Belatedly, a mongrel stew

Mac mentioned the meal I cooked last Thursday; I’ve finally got round to typing up what I did. This really was reactive cooking with a vengeance: I had hardly the slightest idea what I was going to do and just let myself be guided by what ingredients were to hand, sniffing and tasting, and what passes for instinct.

Ingredients:

half Polish caraway seed sausage cut into ~1cm chunks
broad beans
courgette, chopped
large onion, roughly chopped
garlic
ginger
juniper berries
pomegranate seeds
cinnamon bark
cumin
allspice
black pepper
paprika
black mustard seeds
thyme and mint from the garden
red wine
oil

basmati rice
olive oil
some finely chopped red onion (in the absence of shallots)
pine kernels and lemon wedges

Method:

whizz ginger, garlic, cinnamon bark, juniper seeds, pomegranate seeds

grind allspice, cumin and black pepper, and add to mustard seeds and paprika in a tiny brown bowl

boil broad beans for ~10min and drain

heat oil
add dry spices and fry for a bit
add whizzed components
add onion and fry for a bit
add courgette
add sausage
cook for a bit
add slosh of red wine
simmer for a bit
add beans
cover and simmer for a while
add fresh thyme and mint
add water
simmer a while longer
uncover and reduce as appropriate before serving

the pomegranate seeds were probably a mistake done this way, as they left hard seeds in the food as served; soaking in hot water and adding later might have been better.

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things to do with green beans

Seen on LiveJournal, and here as an aide memoire - sounds gorgeous:

Roast them. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, some garlic, chopped onions and pine nuts. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil and lemon juice and roast for about 15 minutes. You could also throw some pancetta in there.

Steam them and serve with some crumbled feta, mint and olives. Season and dress with olive oil and lemon juice.

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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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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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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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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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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.

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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.

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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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chicken stir fry

Using up: spring onions, red pepper, the last bit of courgette, half a lemon

The thing about a stir fry is you can lob pretty much anything in it, but you need to have it all ready before you start.

So, as you may see, I chopped four spring onions, a red pepper, a small piece of courgette.  Garlic and ginger were whizzed in the most useful kitchen gadget known to (wo)man.  Pete chopped up a red chilli.

Out of the larder came sesame seeds, and I had a tub of cold roast chicken in the freezer that was pressed into service - I marinated that in some shoyu and a teaspoon or so of sesame oil for about 20 minutes.

Into the wok went the sesame seeds, garlic and ginger for a minute or so, then added the white bits of the spring onion, the pepper and courgette.  Stir fried till done, then added chicken and marinade, the lemon juice and a teaspoon of five spice powder.  Oh, and a dribble of honey.

Left it to bubble while we boiled up some noodles, and realised it was a bit thin, so mixed up a teaspoon of cornflour with some cold water, and hurled that in.

Drained noodles and put them in the wok, mixed it round a little.

Served into bowls, then sprinkled with the chopped chilli and the green bit of the spring onions.

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