warm salad of broad beans, tuna, bacon and potato

Apologies for the quality of the photo - not sure what happened there!

Using up: broad beans, (old) new potatoes. bacon

This one really was off the top of my head - Pete wasn’t sure about the tuna and bacon together, but he is now :)

I cooked maybe 750g of new potatoes that were looking a bit weary, and steamed some fresh broad beans over them for about 6 minutes.  While that was going on, I fried 3 thin rashers of bacon, chopped into strips, then drained it on kitchen paper; I kept the olive oil I cooked the bacon in.

Chopped up some herbs from the garden (Pete got them, I think there were chives, fennel, flat leaf parsley, rosemary and savory), and a green onion.  Opened a can of tuna in sunflower oil - tuna and bacon go really well together.

Combined all that in a bowl, and made a dressing from the baconified olive oil (plus a bit more), a teaspoon of grain mustard, and some white wine vinegar. Added the potatoes and beans, stirred it all together, ate from bowls.  It was very very nice.

Oh - we didn’t eat all those spuds, for that would be piggy indeed.  About half of them are in a bowl in the fridge, and they are going to be eaten tonight, fried up, to accompany some venison sossidges which came out of the freezer this morning.  YUM.  We like sossidge.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

the last slice

We fancied toast for lunch today, for a change, so we hauled the sliced white out of the freezer.

Pete removed the bread from its wrapped, pulled off four slices, and was about to throw the last two, rather squashed ones, into the compost bowl.  Bad, bad, bad.

Stale bread can be turned into breadcrumbs using a food processor or liquidiser, then frozen.  Great for gratin topping on veg or whatever - don’t waste it!

Powered by Bookmarkify™

a change for lunch

We work at home, and usually have the same thing for lunch every day - crispbread or crackers, with some combination of cheese, cold meat, mushroom paté and chilli (in Pete’s case), etc.  It’s ok, but can get a bit dull.

So yesterday, we had something different - I made a combination of the rest of the beansprouts, some cucumber, coriander, chilli chicken, a green onion, some coriander, mayonnaise and lime juice.  We attempted to, er, wrap some wraps round it, but there was rather a lot of filling.

So we stuck a cocktail stick through the middle, and just went for it - very nice indeed, they were.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

saving money on food

I think pretty much everyone wants to do this, don’t they?

There’s an excellent article at Epicurious.com with 35 great tips - I don’t think there’s anything there that I’m not doing, but it’s worth noting nonetheless.  I think the actual cooking tips are the best, but then they’re just reinforcing what I practice!

Powered by Bookmarkify™

meat free stir fry

using up: bits and bobs of veg, some rather tired coriander leaves, small chestnut mushrooms and some beansprouts from the veg box

It’s nice - and cheaper - not to eat meat all the time.  And it’s good for you.  This served two of us quite happily.  As always, the secret of a stir fry is the prep .. get everything ready before you start to cook.

One red pepper, de-seeded and cut into strips.  Half a carton of bean sprouts.  A handful of chestnut mushrooms, sliced. One green onion, chopped - green bits set to one side with a chopped red chili and the coriander leaves.  Some cashews from the larder, and lime juice from the bottle in the fridge (I’ve given up with fresh limes, we just don’t use them often enough).  Garlic and ginger, minced.  Some tamari.

Cook some noodles in boiling water - I always put a teaspoon of sesame oil in with them.  While that’s going on, fling everything in the wok (apart from what we set aside - green bit of the onion, red chilli) with a little groundnut oil and stir.  This is going to take about four minutes tops.  Then add lime juice and tamari.

Drain and rinse the noodles and add them to the wok with the coriander, and stir until everything is combined.

Serve in bowls, sprinkling chilli and spring onions over the top for a bit of crunch.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

cabbage with mozzarella and pancetta

This is one of our favourite Things To Do With Cabbage - it’s incredibly quick to make, and very nice to eat.

Shred half a cabbage - doesn’t matter what sort; this works with savoy, with hispi, with white, with green. Chop an onion, and a couple of cloves of garlic if you like - sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

I also used some cubed pancetta on this occasion, but it’s not essential either - it’s just as nice without.

Sauté the onion, and the optional garlic, in some olive oil until it’s soft - use a shallow pan with a lid - then add the cabbage, and keep stirring until it has started to soften.  Give it a good sprinkling of black pepper, then put a lid on it and cook for, oh, ten minutes.  Or more if you like your cabbage more soggy, or indeed less if you like it crunchier.  Keep an eye on it - depending on the cabbage you might need to add a little water.  Or I’ve added white wine, or vermouth.

