a plum and apple pudding

using up: four plums and a wrinkly cooking apple

Peel and core the apple, and cut into chunks.  Set in an ovenproof dish.

Cut the plums in half, and remove the stones.  Set cut side down in a shallow pan, and add about 1/2″ of water, two star anise, and half a cinnamon stick, and some honey (how big a spoon is up to you - we don’t like things sweet, so it was probably a teaspoon or so for us). Poach for about 5 minutes.

Remove the plums and pile them on top of the apple.  Turn up the heat under the cooking liquor and boil ferociously until it reduces to a syrup, then remove the star anise and cinnamon and decant the liquid onto the fruit.

Bung 4oz each of ground almonds, butter and caster sugar, together with two eggs, into the food processor and blitz until combined. Spoon on to the fruit mix, and bake for 50 minutes to an hour at gas 4.  We didn’t have any cream, so we had to slum it with vanilla ice cream.  It still worked :)

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a fish pie

using up: a piece of fish, a bulb of fennel, the last third of the bag of spinach.

We’re having a fairly traumatic week, and the reason for this was the cause of the existence of one not very big fillet of anonymous white fish.  One of our cats, our beloved Bada, has been and remains exceedingly ill, and a pair of fish fillets was bought to tempt her (it didn’t work).

When I’m unhappy, I cook, and I don’t like to waste food as you know, so here’s what I did.

I poached the fish in milk and water and a little black pepper for a few minutes, then set it aside on a plate to cool. I put the chopped up fennel in the fish water, and simmered it for, oh I don’t know, maybe 12 minutes with no lid, so it cooked and the milk reduced down.

Then I made some white sauce, chunked the fish, and added fish, fennel, and a pack of prawns from the freezer.  Put that in an ovenproof dish^H^H tin (the lasagne dish is broken, remember).  Piled a layer of spinach on top. Boiled some potatoes, and mashed them with Red Leicester cheese, and added that.

Baked at gas 5 for 25 minutes.  Scoffed - gorgeous comfort food.

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sausage supper

using up: polish sausage

Pete is very fond of kabanos sossidge for his luncheon, which we buy in bulk from Costco. However, the trip before last, they had no kabanos (and no Beurre Isigny either, which was a bit of a blow), so he bought a few packs of sausage from one of the Polish shops.  They weren’t nearly as nice, and some of them have languished in the fridge and need using up.

Last night, I took some of them and made a meal out of them.

Chopped one red onion three cloves of garlic, and a courgette.  Sautéd them in some olive oil (now there’s a change, dear reader!), added some chopped sage leaves and then the chunked sausage.  Added some feta to the mix at the end.

Put some macaroni in bowls, dobbed the mix on the top.  Very nice. I don’t know why people say they don’t have time to cook - this took 20 minutes start to finish,

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mushroom, garlic and cream sauce

Using up: mushrooms, cream

We popped into Bristol on Wednesday to buy my iPhone (bounce!), and found that the farmers’ market was on. Bristol is really badly served for food markets; this one is nice, but we work at home and so it’s not easy to pop into town during the week on a regular basis.  The freezers were full, and we were well stocked too, but we bought a couple of Pieminister pies, which we had for lunch when we got home, a couple of beautiful muffins (white choc and raspberry, and double choc chip), a bag of Worcester Pearmain apples, three varieties of sausage, a small punnet of local strawberries (hence the cream left over), and these lovely chestnut mushrooms.

So - a mushroom sauce.

Finely chopped two shallots and about five cloves of garlic.  Cut the mushrooms into chunks of about 1.5cm.  Put this lot in a pan with a BIG knob of butter and some olive oil.

Mushrooms are bastards - they slurp up all the oil and butter and you think everything’s going to burn and stick, and then all of a sudden they start exuding it all out again, so I cook them very slowly to confound them; these were done for probably 20 minutes.  At some point during this process I hurled in some chopped rosemary and sage from the garden.

Five minutes before the end, I put on some tagliagelle, and added a tiny splash of white wine - probably only a tablespoon, some double cream, and black pepper to the mushrooms.  Pete had parmesan on his, but I felt it didn’t need it.

