21 posts tagged “food”

Well this Easter Weekend we did a lot of relaxing and nowhere near as much gardening as I had hoped.  The weather was mostly grey and changeable and just didn’t inspire us to be outside very much.

We took some green waste to the recycling centre, visited a garden centre and did a little planting out but I did not manage to take the compost heap apart and finish building the raised bed.

We went to the garden centre to get some more herbs for J to put in the front garden.  We replaced the thyme, tarragon and fennel and I got some more garden mint which I planted in a huge pot by the front door.

I also got some flowers to plant out which is rare for me (I tend to prefer vegetables)  – a Night Scented Phlox and something called "The Love Plant"  both of which are very pretty and should be flowering well into Summer.

Unfortunately J discovered he had missed the boat on planting potatoes which should have been done much earlier in the season but instead he has decided to plant them in August so that we can be eating potatoes come Christmas Day.  This will also give me more space for vegetables which will have been dug up by August getting two crops out of the same bed.  Next year we really must get ourselves more organised earlier in the year for potatoes!

I got several more recipes made from Nigella Lawson over the course of the weekend since we were doing a bit of entertaining:

The Mexican Flan – very nice, like a crème caramel but much faster and less hassle to make.  Even J liked it and normally he doesn’t like creamy things.
Sweetcorn Chowder – very quick to make and everyone who had it during the gaming session said it was good.
Deep fried squid rings – I splashed out and bought some fresh squid from Abel & Cole to make Nigella’s deep friend squid rings with garlic mayo.  The recipe was very good and I was surprised at how well the squid came out with its semolina coating.  The meal was really rich though and despite having it with some steamed purple sprouting broccoli neither of us could finished it. In fact I packed up probably another portion of the squid rings with some tzatziki and a salad for my lunch on Tuesday.

J also made quail boiled in a lemon sauce with mashed potato one night and that was also fabulous.  The quail had a lovely flavour but it was so fiddly to eat I am not entirely convinced it was worth it.

I think I have invented a recipe – I mean I *invent* recipes all the time when I just throw everything in a pan and add herbs but this recipe came out so well (J even remarked on how well it came out) that I really need to write it down and keep a note of it since I may have to make it again. Obviously I haven’t weighed anything out – sorry about this

Ingredients:

2 large handfuls of shredded chicken (leftovers from a roast)
2 larger handfuls of chopped mushrooms
1 finely chopped onion
2 cloves of finely chopped garlic
Chopped Fresh Tarragon
Olive oil
2 cups Chicken Stock (made from carcass of roast chicken)
Seasoning
Crème fraiche
1 cup of long grain easy cook rice
White wine splash

Fry the onions and garlic in olive oil until translucent and add the mushrooms, cook until all the mushrooms have shrunk a little and started to go brown add the chopped tarragon.  Add the rice and stir – coating all the rice grains in the oil.  Add the chicken, stock and splash of white wine, season to taste.

Bring to the boil and then let gently simmer for 20 mins until all the liquid has been absorbed by the rice.  Stir in tablespoon or 2 crème fraiche and heat for a couple of minutes then serve.  This dish was entirely made from leftovers (even the tarragon) but tasted incredible.  You could serve it with some finely grated strong cheddar or parmesan if you like.

Sunday a Triskellian and Kauket came over for a knit in day.  For me the point of this (apart from socialising with people I love) was to a) discuss knitting with people who knit b) get motivated to sort out UFOs and other annoying jobs that I have been putting off.

As I have already mentioned I first took the opportunity to complete Durrow and I really don’t think I would’ve had the motivation to sort this out without the Knit In day.  I also frogged the Mystic Star Shawl.  I was very demotivated, was finding the almost black cobweb weight yarn very difficult to deal with and whilst I liked the pattern, I have recently bought Victorian Lace Today which has some other patterns I much prefer that I wanted to use the yarn on instead.  I may come back to the Star Shawl one day (just with a thicker, lighter yarn) we will see.

I also managed to sew up one side and one ribbon (out of four) onto the baby kimono.  Sewing this up has not been a lot of fun, I put it off for ages and once I had finished sewing one side I totally lost motivation to sew up another side.  I am not entirely sure why, after all I am happy to sew in general. In fact I was so disheartened with the sewing I cast on another project (I decided that frogging one and finishing another meant that another slot had come up).  

