Mackerel for tea with a sweet treat for afters.

For me, hangovers usually bring out one of two approaches to food; I either want to gorge on rubbish and stodge all day, or I want to eat incredibly healthy food to undo the badness of the night before.

Today is a mixture of both. I decided to make brownies to distract myself from the pain, and because I’ve got to work on Bank Holiday Monday, so I thought they would brighten up a quiet newsroom.

Chocolate Brownies:

I don’t have a massively sweet tooth, and I’m not great at baking, but I can just about stretch to some cookies or brownies. I think the trick is to get the best possible chocolate with lots of cocoa in it; cooking chocolate just doesn’t cut it.

Melt about 200 grammes of dark chocolate with about two thirds of a bar of butter. (The recipe I used suggested 165g of butter; my scales aren’t that precise). 

When it’s melted and cooled a little beat in about 200g of brown sugar, preferably muscovado but I only had Demerara. Add a pinch of salt, and some vanilla extract.

Beat in three eggs one by one, then some plain flour. (Again, the recipe I used for amounts said 85g, but my scales are not that good.) Put in a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. 

Bake at 160 degrees for about 40 minutes. Allow to cool on a wire rack.Then slice.

And now for the healthy (ish) supper…

Mackerel fillets with chorizo, leeks and peas.

I’m going through quite a chorizo/paprika phase at the moment. 

First slice a leek and fry in a little butter and vegetable oil, with a pinch of salt. Put some potatoes on to boil.

Take the papery skin off a good chunk of chorizo, and cut it up into chunks. Technically you should use cooking chorizo for this, but it’s not that easy to get hold of, so I used some ordinary chorizo. When the leeks are starting to collapse a bit, add the chorizo to the pan along with a good pinch of paprika. You want the edges of the chorizo to go a little crispy. 

 Add the nearly cooked potatoes to the pan to allow them to crisp a little, before adding a small amount of vegetable stock and some frozen peas. If you want, you can add a few spoonfuls of cream to the sauce, but it doesn’t necessarily need it. Add a good squidge of lemon juice, and turn the heat right down.

Season the mackerel fillets. Heat a little vegetable oil in a pan until it’s fairly hot, then put the fish in, skin side down.  If you want to be really healthy you could just grill the mackerel.

It doesn’t take long – just three or four minutes, then turn the heat off and flip the fish to finish cooking in the residual heat.

Serve the fillets on top of a big mound of chorizo leek-y loveliness. If you can hack it, have with a nice chilled glass of white wine.

I’m off for a lie down.

Feeding the post holiday blues

It’s a while since my last post, but that’s because we’ve just come back from an amazing holiday in Istanbul. I’d highly recommend it! There was so much to see, we ran out of time even though we had a full week.  We also spent our time eating bread with sheeps cheese, kebaps, baklava, fresh fish and drinking loads of tea (and not particularly good Turkish red wine).  

Basically a week of over-indulgence. It was brilliant.  And now we’re home wading through about four loads of washing and facing slightly unhealthy bank balances, my plan to tackle this is to cook, cook and cook some more.  So here we go, three recipes in one blog:

1.  The slightly luxurious, drink it with wine, pretend you’re still on holiday meal:  Asparagus Risotto.

Anyone who has lived with me will know I make a lot of risottos.  I love risottos, and they’re pretty easy, just keep it constantly on a lowish heat.

Fry finely chopped onion, celery and garlic in a little butter and oil so it goes slightly translucent but doesn’t colour. 

Add the risotto rice, and cook for about thirty seconds so all the grains are coated in buttery goodness. Add a decent glassful of white wine, give it a stir and let all the wine cook down.

Snap the woody ends bits of your asparagus and chop the rest into chunks about a couple of centimetres long. Add these, and a ladleful of stock, and keep stirring. 

Gradually keep adding stock about a ladleful at a time and regularly stirring for about fifteen minutes, until the rice is cooked. It should still have a little bit of bite.

Stir in a good handful of grated parmesan, a knob of butter and a squeeze of lemon juice. Have with salad and cold white wine…

  

2.  The store cupboard, cheap and cheerful, batch cooked meal: Chorizo and bean stew.

I split my life between Hull and Leeds, and struggle sometimes to keep eating healthy tasty meals while away.  To rectify this, I made a VERY easy stew to last me a couple of nights.

Fry some chopped chorizo in a little oil, until the oil starts to turn red. 

Add a chopped onion, some chopped celery and some garlic and chilli. Everything should keep a bit of an orange tinge. Then add some extra paprika and chilli flakes, stir in, before adding loads of veg. For me, this was peppers, courgettes and mushrooms.  

