365 days: Thursday - not navarin printanier

...that was what I'd planned to cook tonight, but today we went to a late Eid party at the Ramsgate Tandoori - and then went and had a glass of wine in the sunshine - and then realised that we had a lot of last night's quorn korma left...so we had that, and the leftover rice that we were too stuffed to eat...

Nevertheless, I did commit to doing a recipe a day, and I realise I haven't put down several recipes for things I have cooked, such as peperonata, and meatballs.

Peperonata

Slice two large onions and soften in a couple of spoons of olive oil; then slice 3 or 4 red/yellow peppers (you can use green if you like them) and several cloves of garlic.  Put in the pan with the onion and add a sprinkle of salt to help soften the peppers faster.  Put a lid over the vegs and cook down a little until they are getting soft.  Add a tin of tomatoes, chopped, and cook gently for 40 mins or so, checking it hasn't stuck.  If liked add some basil or parsley or freshly ground pepper - or all of these.    Eat hot or cold, very good with lamb, meatballs, chicken especially.  Or as a starter, or whatever...

What I ate
A very nice scrap of chicken curry, veg curry, rice, potato ball, a samosa, and a spoon of vermicelli pudding and some gulab jamun.     For supper, the quorn curry, leftover rice and half a Sainsbury's garlic and herb nan, which wasn't too bad, but not to be compared with the nan yesterday.  Feel quite full.  The quorn curry was really good and the quorn keeps its shape despite re-heating - I somehow expect it to dissolve.

365 days: Wednesday turkey sweet and sour a la Robert Carrier

This was Tuesday's supper.  Pork sweet and sour was one of the first "exotic" dishes I ever learned to cook.  My mother had a lot of cookery books (I think my father used to buy them for her).  There was, I think, a fairly old early Chinese cookery book, perhaps by Kenneth Lo, but I think this recipe actually came from Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World - which was one of the few illustrated cook books I had access to.  Now that I think of it, the reason I preferred The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook (black and white photos) and Mrs Beeton's Household Management (late 50's edition - with colour pictures) was because I used to read them when I was young - and ironically I always wanted to eat dishes that involved an awful lot of fancy piping.  I say ironically, since my piping skills are laughable... I think it's lack of practice, but it could also be dyspraxia...

The Carrier book had quite a few pictures, but not all the dishes were illustrated - including some of the most memorable ones.  This is what I can roughly remember of the recipe -  for which I used rather tough belly pork (it should have been fillet!) - rather than this decidedly tender turkey breast.

The cover is roughly as I remember it, but ours rapidly lost its dust cover and was, naked, a terracotta coloured book with gold lettering.  It's available "used" from Amazon for around £25.00.  I have retrieved a copy from my mother's collection.

For a long time it was my ambition to go to the Carrier restaurant in Islington, which I used to live very close to.  I now cannot remember if I did, I have a memory of it - but did we go in to ask to see the menu and then decide we couldn't afford it? It was very grand style Colefax and Fowler decor - Louis XV rococco mirrors and chairs, a destination, rather than a restaurant.  I never did find out if the food was any good, needless to say, he wasn't in the kitchen himself, and I think the menu was more classic french than international - unless I am confusing it with Frederick's another great Islington institution of swollen poshness.


Turkey sweet & sour

With another substantial veg dish (I served stir fried mixed veg mixed with a lot of rice noodles) this should go around 4 people.

Two turkey breasts cut into 3-4 cm chunks, marinaded in a mix of dark soy (1 tbsp) and sherry or rice wine (1 tbsp) with chopped garlic and ginger.     Marinade for "a bit" - an hour seems good, less would probably be fine.   Then drain and roll in cornflour.  Deep fry until brown and drain.   Chop up 2 garlic cloves and about 1/2 inch piece of ginger root, don't worry about the peel, you'll be chopping it fine.  Slice an onion, a pepper (preferably red) into fine slices and take strips of carrot with a potato peeler, if you have a tin of pineapple drain that (keep the juice) and add about half the fruit.

Mix  1 tbsp light soy,. 1 tbsp sherry, 1 tbsp rice vinegar, 1 tbsp sugar with a heaped tbsp of tomato puree and 1 tsp of cornflour, mix together, add about half the pineapple liquid, if there's any marinade left add that too.   When ready to cook, fry the ginger and garlic in a little oil, then add slices of onion and allow them to soften slightly. Then add the fried meat, pour in the sauce mix let it combine and add the pepper, carrot and pineapple (if using).  The sauce should thicken slightly and it is ready as soon as everything is hot.  Obvs., if you like your veg limp, cook them first.     The flavours should be adjusted for sweet-sour balance.  Without the pineapple this mix is slightly sharp rather than sweet but still good.   Chinese take-aways serve it a lot sweeter than this.

