cabbage, bacon and mozzarella

We seem to have a cabbage glut - two of them in the fridge at the start of the week, which is bad planning. I mandolined half of one on Monday for this week’s soup, so only one and a half to go …

There were a few bits (I couldn’t call them rashers, really) of streaky smoked bacon in the fridge, so they were derinded and chopped up, and sautéd in olive oil with some onion.

Bunged some pasta on to boil, thinly sliced the half cabbage left from Monday, and added it to the onion/bacon mix. Stirred it around to coat in oil, added black pepper and about a tablespoon of water, and put a lid on it for about 10 minutes.

Drained the pasta, added it to the cabbage pan and dolloped in a chopped up mozzarella.

Served it in bowls - quick, easy, tasty.

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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.

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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.

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pasta with butternut squash and feta

Using up: the other half of the feta, the other half of the squash, a lone rasher of bacon

Peeled the squash and cut it into cubes. Chopped an onion roughly, ditto some garlic, and a rasher of back bacon.  All in a frying pan with some olive oil, and some oregano from our herb garden.

Put a lid on the pan, and left for about 20 minutes.

Then cooked some 8 minute fusilli, drained it and put it with the vegetables (thus giving the veg about 30 minutes in all, to get the squash into that gorgeous disintegrating phase), and half a block of feta.  Stirred it all about till the feta melted, then served in bowls.

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