I have been wanting another big scarf for a long time.  I wear my Clapotis almost everyday, it is a perfect size, with just the right amount of warmth and drape.  I don’t want to knit a third Clapotis though (I think I may die of boredom) and so I have been searching for an alternative.  It had to be lacy since this is where the right amount of drape will be generated and yet light enough to wear in spring or wound round my neck 2-3 times in winter so I was going for a sock yarn weight.  Well at Socktopus last weekend I bought 2 skeins of The Knittery Merino Cashmere Sock in Passionfruit (Purples and Grays) deliberately for such a project and I would be lying if I didn’t have a pattern in mind.  In my new favourite book (Victorian Lace Today) the first pattern which jumped out at me was… the melon stitch shawl.  I wound up one ball on Sunday and cast on knitting the first 6 repeats whilst we watched Daywatch (Sequel to the Russian Film Nightwatch and very good indeed).

Here is the in Progress Pic which I am loving.  

Melon Stitch Shawl in progress

The pattern is simple enough to do during TV watching (even during a subtitled film) but the melon stitch itself (once every 6 rows) is interesting enough that it doesn’t get boring.  When I have finished 62 repeats of the main pattern (I am on number 10 right now) I can cast off and try my first ever knitted on lace border which is very exciting indeed.  

I also took the opportunity of visitors to have a nice 2 course meal (by candle light since we were celebrating Earth Hour) and made the following

Roast Chicken with chives (from our garden), tarragon and parsley – all worked into butter which was stuffed just under the skin to self baste the chicken.

Lentils cooked in red wine and stock.

Vine Ripened Tomatoes roasted with basil … all from Rick Stein

Then to finish I had made a cake (which we had already eaten some of earlier in the day) from a recipe I found on the Guardian Website months ago.  This was a fair trade chocolate, chilli and orange cake.  It sounds weird but the amount of chilli is very small and just gives it a nice kick – I finished it off with Crème Fraiche which was a total inspiration as it was not to sweet and cut through the very dark rich chocolate cake.  I cooked the cake entirely from my baking stash so in a way it was completely free since I didn’t have to buy anything even the crème fraiche was left over from another meal.

I really hope we can arrange another one – although it may be a dangerous thing, I am already getting spinning curious and too much exposure to Triskellian doing drop spindling may tip me over the edge.  As a buffer to this I am buying some Procion Acid Dyes for Yarn.  I have 2 lots of yarn that need overdying and 1 lot that needs dyeing from scratch so learning this new skill should put off the inevitable learning to spin for a while at least.

When I first started dating J he (being a Northerner) introduced me to the idea of oatcakes.  These are not the Scottish Oatcakes which are like hard biscuits we would normally eat with cheese.  Instead they are more like a sort of savory pancake.  Like a buckwheat pancake except made with finely ground oats instead of buckwheat flour. J loves these oatcakes - usually covered in grated cheese and grilled but he find them hard to get hold of in the south

Then last in September 2007 we went on holiday to Duckcon with some friends and happened across Shugborough Working Farm.  They had a sort of mini re-enactment going on and I was able to get hold of a leaflet of old recipes from them.  Fast forward to today.  I remembered that the recipes included a "Staffordshire Oatcake" and since I had a day of holiday today I decided to make some.

You need:

8oz fine oatmeal
1/2 tsp of salt
1 level tsp of dried yeast
1 pint lukewarm water.

This is where I feel no qualms about giving out the recipe since the instructions given are incorrect - they miss out the vital step of what to do with the yeast!

So this is what I did.

I mixed the yeast with the lukewarm water and put it in a warm palce for 15 mins to activate the yeast.
Then I put the oatmeal and salt in a bowel and stirred in the water and yeast mixture. 
The whole mixture then had to be set aside in a warm place for another 30 mins until it was a decent batter consistency.

Oatcake batter

I then heated a frying pan very hot with a little oil and butter and fried the oatcakes using about 5 tablespoons of batter per cake.