365 days: quorn korma - 1 vegetarian meal a week

I doubt whether this is technically a korma - it's just a fairly mild curry with coconut milk in it.   I make it to keep us on the one veggie day a week straight and narrow.  I don't think we always succeed with this, but when we do we typically have pasta with some sort of sauce, or a pasta bake with mozarella and cheese sauce, or egg and cheese pie, or stuffed peppers, or risotto.  This practice is hampered by the fact that there is one member of the family who does not like eggs or mushrooms; we also have a certain resistance to lentils - which are part of one of our favourite dishes, meghdarra - food of the poor.  So, recently I have overcome my reluctance to use quorn - and chili with quorn and bolognese ditto have been appearing, helped by the fact that it's wondrously cheap.

Quorn korma
Take a small bunch of coriander, take off the top leaves and put aside, chop the stalks fairly finely; chop 3 garlic cloves finely, and about an inch of fresh ginger, a chilli and one onion.   Put these in hot vegetable oil together with 1-2 tsps of fenugreek seeds.   Stir until coloured.  Then add further vegetables, according to preference, for example a large sliced onion, a chopped pepper, a few fresh green beans (these can be added later on if prefered).  Add salt and let them soften a little, then add a bag of Quorn chunks - when these have begun to defrost add a can of cocnut milk and roughly the same amount of water, bring to boil, add green beans/mushrooms/peas etc.  and ground pepper.  Put lid on and simmer for 30 mins or so.  Add the fresh coriander leaves before serving with rice, nan, and all the usual paraphernalia, which in our case includes mango chutney, carrot and onion salad and cucumber raita.


This is what I am cooking tonight, which we can eat tomorrow, as it doesn't need much preparation.  What we are actually eating tonight is turkey sweet and sour with rice and stir fried veg and rice noodles.  At some point there will be even more oreo ice cream, but with the curry there will be strawberries with mango - bliss.

365 Days: Chocolate tart

Today I didn't actually cook (well, meatballs - see later) since I was going out.  However, I have listed a number of recently cooked dishes which haven't had accompanying recipes.  So here's the chocolate tart recipe (sorry all the sweet things so far have been chocolate based).

I used some leftover commercial shortcrust pastry for this *frugal!, but if I was doing it from scratch I would either do flaky pastry or pate brisee or sucree - either would be good.   So, line a 20cm flan tin or similar with pastry.  Then bake it blind.  I find using the dedicated ceramic beans is the best way to do this, line the pastry snugly with foil, put the beans in and make sure the foil covers the rim of the pastry, otherwise it tends to cook first.  Cook in a medium 4/5 oven for 15 mins, remove hot foil and beans and give it another 5 mins to crisp the bottom.

For the filling, melt 200g dark chocolate in a bowl in a saucepan of water,don't let the water get to it.  Towards the end, add 50 g butter (unsalted pref).  Meanwhile take 300ml double cream and add 2 tbsps caster sugar and whisk together, add the slightly cooled melted chocolate and beat together until shiny (this didn't take long), then add a couple of tbsps of milk to loosen it a little, amalgamate fully then fill pie crust with the mixture.  Chill for 2 hrs before eating.

Alternatively: This is not my recipe - I got it online, it's Jamie Oliver's, based on generations of French precursors no doubt.  Next time I do it I'll probably add orange zest and maybe some cointreau to losen it, or brandy instead of milk, or amaretto and add some crushed toasted almonds, or a layer of crushed amaretti on the crust before adding the chocolate... you could serve this with some very delicious baked/poached pears, possibly mocha/vanilla versions might be tried - whatever else goes with chocolate.  The chocolate is fairly firm, so you could almost make this is a tray bake and serve in slivers, perhaps with some luxurious florentine style topping - yes, I might try that next time - or praline or just a drizzle of white choc and gold dust to improve its appearance.  Oh, sorry, how could I have forgotten sea salt! Or caramels?

What I ate
Oatcakes with cheese,  lunch was leftover pork and bean stew, a leaf or two of overcooked artichoke; later a couple of meatballs I was cooking for the men, then a really dreary cheese and bacon panino at the Gulbenkian... I wanted fresh... they only had dull.  A spritzer - to compensate for the food!

365 days: pork and beans

During the lengthy excavation of the freezer last week, I discovered a cache of still untouched French sauciforms - notably saucisse de monteliard which is a nice smoked sausage which can be used in salad montebeliard (another day perhaps).  Also a lot of potrine fumee and more meguez than could be used in our dull supper the other day.  So on went the beans to soak, while I remembered my misgivings about eating pork and beans in the middle of summer - it didn't seem appropriate somehow.  However, as it happened, today was one of the coldest days this summer, with a nip of autumn and plenty of rain.  So it was the perfect supper.


