Orange-Scented Chilli

Despite my only blogged recipe for chilli con carne, I am a firm believer in sweet potato in chilli. I hinted recently at a vegetarian version with sweet potato, but even the meaty ones should have some. Unfortunately, I didn't have any sweet potato when I decided to recreate this amazing recipe for orange-scented chilli so turned it into a meat-lover's fest. The orange truly does wonderful, wonderful things to it. Also, Tom had the leftovers on toast with a hard-boiled egg (of all things) the next day, and that was pretty spectacular too.

Orange-Scented Chilli

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

1 tablespoon oil

1/2 onion

1 clove garlic

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon chilli powder, plus more to taste

250g mince

1/2 cup red wine

2 cups tomato sauce

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 tin kidney beans

Juice and peel of 1 orange

Seasoning

Bobotie

During the World Cup, my mum made bobotie a lot. It's a traditional South African dish with curried meat and fruit, topped with an omelette, and I decided to mix it with my squash mince bake from the very early days of this blog for dinner last night. Tom really enjoyed it, but the amount of spice was a little too much for me. It was wonderful to have something that was curry-hot rather than chilli-hot for once, though!

Bobotie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 slices white bread

1/2 to 1 cup milk

3 sweet potatoes

1 tablespoon butter

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 tablespoons curry paste, divided

250g mince

1 teaspoon dried mixed herbs

1 teaspoon clove powder

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

2 tablespoons pickle or chutney

6 bay leaves

1/2 cup raisins

2 eggs

1/2 cup cream

Seasoning

Mole Enchiladas

I continue to disappoint myself by forgetting to take pictures of certain meals. For this particular meal, I have no excuse: I photographed most of the process, popped the enchiladas in the oven, served them up, and greedily ate them, without even a thought for the camera that was sitting, sad and alone, right next to where the food was served up. So you're going to have to make do with the pre-oven picture, which is still a nice picture.

Mole is a Mexican sauce which I thought was basically a savoury dark chocolate sauce. (Oh, and it's not pronounced like the animal, but with an é.) I was quite wrong, as this recipe shows. I toned down the recipe a bit but still ended up with enough sauce to freeze for another meal. I served it with a slightly modified version of my enchiladas - modified in that no salsa was made, but the necessary flavourings just added to the meat instead - and really enjoyed it. The mole sauce feels earthy. There's no other way to describe it. Despite the excess amounts of spice added, it wasn't burn-your-mouth spicy, which I liked but Tom didn't.

Mole Enchiladas

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2, with enough sauce for 4

Enchiladas:

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

250g minced pork (or beef, or chicken)

2 cups tomato sauce

1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Chilli powder

1 tin kidney beans

4 tortilla wraps

1/2 cup grated cheese

Seasoning

Mole Sauce:

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 large green chillies

1 cup tomato sauce

1 cup chicken stock

2 tablespoons peanut butter

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

2 squares dark chocolate (mine was 56% cocoa)

1 teaspoon hot sauce or ssamjang

Chilli powder

Seasoning

Weekend Shepherd's Pie

One of the last Saturdays in January marks a special occasion in my family's social circle - the awards night for the cycling group that my father heads. There is generally a big party with shepherd's pie and champagne, a dinner party menu borrowed from British ex-politican and scandalmonger (that's definitely a word) Jeffrey Archer. Wikipedia says "In 1979... He also began to host shepherd's pie and Krug parties for prominent people at his London apartment, which overlooks the Houses of Parliament."

This menu is ostensibly to make the night easy to cater for, although this year I was only one of two people worldwide, as far as I know, cooking for the celebration - and the other one is a professional chef. Oh well.

My boyfriend is a member of this cycling group, hence our own celebration here last night, complete with leftover Christmas crackers. The pie was delicious. It's filling and comforting and best served so hot that it burns your mouth and for hours afterwards even plain water tastes smoky. It should be dark and wintry and thick and liquidy and one of the most rustic meals you've ever tasted.

In terms of time, you could no doubt have this pie ready within forty-five minutes. Unfortunately that's not the point of this particular recipe. The point here is to spend several hours doing something relaxing and weekend-y, occasionally getting up to stir the mince and add a teaspoon of this or that. The mince could probably sit forever slow-cooking, as long as you kept adding stock and alcohol to make sure it retained that red-wine-gravy texture.

