Nigel Slater's chilly weather recipes (2024)

Cold days, big flavours. I have taken to buying the spiciest of sausages and using the meat, peeled of its casing, to make little patties for the frying pan, as a stuffing for peppers or marrow, or for baking under a pastry crust.

This week I picked up a handful of spiced sausages from the deli – the Italian sort with their generous seasoning of black pepper, crushed chilli and fennel seed – and used their meat in a plump sausage roll. I appreciate the coarse grind of the meat but also the fact they are often hung for a few days for the flavour to develop, hence the strings they are tied with. The seasoning will often also include nutmeg and cloves, giving them a depth and warmth rarely found in a traditional breakfast sausage. I could have seasoned my own natural sausage meat, grinding in the pepper and chilli, but once you have found a favourite banger, be it for breakfast or dinner, then you might as well stick with it. It takes just seconds to score the skin with the tip of a knife and peel it away.

The colder the weather, the more spicy I like my sausages to be. The Spanish chorizo are less easy to peel, but worth the fiddle for their rust-coloured, fat-flecked meat. Their flesh is good for filling a sausage roll, too. This week I made two long, thick rolls, each enough for two people as a main course, and served them with an onion sauce and red wine, and the spirit and sweetness of juniper berries and redcurrant jelly.

In a week of, shall we say, robustly flavoured food, we also ate a dinner of potato wedges baked with spiced bacon crumbs and dressed with a sauce of cream and gorgonzola. The seasoning for the potatoes was made from crisply fried bacon reduced to fine crumbs in a food processor, with chilli flakes and smoked paprika. It made our lips tingle. A few slices of speck accompanied the potatoes once they were out of the oven. They crisp up helpfully the next day, so if you make too many you can have them tomorrow, too, after a quick blast in the oven. If blue cheese is not your thing, then a tomato sauce – fruity rather than spiced – can be made really quickly. Grill your tomatoes until well browned, then season them with sugar, salt, black pepper, basil and red-wine vinegar. Mash with a fork or in a blender.

Brobdingnagian sausage rolls, wedges of mouth-poppingly spiced baking potatoes and blue cheese sauces… Big flavours, certainly, and food with the ability to warm, fill and probably fatten, but just what I find I need on these nicely nippy evenings.

Spicy sausage roll and red-wine sauce

I use readymade puff pastry for this – the sort made with butter – but a good homemade shortcrust is suitable, too.

Score the skin of each sausage down its length with a knife, then peel off the skin and discard. Put the meat in a mixing bowl.

Roll the puff pastry out into two rectangles, each measuring roughly 18 x 24cm. Form the sausage meat into two thick sausage shapes, 16 or 17cm long.

Place the rolls of sausage meat on the pieces of pastry, brush the pastry edges with the beaten egg, then roll and seal by crimping the edges tightly together. Lay the rolls on a baking sheet with the join underneath, brush the pastry with more beaten egg, then cut 3 slashes along thetop. Bake for 30 minutes or so until crisp and puffed.

To make the onion gravy, peel, halve, then slice the onions into thin segments, then let them cook in a high-sided frying pan with the oil and butter. Add the thyme leaves, pulled from their branches, and the bay leaves. Let the onions soften and colour to a light brown, then add 1 tbsp of flour. Stir and continue cooking for a minute or 2 until the flour is a pale-biscuit colour, then add the stock and thewine.

Bring the mixture to the boil, then lower the heat, season with salt and black pepper, and the juniper berries, lightly crushed, then leave to simmer gently for a good 20 minutes. Add the redcurrant jelly, tasting as you go. Continue cooking for 10 minutes, correct the seasoning and serve, piping hot, with the spicy sausage roll.

Potato wedges and gorgonzola sauce

Any blue cheese will work here, but I find the milder, sweeter versions are better with the rather hot spicing of the potatoes.

Cook the bacon in a shallow pan with a little of the oil until very crisp. Tip into a food processor, add the chilli flakes, remaining oil and smoked paprika and blitz until the mixture resembles very fine crumbs.

Tip the crumbs over the potato wedges and toss gently to coat. Bake for an hour or so, until the wedges are crisp and sizzling.

To make the dressing, warm the cream in a small, nonstick saucepan, add the cubed or crumbled cheese and stir gently until the cheese has melted. When the dressing is warm, trickle over the wedges or serve as a dip.

Email Nigel at nigel.slater@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/nigelslater for all his recipes in one place