Pork and beans.

Chop up some bacon/poitrine fumee and fry with two chopped onions and 3-4 cloves of garlic.  Add a sprig or two of rosemary and a bay leaf.   Then add a couple of slices of belly pork (or more) cubed, let them take a bit of colour, then add sausages, either whole of chopped up.   When they have all become acquainted with the heat and each other,  stir them a little, then add about some cooked haricot beans (no, not a tin, some that you have soaked and maybe boiled in the pressure cooked (* frugality!)).  Then add either a tin of tomatoes/ a tablespoon of  tomato concentrate and half a carton of passata, some of the liquid from the beans, lots of salt and pepper, any bits of leftover wine - salt and pepper - then put the lid on and cook slowly for about 2 hours.

To be honest,. I wouldn't say this was the most delicious pork and beans, I frequently do a more US variety, with syrup and mustard and worcester sauce.   This is more like a sub-French cassoulet, but without all the duck confit etc.  Maybe more rosemary, parsley, some thyme and more tomato.  It was good though, we ate it with rice and a green salad with vinaigrette to which I added some left over yoghurt * frugal...


What I ate
Lovely lunch party - cold ham, salads, mango and chili one being particularly memorable, plus some cheese, a piece of ginger cake and some home made lemon ice cream - plus way too much wine!

Pork and beans, rice, green salad, followed by chocolate tart.

365 days: don't waste food

Having hauled a lot of things out of the deep freeze, I am now faced with the task of cooking them.... so this morning I began a cooking session.

First in a burst of frugality I went through the fridge and decided what to do with the leftovers:
cold cooked chickpeas (they don't keep that long) - I fried an onion, some garlic, cumin and red pepper, then added the chickpeas, a spoon of tomato concentrate and about 4 fresh tomatoes, chopped, then some water to stop it sticking.  Cooked it gently for half an hour and then kept it to be eaten as a cold veg, but it could be re-heated.

Then I boiled beetroot.  I usually make a sauce for the beetroot which consists of a spoonful of fruit jelly (redcurrant, apple, quince, whatever) the zest or grated peel of half an orange, some orange juice, melted together, a squirt of vinegar too perhaps - you have to adjust the jelly/juice-vinegar ratio according to taste, lots of salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Then I did two artichokes that I'd been given - I am the only one who likes them, and I eat them with vinaigrette.  I made another batch of carrot soup too.

There were cold potatoes, carrots, peas and beans in the fridge - I cut them up added a chopped gherkin and mayo and made a reasonable version of a Russian salad.   We then had a very nice lunch of assorted salads; unfortunately, there is still rather a lot of it leftover, so we may be enjoying them for a couple of days.

Finally, the peppers had been there for about a week, so I made a peperonata.  The boys like this, but it will keep until Monday, when they can have it with meatballs.

This evening we are going to have duck legs, which are not, unfortunately, confit, because I haven't had the time or goose fat - and pommes sarladaise (I hope)  I haven't cooked this before.  This will be followed by chocolate tart.  I also made some bread, a fruit salad for breakfast, and, since the bananas were appalling, another lot of banana and coconut bread. (i.e. last week's banana muffins, but without the blueberries, and in loaf form).  This really was an epic day of cooking, since I also made a bean and pork stew for tomorrow and some more chicken stock..

Pommes sarladaises
The recipe I found was on a US blog - I don't think it's quite right.  Three very large potatoes, peeled and cut into coin-thick slices.  Heat a lot of goose/duck fat in a large, heavy bottomed pan, add the potatoes gradually, turn them over, and keep turning them as they go crisp.  Add 6 chopped cloves of garlic and keep cooking until they are all crisp.   At this point, I would add salt and pepper and chopped parsley, however, the recipe suggests adding 3/4 cup of water and continuing to cook covered.   When I cooked them this would have been unecessary, but I did it anyway.  I don't think it was necessary and I shouldn't have bothered,but I wanted to do it PROPERLY.  Anyway, it made it rather soggy and not very like the pommes sarladaises I ate in the Lot 8 years ago.

365 days: Bog standard food

This is what we ate for supper today, and it is not in the least interesting.   We ate some French merguez which I bought in a supermarche last time we were there, we ate them with potatoes that I had parboiled and then fried in the sausage oil.  I also made cauliflower and added chopped anchovies, gherkin, capers, parsley and dill.  I also cooked some peas, for Ned who doesn't like cauliflower.

It was dull meal really, but others were happy, because sausages and fried potatoes represent heaven.  Unfortunately, due to various rows, most of the food was cold, and this did not improve it.  However, M and I enjoyed a very good Pimm's before we ate.