Butternut squash and cauliflower curry

Joe did the shopping this week, and I'd put cauliflower on the list. I don't think he's ever bought cauliflower before. It was giant. He bought the biggest cauliflower in the shop. Seriously, it was bigger than my head. After a massive cauliflower cheese bake, there was still half a cauliflower left, and I didn't have many ideas that didn't involve more cheese sauce. Then I saw one of Jamie's 30 minute meal programmes on repeat and he turned it into a curry. He massively cheated and used store bought paste, which I never have in, so I made up my own version. It took maybe 45 minutes.

I've written up a lot of curries on this blog, but I love them, and I love making them. They're also a brilliant way of using up stuff. The following recipe makes an awful lot of curry. It fed us tonight, then another pot of it to freeze so we can have it another night, then three portions for me to take to work. 

Giant pot of curry

This would be good with fresh coriander in both the curry and the raita, but I didn't have any.

Ingredients:

2 red chillies, in big chunks

5 cloves of garlic, peeled

a piece of ginger the size of your thumb, peeled and in big chunks

3 onions, sliced

a butternut squash, chopped into rough chunks

a normal sized head of cauliflower / half a giant head of cauliflower, cut into florets

half a bag of spinach

tin of tomatoes

tin of coconut milk

a tablespoon of cumin

a tablespoon of coriander

teaspoon of turmeric

teaspoon of mustard seeds

half a tablespoon of garam masala

half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper

Raita ingredients:

I make this every time we have curry, and it changes every time. It just depends what I 

have in. It's not authentic raita

half a big tub of natural yoghurt (I used low fat)

a couple of inches of cucumber, grated

a couple of chopped spring onions

juice of half a lemon/lime

plenty of salt and pepper

1.  Fry the onion on a medium heat in some vegetable oil with a pinch of salt for about five minutes, then add the butternut squash. Fry for another five/ten minutes. It's ok if it starts to brown, just don't let it stick or burn.

2.  Meanwhile, put the chilli, garlic and ginger in a hand blender and blitz it.

3.  Add the spices to the vegetables, stir and fry for another minute or two, then add the chilli, garlic and ginger. Fry for another few minutes, it should start smelling amazing.

4.  Add the tomatoes and coconut milk, plus half a tin of water. Shove a lid on, then leave it to simmer for fifteen/twenty minutes.

5.  Now make the raita, by mixing all the ingredients listed above.

6.  After fifteen minutes, the squash should be nearly cooked. Taste and season if it needs it. Stir in the cauliflower, and cook for another ten minutes, adding the spinach towards the end.

That's it, serve it all with rice.

Whilst making this I listened to 6 music. And drank wine. I needed a bit of time out.

Everyone can make a bolognese.

So I've been a bit ill. I don't get ill really. Not properly, visit-the-doctors, spend-days-in-bed ill. I regularly get a bit of a cold or whatever and feel a bit sorry for myself (and moan a lot, and make a lot of soup) but I still do everything I would normally do. I tried that this time, and ended up leaving work half way through a shift and calling in sick for the first time in three years. Ah well. The point of this preamble is not for sympathy, but to discuss food choices. I found myself becoming a child again. I was sitting on a sofa, under the same duvet I had when I was ill as a kid, eating tinned tomato soup. Boiled eggs mashed up in a cup. All it needed was white bread spread with margarine to go with it. Brilliant (yet terrible at the same time).

Now I'm feeling loads better. I've started getting bored at home, want go running, go to the pub. (I probably shouldn't do either of those things quite yet...) But I'm not ready to stop regressing. I've always loved spaghetti bolognese. We had mince most Tuesdays when I was growing up, and whenever I saw it defrosting I would always campaign for spaghetti bolognese. More often than not we'd have mince and tatties, as we had pasta on Mondays.  My mum was against having the same carbs two days in a row. Eventually she gave in to my campaigning with a weary “If you really want spaghetti bolognese, you make it.” As such, this is a recipe I've been honing since I was about twelve.

I'm aware there are lots of much easier ways to make a bolognese – often involving a well known brand of pasta sauce – but I've worked out this recipe throughout the last, erm, fifteen years?  For many of those years I was very skint, so this recipe can also make 1lb of mince feed at least four people.

A note on pasta... I will always call this spaghetti bolognese even though we often don't have spaghetti in the house. I use whatever shape of pasta we've bought in industrial sized bags. This week, penne. Most importantly, if you want your pasta to taste of something make sure you stir it into the bolognese while it's on the heat. You don't want a pile of pasta, then a pile of bolognese. The pasta will be horrible. Bolognese is a sauce and it's supposed to coat the pasta properly.

