this week’s meals w/c 26 oct 08

I’m going to start listing what we eat each week for our main meal, mostly for my own reference. But you might enjoy it too!

Powered by Bookmarkify™

butternut squash - a primer

A very useful post from Fiona at Frugal Cooking, on how to stretch a butternut squash into several meals. I think a lot of people don’t really know what to do with one of these, and they’re a wonderful veg!

Powered by Bookmarkify™

this week’s soup w/c 25 oct 08

One parsnip, half a swede (rest was mashed up with potato to go with last night’s stew), three carrots, one leek. All cut into small dice, then sautéd with some oil to cook them down a bit.

Added a couple of litres of cold water, a handful of barley, salt and black pepper, and some Marigold bouillon.

This morning, set it on a low heat at about 10.30, and at lunchtime (circa 1 p.m.) I applied the hand blender to mulch it up a bit. Delicious and warming, especially given the change in the weather!

Powered by Bookmarkify™

fish and broccoli pie

using up: a head of broccoli, some smoked trout

A while back when we were in Costco, we were offered a sample of hot smoked trout.  It was delicious; like sheep, we bought a bag, and I wrapped each fillet separately and put it in the freezer.  I completely forgot about it until I was trying to make space for the mega chicken cookout last weekend, and then I made a mental note.

Thankfully, I managed to retain this note long enough to think about the fish when I needed to use up the broccoli, and this is what I did.  I’m afraid it used a lot of pans, and was a lot of faffing, but it was worth it.  Note the wonderful old battered white and blue enamel dish I cooked it in - I love that dish.

Put some potatoes on to boil for the mashed spud topping.  If you put them in the bottom of the steamer, then you can steam the broccoli on the top, as I did.  Otherwise you’ll have to use yet another pan for the broccoli.

Poach the fish in some milk for about 4-5 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fillet.  Lift out with a fish slice (!), set on a plate, and *keep the milk*.

Chop an onion very finely (I used a red one, for prettiness, but a white would be fine)., and sauté in some butter until soft.  Add some flour to make a roux, then complete a sort of onion sauce by adding the milk from the fish.

Flake the fish into chunks, removing the skin; I gave it to the cats, but they were unimpressed.  Combine with the broccoli and onion sauce.  I added some chopped parsley from the garden.

Put in an ovenproof dish, top with mashed potato, and cook at gas 6 or so for about 20 minutes, until the potato is browned.

A lot of messing about, but *well* worth it.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

this week’s soup

This one is a real mongrel.  You’ve probably heard of Nigella Lawson’s gammon cooked in coke - it’s utterly delicious, and I make it often (we’re big fans of buying a large gammon and having it for our lunches during the week).

Rummaging in the shed last weekend, we found 12 bottles of ginger beer that we’d forgotten about, and they were past their sell-by date.  “I wonder”, I thought … So we tried boiling the gammon in ginger beer, with a stick of cinnamon added, and it was absolutely delicious.

This, of course, left me with a lot of gingery ham stock, so we fished all the rather tired vegetables out of the fridge and chopped them up - a squash, a courgette, some celery, carrots, and a potato.  Cut them into small dice, fried them down a bit, added the stock and half a mug of green lentils.

It has turned out a bit too celery-ish, but other than that, it’s really nice - quite sweet, from the sugar in the ginger beer, but none the worse for that.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

chicken and apricot tagine

using up: some chicken thighs, peppers in green, red and yellow

We needed to do some cooking for the freezer, so we looked at the ingredient stocks to see what we had.  And what we had was a big bag of chicken thighs in the outside freezer, and thus a chicken tagine was born.

On Friday night, I put some chickpeas in to soak, and then boiled them up on Saturday.  On Sunday afternoon we set to.

I browned all the chicken (some of it went into a batch of lemony chicken with coriander) and set it aside while we scoffed a cooked breakfast!

Then chopped up two red onions, the peppers, and lots of garlic, and cooked them down in some olive oil.  Then we fried in some ground spices - cinnamon, dried ginger, allspice, coriander, returned the chicken to the pan, added chickpeas, a quartered lemon, chopped fresh coriander and a little water.

Put it in a low oven (gas 2-3) for about 2 hours.

Out of about 1.5kg of chicken, we got 7 meals, or 14 portions, including the other dish.  Lovely meals, too.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

an afternoon in the kitchen

I’ve not written much recently; not because we’re not cooking - we are! But we’re not doing anything particularly new, and I’m sure my reader doesn’t want to read repeats :)

We spent the afternoon in the kitchen yesterday, turning 1.5 kg or so of chicken thighs into some freezer meals, and making this week’s soup.

I’ll write those up later, but I thought for a change you might like to see Lilith, who decided to be helpful and sit on my tagine recipe, goggling all the while.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

veg box 15 oct 08

Powered by Bookmarkify™

beef, orange and ginger casserole

Not reactive as such, but worth recording.  This recipe came to me originally on a Waitrose card - I enhance and improve it every time I make it.  This was about 1.25 - 1.5kg of good quality stewing steak, which was turned into 10 generous portions (4 x 2 servings in boxes for the freezer, the rest in, er, us :).

Take 6 or so clementines, small oranges, satsumas, whatever you have.  Sometimes I boil them first, sometimes I don’t, but either way, whizz them up in a food processor.  No need to peel, thankfully.

Take a large number of shallots - I used loads, cos we love them.  Put them in a bowl, and cover with boiling water; this makes them easier to peel.  I always keep the water and put it in the soup pot, as it is nicely flavoured.  After about 5 minutes, or when your fingers can cope, fish them out and peel them.

Cut up some carrots into batons, or thick slices - whatever you like, really.

Cut the steak into mouth size bits, and brown it in batches in olive oil,  in a big casserole.  Set it aside as it’s done.

Then into the oil put the shallots and carrots, and stir them about for a bit, until the shallots start to brown. Add the meat back into the pan, and add the orange mush, a glass of ginger wine, a tablespoon or so of balsamic vinegar, and some water - the shalloy water would do nicely here!  You don’t want it swimming in liquid, obviously.  Season with salt and pepper, and add two or three star anise.

The recipe suggests an hour in the oven - I much prefer to do it slowly, so gas mark 2 for about 3-4 hours.

It goes awfully well with mashed potato and cabbage - trust me on this.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

this week’s soup

using up: last week’s soup(!), some chicken

The photo was the start - the jug on the left contains the remains of last week’s soup; a starter, if you will.  The jug on the right contains the water I cooked the broccoli in for Friday night’s stir fry.  The chicken is the remains of a chicken breast on the bone that we bought to tempt Bada when she wouldn’t eat. It didn’t work :(

I boiled up the chicken in the broccoli water, and thus obtained broccoli and chicken stock.  This went in the soup pot with the other soup, the chicken meat, some marmelised veg (leek, carrots).  I’d boiled some borlotti beans up for another dish which I shall write about later, so the water from them went in too!  I generally feel “the more, the merrier” with soup.

Then it was seasoned, and I hurled in some barley, mostly because I could.  We had it for lunch today, and it was good.  Tomorrow, in the way of soup, it will be better.

Powered by Bookmarkify™