Homemade Oatcakes

We had them with melted cheese and J said that they did taste a lot like the oatcakes he remembers.  We couldn't manage more than one each as they are very filling and rich.  But I am sure that they are cheaper this way than buying them in the shops and besides you can't get them down here!

It is well known that J and I love food, and consider it something of a hobby.  Food seems to have been more of a feature in our lives than usual recently (in a good way) and I thought I probably ought to record that fact.

Firstly we went out for a special birthday meal on 2nd February to celebrate J's birthday.  I booked a table at Indigo on Aldwych, a short walk from the theatre where we were going to see Avenue Q and we had a very good (and fairly expensive) 3 course meal. 

First course was scallops with crispy pork belly on a sweetcorn puree, the scallops were a little bitter but this was more than made up for by the perfectly cooked piece of pork belly which was fabulous in everyway.  The puree was a bit of a non-event.  Second course for me was amazingly good.  It was duck breast with caramelised cauliflower, new potatoes and picked blackberries.  It was a perfect combination of sweet and sharp and of course those two flavours go brilliantly with duck. (J had bream with a lightly curried moule veloute and something potato-like) For pudding J had an apple tart and I had pineapple poached in coriander with tapioca and shards of peppermint flavoured sugar.  J's pudding was nice - mine was a bit of an experiment gone wrong.  The pineapple was ok but not amazing, the tapioca…welll I have never eaten it before and I probably wouldn't bother eating it again and the shards of sugary stuff tasted like humbugs or everton mints which was a bit retro but not in a good way.   Fresh mint with pineapple - yes... melted humbugs with pineapple - no.

Then it was J's birthday party and I took the opportunity to reprise my maple syrup baked ribs and drumsticks from the year before - they always come out perfectly and taste great.  But I also decided to make something new in the form of cocktail sausages baked in a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil and honey.  Both sets of nibbles were really good and were devoured really quickly (which was very satisfying).  I managed to get free range chicken drumsticks but couldn't source free range ribs or cocktail sausages so next time I make this I will try harder to get some more sustainable pork products.  The sausage recipe also came from Nigella Lawson so I am one recipe closer to cooking the whole of her Express book for my 101 in 1001 challenge. 

I am now up to 83 out of 130 and have two more scheduled to make this week.  No birthday is complete without a cake and I made 2, one lot of banana bread (which J doesn't like) to use up some very ripe bananas and a pineapple upside down cake (J's favourite).  I used John Barrowman's banana bread recipe with only 2 bananas not 4 and one extra egg.  It was actually amazing.  Probably the best banana bread I have ever had, it was moist but very very light and I had 2 slices for breakfast the next day.  The pineapple upside down cake was touch and go (our oven appears to have started cooking unevenly - very annoying) but looked fine when I flipped it over and tasted perfectly good.  In celebration of the special day I used some more of my (rare and magical) edible glitter to turn the whole cake into a giant sparkly affair.  Everyone commented on the sparkly cake and I was really pleased with it.  Someone even took a photo where you can see some of the glittery bits.

J's Birthday Cake 2009

In fact you can also see the edge of the banana bread at the very back of the photograph.

I only want to use the glitter on special occasions because there isn't a lot of it but I am so keen to bake with it again.  I might make a simnel cake for Easter this year and use the pale green glitter as I reckon pale green glitter on yellow marzipan would look very springlike.

On the morning of J's birthday his Dad and Step-Mom had got him a bottle of nice champagne some good chocolate and a jar of really good looking pate.  J and I do love pate and I am really looking forward to eating it.

Lastly we finally ate our first meat from the stash of game in our freezer.  When we ordered our Christmas Goose from Heal Farm we decided that to save on transport costs etc we should order a few other bits and pieces as well.  We ended up with 2 pheasant, a partridge, 4 quails, 1 rabbit and 2 pigeons which we have been treasuring ever since.  Sunday night J cooked half of our wild rabbit portion using an Antonio Carluccio recipe.  He put the rabbit pieces in a big pot with onions, peppers, sliced potatoes and lots of wine and rosemary and simmered it for a fairly long time in the oven.  The flavour of the rabbit came out really well and I was lucky enough to get a chunk of rabbit liver in my portion (I love liver and the rabbit liver was a bit over done in terms of texture but had a fabulous flavour).  I think I would have preferred the potatoes to brown a little more as I like my potatoes quite crispy but the flavour was excellent.  I am looking forward to working out what to cook next.