Add a tin of beans, I used borlotti, and a tin of tomatoes.  Add some tomato puree, Worcestershire sauce and top up with water. Let it bubble down for quite a while (probably about half an hour) and continually check for seasoning, it’ll take quite a lot of salt and pepper.

If it tastes too spicy or too sharp, add a little sugar to take the edge off it. Stir in some spinach at the end.

Done! I’ll be eating this with some cous cous. 

3.  The post-holiday diet starts today, healthy vegetable-tastic soup: Sort of Thai vegetable and noodle soup.

Blitz up a decent amount of garlic, chilli and ginger, and fry it in some oil with some sliced onion.  Add a spoonful of Thai curry paste. And fry a little.

Then add a load of veggies, for me this was sliced pak choi, thinly sliced carrots, mushrooms, and green beans, and a few halved cherry tomatoes. 

Add some stock, and allow it to bubble away but not for too long (best if the veggies retain a little bit of bite) Add some lime juice, and plenty of Thai fish sauce (to taste) at the end, as well as some chopped fresh coriander.

Meanwhile, cook some noodles separately.  I was looking for rice noodles, but they were sadly lacking from my supermarket so I ended up with udon noodles. When they’re cooked rinse them with cold water to keep them separate.

Because I was taking this to work for lunches, I let it cool in separate containers, then added the noodles to each one.

I made this with home made chicken stock, but if you were going to be making a veggie version just use vegetable stock and soy sauce instead of Thai fish sauce.

Three curry feast

We were supposed to go out for a curry on Friday night to Arti’s, our local cheap, cheerful (and very tasty) curry house. Unfortunately, I’d been working overnight at the election on Thursday night, had very little sleep, and hit a wall. I ate a massive Chinese takeaway instead, then fell asleep.

We still wanted a curry though, so tonight was a home made curry night.  With this I work on the same basic principles as with a roast: you can make the meaty bit go a lot further if you have a couple of really good veggie dishes.

Joe’s input was needed for this one too. He got the Madhur Jaffrey Curry Easy book for Christmas, and has cooked two meals from it, both of which were absolutely amazing.  I’m not going to retype someone else’s recipe, but Joe’s side dish was South Indian Potato Curry, and it looked like this: (yum)

I made a lentil dahl.  First I toasted some cumin and coriander seeds and the insides of cardamom pods. Then crushed these in the pestle and mortar.  As I’m making two curries I did a couple of teaspoons of each.

I then fried some onion and plenty of garlic, and added half the spices back in, along with some turmeric. It'll go very yellow!

 Add some lentils and some water and let bubble till the lentils are nearly cooked. Then add a couple of tomatoes (from a tin is fine) and some green beans (I keep these in the freezer)

The lentil dahl takes about half an hour to cook, be careful it doesn’t dry out. Add some finely chopped fresh coriander at the end.

I also made chicken and spinach curry. First, brown off some chicken pieces. I prefer to use chicken on the bone, such as thighs and drumsticks, as they’re much tastier. Then put them to one side, and fry sliced onions with blitzed up garlic, ginger and chilli. Then add the remainder of the spices from earlier, and a good pinch of curry powder (bit of a cheat), some turmeric and some garam masala. 

(It is the easiest way to deal with chilli and garlic etc.)

Put the chicken back in, and give it a good stir around. Add the remainder of the tinned tomatoes that you used for the dahl.  I would normally at this point add coconut milk, but I got in a strop with my local supermarket yesterday for only having branded, organic coconut milk which cost more than £1.80 a tin.  Ridiculous, I know, but the non-branded stuff is less than a pound, and I needed a few of them! Instead I bought coconut cream, which is much cheaper.

Add some water (to cover) and let it bubble away. That’s just about done. Five minutes before serving, add at least half a bag of spinach, it’ll wilt quickly, then stir it in.

Just about done. Whilst that’s bubbling away get some rice on, and make some raita. This would normally be made with mint, but I’ve been growing fresh coriander and have a lot of it. Mix natural yoghurt with chopped coriander, chopped cucumber and salt and pepper. 

All done! This is going to last us a couple of nights. Presentation might leave a little to be desired... but it was ace.

I’ve made quite a few changes to the blog: let me know what you think of the redesign. I think everyone should be able to comment on the posts regardless of whether you’re signed up to google or not.

This weeks soup: Mushroom, made with the stock from last week’s chicken. I made some rosemary bread the other day when I was bored too, so going to have some tasty lunches at work this week!

