Roasted butternut squash and mushroom lasagne

Fancied a bit of a veggie treat this weekend, and this is one of my favourites. It’s pretty different to a normal lasagne!

The first job is to sort out the butternut squash. Put on the oven to preheat at around 180 degrees. The best advice I could give for squash is to use a really big knife! Peel, deseed and chop up the squash into cubes. Put a little vegetable oil and some salt and pepper on and put it in the oven for half an hour. 

Whilst that’s cooking, chop up some mushrooms (I used the best part of a standard supermarket packet!) and fry them on a high heat. I then put a couple of cloves of garlic in the pestle and mortar with a little salt, a little olive oil and a handful of fresh parsley, mushed it up until it resembled a sort of pesto, and added it to the mushrooms.  You don’t have to do this, I more or less did because I have a new pestle and mortar I wanted to play with, but it was nice! 

I soaked some dried mushrooms in a little boiling water for ten minutes then added them too. (Porcini mushrooms are the nicest, but I used Portobello because they’re cheaper! Not quite as tasty though) After they’ve cooked for a minute or two, add the water the mushrooms soaked in. About two tablespoons of double cream, and a good tablespoon of crème fraiche makes them pretty tasty. Add a good dose of salt and pepper.

 (it's very green because of the parsley pesto)

Then make a béchamel sauce, by mixing together flour and butter over a low heat and SLOWLY mixing in milk. I will confess that I managed to totally screw up my béchamel tonight! I added the milk too quickly and then wasn’t paying attention and it went a bit curdled and manky… I promise it’s the first time in years that’s happened! I started again, and followed my own instructions… and it was perfect. Then mix in some grated cheese to thicken it up. Your squash will be cooked by now so take it out of the oven!

If you were doing this for a dinner party or anything you could prepare most of the bits in advance, and assemble later.

You need quite a lot of sauce, as this is going to be the main cooking liquid for the lasagne sheets. About three quarters of a pint of milk. 

I recently had a conversation at work where more than one person said they would ALWAYS cook lasagne sheets before using them, even if the packet said you didn’t have to. I have to say, I really don’t bother. There’s enough faffing around in this recipe without that to deal with too! I don’t mind the occasionally crunchy corner, and as long as there’s enough liquid to cook them it doesn’t make too much difference.

 Then layer it all up. I go for:

Fresh spinach, roasted squash, then half the mushroom mixture. Then a layer of lasagne, and the same again. I’m not too fussy about making sure there are absolutely no gaps in the lasagne sheets. When I put the white sauce on top I want it to dribble through a bit to help cook everything evenly. The top layer should be lasagne then pour the sauce over the top. A bit of grated cheese and some salt and pepper, and it’s ready to go in the oven, for about forty minutes. 

Whilst in the oven, have a glass of wine and make a salad. Then it’s all done! I love this dish, and I don’t miss meat in it at all. Cheap and really tasty.

This weeks soup: Leek and potato again.

Whilst making this I mostly listened to: Monsters of Folk. A colleague recently purchased this, and has let me borrow it while he’s on holiday. Seems only fitting whilst making a hippy-ish veggie meal I should also listen to hippy-ish music.

Fish pie and egg poaching

So it’s the weekend before payday, and I spent five days in Scotland last week eating and drinking. This means I am absolutely skint, and trawling the freezer to see what we could eat this weekend! I realised we had basically all the ingredients for a fish pie, and even better might have enough to cook for some friends too…

I also have duck eggs, courtesy of a nice man at work who keeps ducks and hens and brings in the eggs. So the sort-of-dinner-party recipe is:

-          Poached duck egg salad with bacon bits and balsamic dressing

-          Fish pie

-          Loads of wine

Fish pie is a bit laborious, but worth it. It always feels to me a bit of a treat and very comforting. The key thing is to have a good variety of fish. In our freezer we had some pollock, a tiny bit of salmon, and some prawns.  I bought a piece of smoked haddock to go with it (smoked fish adds loads of flavour to fish pie, it’s a must).

Put some potatoes on for mash.

