chicken fusion pie

As it’s a bank holiday weekend here, we decided to splash out on a Chickie! from the wonderful T L Norman on Princes Ave. Pe picked up a 5.5ln bird on Friday morning, and we roasted it on Saturday, with potatoes, and fennel and carrots from the veg box.

Yesterday, we had cold chickie!, and wondered what to have with it. I surveyed the contents of the fridge, which included a celeriac (of which I am not unduely fond), and an elderly sweet potato. A quick google brought forth this rather nice recipe for a celeriac and sweet potato puree, which Pete made, and it was lovely.

We didn’t eat all the puree, so in a rather courageous fusion recipe, we have made a pie filling out of cold chicken, the left over fennel and carrots, and the puree. It is about to be enrobed in puff pastry from the freezer (life really is too short to make puff pastry) and we shall consume it with some spring greens.

It smells OK …

The chicken carcase has gone into the freezer to make soup, and the rest of the cold meat is in a bowl in the fridge – it might be enfreezered too, as we are away next weekend, and have a lot of veg to eat up.

rhubarb, rhubarb

A friend this morning very kindly brought me a huge box of rhubarb, as she has a glut of same on her allotment.

I haven’t done much winemaking of late, but I shall be turning a goodly portion of this rhubarb into alcoholic beverage, because rhubarb wine is just gorgeous. I’m going to try this recipe, I think.

I also see a rhubarb crumble or two in our very near future :)

back to veg boxes

We’ve been dithering about a veg box again, but we prefer to use a local supplier rather than one of the franchies. And lo and behold, we discovered Arthur’s Organics on Facebook, and ordered a medium box and a small fruit box for the princely sum of £15.

We got:
potatoes
carrots
white sprouting broccoli
chestnut mushrooms
leeks
spring greens

five apples
four bananas
a kiwi fruit (any ideas what to do with it?)
some oranges

I don’t think the fruit box was very good value at six squid, but the veg was nice – fresh, local where possible. We’ll keep it going for a bit, and see how it works out. I like a veg box, because it challenges me to cook what it brings – tonight will be the broccoli in cheese sauce, and some roast potatoes.

red pepper sauce

So – 2/3rds of a huge jar of roasted red peppers. Opened. What to do?

Finely chopped an onion and about three cloves of garlic, and fried them off in olive oil, then added a slug of red wine and deglazed the pan. Sliced up the peppers and threw them in till they were warmed through thoroughly. Liquidised it in batches, then “cleaned” the goblet with about a glass of water and added it to the sauce; it made enough for at least two meals for us, and possibly three.

I cut up a thin leek into thin rings (we have just started a veg box again, so there might be interesting (or not :) posts re that soon). It went into a pan with some olive oil, and was fried until just caramelised. There were some chickpeas left over from the tagine, so I added them, some seasoning, and some torn basil leaves from the pot on the windowsill at the end. I could have taken some chilli, I think, but was really delicious eaten with fusilli pasta, and I shall freeze the rest of the sauce today. So nice we shall have it again, and possibly again after that.

a big jar of red peppers, and some half price chicken

I bought a *huge* jar of roasted red peppers for something – not sure what, either our big party last year, or our camping break in Wales. Whatever it was for, they didn’t get used, and have languished in The Cupboard Under The Stairs for many months, next to the big jar of sun dried tomatoes; no, don’t know what they got bought for either.

One day last week, I popped into the local CoOp minimart – sadly, it is not nearly as local as the local Sainsburys minimart. and I much prefer it, but I happened to be nearby and popped in for some bits. They had packs of four chicken breasts at half price, so I snapped up a couple of packs. And left my beautiful bunch of irises on the counter, but never mind.

I made a chicken and chickpea tagine with five of the breasts, having put the chickpeas in to soak a couple of days before, and then cooked them in the slow cooker on Saturday while we were Morris dancing in Malton. The tagine is dead easy – brown the chicken and put it in a pot (slow cooker for me), add sliced onions and garlic, and Ras el Hanout spice mix fried off a bit, some dried apricots, about 1/3 of the jar of roast peppers sliced up, a lemon or two halved and squeezed and hurled in the pot. Bit of water and left alone for a few hours. Was lovely.

The other three chicken breasts were roasted off in the Remoska with seasoning and olive oil, and stowed in the freezer for … well, whatever. Pasta or stirfy or something, but all eight would have made far too much tagine.

As for the rest of the peppers – that’s for the next post!

Indian lamb stew

We eat a lot of Indian-ish food here. We love the flavours, and it’s a good way of using up bits and bobs. We do have an extensive range of spices, built up over years, but you can manage with ground coriander and cumin, cumin seeds, and turmeric. And fresh garlic and ginger wouldn’t go amiss either.

We were away for the weekend a couple of weeks ago, and had far too much in the fridge that needed eating, including the last of the lamb I roasted for Easter.