Shepherd's Pie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4

1 onion

2 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon flour

400g mince, preferably beef or lamb

1 cup red wine

3 cups water, separated, each with 1 tablespoon gravy or beef stock powder

1 teaspoon anchovy powder

2 teaspoons worcester sauce

2 teaspoons mixed herbs

1 head broccoli

25ml rum

Seasoning

Mustard, for serving

1200g potatoes

1 tablespoon milk

1/2 cup butter

Seasoning

Chop the onion and garlic finely and fry in an oiled pan. Once softened, sprinkle the flour over to make a very loose roux. This will help thicken the gravy later.

Add the mince and stir through to break up any clumps, allowing the mince to brown all over.

Whisk two cups of cold water with two tablespoons of stock powder, and add it to the mince pan along with the red wine. Turn to the lowest heat possible, and allow to simmer for at least fifteen minutes.

Start peeling 1200g of potatoes, or simply three of the biggest potatoes I've seen in my life.

I struggled to keep my hand around them.

Once peeled, cut the potatoes into small chunks and boil them vigorously. You'll need quite a large pan for 1200g of potatoes. The softer they are, the better (and easier) the mash will be.

Add the anchovy powder, worcester sauce and mixed herbs to the mince pan. Taste, and season accordingly.

Break the broccoli head into small florets and add it to the mince pan, along with the third cup of water whisked with stock powder. Turn the heat up to a medium-low flame, and simmer for ten minutes or so.

Gravy is built in to a shepherd's pie, so don't simmer the entire thing away. Our meat mixture looked this liquidy before it was tipped into a deep ovenable dish. Taste again at this point - I felt there wasn't enough boozy flavour so added 25ml of rum, our red wine stock having been depleted by this stage of cooking. The heat can be turned off at this stage, although be sure to keep it warm to avoid re-heating dangers.

Drain the potatoes, which should have been boiled to almost breaking point, and mash them with milk, butter and more salt and pepper. This amount of butter should create a gorgeous mash, the buttery taste of which can even withstand the beefy boozy filling later on.

Tip the beef mixture into a large, deep dish (ours is 23cm across, 77cm around, and 8cm deep). Carefully spread the mash on top, and then use a fork to create mountains and troughs by raking and lifting. A smooth topping seriously detracts from this dish.

Bake for twenty minutes to forty minutes, depending on how desperately you need the pie, at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit). It's a good idea to put the bowl on a large sheet of foil, because - as you will see below - the pie will try to escape a little.

Serve. Tastes brilliant with mustard, particularly (I find) wholegrain.

See how the gravy has leaked out slightly, and how the mountains of the mash are a little blackened. Perfect.

After we'd each had a large bowl of pie, there was still this much left.

Continue eating the pie until it's gone. Which takes much less time than you might think.

Mexican Shepherd's Lasagne

I've mentioned already today that the last few days have necessitated quick comfort food. I'm something of an expert at whipping up meals that make me feel better - but only for myself. Tom isn't generally a fan of what I, personally, think of as comfort food. And the lack of decent cheese in Korea has hindered my ability in this area somewhat. (No, I will never stop going on about how much I miss cheese. It's even mentioned in my about me section - that's how deeply I'm affected by this.)

I had defrosted some mince yesterday, so decided that I wanted shepherd's pie. Unfortunately I didn't have the energy for mashing potatoes, and we'll be having shepherd's pie next week anyway (an annual celebration - I'll attempt to explain more at the time). So I thought - tortilla pie. And immediately discarded that thought, because we'd had tortillas the night before. In the end I went for a combination of the two, with a little bit of lasagne-esque layering thrown in - I'm just cool like that.

Dinner was pretty good, with the comfort factor of being able to eat it with a spoon, although the potatoes retained enough crunch to make it just on the wrong side of comfort food. Not necessarily a bad thing. This could easily be made vegetarian following the recipe for mince from the tortilla pie recipe rather than including mince.

Oh, and I shall warn you before you look at the recipe and pictures: this is not a pretty meal.

Mexican Shepherd's Lasagne
(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4 with a side.

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 chilli pepper

1 pack of mince (250g)

6 small potatoes

2 tablespoons gravy powder

300ml tomato sauce

Pinch of cinnamon and anchovy powders

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1 tablespoon chilli powder

1 tin kidney beans

1/2 cup red wine

1 tablespoon mayonnaise or sour cream

Grated cheese

Seasoning

Chop the onion, garlic and chilli and fry until softened. Add the mince and stir, breaking up any large clumps, until browned. Sprinkle with gravy powder.

In the meantime, slice the potatoes into thin discs and boil on a medium-high heat until easily pierced with a fork. Peel them first, if you like.

