Don't Sweat the Aubergine

for an hour, or until tender; drain, coat in marinade, and put on the barbecue or in a gas mark 6/200°C oven until the marinade becomes pleasingly sticky – 5 to 10 minutes (or perhaps 15 to 20 if the meat is heating up again from cold). What you hope is that the marinade will protect the meat enough to stop it drying out. Or you could bake your chops or belly pork, smothered in marinade, very gently in a roasting tin covered with foil, before grilling it. The disadvantage here is that the meat will shed a lot of liquid, giving you a tin full of diluted sauce, which will be an unsatisfactory marinade for the final, grilling stage.
    You can poach spare ribs, for about an hour on a very gentle heat in an uncovered pan. Drain them, chop them into individual ribs, marinate them, and bake or grill them as above. It’s a good idea to line your roasting dish or gill pan with foil.
Frying and grilling steak, or hamburgers
    Warm the frying pan (I use my heavy cast-iron one), over a medium to high flame. Coat the steak in a little sunflower, vegetable or groundnut oil (which withstand higher temperatures than does olive oil), and salt it. The oil assists in the transmission of heat, and at the same time protects the steak from the very high heat of the pan. If you applied the oil to the pan rather than to the meat, you might burn it.
    Don’t crowd the pan with steaks: you’ll lower the temperature, halting the browning reactions ( see here ). After one minute, turn over the steak, which should have browned. (If it is brown in much less than that time, you’re probably cooking it too fast; if it’s not brown, the heat is too low.) After another 60 seconds, turn it over again.
    Now, how thick is your steak? Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says that a 3cm-thick steak will be rare in 3 to 4 minutes, and medium rare in 5 to 6.
    The problem is that your steak is already browned after 2 minutes; leave it for another minute on each side, and the surface meat will burn and dry out. Turn down the dial, and you may find water entering the pan: the meat, which the browning has not sealed ( see here ), continues to expel its moisture, which the pan is not hot enough to vaporize. When the meat stews, it dries out very rapidly: water has this paradoxical effect, because it is such an efficient cooking medium.
    One answer is, once the initial browning has taken place, to turn the meat very regularly – every 20 seconds or so, until it is done to your liking. It gets enough heat to continue cooking, but not enough to cause it to burn. Or put it in a gas mark 6/200°C oven for the remainder of the cooking time. To judge whether it’s done, you might have to dig into it and have a look.
    Put the steak on a warm plate to rest for a few minutes ( see here ). It will exude some moisture, but will nevertheless be juicier and more tender.
    You could make a simple sauce, as you would with a chicken sauté ( see here ).
    To grill, rub the steak with a little oil and seasonings before putting it on a barbecue or ridged grill pan. Follow the frying procedure, above.
    You fry or grill a hamburger in the same way. Some people like to select pieces of steak and get their butchers to mince them, but I usually make do with the excellent steak mince my butcher offers. I season it with salt and pepper, and, heretically in the views of some, add beaten egg to it (1 egg for 450g mince), to help it cohere. I form it into patties of about 150g each.
Grilling lamb
    I prefer to fry steak, but to grill lamb, perhaps because lamb is often fattier; also, the grilling flavours complement the meat particularly well. Thicker cutlets or lamb steaks may require 5 to 10 minutes of cooking to get to medium rare; but you can turn down the heat under your pan without risk of the stewing that steaks suffer under the same treatment. On the barbecue, start the cutlets in a place of high heat, turn over after a minute, brown the other side, then move them to a place where the embers are less fierce.
Frying and grilling chicken
    You can fry or grill any parts of a chicken. But the legs take about 25 minutes to cook; they are quite difficult to manage on a barbecue, and almost impossible to grill successfully on a ridged pan: the skin and outer flesh burn before the heat penetrates the interior. You could use an overhead grill, which cooks chicken much more satisfactorily than it does other meats; or you could bone the legs, creating a thinner cut. Make an incision starting from