When Tom Doorley'sin the kitchen with his children, the results are irresistibly delicious
When my daughter Georgia, who is 14, comes home from boarding school at weekends, my calorie intake shoots up. Like her sisters, she is an excellent cook, but her repertoire tends to involve chocolate. Not just any old chocolate, mind you, but the good stuff with lots of cocoa solids. Georgia's chocolate pots are irresistible. The origin of the recipe is obscure, but we feel Nigella Lawson may have had a hand in them. Baked in ramekins, they have crunchy sponge tops that merge with their molten interiors. I rarely manage one after dinner; I keep mine for cooking at breakfast time.
Like so many dishes that make a distinct contribution to the waistline and the sum of human happiness, this is pure comfort food, the sort of thing that comes into its own around the time of the first frosts.
This is the one thing that Georgia's chocolate pots have in common with the coddle that Roberta, our 11-year-old, makes to a vague recipe the family has developed over the years. She is the first to agree that coddle is not a pretty dish, and she prefers to have hers without even the cosmetic addition of finely chopped parsley, as she is not a fan of "green bits".
The coddle is simplicity itself, involving chopped streaky rashers, good sausages, plenty of onion, roughly chopped potatoes and the stock we make from the weekly organic chicken. Roberta's cooking skills are not taxed by making it: all you have to do is put the ingredients in a large saucepan, bring it to the boil and let it simmer until the spuds have softened and are starting to thicken the broth.
If the colour - a kind of grey with bits of pink - offends your eyes, close them and concentrate on the flavour and the textures. It delivers a remarkable sense of wellbeing.
Onions do that, too, and they are definitely therapeutic - something I try to think about when Roberta and I brave the cold and damp to plant several hundred of them every spring.
A sovereign remedy, as they used to say, for a cold is onion-and-thyme soup. Both are decongestants, and, although they won't kill the virus, they help to clear the head. All you have to do is soften a couple of onions in butter or olive oil, add a handful of chopped thyme and some water or stock. Then simmer it all together for about 15 minutes before blitzing the mixture with a blender. Eaten right away, it seems to have extraordinary medicinal properties; left overnight, it's less effective but no less delicious. Onion and thyme are natural partners, each making the other taste more intensely of itself.
Chicken, too, has a therapeutic value, but only, it appears, when consumed in the form of broth. A whole small chicken (the best you can buy), simmered with some chunks of carrot until tender, gives you a starter and a main course in one dish. Add some leeks towards the end for additional taste, and use your own chicken stock for a turbocharged effect.
I don't know if the scientists have yet discovered medicinal properties in traditional rice pudding, but I know there's nothing quite like it if you need to retire briefly from the world and cosset yourself. Sarah, who is 18, likes to cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's version, which involves pudding rice, milk, cream, sugar, vanilla and butter brought to the boil, then left for hours in the bottom oven of the Aga. She caramelises some chopped eating apples - our Worcester Pearmains are perfect for this, being sweet and sharp at the same time - and puts a dollop on each serving. It's equally good with home-made jam or even a handful of fresh autumn raspberries from the garden.
It's a blessing to be married to an excellent cook, in Johann, but it's wonderful to have an entire household interested in and appreciative of good food. And you can't really plan it that way. It either happens or it doesn't.
Georgia and Roberta are the committed carnivores of the family, but we all enjoy the guilty and very comforting pleasure of steak, frites and Béarnaise sauce. The secret is to use rib-eye (from O'Flynn's in Cork, ideally), cut two or three centimetres thick, and to give it seven minutes on each side in a fairly hot pan. Then rest it somewhere warm for 15 minutes.
The first of the maincrop Cara potatoes, which we lifted recently, are cut very finely and cooked twice in sunflower oil, which is the only way to get a proper chip: crisp outside and fluffy within.
Sarah has a deft hand with the Béarnaise. If you have the confidence, it will work; the trick is to get the butter to form an emulsion with the egg yolk. In a double saucepan she combines the yolk and a little tarragon vinegar and heats it gently until it covers the back of a spoon. Then she very gradually whisks in the butter, in cubes and at room temperature.
After such a meal the only thing Johann and I can face is a green salad from the garden, but most weekends Georgia will have been busy in the kitchen making such sweet delights as Wellington squares (aka millionaire's shortbread). This is partly because she wants to be a chocolatier and partly because they are commercially very useful back at school. I've been known to indulge, but only after a good spell of digging in order to assuage the guilt.
Johann and I have a book coming out next month, Grow and Cook, which deals with what we grow and what we do with it. With a bit of luck the next volume will be a family collaboration.
Grow and Cook by Johann and Tom Doorley will be published by Gill & Macmillan, €24.99