with four new life-enhancing ways to stack up the fluffy American kind. If that doesn’t make the wait for spring shoots and sunshine more tolerable, I don’t know what will.