All the fish except the prawns goes in a big tub with a bay leaf and some peppercorns and gets covered with milk, then goes in the microwave for 4 minutes or so to poach lightly. It needs to be only just cooked, and pulling apart quite easily. 

Meanwhile, de-vein the prawns. Basically there’s a manky looking black line on prawns that is their intestinal tract or something (bleurgh). Thankfully, a quick scrape with the point of a sharp knife gets rid of it. 

Scatter your prawns into your pie dish, and pull the fish apart into chunks and distribute it fairly evenly. You don’t want any skin or anything. I also add some spinach leaves for a bit of extra veggie goodness, but you can leave it out if you’re not bothered.

Then make the sauce by stirring together some butter and flour over a medium heat, and gradually adding the milk you cooked the fish in. (Basically a classic white sauce, but it tastes all fishy and good). Add a load of chopped parsley and some chopped chives and the juice of half a lemon. Season with salt and pepper, then pour over the fish. Should look a bit like this:

 Mash the spuds with butter and milk then spread over the top. I tried something different with this pie, and blitzed up some bread with some herbs and salt and pepper to give it a nice crust on top. (Got the idea from a Nigel Slater article I think). It worked a treat!

(Not to blow my own trumpet but one slightly pissed guest said the fish pie was “awesome”)

Ready to go in the oven for about 30/40 minutes at 200 degrees. Should end up looking a bit like this (perhaps slightly less blurry. May have had a G and T by this point...):

For the starter, I fried off some bacon-y bits. I was going to buy pancetta or streaky bacon slices but my butcher gave me tail end bits of bacon for free, so I wasn’t about to complain! A salad of spinach, chives and radishes, then a lovely poached duck egg, and some bits of bacon. After the bacon has fried off, I put it on some kitchen paper to drain, and added some balsamic to the pan to deglaze it for the dressing with a bit of lemon juice.

Poaching eggs is a bit of a dark art, and it’s in the hands of the gods whether it works out or not. Lots of boiling hot water with a touch of vinegar in it is the key, break the egg into a cup or saucer so you can make sure it stays whole, swirl the water around and drop it in. Then hope for the best. They don’t take long, just a couple of minutes for a nice soft centre. Take out of the water with a slotted spoon and let them drain really well; no one wants vinegar-y water on their dinner. I’d never poached four eggs at once before, and decided just to go for it and see what happened. By some fluke it worked!

Awesome! I’ve been having a 6music and sunshine based weekend, hope you have too.

Just sheer gluttony. Roasted belly pork

I love roast dinners. My general approach is to buy the biggest bit of meat we can afford, as leftovers are never going to go to waste. (They just present a challenge for another night… and there’s always sandwiches)

Belly pork is a brilliant cut of meat. I can understand why it might not be to everyone’s taste, as it is quite fatty, but it is incredibly tasty because of it. It’s also very good value, a piece of meat too big for our roasting dish set me back about six quid. The way I cook it is a bit of a rehash of a Jamie Oliver recipe, but I’m not great at following recipes.

First thing to do is whack the oven up as high as it can go to try and get the best crackling. The butcher had scored the skin for me, so then it’s a case of rubbing in a frightening amount of salt to all the scores. I do think it helps to get the salt quite deep into the cuts. Put it in the oven when it’s good and hot for half an hour. The skin should start to puff up and look crackling-y like this:

Whilst that’s in there, chop up a couple of onions and a stick or two of celery into big chunks. Take half a dozen cloves of garlic and smash them a little bit. You can leave the skin on the garlic, just put the flat of a big knife on them and give them a whack.

After half an hour, take the meat out and turn the oven down to 180. Lift the meat out (no easy task) and put your onions, garlic and celery into the pan and add some rosemary if you’ve got it. Thyme would be good too, but I didn’t have any. Toss this stuff around in the meat juices in the pan, and put the meat back on top. Put it in the oven, and it will now do its thing for about two hours. Occasionally baste it with some of the fat from the bottom of the tray.

I know with a roast it would traditionally be roast potatoes, but tonight’s meal is all about sheer gluttony (and I had some cream to use up) so I made dauphinoise potatoes.  I am of the firm belief that everything is better with dauphinoise potatoes.