We followed it up with the remains of a plum and pear crumble I made on Monday, and the very last of the cream.  All entirely gorgeous.

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chickpeas and chorizo

using up: chickpeas, a courgette, fresh coriander, a rather shrivelled lemon

I soaked and boiled some chickpeas for Saturday’s vegetable tagine, and as usual, I did too many.  I found a courgette in the fridge that was going a bit manky at one end, so that needed eating up as well, and the freezer audit revealed *14* chorizo sausages, which really does seem rather too many.  A plan was formed.

I chopped up:

one red onion, most of one courgette (see above), three cloves of garlic, one red pepper and two chorizo sausages. Set these to sauté over a low heat in some olive oil.  When you cook chorizo, they give off a lovely paprika-y juice, so don’t use too much oil if you’re doing this.

I let them cook for about 20 minutes over a fairly low gas, then added the chickpeas and the juice of a lemon, and carried on for, oh, about ten minutes on as low a gas as possible, just to warm them through.

Just before serving, I stirred in a handful of chopped coriander.  Decanted it into bowls and scoffed.

Followed it with local strawberries - yes really, in mid September!  More on that story later.

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vegetable tagine

Using up: bits of veg - courgettes, carrots, aubergine, spinach

As I said a day or so back, I wanted to do something other than moussaka with the aubergine.  We also had some green beans that needed eating up, a fair number of carrots and a lot of courgettes, so they seemed like suitable candidates for this.

Firstly, I simmered the cut green beans and carrots for 5-6 minutes, as they would need longer to cook than the other veg. I also cooked the last third of the bag of spinach for a couple of minutes, rinsed it under cold water, drained it, and marmalised it in the food processor.

We chopped up two red onions, lots of garlic and two green chillis, and cooked them down in olive oil in my old faithful Le Creuset cast iron casserole.  Then we added some spices, ground up in our trusty spice grinder; Pete did them, and there’s no point in asking for quantities - just do what you think is right.  He did cumin and coriander seeds, allspice, dried ginger, cinnamon and turmeric, and some black pepper.

We added this to the pan and fried them a bit to release the flavour.  Then we added one each of aubergine and courgette, cut into dice, and stirred them around a bit until they were coated with oil.  Added the carrots and green beans, and quite a lot of chickpease (I’d put a big batch into soak on Friday night, and cooked them up yesterday; not sure yet what I’m going to do with them).

Added a tin of tomatoes and a little salt, brought it to the boil, put a lid on it, and simmered for about 25 minutes, then added the spinach puree and simmered for another ten or so.

Ate it with couscous.  I put three tubs in the freezer this morning, so that made eight portions for what can’t have been more than about four quid, which I think is pretty good.  And it was delicious too!

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lentil lasagne

[sorry - no photo]

Using up: some spinach

As my regular reader will know, I made some lentil moussaka mix last weekend for the freezer. I even bought an aubergine to go with it.  But then I thought “we always make moussaka when we have aubergine”, and decided I might try something different with it.  Which I will be doing tonight, so you can read about it in a couple of days - unless, of course, it’s a disaster.

However, as I had removed the lentils from the freezer, I had to think what to do with them.  And this is what I came up with.

Make a white sauce with plenty of nutmeg.  Layer half the lentils in a dish, cover with lasagne verdi, add a thick layer of spinach and half the white sauce.  Repeat, but without the spinach this time.  Sprinkle the top with a mixture of parmesan and gruyere, grated.  Bake at 200/gas 6 for about 30 minutes.

It was spectacularly nice - I’m not sure I didn’t like it better than lasagne with a bolognese sauce.  We’ll be doing that again.

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roasted veg

Using up: sweet potatoes, other veg

We haven’t had this for ages, and I really don’t know why. It’s simple to prepare, and utterly lovely.We had a couple of sweet potatoes in the veg box this week; not enough to make a sweet potato mash, so this is what I did.

Cut up into chunks: 2 medium sweet potatoes, 1 courgette, 2 carrots, 1 red pepper, 1 red onion.  Finely chopped 3 cloves of garlic.