This is almost certainly not authentic.

My version of Bolognese

Ingredients:

1lb decent steak mince (I think that's probably about 450grammes?)

4 rashers of smoked streaky bacon diced up/or a small pack of lardons

2 onions, finely chopped

a carrot, peeled and finely chopped

2 sticks of celery, finely chopped

6 or so chestnut or button mushrooms, chopped

a red or orange pepper, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

a big glass of red wine

a tin of tomatoes

2 tablespoons of tomato puree

a splash of milk (optional, but I think it adds a bit of richness and helps bring it

all together)

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon dried thyme/some fresh thyme

2 dried bay leaves

plenty of salt and pepper

-  First, in a big pan, fry off your bacon/lardons until it's going a bit crispy and tasty. Resist the urge to eat a bit of it out of the pan. (actually eat a bit of it, there's nothing better than fried smoked bacon)

-  Add the onions, carrots, celery and pepper, a big pinch of salt and give it a stir. Now shove a lid on and leave it for five – ten minutes. It should be on a lowish heat, so everything starts to sweat but not colour.

-  Add the mince and garlic, and stir it a bit then let it brown. Stir it occasionally for five minutes until there aren't any pink bits left in the meat.

-  Add the mushrooms and tomato puree, stir, then cook for another five minutes.

-  Add the red wine and turn up a bit to bubble off the alcohol.

-  Add everything else (tomatoes, herbs etc.), give it a good stir, turn it right down and pop the lid on. Now cook it for about an hour, stirring occasionally. 

-  Keep an eye on it – it should reduce and get quite thick. If you think it looks a bit wet, take the lid off for a while. Keep tasting it and checking for seasoning. (if you don't have an hour and a half to make your bolognese you can cook it on a higher heat for less time, it just won't be quite as rich. I'd still give it half an hour of simmering if you can)

-  If you've got four people round for dinner, cook your pasta and drain it, before adding to the pan with the bolognese. If you're freezing some of it, take some of the bolognese out and put it in some tupperware, then stir your pasta into the rest of it. Cook the pasta in the bolognese for thirty seconds – a minute.

There we go! Serve with grated parmesan, salad etc. It probably doesn't need garlic bread, but sometimes it's nice to have a carb overload. 

I promise to do more adventurous food soon. Probably when I've finished the antibiotics and stopped regressing.

In which I follow a recipe and don't write about it, and write two other recipes instead

Happy New Year! Hope you've had a fantastic Christmas/New year. I thoroughly enjoyed my Christmas, which contained lots of food, booze, a backing track of Peppa Pig (thanks to my two year old nephew) and a lot of trips up and down the M62. My Hogmanay was spent on a night shift at work but never mind. We celebrated in the office with cheese and party snacks.

After all the excitement of the festive season, I am now in the process of using up a load of leave. That means some time at home, cooking, cleaning, relaxing, and recovering from all the excesses of the last month. I should probably do some exercise too.

I didn't get as much cooking related stuff for Christmas this year as my tiny kitchen is already full to overflowing. I did get Nigel Slater's book Real Food, so in a rare break from tradition I'm going to follow a recipe. I think Nigel Slater's style of cooking is amazing, and I love his food writing. One of my greatest charity shop finds of last year was a very very old copy of Real Fast Food for about two quid, which I proceeded to read from cover to cover without actually cooking anything from it. Anyway, this time I toyed with the idea of coq au Riesling but decided it was a bit excessive for a Thursday night and made Roast Chicken with Basil and Lemon instead. I'm not one for typing out someone else's recipes – buy his book if you want it. But it was very good! It looked like this: 

So what's the point of this post? Well yesterday I inadvertently opened a tin of cannellini beans when I thought they were chickpeas (middle-class woes). I had to think of something to do with them today, and I thought I'd try out a cannellini bean mash to go with this chicken and a massive pile of green stuff. Plus, when I was writing it, I found a recipe on my hard drive for chicken soup which I'd never posted... so I'm putting it up as a bonus recipe. (Yes, I have random recipes kicking around on my hard drive. What of it? I even had a picture of it on my phone. I know, I should get out more)

Cannellini Bean Mash

Ingredients:

a leek, rinsed and finely chopped

a clove of garlic, finely chopped

a tin of cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

a load of olive oil

a dollop of crème fraiche

salt and pepper

lemon juice (optional – I didn't bother this time because of the lemon-y chicken)

On a medium/low heat fry the leek and garlic in about three tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of salt. Stir it regularly until it all gets very soft – probably about ten minutes. You don't want it to take on any colour.