I used up about half a carton of double cream, and added milk until it looked wet enough. Normally it would be all cream, but I didn’t have quite enough. Finely chop a clove of garlic, peel some potatoes and slice them as finely as you can.  Put this into a bowl, and mix it together with the cream and a little bit of milk. Add salt and pepper. Then tip into a gratin dish or casserole dish, flatten it out a bit, and put little knobs of butter on top, along with a touch more salt and pepper. This will take 45 minutes or so to cook, so doesn’t need to go in until the last half hour of the pork’s cooking time. 

We had this with kale, which I just steamed, and some glazed carrots. Chop up the carrots in big chunks, put a little drop of water in, a knob of butter and a teaspoonful of sugar. Boil until the water all but disappears and you’re left with a lovely glaze. I had this at a friend’s once, and I’ve been trying to recreate them ever since! (Never quite as good as Hannah’s I have to admit)

When the pork’s had it’s time, take the meat off and let it rest on a plate for a while. It won’t go cold, but if you’re concerned put a bit of tinfoil over it to keep the heat in.

Now we see the reason for the veggies in the bottom; with all that cooking they will have gone beautifully caramelised. Any bits underneath the meat will be very pork-y and lovely. Any bits that look a bit too charred, just chuck!

Pour away most of the fat from the roasting dish, then put it over a low heat, and stir in a teaspoonful of plain flour. Once it’s cooked for a minute pour in a glass of white wine, then slowly add some chicken/vegetable stock (or even just water), stirring continuously to avoid lumps. Make sure you scrape up any sticky bits off the bottom of the pan: they’re the business. 

Let it bubble and reduce, taste it and season if it needs it, after ten minutes you’re ready to go. Pour it through a sieve for an amazing, dark, rich gravy.

Then dish up! Sorted. Not something to have every week, but a hell of a treat. And you’ll be fighting over the crackling. (The meat is lasting us a couple of nights. The crackling has now disappeared.)

Whilst making this I was mostly listening to: The new Elbow album. I’m sort of in love with elbow a bit.  And then Sigur Ros – Takk. Because it’s brilliant.

No soup this week, I’m away during the week.

What do you think of the new design? I’m not sure I like it, but got very bored of looking for others options.

National Pie Week; a very rustic steak pie.

It’s national pie week. Apparently. I didn’t know that such a thing existed until Friday night when we saw an ad in the pub, but I’m not one to ignore a cookery based bandwagon I could jump on!

Now this is quite laborious, particularly in comparison to last night’s mussels and chips. This was a full on apron wearing, hours in the kitchen, job. It’s not very traditional, but check it out nonetheless:

I used shin of beef for this, because Delia reckons it’s the best for stews and things.  I didn’t follow her recipe, but did follow her advice on that, and it was dirt cheap (I got over a pound for about three quid!)

First, I took about a pound of beef and tossed it in some seasoned flour. I then browned it all off bit by bit in some hot oil. You want it to caramelise on the edges and go nice and brown, and try not to worry about the state of the bottom of your pan! So eventually you have a plateful of lovely browned meat, and a messy looking pan.

Add little more oil to the pan, then fry off two onions. I used one red and one white onion, but that wasn’t for any fancy reasons, just because I have red onions to use up.  Add a load of mushrooms and let it fry for a bit. Then put the meat back in, add some red wine (I had about a third of a bottle left over) and a dash of Worcestershire sauce (I had to google that to check how to spell it.) Top up with a bit of water, and stick in a bay leaf and let it bubble for about two hours. Take this opportunity to have a cup of tea/glass of wine/start writing your blog… I know that normally it would be ale or stout in this, but I didn’t have any.

It reduces down lots and lots:

I can’t claim to be a pastry expert, and I know that steak pie is the best ever when made with suet pastry, but I don’t have suet, and if I bought some it would sit in the cupboard forever more. So I’m just going for a bog standard short crust as per the BeRo cookbook: http://www.be-ro.com/index.asp I left it to rest for half an hour in the fridge.