Put all this in a bowl with some sea salt, and some good, strong olive oil and mixed it up with my hands. I have discovered through trial and error that this is the only way to get everything coated.

Put in an oven at gas 6 for about 45 minutes - 1 hour.  It’s hard to be precise because of the size of the veg chunks.  I was running late due to the cake making, and so I covered the veg with a tin foil hat for about 20 minutes to give them a kick start, or you could give them 5 minutes in the microwave.

Serve with cous cous.  Delicious!

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beef and borlotti bean stew

Using up: ribeye steak, tin of borlotti beans, 2/3 jar roast yellow peppers

As previously mentioned, we brought back some meat from our Wales camping trip.  Neither Pete nor I are that fond of steak in its natural form these days - we are too old and badgery to digest it properly :) But we still had three left (P stirfried one a couple of nights ago, and it was delicious).  However, we do like a nice casserole.

So … rummaged in the cupboards and this is what I concocted.

Chopped up 2 sticks of celery, 2 carrots, 1 large courgette into small dice.  Sautéd these down with a chopped onion, several cloves of minced garlic, and a sloosh of olive oil.  I just stuck a lid on the pan and let it get on with it for 20 minutes or so.

Found two tired mushrooms in the fridge and chopped them very small - more for flavour than appearance. Retrieved the jar of roast yellow peppers that I opened last week and had forgottten (oops), and sliced up the remaining contents. Sliced the steaks into chunks and put all these in a big cast iron casserole dish.

I added a tin of borlotti beans that was so old it was going rusty (!), a tin of chopped tomatoes, half a glass or so of red wine, the sautéd veg, seasoning, and sage / thyme / rosemary from the garden.

This sat on a very low light at the back of the cooker while I cooked our supper (we always try to leave casseroles till the next day, they taste so much better), then it was put in a very slow oven to cook overnight.

At about 2.30 a.m. the smell was driving me mad, so I came down and switched it off.  I found Liessa sitting on the worktop beside the cooker, basking in the heat from the oven :)

This morning, I decanted most of it into three tubs for the freezer, while leaving enough for our supper tonight (nom nom nom).  So three steaks have made eight servings - not bad :)

p.s. Photograph taken before it went into the oven, as the “after” pic didn’t come out very well.

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lentil moussaka

Sorry - forgot the picture!  Using up: aubergine, some grated cheese

This turned into a bit of an epic, and was lovely.  I looked up some recipes, both on the interweb and in my copious collection of cookery books, but nothing seemed quite right, so I made it up as I went along.

I put some olive oil in our small Le Creuset casserole, while I chopped a large onion and some garlic.  Then I realised it would be *too* small so decanted the oil into the next size up. Sautéed the onion and garlic  until the edges started to brown.  Then I added half a sachet of “Egyptian spices”, which has been on the shelf for ages.  It consisted of cumin, coriander, ground hazelnuts (!) and some other stuff - easy enough to replicate.  Stirred that around a bit, then in went a mugful of puy lentils, a tin of chopped tomatoes, and a mugful of water (with which I swilled out the tomato tin first), and a sloosh of red wine.   Put the lid on, moved to the back on a low light.  A little later, when I thought of it, we added some thyme and rosemary from the herb garden.

Regarded the oil sticking to the small casserole, and decided that I couldn’t waste it.  So I chopped three potatoes into dice, boiled them for five minutes then fried them in the small casserole, with more olive oil.  That’s reactive!  Set them aside.

Sliced an aubergine into, um, slices, and Pete fried them in olive oil (we must have used a lot last night).  Set them to drain on kitchen paper.  Made a bechamel-style sauce, and added half the grated cheese; it was red leicester and gruyere, I think, and had been grated on Sunday night for the pasta bake, but we decided to use a mozzarella instead.

The lentils were done by now - I think they had about 45 minutes in all.  I put the potatoes into the lentil mix, then took a pyrex dish, and layered lentils / aubergine / cheese sauce twice, and scattered the remaining cheese over the top.  It had about 20 minutes at gas 6/200°, and then we ate it and it was divine.

Half the lentil mix went in the freezer for another day, so this would serve 4 quite hungry people.

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