While this is going on cook some pasta - tagliatelle works well.  Drain it, rinse it, add it to the pan, and hurl in one mozzarella cut into cubes.  Stir this all around until the cheese starts to melt, then decant into bowls and scoff.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

stuffed mushrooms

Using up: portabella mushrooms, bacon, blue cheese

I’ve never done stuffed mushrooms before, but had seen a couple of people prepared them on Come Dine with Me, a programme which I rather like.  We had some lovely bacon in the freezer, from a friend’s first attempt at pig rearing, but it was sliced very thin and so is not really any good for bacon sarnies (the proper thing to do with bacon), so that needed something doing to it.  We also had a lump of ancient blue cheese - dolcelatte, I think.  So off I went …

I put about 25g of porcini to soak in some boiling water - about 150ml, I should think - for about 20 minutes.  Then I took out the mushrooms, and put about 3 large teaspoons full of couscous into the water.  I know this is not the normal way to cook couscous, and it took a while, but it was fine after about 15 minutes, when I was ready for it!

Cleaned the mushrooms, cut off what little stalk they had and saved them, and put them in a shallow dish, which I sprayed with sunflower oil (I’m trying, not very hard, to eat more healthily).

Then I chopped the mushroom stalks, one huge spring onion, 2 cloves of garlic, the porcini, 2 rashers of bacon (ingredients here).  I fried off the bacon in some olive oil until it was crispy, then set it to drain on kitchen paper. Then I put the mushroom stalks, spring onion, porcini and garlic into the pan with some more olive oil and fried it up until the veg were soft.  Returned the bacon to the pan, fished the couscous out of the mushroom water and mixed it all together - photo.

Ladled the mix into/on top of the mushrooms, topped with cubes of blue cheese, and baked at gas 4 for 30 minutes.  I put a foil hat on for the first 10 minutes, but I don’t think it was needed.

We ate them with steamed new potatoes - they were gorgeous.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Apologies

For the lack of posting, but some security upgrades completely buggered up my posting ability on this blog.

Now fixed, and I’ll try to catch up over the weekend.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

not so much Reactive, as desperate

Having been diligent in using up absolutely everything before we went away, we found ourselves with hardly anything to eat when we returned on Friday night.

We got home just after 7 p.m., and I’m ashamed to say we had a Chinese takeaway that night.  Pete manfully cycled off to North Street and got a stack of fruit from the greengrocer on Saturday (the car is off the road while it waits for a no doubt expensive piece of pipe to arrive from Mitsubishi).  I did a big Sainsburys order for delivery yesterday (Sunday), and the Riverford box will be here tomorrow.

So Saturday was a tub of Indian lentils from the freezer, with basmati rice, and Sunday was a tub of chicken and chickpeas from the freezer, with brown rice.  And tonight will be black-eyed beans with tomatoes, and still more rice.  I’ll give you the recipe later - it’s very nice.

[edit] Here’s the recipe as promised.

But I *yearn* for some fresh veg … and to get back to actually cooking.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

holiday food

We went to Ireland; specifically, we went to County Galway, one of our favourite places in the world.  If I won the lottery, I’d be over there househunting tomorrow.

We spent the first night at a guest house in Ennis, which I will gloss over; suffice it to say that at breakfast, they gave us a thermos jug of hot water and a selection of teabags.  Quite.

We then moved on to Rosleague Manor - we’ve stayed here before, and loved it.  I’m not convinced that the food was quite as good this time, but it was still spectacular.  No Connemara lamb, though, which was disappointing.

We ate (between us, not each!):

• clams with coconut and lime
• veal with wild mushroom sauce
• king prawns with sundried tomatoes
• french onion soup
• guinea fowl
• chocolate mousse
• scrambled eggs and smokedsalmon
• asparagus with walnut dressing and Baronne ham
• scallops with roast red pepper
• mackerel
• pork with prunes
• lime pie
• goats cheese with vinaigrette
• honeyed duckling with spiced cranberry relish
• chicken liver pate
• bream with olive tapenade and pesto
• clafoutis

Then we moved on to the Park House hotel in Galway City. This is an odd hotel - in Eyre Square, the heart of the city, and trying desperately to be a chic 21st century hotel (white bed linen and burnt orange throws), but failing desperately.  And the food … I’ve never seen so much food.  The tables were too small, so things were piled upon things.  It’s too depressing to list what we ate, but here’s an example:

I ordered baked cod.  It came on a plate, accompanied by some sort of fish cake. The waiter brought me a baked potato.  The waiter then brought us mange touts and some sort of vegetable puree (it certainly involved parsnips).  The waiter then brought us potatoes in garlic and cream.

The woman at the table next door ordered  lemon meringue pie.  She got it.  On the same plate, she got some sort of red jelly, a brandysnap basket with ice cream, a dob of whipped cream, a strawberry, some blueberries, god knows what else.  It was as though the chef wasn’t really confident, and thus had to put a little bit of everything on every plate.  Just about every plate went back to the kitchen with food on it - nobody could eat all that. I must write and complain - the waste must be colossal.

We ate in the bar the next night - much less gargantuan.

We also ate crab sandwiches (at the (award winning) restaurant in the photo above) and scones and beef and guiness stew and irish cheese and apple pie and chowder and and and.

I love Ireland - can I go back now, please?

Powered by Bookmarkify™