Don't Sweat the Aubergine

the thin end of the leg, and follow the line of the bone to the thigh end; prise away the flesh, and chop off the tendons. The absence of bone will not cause the chicken to be less tender, unless you overcook it. (It’s worth boning thighs, but not drumsticks.)
    A thick piece of chicken breast on the grill or barbecue may develop an overcooked outside and a rare interior. Finish it in the oven; or (my preferred option), cut it into thinner pieces before cooking; or cube and skewer it, then grill.
    The easiest way to cook chicken wings, unless you’re happy fiddling about with 20 pieces of meat or more on your grill , is in the oven. I like to get them very tender. Try mixing the wings with a barbecue sauce ( see here ) and baking them for 30 to 40 minutes at gas mark 5/190°C, turning once. They respond well to slow cooking too: 75 to 90 minutes at gas mark 2/150°C.
    You can pan-fry chicken legs (or just thighs) slowly (see Chicken sauté, see here ). Or make a seasoned crust: mix flour with black pepper, cayenne pepper and salt, and toss the chicken pieces in it thoroughly, perhaps in a paper bag if you have one large enough. Transfer to a pan containing hot (but not smoking – i. e. burning) oil. You need a medium heat, to crisp the crust; so perhaps it’s a good idea to bone the chicken first. (Dipping the chicken in egg or buttermilk before flouring it can give you a claggy, rather than crisp coating.)
Grilling pork
    A pork chop is the cut of meat for non-cooks. All you do is shove it under the grill, turn it once, and it’s ready in 15 minutes. Serve with plenty of mustard or bottled sauce, to compensate for the dryness of the meat.
    The Food Standards Agency advises that pork, along with chicken, be cooked through. We shouldn’t, according to this official advice, leave in it the pink centre that in beef or lamb represents tenderness and juiciness. But a pork chop is particularly lean: it lacks the fatty lubrication that will give an impression of tenderness even when the muscle fibres are dry. An overcooked chop is an uningratiating meal.
    The best way I have found to retain some tenderness in a chop is to fry or grill it for a minute on each side (see steaks, above), and then give it a further 15 to 20 minutes, depending on thickness, in the oven (gas mark 6/200°C). Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a nice recipe (for 4): fry a whole head of separated, unpeeled garlic cloves in a layer of olive oil in a large pan for a few minutes; add the chops and brown for a minute on each side; remove the chops and garlic, and place in a preheated oven dish, with the thinner ends of the chops pointing upwards to expose the fat; throw away the oil; deglaze the pan ( see here ) with a glass of wine or cider, reduce the liquid by half, and pour it over the chops; season, and put in the oven. The drawback can be that garlic does not always soften in this time. If in doubt, poach it for 10 minutes first.
Sausages
    They may be an unassuming foodstuff, but sausages are difficult to cook well. The challenge is to get them nicely browned without causing them to burst and lose their juices.
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HOW TO COOK THEM
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    Melt a small knob of butter in a heavy frying pan. Put the pan on a heat disperser on one of the back rings of your hob, and place the sausages in it. The heat should be so low that, after 25 minutes, it has just begun to brown the undersides of the sausages. Turn them; the other side will brown more quickly – perhaps in 15 minutes. Turn again. And, after another few minutes, again. And so on (see Frying and grilling steak, here ). At this heat, it may take an hour to cook through the sausages properly. 1 If the browning is progressing faster than the cooking, you’ll need to turn the sausages frequently from the moment the browning process starts. 2
    You might also grill or bake them. 3
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • An hour to cook a sausage? Even for a sausage sandwich? If you have the time, it’s worth taking it. They don’t split; they keep their juices; and they remain tender.
    2 • Defusing bangers . Sausages came to be called bangers because of their high water content; as they heated up in the pan, the water would boil and cause them to explode. The preventive measure was to prick the skins, to give outlets to the liquid. We have less need to defuse the better sausages that are more widely available nowadays, and we don’t like to encourage the loss of juiciness. But sausages still split quite