potato and chicken bake

Using up: cold roast chickie!, old potatoes, spring onions from a friend’s garden, cream bought for supper on Saturday and not eaten (due to circumstances beyond our control)

This is a real bitsa one - I’m pleased with it, because it was lovely.

Chopped some very elderly potatoes into slices about 1/4″ thick, and layered half of them into an ovenproof dish.  On top of that went the chopped spring onions, and the chickie! from the carcass I boiled up for soup a couple of days ago.  Added some cream and seasoned, grated a little gruyere cheese onto it, then layered the rest of the potatoes on. More cream (you need quite a lot, really), more seasoning, then cut more gruyere into very small dice and scattered them over the top.

I gave it 5 minutes in the microwave to get it started, then it had about 40 minutes on gas 5.  Should you try this, make sure you put the dish on a tray in the oven, because ours oozed a bit.

We had it with a bulb of fennel, sliced up, put in a little casserole dish with some of the chicken soup broth, and cooked in the oven alongside the potatoes, to save gas.  I really must think more about gas consumption when I’m cooking.

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mongrel soup

As mentioned previously, soup was in the offing. I boiled up the chickie! carcass from the freezer yesterday, and used the stock to make ris e bisi, and very nice it was too.

The rest has been turned into soup, with some carrots, some exceedingly wrinkled potatoes and - believe it or not - a brace of small lettuces.  P and I are not keen on lettuce, so this is as good as anything else to do with them.  Sadly, I set it on too low a gas, and so the soup was not ready for lunch, but it will be there for tomorrow.

And there were some fragments of chicken rescued from the carcass when it was en-stocked, and for these I have a cunning plan.

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ris e bisi

This is one of our favourite things - you can use frozen peas for the, er, peas, but you really do need the pods for the stock, so we only have it in summer.

Take about 500g of peas in the pod, and shell them.  Put the pods in a pan with about 1l of chicken stock (we had some from the shoup I made yesterday, but a stock cube is fine), bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes.  Drain the stock, and put the pods on the compost heap.

We had some lovely spring onions from a friends garden, so we chopped up some of those, and sautéd them in olive oil with some pancetta.  Then we added the stock, and 6oz of risotto rice (I know - I’m mixing the measurements here; sorry).  Bring to the boil, and simmer gently for 15 minutes.  Then add the peas, and simmer for another 5 minutes.  Add some shavings of parmesan and that’s it.

Serve it in bowls, as it is quite a soupy texture.

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I love my freezer …

It is the Summer; and thus it is cold, and raining, and generally bloody miserable, weather wise.

In the fridge I have some peapods - mostly empty, because Pete got to the bowl of peas, but still. I have a plan for these pods tonight, which I shall reveal to you later. I need some chicken stock for this plan, and I was just going to use an organic stock cube.

But … I also have a bunch of carrots that need using.  And the chickie! remains from June were in the freezer, enrobed in tin foil.  So the carcass is now sitting on a very low heat on the hob, and I shall take some stock from it for tonight’s supper, and the rest will be turned into shoop, with the carrots and some elderly spud.

Hurrah for the British summer, I say, and bring on the warming soup.

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duck and pineapple stirfry

No photo, I’m afraid, as the household was a tad fraught last night, due to one thing and another.

I bought a pineapple last week, and Pete brought home a huge bunch of coriander.  We were going to have pork and pineapple, but somehow we ate all the coriander with other things.  Then when I went to get the basil from the fridge for Thursday night’s pasta, I realised that we had enough to open a market stall.

So yesterday morning, I took a duck breast from the freezer ready for a stirfry.  Pete manfully chopped up the pineapple - in fact he cooked the whole thing.

A tip if you’re stir frying duck is to steam it over some boiling water for a few minutes, skin side down.  It causes the fat to crisp up nicely.

He stir fried the duck first, then set it aside; then he fried the usual suspects - green onion, mushrooms, garlic, ginger, added the duck back to the wok, added some pineapple and the remaining basil.  Delicious!

We had the rest of the pineapple for breakfast this morning, combined with some strawberries.

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plum (and pear) crumble

Using up: plums and a pear

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re not good with fruit.  we buy it, and are full of good intentions, but somehow we don’t actually *eat* it when we should.  So there was a punnet of six lovely golden plums sat by the fruit bowl, *looking* at me.  And a lone pear.

I cut the plums in half and removed their stones, and cut the pears into eighths; I’m afraid peeling wasn’t on the agenda.  I put the fruit in an ovenproof dish with about a tablespoon of water, then zapped it in the microwave for 2.5 minutes to start it cooking.  Then I added quite a bit of fresh grated ginger.

Crumble is easy - 2 parts flour (or equivalent*) to 1 part fat and 1 part sugar.  On this occasion, I used 5 oz of flour and 1 of walnuts, and whizzed it in the food processor with the butter, then added the sugar.  Put it on the fruit, pat it down, cook at gas mark 4 for about 40 minutes.  We ate it with good vanilla ice cream.

*Other things to substitute for some flour are porridge oats, or ground walnuts.

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living without plastic

Here’s an article about a woman who has vowed not to buy any plastic for a month - so no, yoghurt, bread or fruit in bags, chinese takeaways, bottled water or other drinks, milk in bottled (wonder what she’s doing about Tetrapak) etc.

Of course, like all these things, it’s not as simple as it at first appears.  Plastic cuts down waste by preserving food, by protecting it during transportation, etc.  But anything that helps to reduce the ridiculous amount of packaging we are almost forced to buy seems to me to be A Good Thing.

Christine Jeavons will be blogging about her month.

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things to do with beetroot #2

(#1 is a beetroot and chocolate cake, which works better than you could possibly imagine)

I don’t care for beetroot.  Not AT ALL.  But They will send it to me in the veg box from time to time.  Hanne Blank has just posted a recipe for stirfried beets with ginger, onion and pork on her blog.  It looks so pretty in pink that I think I will give it a shot next time a beetroot dares to show its face here.

Now then - where’s my cleaver?

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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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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!

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