Add the tomato sauce to the mince, along with cinnamon, anchovy, sugar and chilli to taste. Reduce for ten minutes, then add the kidney beans and red wine. (I also added leftover mashed beans from the night before, to thicken the sauce a little - you could skip this step, or mash some beans before adding to the pan.) Cook for a further five minutes before adding a tablespoon of mayonnaise or sour cream to the mince and stirring through.

Drain the potatoes and allow to cool for a moment. In a deep oven dish, spread 1/3 of the mince mixture, cover with 1/3 of the potatoes, and sprinkle a little bit of cheese on top. Repeat until all the ingredients have been layered, using a heavier hand with the cheese on top. Bake at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Serve.

Enchiladas

I've mentioned enchiladas a few times before, namely here and here. They are one of my essential recipes, and although they are fairly fiddly and require a fair amount of time and washing up, I consider them an easy meal. They are delicious. So I've decided to post a better version of the recipe, with pictures.

My enchiladas are a storecupboard meal, so the flavour is slightly different each time depending on what's actually in the pantry. Generally, there are onions, sometimes garlic and chilli and bell pepper too. There is mince, usually beef, and a tomato sauce spiked with chilli and sugar to make it taste more like a salsa. The mince is cooked and has some of the sauce added to it, along with grated cheese and mayonnaise, and the mince mixture is spooned into tortillas. The tortillas originally sat on top of a layer of refried beans, which have now (of necessity) been replaced with smashed kidney beans, and are covered in the rest of the sauce and a bunch of cheese before being baked for twenty minutes.

That's the basic idea of the meal.

Enchiladas
(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

(2 filled wraps are a medium-large meal for 1 person)

Essential:

1 onion

1 pack of mince (250g)

3 tablespoons of tomato puree and 500ml water

(or 500ml tomato sauce)

Chilli powder

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1 handful grated cheese

1 tablespoon mayonnaise or sour cream

4 tortilla wraps

1 tin of kidney beans

More cheese for topping

Seasoning

Optional:

Garlic

Chilli pepper

Bell pepper

Gravy powder

Red wine

Extra vegetables

Bacon

Use your imagination!

Chop your onion, and garlic, chilli and pepper if using.

Put about 1/3 of the chopped vegetables into a large pan, and the other 2/3 into a small pan. The large pan is for the mince, the small one for the sauce. Fry on a medium heat until softened.

Add the tomato puree and water, or tomato sauce, to the small pan. You need a fairly thick sauce - enough to bind the meat together and cover the final dish. Let the pan simmer for a few moments before adding chilli and sugar to taste, along with other herbs and spices if desired. Add some red wine to the sauce, if using, and season.

In the large pan, add the mince once the onions have been softened. Last night I added 3 rashers of bacon, cut into strips, to the mince pan at this point as well. I usually sprinkle some gravy powder over the mince in its first few seconds of cooking, to darken it a little and make the mixture more gluey when it comes to spooning it into the tortillas.

Once the mince is almost entirely cooked through, add about two-thirds of the sauce to the mince pan, trying to get most of the big lumps of onion and pepper in. Stir through. If you are adding vegetables to the enchiladas, such as broccoli florets, add them to the pan now and allow to simmer on a medium-high heat for five to ten minutes. Season!

Turn the heat off under the small pan.

Add mayonnaise and grated cheese to the cooked mince and stir through.

Get your kidney beans, drain and rinse them, and put them in the microwave on high for one minute.

Mash the beans roughly with a fork and put back in the microwave for another minute to soften them further. Mash again, and spread on the bottom of an oven-proof dish.

Spoon a quarter of the mince mixture into a tortilla and roll it up.

Place the tortillas in the dish, on top of the layer of smashed kidney beans.

Repeat with the other three tortillas. Cover the tortillas in the remaining sauce, sprinkle with grated cheese, and bake at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Serve, happily.

Steak and Ale Pie

A dinner! After what feels like weeks (but is actually, oh, two days if you count the tomato sauce post) I have cooked something new that didn't require dough. (Except it did.) I have to admit, though, that already my horrifically bad food photography skills are annoying me. I know it'll be a learning curve, but honestly, can't learning curves happen faster?! Sigh.

I've mentioned before that we bought one and a half kilograms of beef for Christmas Day, and ate very little of it. It finally got finished today, in a steak and ale pie. I used Gordon Ramsay's rough puff pastry recipe for the topping, and my own imagination for the rest. I forgot to add flour, so the pie filling was rather runny, but still pretty damn good; the pastry was delicious and buttery but not particularly flaky. Tom compared it to suet, in a positive way I think.

