in praise of spinach

Spinach is wonderful stuff - I don’t know why more people don’t like it.

This post is a bit of a cheat really, as I wasn’t using anything up per se; it’s more that I fell upon the spinach with cries of glee, and immediately got a tub of bolognese sauce (home made, of course) from the freezer.

This is because we have discovered that, if you put a layer of spinach inside the lasagne, between the bechamel and the pasta, the whole dish is raised from the “isn’t that nice” to the “gorgeous” level.  So that’s what we do.

I’ll be using up the rest of the spinach tonight.

We followed it up with a small fruit salad-ish affair, just chopped up peaches and grapes.  I do wish we were better at fruit …

Tags: spinach

fried rice

I refer you, with pleasure, to Hanne Blank’s post on how to make - and indeed how not to make - fried rice.

Apart from telling you exactly what to do, in a style of cooking that is exactly like my own, it is screamingly funny.  Enjoy

Tags: fried rice

pasta with butternut squash and feta

Using up: the other half of the feta, the other half of the squash, a lone rasher of bacon

Peeled the squash and cut it into cubes. Chopped an onion roughly, ditto some garlic, and a rasher of back bacon.  All in a frying pan with some olive oil, and some oregano from our herb garden.

Put a lid on the pan, and left for about 20 minutes.

Then cooked some 8 minute fusilli, drained it and put it with the vegetables (thus giving the veg about 30 minutes in all, to get the squash into that gorgeous disintegrating phase), and half a block of feta.  Stirred it all about till the feta melted, then served in bowls.

Tags: bacon, butternut squash, feta, pasta, squash

courgette and fennel “cottage pie”

Using up: fennel, courgette, potato

Chopped a courgette into chunks, and the other half of the fennel into thin slices, and chopped an onion.  All into a frying pan with some olive oil, and left to sauté down.  I left it for 20 minutes, but I think it would have been better to either put a lid on it, or left it another ten - the end result was quite crunchy.

While this is going on, I boiled some spuds for mash,

Added a tin of tomatoes to the vegetable mix, a dash of salt and a good grinding of black pepper, and cooked for another 6-7 minutes.

The spuds were mashed with a combination of Red Leicester and gruyere cheeses (that’s odd - why did I capitalise the red leicester and not the Gruyere?), with some reserved for the topping. With hindsight, I thought it was too much cheese - either in, or on - but Pete thought it was just right.  We also added some chopped chives to the mash.

Veg/tomato mix into an ovenproof dish, top with mash, sprinkle with remaining cheese. Cook at gas 6 for about 20 minutes.

Tags: courgette, fennel, potato, tomato, vegetarian

nutty brown bread

Soda type breads are a great way to use up old milk, and don’t need yeast.

This recipe comes from an old book of mine entitled the Irish Baking Book - no sign of it on Amazon or anywhere else, but it has a lot of recipes from my childhood in it. I have no idea why this is called “nutty”, but it is gorgeous nonetheless.

We had it with scrambled eggs, the last of the mushrooms, and bacon for Sunday brunch, and then used what was left for lunch today - I had it with egg mayo, and Pete did something with cheese and a kabanos sossidge. Lets not go there.

50g oats
175g wholewheat flour
75g strong white (bread) flour
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 heaped tsp baking powder
250ml buttermilk (if you don’t have it, just use half and half milk/yogurt)

Put the oatmeal, flours, sugar and baking powder into a bowl and mix together.  Add the buttermilk.  Mix everything with a wooden spoon, and knead slightly (or do what I do - Kitchenaid with a dough hook!)

Place the dough in a small greased loaf tin, and bake at 200C/gas 6 for 30-35 minutes.

The recipe says “eat withiin 24 hours” - you’ll have trouble keeping it that long!

Tags: baking, bread, irish

thai vegetable curry

Using up: butternut squash, green beans, courgette

This is vaguely based on a recipe I saw on Come Dine With Me, a television programme here in the UK.  I was very struck by the potato element, which is:

One potato, boiled then cut into dice and deep fried.  Set aside for now.

Made a paste by blitzing a chopped onion, 3 cloves of garlic, about a square inch of ginger, a stalk of lemongrass, a dried chilli,  half a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespooon each of lime juice and  olive oil in a blender, and pureéd until it was transformed into a smooth paste.

Peeled the butternut squash that had been lurking in the fridge for a couple of weeks, removed and discarded the seeds, looked at it and realised it was *way* too much for this curry and returned half to the fridge.  Watch this space to see what I decide to do with the rest! Chopped the flesh of the remaining half into 1/2 inch cubes.  The green beans had been topped and tailed on Friday, and I chopped the courgette into smallish chunks too.

Put the paste into a large pan or wok and fried it gently for a couple of minutes, stirring all the while.