Tonight we are having a roast chicken.  I owed J a roast (can't remember why) and I find chicken more versitile than other meats (the relevance of this will become obvious).

Firstly I started with a chicken and added 3 cloves of garlic and one quartered onion to the cavity.  Then I mixed 100g of softened butter with parsley, 3 crushed cloves of garlic and salt and pepper and spread it in between the skin and the breast meat.  After covering the whole thing in bacon it is now roasting gently in the oven using Delia's instructions.

I am a member of a frugal foods and a crock-pot lovers group on ravelry which is giving me lots of helpful tips.  J and I are doing ok financially but I don't see that as a reason to be wasteful so I am trying some ideas from both forums and trying to get into good habits because you never know when something might go wrong.  Firstly when the roast is done I will be putting the carcass (stripped of meat) in my slow cooker overnight to make stock.  In the morning I will strain the stock and put it back in the slow cooker adding pearl barley, vegetables, chicken, dumplings (any leftovers basically) and put it on all day as a stew for our dinner.  So we will get many portions of food out of the chicken (which was expensive because it is free range) and apparently the slow cooker has a much lower energy usage than an oven (even if you leave it on all day) so it is more environmentally friendly.  All good stuff.

With the roast chicken we are having roast potatoes, peas and kale and homegrown parsnips.  I am so proud of these parsnips.  They are quite small (because the ground was very stoney and probably too well composted) but they smelled just like I remember my Dad's homegrown parsnips.  In fact peeling them in the steamy kitchen smelling of roast chicken took me right back to my childhood.  We have a good few left, for another couple of meals and the big family Christmas dinner.  These are one of my favourite vegetables, I prefer them to potatoes in every way and it is so lovely to have them on tap in the back garden even for only a few weeks.  We are slowly making headway on the vegetable patch and although it doesn't impact much on our fruit and veg bills yet we are learning more every year about how to make it work better for us.

IMGA0704

I sometimes wake up in the morning and hate Supermarkets for what they have done to fruit and veg.  As a child I grew up with parents riding high on the good life craze of the 1970s  (my father was clearly a frustrated self sufficient farmer).  We grew a large amount of our own fruit and veg in the back garden and supplemented it with produce from the market, Dad made wine, Nana (who live 10 doors up the road) made jam and baked twice a week.  Apples tasted amazing, peas were the best thing in the world and fruit and veg were some of my favourite foods. 

Then Tesco arrived, it was much nearer than the market and we started going there.  A couple of years after that I left home for Uni without appreciating the halcyon days of food I was leaving behind.

The big supermarkets have ripped the point out of fruit and veg i.e. the flavour.  I moan about this a lot, everytime I go to France or Italy I moan some more and today I am truly distraught.

I love apples and I love the variety of apples but I am quite discerning.  Granny Smith's are good, Russets and Coxes and very good and Discoverys and Worcesters are the best because of their sweet floral scent and flavour.  Supermarkets sell Granny Smiths of ok quality, Russets of poor quality and the Coxes are hit or miss, sometimes sharp and gorgeous sometimes mealy and nasty.  I love them enough to brave the lottery but it *is* a lottery.  Discoverys and Worcesters you couldn't get at all, my fix usually came from the local greengrocers if I got there in time to pop in before my train (which wasn't often enough).  Only on Saturday something amazing seemed to happen.  My bag of apples from Tesco's online was substituted at the last minute and a bag of Discoverys arrived instead.  They were a little smaller than I like but I was so pleased to see them.

Well today I ate my first one.  Horrid.  No delicate floral scent, no sweetish, it was sharp and nasty.  Now I know that this isn't all the rose tinted specs of youth since I had some perfectly delicious ones from the local green grocer in about July this year.  In the desperation to make a little bit of money selling heritage branded food they have taken something I love and turned it foul.  Now all the kids of today will grow up thinking discovery apples are tiny and horrid - well I suppose they would if the other options weren't all equally bad since Golden Delicious and Red Delicious really ought to be reported to trading standards for misleading advertising.

