pasta with cauliflower, broccoli and blue cheese

I love “bitsa” cooking - just open the fridge and see what needs eating.

And last night, what needed eating was some veg and some cheese. This was ridiculously quick and easy.

Divide the broccoli and cauliflower into smallish florets. Put them in a pan with a couple of inches of water and salt, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer/steam for about - oh - 7 minutes.

In the meantime, finely chop an onion - feel free to use a food processor - and sauté it gently in some olive oil, in a deepish frying pan, until it’s soft. While that’s all happening, crumble some blue cheese. I used stilton, because we had some that needed using up, but anything would do. And cook some pasta; we had tagliatelle.

When everything is done, drain the veg, drain the pasta, hurl them in the pan, add the cheese and stir it round.

Took about 15 minutes from going into the kitchen to hitting the plate - fast food!

bitsa lunch

We had a bag of salad leaves from Riverford this week. Neither perlmonger nor I are especially fond of salad; it always seems too much effort for little reward. However, we also have three mozzarellae which need eating (bought a tub full at Costco the other week). And so, today’s lunch:

1 packet pancetta cubes, gently fried in olive oil with a couple of cloves of garlic
3 salad onions, chopped
1/4 cucumber, diced
1 mozzarella, chopped
1 bag salad leaves, torn and destalked
1 can chickpeas
juice of half a lemon
some soy sauce
mixed seeds

Mix ‘em all together. Eat. Delicious.

bitsa

I’m going away for a few days, and need to use up some bits and pieces. These sorts of suppers are ones that are never repeatable, and I’m looking forward to this one.

The rest of the seven year old butter beans are currently boiling. And I have eight chorizo sausages, two cooked chicken breasts, and four slices of bacon. And half a head of fennel, some carrots, some parsley and some coriander to use. And half a bottle of red wine that is too far gone to drink, but will be fine for cooking.

A bottle of passata and some seasoning, and I think this is going to make something very nice. If you don’t hear from me again, it didn’t …

clearing up the fridge

For one reason and another, I haven’t done much cooking this week just past - probably because I’ve been coding this site for hours on end! So I looked in the fridge last night, and decided to clear up all the bitsa that was in there. What did I do?

• there was a jug of gravy left from last week’s roast pork; said gravy made with the pork juice, the vegetable water and a splash of oloroso sherry. I combined that with the last dregs of the duck soup from this week, boiled it up, and that’s the basis for this week’s soup.
• 5 sticks of rhubarb, getting a bit weary. 100g chopped and simmered to a pulp as the start of a pig’s bum for tonight or tomorrow. The rest of it chopped and lightly simmered with sugar and fresh ginger, and will go in the freezer for a crumble at some point
• the end of the loaf whizzed into breadcrumbs for the freezer
• 4 chicken breasts - was completely uninspired, so stuck them in a dish and baked them with a little olive oil and seasoning. They’ll go in the freezer, and be used for lentils with chickie!, or risotto, or stir fry, or sandwiches, or whatever

That leaves eight chicken thighs, which will be turned into a batch of moroccan chicken with chick peas and rice, one of our favourites.

And at the end of that, we ate cauliflower au gratin (inspired by the bread crumbs), accompanied by potatoes roasted in goose fat. Gorgeous :)