Add the cannellini beans and heat through for five – ten minutes.

Add a big dollop of half fat crème fraiche and stir through, then season with some pepper. Start mashing.

Add more extra virgin olive oil to get the consistency you want. Because of the leek it won't go completely smooth anyway, I added another three or four tablespoons. Taste it, and add more salt and pepper if required. Serve with whatever you like.

I really enjoyed this as an alternative to potatoes. We've had a LOT of potatoes over the last few weeks... 

Now the bonus recipe:

Chicken soup

This is my rough recipe for chicken soup which I made up after three days of coughing, sneezing and generally being very dopey. It's not authentic Jewish-penicillin-chicken-soup, not least because I'm not Jewish. Maybe lapsed Catholic penicillin?

It's in two stages - first the stock then the soup itself. This probably made enough for three/four portions? You can add whatever veg you have to hand.

Ingredients:

one chicken carcass (or some chicken pieces, three to four bits? wings/drumsticks or whatever)

an onion, peeled and quartered

two carrots, one roughly chopped and one peeled and finely chopped

a leek, take the top leafy bit off and roughly chop then rinse it, finely chop and rinse the rest

3 or 4 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed a wee bit

a quarter of a head of celery, take the spindly middle bits out and roughly chop, then finely chop a couple of substantial sticks of celery

a couple of big handfuls of pearly barley, rinsed (could use a couple of peeled, diced potatoes or some pasta. Some sort of starch anyway)

about a centimetre of ginger, roughly chopped into chunks

seasoning - a sprig or two of thyme, two or three bay leaves, 6/7 peppercorns, two cloves and a good pinch of sea salt

For the stock put all the reject bits of the vegetables (onion, roughly chopped carrot, leafy bit of leek, the garlic, spindly bits of celery and the ginger) and the chicken carcass in a pan with a lid, along with the all the seasoning. Cover with cold water, then bring up to the boil. Skim away any scum, turn the heat right down, cover it and leave it to simmer for about two hours.

When it's done, pour the stock through a sieve and put it back in the pan. Add the pearl barley and bring it back up to the boil before turning it down and simmering for twenty minutes. Then add all the other vegetables – ie. The nicely chopped stuff. Now simmer until everything's cooked. If you did chicken pieces in the stock you can pull off the meat and add it to the soup too.

Then it's done. Eat whilst under a duvet, then go back to bed.

 

Smoked Mackerel Chowder

We've been very busy the last few weeks and I've not really been keeping on top of things in the kitchen. This includes buying food. Joe has been a legend and has done the shopping, but that can mean we have an awful lot of some random things. Often it means we have a lot of booze and meat. Strangely, this time, we have a lot of celery and potatoes.

I'm not very good at cooking for one. I tend to make big pots of stuff and really struggle to downsize. Normally when I am on my own I make a stir fry or noodle soup. This time I fancied something different, but I still wanted to use up some stuff and avoid going shopping. I found a solitary smoked mackerel fillet in the freezer so I thought I'd make some sort of chowder. (I defrosted some prawns so I had a bit more meat) I did buy some soda bread to go with it.

Ingredients (to serve one very hungry person) - 

 

One smoked mackerel fillet, with the skin peeled off and flaked into chunks

Three/four big prawns, uncooked and chopped into 1cm chunks

Two medium potatoes (or three small ones), peeled and diced into 1cm chunks

One stick of celery, finely chopped

Three spring onions, sliced into 1cm pieces

Half a small tin of sweetcorn/three or four baby corn sliced into chunks

A small handful of frozen peas

A bay leaf

A quarter of a pint of milk

Two teaspoonfuls of crème fraiche

A quarter of a pint of vegetable stock

A handful of fresh spinach

Melt a little butter with a spoonful of vegetable oil over a low heat then add the potatoes, celery and spring onion with a pinch of salt. Fry slowly until they soften a bit. Then stir in the crème fraiche.

Stir in the milk, vegetable stock and bay leaf, simmer for five minutes then add the peas and sweetcorn and smoked mackerel. Keep the heat low and simmer for another five-ten minutes until the potatoes are completely cooked. 

For the last minute or two add the chunks of prawn and the spinach until they cook. If you happen to have chopped parsley or chopped chives add some finely chopped at the end. I didn't have any. 

