goose pudding etc

We’ve had a weekend of “using up bits”. Saturday brunch was bacon, black pudding and the last of the flat mushrooms, and supper was Indian mushrooms with spinach (except we forgot to add the spinach so that’s still in the fridge – spinach frittata during the week, I think). That was to use up half the pack of button mushrooms that was left.

Sunday morning was potato scones, made with some cold mashed spuds that was in the fridge, and a pack of baby sossidges, to which we are addicted.

Today we ate the last of the M&S party food individual pies, which really are surprisingly nice. Just parmesan and basil twists to go there! I have cracked today and been to the greengrocer, as one leek, half a pepper and a wizened swede is not an inspiring collection of veg.

For Sunday supper, I made a goose pudding, thus:

Diced carrot, onion, garlic and celery, and sauted off. Did about three times as much as needed, and dumped the balance into the soup pot, which was a tad lacklustre. Discovered that Pete had, in fact, used all the mushrooms on Saturday night, so despatched him up to Jacksons for some more. Sliced them (not him) and added to the pot. Dumped in a 1/2 glass of red wine, and some vegetable stock, and the very, very last of Johnny Goose. Added some thyme. and a little cornflour mixed in cold water to thicken the mix, and left it for about 20 minutes, while I made a suet pastry.

Combined filling and pastry in a bowl, covered with foil secured with an elastic band, and dumped in the slow cooker on “high” for about seven hours. It was lovely, and we ate it with green beans and mashed potato. The rest will do for supper tonight, with a few roasties (more cold spud in the fridge), and some cabbage.

corned beef hash

We haven’t had this for ages, and it’s a really tasty, easy meal if you have the bits ready cooked. Which we had.

Chop an onion and fry it off in, ideally, some dripping, but oil would do. I suppose. Add chopped cooked potatoes, and something green in the way of vegetables – cooked cabbage, sprouts, spring greens – we had sprouts left from last night. Cook gently until it’s all starting to break down, then add a can of corned beef, cut into dice, and continue to cook gently until that breaks down too.

In a perfect world, you’d be using a non-stick sort of pan so you could bring up the heat and brown it off, but in my current kitchen-free world, I was using a cast iron sauté pan, and didn’t dare do that, because I couldn’t face the certain sticking.

That’s it, really – very nice with HP Sauce, for those of us with taste, or Lea and Perrins Worcester sauce, for those who don’t. One pot cooking.

balsamic potatoes with red onions

I referred to these in my last post, about our New Year’s Eve dinner.  Here’s the recipe – highly recommended!  It comes from one of the Jamie Oliver books.

serves 6

1.5kg medium-size waxy potatoes, quartered lengthways (I don’t generally bother with peeling potatoes, but feel free)
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
olive oil
200g butter, cubed
fresh rosemary, leaves picked and chopped
1 whole bulb of garlic, quartered or smashed
5 medium red onions, peeled and quartered
350ml cheap balsamic vinegar

Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6. Parboil the potatoes for about eight minutes, then drain, return to the pan, and rough them up a bit by shaking (this works really well for roasting potatoes too, by the way).

Pour a glug of olive oil into a roasting tray, add the butter, rosemary and garlic, and heat it on the hob – you want to be able to fit the potatoes in one layer. Add the potatoes and toss them in all the flavours. Add the onions and all the balsamic vinegar and season with salt and pepper. Cook for five minutes on the hob to reduce the balsamic vinegar a little. Place the tray on the top shelf and cook for about 50 minutes, until the potatoes and onions are dark, sticky and crispy – removing the tray to toss the onions and potatoes halfway through.

sausages!

We are huge fans of sossidge – we buy nice ones whenever we see them, and stash them in the freezer. They’re real comfort food for us, and when we don’t know what to have to supper, the cry of “sossidge” will be heard chez Jordan.

And sossidge it was last night – some Merguez beef ones which I got from lord knows where. I wish I did know, as they were lovely, as were the other ones which came from the same place. Ho hum.

I cooked them in the baby Remoska, just to see if it would work, and it did! I want a bigger one now, so I shall haunt eBay.

They were accompanied by fried potato – I took two largeish spuds, and quartered them lengthways to make big wedges. Boiled them for 12 minutes, then fried them in groundnut oil in the wok, which gave them a very slight Thai flavour after last night’s thai stir fry! (And we had baked beans too, and I don’t care.

stovies

using up: pot roast stock and veg

At least, that’s what we call them … it’s a Scottish dish, and a great way to use up stuff.  We did a pot roast for Sunday lunch the weekend before last (sorry, been really busy decorating, so no time to write blog posts!), and were left with a big jugful of gorgeous gravy with carrots and shallots.

Cut a couple of onions in half, and slice thinly, so you have half rings, if that makes sense.  Melt some dripping – and it has to be dripping, don’t mess about with olive oil or so forth – in a large pan, and cook the onions until they are just starting to brown.

While that’s going on, slice some potatoes fairly thinly (no need to peel), and when the onions are ready, add the spuds to the pot and turn them around so they are covered in onion-y fat.  Then add sufficient gravy to just cover, put a lid on and set on a low heat for about 35-40 minutes.  You’ll get a gorgeous potful of beefy spud, which will go beautifully with cold roast beef.  Trust me.

indian vegetarian meal

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Pete brought a huge bunch of coriander home from the Indian supermarket on Saturday.  We had some with a vegetable tagine, some with sour pork with rhubarb, but there was still a reasonable wodge left.

We have lots of spuds to eat too, as the rain got through the shed roof and into the sack, and I don’t know how long they’ll last.  So …

We had:

• Madhur’s potatoes with ginger and garlic
• basmati rice, cooked with cinnamon and black cardamon, with a big mushroom chopped up to make a sort of pillau
• a small tub of lentils and spinach that I found lurking in the freezer at the weekend

We sprinkled a lod of coriander over it all.  A feast fit for anyone, for peanuts.  The potatoes are utterly lovely – highly recommended.

potato and leek bake

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Using up: elderly spuds, some cream

Scrubbed potatoes (we never bother with peeling) and sliced very thinly.  There was a bit less than we hoped for because one spud had gone over, unfortunately.

Washed one leek – a handy tip from Jamie Oliver is to slice the leek in half lengthwise from the core, then run it under the tap; gets all the mud out easily.  Sliced it up fairly small.

Greased an ovenproof dish – I use a sunflower oil spray for this, Layered in half the potato slices, sloshed in some double cream, seasoned.  Added leeks, sprinkled on grated gruyere cheese.  Layered on the rest of the potato, more cream, more seasoning, more gruyere.

I always start this kind of thing in the microwave for 5 minutes – it cuts about 20 minutes off the total cooking time.  Then into the oven on gas 5 for about 30 minutes.  Put it on a tray, because it might ooze a bit.

You can substitute all sorts for this – chicken stock instead of cream, spinach or courgette or whatever instead of leeks, breadcrumbs on the top.  Excellent standby for using up stuff – I’ve even put leftover chicken in the middle sometimes.

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.

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.