Anyway - in about 2-3 weeks my own Russets will be perfectly ripened and I just hope that they will last me a good while.  In the meantime I think I need to bring up having an Organic box again with J.  This time Tesco have gone too far.

J and I eat a lot of tomato based pasta sauce.  The primary version called "grown up spaghetti" is a dish from J's childhood and is just fried chopped onion and garlic with a tin of chopped tomatoes and some tomato puree. Very simple and very cheap we usually eat it when there is nothing else in the house and we need something fast.  It also makes an amazing base to which all sorts of leftover can be added e.g. mushrooms, pepper, sausage etc.

However another standby meal that I have and which I made tonight is pasta puttanesca.

Chopped Onion
Garlic Oil
Tinned Chopped Tomatoes
Chopped Capers
Chopped Anchovies
Chopped Black Olives

Fry the onions in the garlic oil.  Add the anchovies and capers and fry off.  Add the tomatoes and black olives with a little pepper and reduce until it is a thick sauce.  Serve with pasta.

The online shop is not due to arrive for another couple of hours at the time it was ready to make dinner today so it was a great opportunity for a storecupboard raid.

We had Cheese Scones with Tomato and Lentil Soup.

I used this cheese scone recipe from the BBC website but I added about a tablespoon of pumpkin seeds, a tsp of oregano and sprinkled some extra cheese on the top of each one.

The soup is inspired by Nigella Lawson's Quick Ministrone.

Ingredients

1 chopped onion
2 diced carrots
1 tin of green lentils
1 tin chopped tomatoes
vegetable stock
garlic infused olive oil
seasoning
bay leaf
tomato puree

Fry the onions and carrots in the oil until softened then add the chopped tomatoes, stock, lentils, seasoning, bay leaf and tomato puree.  Heat for about as long as the scones take to cook.

I also poked through the cupboard gingerly and threw out some old ground almonds which probably aren't any good any more, since nuts can go rancid and ground almonds even morequickly.

Savoury scones seem like a great way to get through the storecupboard items since they are quick, easy and I can add all sorts of things like nuts, seeds, raisins, herbs and spices to get through the huge stockpiles I have.

I also think it would be good to pick one item in the store cupboard per week and arrange a meal around it  so that I don't find myself struggling with nothing left but tinned tomatoes and walnuts!  So next time I will try and use up some of the suet I have.

Although this was the bank holiday weekend we took it fairly easy and I was reminded that some of my favourite time is spent pottering around at home.  I got jobs done as did Josh and generally relaxed.

A little tidying was done, I also moved the tomatoes to a sunnier spot and dug over the veg patch and planted another  3 rows of quick salad leaves.  The week after next I will do the same to stagger the salad leaves.

Firstly I have made my first meal from the garden - it was also a store cupboard meal and tastes delicious.  It is all bagged up and frozen into portions for my lunch at work as I am working on the challenge of taking a packed lunch to work for 14 days. 

Beetroot Stew

Fresh beetroot cut into matchsticks
Tin of Cannelini Beans
Onion finely chopped
Garlic infused olive oil
Chicken Stock
Tin of Tomatoes
Chorizo sliced
Bay leaves

Fry the onion in the oil until translucent and then add the beetroot.  Add a tin of tomatoes and some stock, bay leaves and cannelini beans. That is basically it and uses up another tin of cannelini beans (I had 3! in the store cupboard).

(see how Chorizo and Cannelini beans can make a meal out of anything!)

At the moment I am trying to live without buying as much or impacting the planet so much.  So far I do not have to do this for financial reasons (in fact I have finished paying the second loan) but more for green reasons.  If I can reuse something rather than buy new then I am trying to.  To this end I have mended one pair of trousers today for work and printed out a burda pattern for a nice dress I can make out of second hand fabric from my stash.

I have also discovered the following two interesting blogs:

Down to Earth - a blog about living simply
Weezl - a blog by a women who is on a mission to eat a healthy diet on 50p per day from now until Christmas!

Josh has also been busy re-sealing the bath but we have to wait until tomorrow morning to see if it worked!