Serve with big slabs of brown soda bread spread with butter.

This was great. Cheap and really tasty. It would be better with smoked haddock, because that would flavour the soup more, but still, this did the job.

I'm aware posting this means I've done two soup recipes in a row but I think this is more of a stew... later in the week I'm going to make a really easy pie. Maybe I'll put that one up here to remind you I do eat solid food occasionally.

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.

Not quite perfect pizza.

After a week in food heaven (Andalucia; amazing tapas, dirt cheap and lots and lots of ham) we're going to be staying in a bit for the next while... which might mean more blog updates. This post is a total cheat. I'm sure you can all follow someone else's recipe but hell, it's the first proper cooking I've done in a while and I'm quite excited about it.

Tonight's weekend treat was pizza and a film. I've always loved pizza. When I was growing up frozen pizza was our Friday night tea, when my mum had been working all week and couldn't really be bothered to cook. To this day it's the only ready meal type thing I really have in the freezer. I've made my own pizza a few times, but always found that the base was a bit bread-y (it's a word) and doughy, and time consuming. I haven't quite worked out how to avoid that yet.

Then I watched Lorraine Pascale and she made a basic bread dough and used it almost straight away. I thought this could revolutionise pizza making in my house! Her recipe is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/pizza_expressed_three_77124 and I used that for the base. But I'm still not sure this nails it. I think it needs to be left to prove then just be rolled really seriously thin, but that's for next time. This was still good, just not as bubbly and crispy as I would have liked.

I've made my own pizza sauce, my own toppings, and two tasty salads to go with it.

Before you do anything, put your oven on to preheat as high as it will go. It's the only way you'll get anything resembling crispiness.

The salads:

Spinach salad with tomatoes, cucumber, peppers and toasted pine nuts. I made a lemon-y dressing:

- one part lemon juice

- two parts good extra virgin olive oil

- plenty of salt and pepper

- half a teaspoon of grain mustard

I'm sad enough to keep jars specifically for making dressings in. Give it all a good shake about, then dress the salad just before serving.

Bit blurry. Sorry about that, I was really hungry.

The second salad had beetroot (because it was reduced), grated carrot, spring onion and celery. Autumnal, eh? It would have been REALLY good with some feta in it, but I decided two types of cheese in one meal was probably enough. Two go with this I made a balsamic dressing:

-  one part balsamic vinegar

-  two parts good extra virgin olive oil

-  plenty of salt and pepper

- half a clove of very finely grated garlic

And again, dress it just before serving.

  

The pizzas:

First make a pizza sauce, I like to keep it fairly basic.

- some passata/seived tomatoes (I used a whole carton, as it's going to be pasta sauce later)

- a clove of garlic, finely chopped (or a clove and a half if you've got a random half clove of garlic after making the balsamic dresing)

- a splash of red wine vinegar (a teaspoon?)

- salt and pepper

- a handful of fresh basil

Fry the garlic in a little oil on a low heat for a minute or two. Don't let it colour. Then add the passata and red wine vinegar, season and let it bubble away for a little while before adding your chopped or torn basil. You could add some thyme, or some chilli or whatever you like really. That's it. Let it cool a bit before you use it.

For the pizzas you want the sauce to be a very thin layer so it's not too gloopy. Any leftover sauce can be used in pasta/with chicken or whatever during the week.

Follow the base recipe as above (or leave it to prove for an hour then roll it). Without a pizza oven or even pizza stone it's always going to be difficult to get a really crispy base. You just need to make it as thin as possible and hope for the best.

I'm not sure about pizza “expressed” three ways in Lorraine Pascale's recipe, I made two different types.

Of course you can add whatever you like. I made one with goats cheese and red onion. Just thinly slice a red onion, put it on top of a thin layer of sauce then add big chunks of torn up goats cheese. Season it well. 

The other was a more standard pepperoni and mozzarella. A thin layer of sauce, then a load of pepperoni (try not to lay it flat so some of it goes crispy) then some proper mozzarella torn up over the top. Season well. 

When you've put the toppings on your pizza shove in the hottest oven you can for ten minutes. That's it.

Don't pile the toppings up too high, remember it's all going to melt and go everywhere anyway.

We had it with artichoke hearts in olive oil, lots of olives, and the salads. And some wine. Happy days. 

This week's soup: Celeriac. It was reduced. With some home made stock, white wine and parmesan in there it's pretty tasty.

Whilst making this I mostly listened to: Fleetwood Mac – Rumours on vinyl, then 6music. Because it's brilliant.