Steak and Ale Pie

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 4

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 and 1/2 cups butter

100-150ml cold water

2 onions

3 garlic cloves

About 750g beef

1/2 cup flour

300ml ale

1 tablespoon gravy powder with 1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 teaspoon chilli powder

1 head broccoli

1 mulled wine ice cube

1 egg

Seasoning

Slice the butter into chunks (it shouldn't be softened) and add to the flour and salt. Scrunch the mixture together with clean hands, rubbing your fingers and thumbs together as if to make a crumble topping. After about five minutes of this, make a well in the middle of the dough and add 100ml water. Incorporate the water into the dough, adding the remaining 50ml if necessary. Shape into a ball, wrap in clingfilm, and chill in the fridge for twenty minutes. After this, knead the dough and roll it out. Fold the dough back into a ball and chill it for a further twenty minutes. Repeat this rolling and chilling as many times as you like - the more you do it, the flakier your pastry should be. I rolled and chilled twice before rolling my dough out to the desired size and using it as the pie topping.

Roughly chop 2 onions, and finely chop the garlic. If you are using raw beef, chop the beef too and add all of these to a hot oiled pan. Brown the beef on all sides. I was using already cooked beef so just fried the onion and garlic for now.

Chopped garlic, onion and beef.

Once the beef is browned (or just after the cooked beef is added to the pan), add the flour to the pan and stir so the meat is coated. Mix the gravy powder and soy sauce and add 500ml boiling water. Stir the liquid and pour it into the pan, along with the 300ml ale. Stir the chilli powder into the mixture along with seasoning, and allow to simmer for forty-five minutes. In the meantime, snap the broccoli head into florets.

The pie filling simmering.

Add the broccoli and the mulled wine ice cube (or some red wine) to the stew and cook for a further ten minutes. Pour the stew into a deep pie dish and top with the pastry lid. Score some lines in the lid, and brush with a beaten egg. Bake at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for thirty to forty minutes, and serve.

Christmas Food

Christmas!

Sadly Christmas does not seem to be that big a deal in Korea, but that wasn't going to stop us from going all-out. We spent about twenty-five pounds on a giant slab of beef, drank buck's fizz from 9:30, had monkey bread for breakfast, and cooked enough so that we could recreate Christmas dinner again today from the leftovers, if we felt like it. And probably tomorrow, too.

Also, one of my Christmas presents was a pair of pink spotty pyjamas, so now I really am a cook in pink pyjamas. I'm very happy about this.

Monkey Bread leftovers in tupperware - we needed the cake tin!

Christmas Breakfast: Monkey Bread

Fills one cake tin

From this recipe

2 and 1/2 tablespoons butter

1 cup milk

1/3 cup water

1/4 cup brown sugar

4g instant yeast

3 and 1/4 cups flour (I used 1 and 3/4 bread flour, 1 and 1/2 wheat flour)

2 teaspoons salt

1 tablespoon oil

More flour (I estimate about 300g)

150g butter

Equal amounts brown sugar and cinnamon

Put the milk and water into a medium-sized, microwavable bowl, and heat on a medium temperature in the microwave for one minute. Add the two and a half tablespoons of butter and return to the microwave for another thirty seconds to a minute so that the butter melts into the mixture. Add the quarter-cup of brown sugar and the yeast and stir to combine.

In a big mixing bowl, stir the flour and salt together. I used two different kinds of flour because the first packet was empty after 1 and 3/4 cups! Make a well in the middle of the flour and pour the milk mixture in. Stir with a wooden spoon until the dough has formed, and is quite sticky - this shouldn't take long at all.

Sprinkle a lot of flour on to a clean surface, heavily flouring your hands as you do so, and tip the dough on to it. The original recipe says to "lightly flour" your work surface, but I found that I needed to use probably 300g of flour to get it to the right consistency. Keep the flour nearby and a clean hand (I used Tom's) ready to sprinkle more for you if necessary. Knead the dough until it is smooth and satiny, incorporating any scraps that come apart during the kneading. The original recipe says this should take about ten minutes; for me it took about seven.

Pour most of the oil into a large ovenproof bowl and swish it around (I used my hands to make sure it covered the bottom and sides of the bowl thoroughly). Put the dough into the bowl and cover it with a little more oil. Cover the bowl with foil and put it in the oven at 50 degrees C (120 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes, after which you can turn the heat off and leave it for another forty. By now it should have doubled in size.