Added the veg, and stirred them about a bit, to coat them with the paste, then hurled in a tin of coconut milk. Put a lid on it, and simmered it for about 20 minutes, then uncovered it and cooked for about another 10. I added the fried spud a few minutes before the end (crystal ball job).

Ate accompanied by noodles cooked with a few drops of sesame oil.  I cannot begin to tell you how nice it was - it was ambrosial, utterly lovely.  The squash had started to break down, and had a texture that I can hardly describe.

This made enough to feed the two of us, with another meal’s worth gone into the freezer.

Tags: "green beans", butternut, coconut, courgette, curry, squash, squashh, thai, vegetarian

fennel risotto

Using up chicken gravy, feta, salad leaves, fennel

Yes, another risotto^H^H rice based dish. These are just a great way to use up vegetables and so forth, and I love the texture - real comfort food stuff.

The chicken gravy/stock was left from Sunday’s roast chickie!, and was a much thicker liquor than I’d usually use for a risotto, but was none the worse for that.

Chop a red onion, and slice half a head of fennel thinly.  Sauté in some olive oil and a knob of butter until they’re soft, then add 5oz of risotto rice, and stir it around until the rice is coated.  Then add 1 pint of liquid - I just made up the gravy to the right amount.  You can use water, stock, wine, lemon juice - whatever takes your fancy.  Add some salt and black pepper - remember that if you’re cooking with feta, you’ll need less salt; it’s very salty.

Bring to the boil, and cook on gas mark 2 for 20 minutes.  Then I added half a block of feta cheese that needed eating up, cut into small cubes, stirred it around, and returned to the oven for another 15 minutes.

The salad leaves were a remnant from a Riverford bag.  I put them in a bowl, and added - from our little herb garden - chives, lemon balm and some bronze fennel leaves;  I made a dressing of olive oil, white wine vinegar and a splash of tamari.  Worked very well - perlmonger kept saying, as he ate it, “this is *lovely*”.  And it was!

Tags: risotto fennel feta

green beans with mustards

Another reminder of childhood - my grandparents grew green beans in the garden of their little terraced house in Gosport, on the Hampshire coast.  They trained them up a sort of teepee arrangement of canes, and I can still see their bright red flowers.

Riverford sent us a big bunch (were they a bunch?  Well, plenty, anyway).  Pete and I don’t really eat “meat and two veg” meals, and so it can be difficult to know what to do with such things.  But here’s what we did.

Top and tail the beans, and string them if need be - these were nice and young, and so didn’t need it.  Then I cut them into diagonal chunks of about 1/2″, and blanched them for five minutes.  Drained and set aside.

Then, in a wok (I like woks, ok?), I gently fried some black mustard seeds, a finely chopped shallot and some* garlic in groundnut oil.  Tip in the beans, add a good heaped teaspoonful of grain mustard, some tamari, a ground up dried chilli.  Warm it all through thoroughly, and serve with basmati rice.

There’s another bowlful of greenies left, which I shall deal with tomorrow.  I’m thinking feta, and lemon, and pasta, but that might change.  And the wretched slugs have eaten all my basil :(

*some being lots, in our case, but you might not want that much :)

Tags: "green beans", mustard

broad bean wrap

Using up: broad beans, cashews in salt and black pepper, salad leaves, roast chicken

Riverford brought us broad beans last week (I think these are fava beans in the US).  They’re not something we get excited about, and so they languished in the bottom of the fridge.  Last night I fetched them out and podded them; they took me instantly back to my childhood - the pods are filled with a sort of woolly stuff, and I spent hours podding broad beans with my grandmother, ready for her to salt down into kilner jars (no freezers in domestic houses in those days).  She did the same with runner beans.

So today, we had them for lunch.

In a bowl went the beans (I should mention that I steamed them for about five minutes first), a finely chopped shallot, some chopped herbs from the garden (mint, lemon balm, chives and flat parsley), some shredded chicken, some cashews, diced cucumber.

Also in went a dessert spoon of mayo, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a good sloosh of lime juice, and a grating of black pepper.  Mix ‘em all up, and place into wheat tortila wraps, with some salad leaves on the top.

You can see the finished wraps here.

Made a very nice change from our usual cheese and crispbread!

Tags: broad beans, lunch

sunday breakfast

We often have a cooked breakfast on a winter Sunday - although we usually do so much food that we lie groaning on the sofa for the afternoon, and just have some scones or something for supper.

We fancied something more substantial than usual today, but we were more restrained - four eggs scrambled with a little cream and some chopped chives from the garden, four rashers of locally “grown” bacon, and three bagels between us.  I had HP Sauce too - obviously.  Just enough, and leaving room for roast chickie! tonight.

We ate it while watching Turn Left, this week’s Doctor Who episode, which I thought was exceeding good.  And now I’m working, which isn’t, given it’s Sunday afternoon.  Ho hum.

Tags: breakfast