I buttered and floured a pie dish.  I think ideally the filling should be allowed to completely cool so the pastry doesn’t go soggy, but I was running out of time! So I had to just go with it. I lined the pie dish with half the pastry, and filled it with the stew mixture. I used a slotted spoon so the gravy stayed in the pan, to stop it going soggy, and saved it for serving. Roll out the other half of the pastry, put it on the top, and mash down the edges a little bit with a fork. Put a hole in the middle so the steam can get out. And put in the oven at 180 degrees for about forty five minutes. It all looks a bit haphazard, but let's call it rustic:

I don’t have a rolling pin, but do have lots of empty wine bottles:

We had it with curly kale and lovely buttery mash, served the gravy at the table to pour over the top of this: 

 

Whilst making this I mostly listened to: Elbow, the Seldom Seen Kid. However, that ended when I was only about a third of the way through the process, so then I switched to 6music.

This weeks soup: “spring minestrone” At least that’s what I’m calling it. It used up all our leftover veg, had some bacon, a tin of borlotti beans and some home made chicken stock.

Mussels and chips

Or Moules Mariniere. It’s one of my all time favourites. I love mussels. My folks introduced me to them as a kid, probably on one of many trailer tent holidays in France.

To this day, one of my most memorable birthdays took place while we were on holiday in France, in a slightly dodgy café, where men came in trying to sell us leather jackets as we ate.  We had French onion soup, with proper big croutons with Gruyere cheese on top, then had mussels and chips.  A man with an accordion came in, and my mum got him to play happy birthday. I must have been about nine. Amazing.

Anyway, enough of my (slightly wine fuelled) trip down memory lane. The other thing I love about mussels is that they’re so damn easy. A little labour intensive to clean maybe, but very little skill involved!

And the OTHER thing I love about mussels is that they’re so damn cheap! I bought a kilo of them from Waitrose yesterday (hardly known for being cheap and cheerful) and they were about three quid. It was more than enough for two people with hearty appetites, and feels like a proper treat.

The first, and most arduous, bit of tonight’s meal was cleaning them.  Thankfully these were rope grown, so there weren’t many barnacles. Basically the job involves running them under cold water to get any grit or dirt off, knocking any barnacles off with a knife, and pulling off the beards. (see below for a picture of a mussel with a beard) 

If any are open, give them a good tap on the sink/counter.  If they close they’re fine, if they don’t then get rid of them. There’s always a few that need to be discarded.

Finely chop an onion (traditionally it would be shallots) and a clove of garlic, and soften them in some butter on a low heat, so they don’t colour. Then chuck in 100 ml of white wine, the mussels, put the lid on and whack the heat up. They take three to four minutes, with the odd shake of the pan.

Once they’re opened, pour in about 100 ml of cream and a load of chopped parsley and give it a good stir around. That’s it. Really. And they’re brilliant.

I don’t make chips from scratch, due to lack of deep fat fryer/chip pan. Also, we rarely have chips, so the standby frozen skinny fries do me just fine.

And the best bit? Dipping some nice bread in all the juices that are left in the pan. And having a nice glass of white wine with it. Truly awesome. I now need a lie down as I couldn’t resist a third slice of bread to dip.

Note: I can’t claim moules mariniere as my own recipe, but it’s so good I wanted to write about it anyway.

And I’m not even on a diet…

Being a bit of a hippy, this weekend I made steamed fish and brown rice.

Right, this is more appetising than you might think.  I had a heavy weekend last weekend at my lovely nephew’s Christening in Ireland, and came back begging never to drink again and craving steamed fish and vegetables.

Of course these things never really come to fruition, but it did make me think I don’t eat enough fish, which is odd, as I’ve always really liked it. My Mum loves fish, and I was brought up eating it.

As I try and buy all my meat from the butcher, I really ought to buy my fish from a fishmonger too, but unfortunately there isn't one nearby. So instead, I’m aiming to try and at least buy more sustainable fish. (see Hugh’s fish fight: http://www.fishfight.net/ ) I bought pollock, to try and replace the usual haddock/cod.