Remove the foil from the bowl and tip the dough on to a work surface - this time the work surface does only need a light dusting of flour. In one bowl, melt the 150g butter; in a second, mix equal parts brown sugar and cinnamon (you can cut back on the cinnamon as much as you like, but Tom is a big fan of it so I went full-on). Pull small pieces from the dough and shape them into balls, about an inch and a half in diameter (bigger than a two-pound coin but smaller than a golf ball). Dip each ball into the butter, then the sugar mixture, and then put back into the ovenproof bowl. I stacked mine to make a pyramid, not bothering with using a fork to dip each ball in the melted butter.

The dough needs to rise again: I covered the bowl with clingfilm and left it on the side overnight (it had at least thirteen hours). The original recipe suggests putting it in a pre-heated then turned-off oven for another fifty to seventy minutes.

When the dough has risen and you are ready to eat, remove the clingfilm from the bowl and put it into an oven at 180 degrees C (360 Fahrenheit). Cook for thirty minutes, leave for five, and then start tearing the whole thing apart. Delicious when warm, but somehow even better when cooled. Very doughnut-esque. It would be wonderful to adapt the dough slightly by lowering the amount of sugar, and making a savoury version with olive oil, herbs, garlic and cheese instead.

For dinner itself we had roasted beef with roast potatoes, pumpkin mash (having forgotten to buy sweet potatoes), cauliflower cheese, pigs in blankets, Yorkshire puddings, broccoli, and mulled wine gravy. The pigs in blankets were simply sausages rolled in bacon and put in the oven for twenty minutes, and the pumpkin mash was made in exactly the same way as normal mash. Sadly it was very watery so we didn't eat much of it, but it should make great leftovers soup. The Yorkshire puddings are very much Tom's area of expertise so I have neither recipe nor experience to share. Our roast potato recipe remains unchanged since Thanksgiving, so here are my beef, cauliflower and gravy recipes. (We were so excited to see cauliflower in Tesco. It was the first time we'd seen it since we came here. Like a Christmas miracle!)

Roasted Beef

Serves 6

1.5kg beef, no bone

2 onions

Oil

Seasoning

In a large oven tray on the stove, heat some oil. Add the beef and sear on all sides. Add the onions, peeled and quartered, and put in the oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for one hour. Lower the temperature to 150 (300 Fahrenheit) and cook for a further two hours for rare meat.

Cauliflower Cheese

Serves 4

Half a head of cauliflower

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon flour

2 cups milk

1/2 cup white wine

1 teaspoon mustard

1 teaspoon cream cheese

1 handful grated cheese

1 cracker

Parmesan dust

Seasoning

Chop the cauliflower into florets and boil at a high heat for five to ten minutes. Drain and transfer to a small baking tray. In the pan, melt some butter and add the flour to form a roux. Add the milk to the roux, whisking thoroughly, along with the wine. Allow the sauce to simmer for a moment. Add the mustard and cream cheese, waiting until both have melted into the sauce before removing the pan from the heat and adding the grated cheese. Stir the sauce through for a few minutes before returning it to the heat and adding parmesan dust and seasoning to taste. Pour over the half-cooked cauliflower and sprinkle grated cheese and crushed cracker over the top. Bake for twenty minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit).

Mulled Wine Gravy

Makes about 200ml

Roasting juices

Gravy powder

Red wine

1 mulled wine ice-cube

Seasoning

This recipe is necessarily very vague because the amount of roasting juices you get varies massively, as well as the number of people you're hoping to feed with this gravy. Below are my rough estimations, given that I made gravy for two with only a tiny bit left over. You may want to add more or less for taste, also. The mulled wine ice-cube could be replaced with other flavourings, such as mustard or horseradish.

After the beef, or other roasting meat, has been removed from its pan in preparation for carving, take the pan to the stove and put it in a low flame. My roasting juices had the two braised onions in it. Add about one tablespoon of gravy powder, one cup of red wine, one mulled wine ice-cube, and seasoning. Stir. Allow the sauce to bubble for at least five minutes, or until it is needed, before pouring into a jug or gravy boat for serving.

Chilli con Carne

Before Tom left for work yesterday, he issued me a challenge. He stepped out of the flat, ready to leave, and said "I fancy... chilli con carne for dinner," closed the door, and left. He knew full well that we had no rice and, more importantly, no mince. I immediately knew that I had to win, and that to do so I would make the best chilli con carne ever. Admittedly it does sound like Tom would be the winner in that case, particularly as I've never liked chilli con carne, but I also resolved to make it in the messiest way possible. Tom is the one who washes the dishes. I ended up going shopping after work.

Luckily, my chilli was so good that even I really enjoyed it - although to be fair, my tastes have developed since I last tried it, and that was only from a tin anyway. My plan was to make the chilli with biscuits, but Tom arrived home before I'd made the dough and confessed that he'd prefer rice anyway. I did make sour cream from scratch (he was very pleased), and we ate the meal in wraps. There's a lot left - enough for another night's dinner.