I chopped up a peeled sweet potato, an aubergine and a couple of peppers. Finely sliced an onion, and set it tok down in some olive oil. Added finely chopped ginger and garlic. Then added some ground Indian spices to the pan and cooked them down, then in went the prepped veg. I added a carton of passata and some salt and black pepper, and left it to cook for about 40 minutes, until the veg were soft. Then I added in the sliced roast lamb and a can of drained kidney beans, and gave it another 20 minutes.

It did three meals for the two of us (two tubs went in the freezer), and was just lovely. Served with basmati rice.

cranberry and lemon cake

Like most people, I tend to overbuy at Christmas, and that’s even with cutting back a *lot*. We had a couple of punnets of fresh cranberries lurking in the back of the fridge; well, when I say “fresh”, $deity alone know what they do to them to make them keep for over two months, but there they were.

Pete picked through them and we had about 1.5 punnets when done. So, I made lemon and cranberry cakes. This cake recipe is a good basic one, and you can add any dried fruit to it, but fresh is even better – give it a try with blueberries!

This is the recipe for one cake, but I always make two, because it freezes well. And I use the zest and juice of the lemon for two cakes.

160g caster sugar
125g butter or marge
175g self raising flour (or be like me – plain with a teaspoon of baking powder)
2 large eggs
zest of one lemon
a pinch of salt
4 tablespoons of milk

If you like, you can glaze the top with lemon juice and icing sugar mixed together, but that’s too sweet for us.

Cream sugar and butter/marge, add eggs, fold in flour, add lemon bits, berries and milk. If you’re adding fresh berries, I blitz them in the blender for a few seconds to break them up.

I always bake loaf cakes in a parchment liner – much easier. About 40 minutes at 180C should do it. Recommended.

Also, as a hint, chopped fresh cranberries are just lovely added to sausagemeat for home made sausage rolls.

chickpeas

Chickpeas are splendid legumes. We always keep a couple of cans of them in (along with a variety of other beans), but I do prefer to soak and cook them myself, as that way they are far, far cheaper. However, I am a bit prone to just lobbing a load in a bowl of water, and then finding I have far many more of the little chaps to deal with than I had anticipated …

I soaked and boiled some on Sunday last week, and then on Monday I chopped red onion, yellow pepper, a tired aubergine, together with some garlic. Fried that off in olive oil, lobbed in a couple of teaspoons of Ras el Hanout spice and some lemon juice, added a load of chickpeas, and cooked it down for half an hour or so. Added some finely chopped flat leaf parsley, and had it with rice for supper. And there was enough to have for lunch the following day with some toasted pitta.

The remaining chickpeas went into the food processor with lots of garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper, and tahini, to make hummus. Hummus is ridiculously easy to make, I really don’t know why I ever buy it! Some of the parsley went in that too (and the rest? Post coming!).

a pair of smoked mackerel

We saw Nigel Slater do something interesting [fnaar] with a smoked mackerel on a programme just before Christmas, and on our seasonal visit to Newland Avenue, we picked up a brace of them in the fishmonger (yay! fishmonger!) to use over the holiday.

When we fetched them out of the fridge, they were bloody enormous, far bigger than the vacuum packed ones you pick up in the supermarket, so I have two smoked mackerel recipes for your delectation. [Edit] In neither recipe did we use the skin.

Smoked mackerel on toast
Now, this might not sound very exciting, but trust me. We flaked up one of the fish, and mixed it with a finely chopped shallot, some cream, and quite a lot of grated parmesan. Nigel said to add fresh horseradish, but Newland Ave in Hull doesn’t run to that, so we added a pinch of cayenne instead. We toasted some thick slices of bread on one side (my word – we turned the grill on!), then piled the fish mixture on top of the untoasted side and put it back under the grill.  It was gorgeous, and remarkably filling.

Smoked mackerel omelette
So we were faced with Another Huge Smoked Mackerel, and we had quite a lot of eggs. So – an omelette. Again, the fish was flaked, and bunged it into the pan when the eggs were starting to set, on half the area, so that it could be folded and flipped. Again, just lovely.

We liked both these so much that a pack of smoked mackerel is now a staple in our fridge.

leeks and pasta

We decided last night that, come what may, we should make an inroad into the remaining Christmas pud, so a  light supper was called for. I made it to the greengrocer yesterday, so we were stocked with veg.

So, trimmed a leek and cut it lengthways, then cut into thin slices. Set to cook off in some olive oil, and added three finely chopped cloves of garlic.  Put some pasta on to cook.

Towards the end of the pasta cooking time, added to the leek mix some black pepper, the end of a tub of cream that was just going over, and the juice of half a lemon that was lying about. Dumped in lots of parmesan and stirred everything together with the pasta. Nice, light, tasty.

The pudding was good too! (Luxury one from Aldi, with candied orange slices on the sides. I love Aldi).