Right, off my soapbox and back on with the cooking…

The first thing I did was boil the kettle and get the brown rice on, as it takes ages compared to white rice.* I also put the oven on to preheat. (180 degrees)

I put the fillets on a bit of tin foil with sliced ginger and sliced red chilli.  I then added the juice of half a lime, a tablespoon of soy sauce, and a tablespoon of Thai fish sauce. (I love Asian flavours, but don't always use them in the most authentic way and tend just to make it up)

I wrapped it up into a big pasty-type effort, leaving enough room for steam to be created, but sealing it at the edges.

I then thinly sliced some carrot and peppers, chopped up some broccoli and garlic, and took some green beans out of the freezer. When the rice had been on for about fifteen minutes, I put the fish parcel in the oven, and stir fried the veggies in some hot oil.

The vegetables only took about five – ten minutes, and I then dressed them in some soy sauce and sesame oil.

 Then we were more or less done! The fish takes about ten minutes. When I served it I left some of the slices of chilli on, as I like a bit of heat, but didn’t bother serving up the ginger.  I figure its done its job, and otherwise is like chewing on a bit of wood. 

Pour the lovely juices from the foil parcel over the top of the fish and rice.

* Note on brown rice: I don’t eat this entirely to be a hippie. I like the taste. I find white rice very heavy and stodgy. To me it’s like the difference between white and brown bread, and I generally prefer brown bread, as it’s got some real flavour. But if you don’t like it you can always use white rice.

This weekend I am also making: Roast chicken, with the works. I may be having a lean healthy meal tonight but tomorrow is pure gluttony. It’s going to be the basis of many more meals, as the chickens from my butcher are massive.  There’s another blog entry to be had with “Five meals out of a chicken” But not this week.

Whilst making this I was mostly listening to: 6music

This weeks soup: Leek and Potato.  I have to admit that after many years, I still don’t make this as well as my mum.

Right. I’m off to the pub.

It's not really cassoulet is it?

A few weeks ago we had my parents over for dinner, and I made sausage cassoulet from a Jamie Oliver recipe.  Because we were having guests, I even followed the recipe! So rather than describing that, here’s the link:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pork-recipes/quick-time-sausage-cassoulet

My favourite bit of the dish, was the bean-y stew-y goodness underneath; utterly brilliant and the leftovers were great as a pasta sauce. 

So I’ve decided to recreate the dish, except that I don’t have any sausages. So I’m not making sausage cassoulet at all, but chicken legs, with tasty bean stew.

As it’s so completely inauthentic, I will deviate completely from the recipe above. I also don’t have any dried porcini mushrooms left (which is an error, they’re pretty amazing).

So, I fried some smoked bacon lardons whilst I finely chopped two carrots, celery, garlic, ordinary mushrooms and two onions, and added them to the mix with a pinch of salt. After they’d cooked I added whatever was left in the bottle of red wine from the weekend, a bay leaf, and the leaves from a couple of sprigs of thyme and rosemary.

I let that simmer down for a bit, before adding a tin of borlotti beans and a tin of tomatoes. Whilst that’s cooking for about ten minutes, I chopped a couple of slices of bread and tossed them in olive oil with salt and pepper and some more roughly chopped thyme and rosemary. I didn’t have any nice bread – I used the end bits off our normal loaf.

-  Beany mixture bubbling away... (Ignore the marks on the pan. They're from a previous haggis mishap.)

I put the bean mixture in the roasting dish, set a couple of chicken legs on top, season with salt and pepper and add the croutons around and about them. I put this in a preheated oven at 200 degrees celsius (I don’t know how to do the little degrees sign on this…) for about forty five minutes, and, ta da:

 (I really ought to use my camera rather than my phone for these pictures, but that's a little more labour intensive)

We had it with greens, as we’ve eaten extremely well over the course of this weekend courtesy of other people making tagines and roasts for us, so I didn’t think it warranted extra potatoes. It's an insane amount of food for two people, so the rest is going in the freezer so wecan have bean stew another day.

Whilst making this I was mostly listening to: The Beta Band.

This weeks soup: Carrot and Coriander. It was about 40p for a kilo of carrots from Lidl, so it’d be foolish not to.

My excitement about Masterchef escalated this weekend after reading this article by the very talented and extremely funny Grace Dent: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/feb/12/grace-dent-tvod-masterchef