Chilli Con Carne with Sour Cream
Makes 4 large servings

1 onion
4 small garlic cloves
1 large carrot
3 small packs of mince (probably about 400g)
1 tablespoon gravy powder
1/2 cup chilli powder
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 tablespoon ssamjang
1 large tin of passata
1/2 large tin's worth of red wine
2 squares of dark chocolate
1 green bell pepper
1 normal-sized tin of red kidney beans
Seasoning

4 tablespoons cream cheese
1 tablespoon lemon vinegar
2 tablespoons milk

Peel and dice the onion, garlic and carrot, and fry lightly in a large pan until softened. Add the mince, with gravy powder to darken it, and cook, stirring to break up clumps, until brown (about ten minutes). Add the chilli powder, curry powder, ssamjang and passata and stir. Pour red wine into the passata tin, enough to about half-fill it, and swish it around to collect all of the leftover tomato, and pour that into the pan too. Allow to simmer for fifteen minutes; add the dark chocolate and kidney beans, cover, and simmer for a further ten.

Meanwhile, mix the cream cheese, lemon vinegar and milk in a blender until smooth, which should only take about ten seconds. Boil rice if you are serving with rice.

The chilli should have reduced and be fairly thick by this point. Add the bell pepper and give the pan five more minutes before serving, with rice and/or biscuits and/or wraps and/or sour cream.

Beef Pumpkin Stew

On Saturday, my wonderful co-teacher took us out and we went for lunch in a Korean restaurant. Tom was very excited by the fact that we sat on the floor, even though he struggled to get back to his feet at the end of the meal! We had dumplings and galbi. Galbi is amazing. It's a kind of stew, which had various vegetables (carrots, mushrooms, GIANT Korean radishes) and lots of on-the-bone beef, which had clearly been cooked in the stew for ages because it was so tender. I love the whole stove-in-the-table thing which keeps food like this really hot. Anyway, galbi - definitely one to try.

Yesterday I decided to make a beef stew as well. There was just SO much of it in the end. I thought the quantities I used were fairly regular, but we could easily have fed another two people and there was enough sauce that we've frozen enough for another two meals (where meal = meal for two). Lots and lots of food. Yum. We ended up siphoning about half of the sauce off during cooking to allow the stew to be more stew-like than soup-like. This could be served in smaller portions with rice or pasta, or just on its own (which we did).

Beef Pumpkin Stew
Serves 4-6


1 onion
2 garlic cloves
3 potatoes
1/4 small pumpkin
1 400g pack beef
Vegetable stock
Rosemary
Basil
Seasoning
Flour
Oil
Gravy powder/meat stock
Half a can of beer (we used Korean 'Black Beer Stout,' which apparently is the closest thing to ale here)
Water

Chopped the onion and garlic, and the potatoes and pumpkin into bite-sized chunks. (Oh, it's a million times quicker to type that than to do it!) Sliced the meat into large pieces. Mixed the vegetables and meat in a pan with stock (just the powder), rosemary, basil, salt+pepper, and a couple of tablespoons of flour. Oiled and mixed well before putting the heat on medium. Stirred until everything had fried a bit, then added a litre of water mixed with gravy powder. Added the beer and a few glugs of water. Turned the heat down to low and left to simmer for roughly thirty minutes.

Bulgogi

I mentioned a few days ago that we went to a Korean barbeque place on Saturday, and really enjoyed the food. Given that we were defrosting meat anyway, I looked up bulgogi (a kind of marinaded beef, fairly common in Korea and a specialty in this area) and found that it would be fairly easy to make. I wish we'd had sesame seeds to put in the marinade, and even though it was cooked in the marinade the beef was still quite dry and tough, unlike the meat we had on Saturday. If I had cooked less rice, we could have rolled it up in lettuce leaves, but I was silly and did giant-sized portions. It was still very nice – the onions cooked in marinade with the rice were absolutely delicious, and worth trying of their own accord.

Bulgogi

Serves 2

1 400g pack of beef

Soy sauce

Oil

2 tablespoons sugar

3 garlic cloves

Chilli powder

Seasoning

1 onion

2 servings of rice

Large handful of broccoli florets

Chopped the beef into medium-sized, very flat strips (each strip should theoretically take no more than 1 minute to cook through). Marinaded in a mixture of soy sauce, oil, sugar, chopped garlic and chilli for about twenty minutes. Put the rice on a low heat in salted water for ten minutes Chopped the broccoli into small pieces and added to the rice, cooking for a further ten minutes. Chopped 1 onion into half-moons and put in a pan on a high heat with the beef and marinade, which only needed about five minutes of cooking time. Served the rice with the beef alongside, with some cooked marinade drizzled over the rice.

