Home comforts and cheap eats.

This is a rare post about soup. I make it almost every week but rarely put the recipe up, as it took me years to convince people that it wasn't the only thing I ate. But now, with autumn well and truly here, it is the perfect time for soup. It's healthy, cheap and very very easy. Make it now. Freeze some of it. Have it on night shifts when you're cold and sleepy. 

Split pea and ham soup

My mum used to use ham hock in soups all the time, but I don't remember them being enormous. I don't know if hock is just the Scottish phrase for it but never mind. My conversation with the butcher went like this:

Me: “Have you got any ham hocks?”

Him: “Do you mean ham shank?”

Me: “Is it the same thing? It's for soup”

Him: “Yeah it's good for soup.”

(produces a ham shank the size of my head)

Me: “Jesus it's enormous!”

Him: “Yeah you're going to have a lot of soup.”

And yet, it was only £2.80. And I go to a good butcher, where the meat is free range and brilliant. £2.80. Amazing. So I'm now concocting other recipes for this rather ugly but totally delicious cut of meat. Honestly, I don't buy cheap meat, but cheap CUTS of meat are the way forward.

So with some split peas from the back of the cupboard and the cheap meat this probably works out at about 35p a portion.

Ingredients:

a ham hock

half a pack of green split peas, rinsed

a carrot, scraped and roughly chopped

a couple of onions, peeled and roughly chopped

a clove of garlic, peeled and sliced in two

a couple of bay leaves

lots of water

pepper

normally I would have a couple of roughly chopped sticks of celery

too, but the celery in our fridge had gone bendy

1. I boiled the ham for a short blast on it's own before cooking as it's an insanely salty piece of meat. Some ham hock recipes I've seen say you should soak it overnight for this reason. That would require planning though. Put it in a soup pot, surround with water and bring to the boil for ten minutes. This helps to take away some of the saltiness, and any scum from the ham (no one wants scum).
2. Pour away that water and put the ham to one side. Wipe any scum from the pan.
3. Fry the onions garlic and carrots on a low heat in a little vegetable oil, then add the ham, bay leaves and split peas to the pan
   
   

   

   Ugly, isn't it?

4. Top up with a full kettle full of cold water. Probably a couple of litres. Bring it up to the boil, then lower the heat stick a lid on and leave it to simmer for ages, depending on the size of the ham. At least two hours but probably more.
   Go with your instinct on this. I did it for two and a bit hours but then we were due to go out for dinner, and I didn't feel like the ham was quite falling apart enough. We do have a rubbish electric hob though, which takes an AGE to cool down, so I just switched the hob off and left it while we went out. I would guess it probably bubbled away for about two and a half in the end.
5. Remove the ham and bay leaves and blend the rest of the soup. When the meat has cooled remove the skin and bones, tear up the meat and add as much of it back to the soup as you like. Use the rest for sandwiches or something. I've frozen some so next time we have chicken I can make a chicken and ham pie.
   
   

   

   A dinner plate full of ham!

   
   

   
   
6. DON'T ADD SALT. It won't need it. Even for a salt fiend like me.

The enormous piece of ham was a revelation. I'm already plotting recipes which involve ham hock and pearl barley.

A friend and fellow food blogger has just mentioned lamb breast as an equally delicious cheap cut of meat. Any others that I don't know about and should be cooking? It might just be the theme for this winter...

A bit of batch cooking - sausage and lentil stew

Autumn is my favourite season. Every now and then you get those really special autumn days where the sky is bright blue, it's a little bit cold but crisp and clear and all the leaves are changing colour. Those are the best kind of days. My pasty white skin is more suited to jeans and boots, jumpers, big coats, and scarves. And I get to make lovely casserole type things, and stews, and it's the best time of year for soup. I love soup.

Today is not one of those special days... it's one of the other type of autumn days where it's cold and grey and drizzly and a bit rubbish. Perfect for batch cooking some stuff to last me the next few days at work. It'll save me from living off ready meals and stuff with bread from the canteen.

Today's batch meal is sausages with green lentils. The traditional recipes for this sort of thing would use Puy lentils but I didn't have any and they're more expensive. I do have lots of green lentils, so I used those.

Lentils go really well with the salty/savoury flavours of pork. They're great with things like ham hock etc. I used sausages because they're brilliant comfort food. It's also nice to have this one pot dish with all the vegetables included – it makes it easier to freeze portions of it and then microwave it at work.

Ingredients:

6 good sausages (my butcher has a decent range – choose one you like. I got Cumberland)

200 grammes dried green lentils, rinsed

3 rashers of smoked streaky bacon or some smoked pancetta/lardons

2 onions, finely chopped

2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped

3 sticks of celery, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

a tin of tomatoes

a good glass of red wine

a pint of chicken stock

two bay leaves

the roughly chopped leaves of a few sprigs of rosemary and a small handful of thyme

1. Heat up some oil in a large pan and brown the sausages well, before removing them from the pan. They don't need to cook at this stage, just get a good colour on them and make the pan porky.
   
   

   

   One of the sausages was enormous. It ended up at the front of all the photos

   
   

   
   
2. Slice the bacon into small pieces and fry until browned. Try not to eat them all straight out of the pan. Nothing is better than fried crispy bacon.
3. Lower the heat and add the onion, carrots, celery and garlic then fry until softened. Minus the garlic, these three vegetables form the basis of most good stews/casseroles/bolognese etc.
   
   
   
    
4. Add everything else to the pan, give it a good stir, season with salt and pepper. Bring it up to the boil and boil for ten minutes. 
5. Turn the heat down and put the sausages back in. Shove a lid on and simmer for twenty minutes to half an hour until the lentils are cooked. It depends how long they've been kicking around in the back of your cupboard. (Packets of green lentils are the kind of thing that lurk at the back of cupboards) 
   
   
   
   
   
6. Serve as is, or with some greens on the side (kale/cabbage/cavolo nero or similar) and a big dollop of dijon mustard. 
   
   
   

Really easy, and utterly delicious. This was supposed to be just for planning ahead, and I was going to have risotto tonight but I couldn't resist and had this for my tea. I'll have risotto tomorrow.