Four meals, one chicken

Is there anything more satisfying than a Sunday roast? I love cooking a chicken, and then having chicken based meals for the rest of the week. I would urge you to always buy the biggest and best quality bit of meat you can afford, and you’ll taste the difference (and get lots out of it). And the chicken won’t have had a miserable existence before cooking.

I know cooking a chicken is hardly rocket science; I reckon it's the other bits that make it!

This blog will focus on the initial roast… but I’ll list the probable other meals at the end with brief instructions! The trick to eking it out is loads of veg; and good veg, not some over boiled carrots and broccoli. Get some nice stuff in season (I’m quite excited it’s asparagus season again) and put a little bit of effort in, and you won’t eat quite as much meat! You could always makeYorkshire puddings if you really want to stretch it further. If you add lots and lots of cheaper bits to your roast, you won't feel short changed.

Of course the real key is gravy… always gravy.

For the chicken:

I get all my timings for roasts from Delia. It’s about 20 minutes for every 450g and then another 20 minutes on top of that. It’ll need about half an hours resting time too (covered with tin foil or something), but that’s your gravy making time.

Cover it with butter, and stuff some on the breast under the skin. Shove a halved lemon inside the cavity, and season the whole thing with salt and pepper. Cook as Delia tells you: (I tend not to bother with the bacon she mentions)

http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/meat/roasting-times.html

 

 While that’s doing its thing you can make a start on your exciting veg. We’ve got some Jersey new potatoes, which I parboiled, then squashed slightly, before tossing them with chopped rosemary, garlic and olive oil, seasoned and shoving them in the oven for half an hour.

 For asparagus, break any woody end bits off, and then steam for a few minutes. It doesn’t need much more, but if you’re so inclined you can then chuck them in a hot pan with some butter and lemon juice. In an attempt not to make every vegetable incredibly unhealthy, I opted not to do that with this one! Steamed. Touch of lemon juice. That’s it.

My carrots, however, are another story. I made glazed carrots, which I have described in a previous post, but will copy and paste in anyway: Chop up the carrots in big slices, 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.

 How do you know the chickens done? Again I use Delia’s hints for this one: stick a skewer in and see if the juices run clear. Tip it backwards, and see if the juices that run out of the cavity are clear. Pull the legs away from the chicken a bit, of they give quite easily it’s good to go. Put it on a plate to rest, get your potatoes in the oven.  

Gravy:

Pour away most of the fat from the pan, and then put it on the hob over a medium heat. Add a spoonful of cornflour or flour and stir it in to the remaining fat and juices. Then whack up the heat and pour in a glass of white wine, mixing all the time. Make sure to scrape up any sticky bits of the bottom of the pan.  Add half a pint of stock or water (depending on your preference) and keep stirring, then let it reduce down. Taste and season. If you had thyme it would be nice to add some, I put in a little dried parsley (as my parsley hasn’t really grown yet…)

 While it’s reducing get your carrots on, and right at the last minute the asparagus.

And serve!A leg each with all the extras did us.

Once you’ve had your roast and it’s cooled, take every last little scrap of meat off the bones. All of it, you’ll be amazed how much there is. The bones will make a brilliant stock to make the best risotto or soup you’ve ever had. I’m not making that today, so will shove them in the freezer until I get round to it. (Maybe tomorrow, might write about it then)

Other meals (our menu for much of the week):

- Thai chicken and vegetable curry.

I have made my own curry paste before, but not for ages.  I like to add a bit more oomph to a shop bought paste by frying some garlic, chilli and ginger first. (Blitz it up in a little hand-held food processor: one of the best cookery inventions ever) Add to the wok a LOAD of veg; carrots, mushrooms, peppers, green beans and broccoli will be going into ours. Add two tablespoons of curry paste, let that fry off with the veg, then add a tin of coconut milk. Add some chopped up chicken, two dessert spoonfuls of Thai fish sauce (or to taste) and the juice of half a lime. Loads of fresh coriander. Happy days…

- Midweek mini-roast

Awesome. As long as you’ve got enough gravy to last two nights this feels like a proper treat on a dull Wednesday.  Just heat up a bit of chicken in the gravy to keep it moist. We’ll be having it with sweet potato mash for a change, and some probably slightly less exciting veggies, but it is midweek.

- Stir fry

Chilli, garlic and ginger, blitzed up.  Fried with some cumin, ground coriander and paprika (or whatever you’ve got in) and then loads of veg. Add a bit of chicken, lots of soy sauce and then mix in some cooked egg noodles. Add a bit of sesame oil after it’s cooked and you're done. Add more soy to taste.

I’d say that’s not bad going for a seven quid bird! Happy bank holiday one and all, I'm off to the pub.

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.