We ate this with ssamchang, a Korean condiment which I doubt you'll be able to find, at least without difficulty, anywhere else in the world. It's a 'meat dipping seasoned bean paste' and absolutely delicious, if really spicy. Any spicy salsa-esque dipping would probably serve just as well, although you'd miss out on some unique flavours.

Pumpkin-Broccoli Mash with Mince

Tuesday night's dinner. An oven-free combination of the squash mince bake and a shepherd's pie. I was planning on putting some fruit in the mince but ended up buying walnuts instead and then not using them. True story!

The mash was too creamy - this could easily be solved by baking the dish after assembling it, but you do what you can without an oven. (I need to stop whining about this and actually BUY one.) And there was too much sauce and not enough meat. Other than that, I liked it!


Curried Mince with Pumpkin-Broccoli Mash
Serves 2

1 pack mince
1 onion
1 garlic clove
Curry powder
Chilli powder
Passata
Honey
Lemon juice
Orange juice
Seasoning

1/2 a small pumpkin
Vegetable stock
2 handfuls of broccoli florets
Cinnamon
Butter
Milk
Seasoning

Chopped onion and garlic and fried. Added mince and fried until browned. Added hefty amounts of curry and chilli powders, stirred, and added the passata. Left to simmer on a low heat, adding the other ingredients to taste, for about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, I peeled (with difficulty) the pumpkin and chopped it into bite-sized chunks. Sprinkled vegetable stock over and boiled for ten minutes. Added the broccoli and boiled for a further ten. Drained, added cinnamon, butter, milk and seasoning, and mashed until smooth.
Poured the mince mixture into a bowl and spooned the mash on top. Served.

Beef 'Curry'

The last few meals were cooked, and written up, while I had no access to the internet - hence the sudden plethora of entries! This one was written on 6 October.

Running low on things to cook yesterday, as well as money with which to buy more, apartment 101 ended up with a store-cupboard 'curry'! It did the job, even if it didn't blow either of us away, and I just (this evening) had some leftovers – the beef was even nicer this time. I suppose, like all curries (though I am ashamed to use a nice word like 'curry' to describe this albeit edible mess), it improves with time.

Beef 'Curry'

Serves 2

1 pack of thin, flat beef (400g, although a bit less once the gristle had been thrown away, and this was enough for 2 meals + 1 leftovers meal + more)

Curry powder

Balsamic vinegar (I say balsamic vinegar. I actually used a creamy balsamic salad dressing as it was the only vinegar-y thing in the flat. Any vinegar works)

Tomato sauce/passata (I used a Tesco's own original pasta sauce)

Milk

Spices (I used chilli and cinnamon)

Seasoning

2 servings of spaghetti

Chopped the beef into bite-size parts (though on the large side). Made curry paste: (very) approximately one tablespoon of curry powder to one tablespoon of vinegar. (I made too little and added more vinegar and curry powder to the pan.) Added the beef to a hot, oiled pan with the curry paste. Stirred until lightly cooked. Poured into the tomato sauce, some milk, lots of chilli and cinnamon spices and salt+pepper, and left to simmer for about half an hour – the sauce got quite thick.

Boiled 2 servings of spaghetti in salted water until cooked. Served spaghetti with beef and sauce on top and ate with chopsticks.

First Korean Dinners

Written on 2 October.

The last few days have been extremely disappointing in the culinary areas of my life. Limited resources, in terms of finances, space, time and equipment, have given us meals with, for example, frozen ready-made Korean dumplings, and pasta sauce from a jar. A jar! As well as embarrassing, that experience was quite strange: the inconspicuous-looking garlic and onion tomato pasta sauce ended up being unbelievably spicy, even though I'd only added a tiny bit of chilli. Korean food is spicy. It turns out that they even like their Western food hot.

We've eaten out once – and again, this is going to disappoint – at a Korean panini place where the menu was all in English. The boyfriend had a salsa chicken panini and I had a double cheese panini. Both were very nice, with lashings of wholegrain mustard, which was unexpected but delicious. It might take a few days before we have enough time, money, and confident Korean (or at least confidence in the phrasebook) before we try anything more adventurous.

So far the two of us have experienced a couple of food markets (hundreds of street corners are home to Korean grandmothers squatting for hours trying to sell their home-grown vegetables) and explored three supermarkets. The selection, particularly of fresh cheap vegetables, is wonderful: squash and sweet potatoes are to be found everywhere. Fruit is more of a problem, mostly because much of it is unrecognisable to our sadly untrained eyes. Tofu is abundant – I will have Tom eating it by the end of the year! – as is fish, with which I don't believe I'll be so lucky. Chicken is cheap, the pork we've seen is prohibitively expensive, and beef is cheaper than it is in Europe but still not so much so that we'll be consuming much of it. As far as we can tell, the only passata-type stuff comes in tins the size of a person's head. We'll have to figure out how to keep one of those without it going mouldy before we actually buy one.

Our kitchen is narrow, and lacking in several things: workspace, for one, and an oven, for another. However, what we do have is a two-burner gas stove, an extra long sink, a full-sized fridge with freezer, a microwave, and – a pantry! A door off the kitchen leads into a cool area which currently houses tins and packets (as well as being a convenient place for the hoover). The pantry was where we discovered that we live a very quick, cheap taxi ride away from a real, honest-to-goodness Tesco, thanks to the labels. (For more on this, see my travel blog here.) We explored the shop on Saturday, which was our third anniversary, and treated ourselves to some of our favourite foods. Sadly we were unable to find frozen vegetables, and fresh vegetables were out of the question as buying those would have meant we were unable to buy wine. A couple has to have their priorities, you know.

It ended up as a very simple dinner – I can't emphasize how simple it was – but Tom found it absolutely delicious. I very much enjoyed it, but found the mash a little dry, so added extra butter.

Anniversary Steak with Sweet Potato Mash

Serves 2.

2 beef steaks

4 or 5 medium-sized sweet potatoes

Milk

Butter

Seasoning

We peeled, chopped, and boiled the sweet potatoes in salted water for about fifteen minutes, until they were very soft and easily penetrated with a fork. The potatoes were drained.

Meanwhile, the raw steaks were rubbed with oil, salt and pepper before being placed into a hot, dry pan for 3-4 minutes.

The potatoes were mashed with plenty of milk, a few teaspoons of butter, and lots of salt and pepper before being served.

The steaks were flipped, cooked for another 3-4 minutes, and rested briefly before being served rare.


And that was it!

Squash Mince Bake

I bought some squash today, after reading this recipe for a summer squash gratin. Then I did some more recipe research and found this squash and pasta recipe, and this squash and mince recipe. A quick poll of some family members showed that the mince recipe was preferred by most, so that is what I ended up cooking.

Cooked for 8 although I should have been cooking for 6 - forgot that a couple of people were out or away. Oh well, leftovers! Oh, and I realized belatedly that this was my last time cooking for the family. We fly out to Korea on Tuesday or Wednesday and my little brother, he of the gap-year, is volunteering to take my culinary place.

Everything on the stove was done on a medium-high to high heat (4 to 6 out of 6, depending).

Peeled and chopped a huuuuge butternut squash (in bite-sized chunks it filled two large roasting trays) with lots of help from my wonderful boyfriend. Mixed with nutmeg, salt+pepper, and sesame oil (we're out of olive) and put in the oven on 180 degrees C. I think they were probably in there for about half an hour, maybe a bit longer, before they started going brown and I took them out to rest.
Defrosted 3 500g packs of mince and chopped 2.5 onions and 3 garlic cloves. Fried in butter. Added the mince to the pan, along with salt+pepper and a dash of balsamic vinegar for flavour. Cooked for 10 minutes. Added small bacon bits and cooked for a further 5. Added a hefty dose of tikka curry powder, a big squeeze of tomato puree, and a dash of garlic pepper. Added two tubs of passata, 250ml of cream, splash of HP sauce and some lime juice (we are out of mango chutney, and I had no jam as a viable alternative); also another dash of balsamic vinegar. Simmered for five minutes and added one tin of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed. Added hot chilli powder along with salt+pepper upon tasting.
Simmered the whole thing for twenty minutes before scooping in the cooling roasted squash pieces. Gently folded the squash through before (with lots of help!) pouring the mixture into a deep baking dish and covering thickly with grated cheese. In the oven at 180 degrees C for twenty minutes.

Oh my god, this was amazing. We served it with some mango chutney, which was bought during the cooking process and only arrived home afterwards. Everyone loved it, and the leftovers were good too (if a little dry).

I'm always on the lookout for fresh mince recipes, because my mince repertoire is sadly lacking: shepherd's pie, spaghetti bolognese and enchiladas is about it. I can see this becoming my fourth!

Enchilada Lasagne

Tonight I planned to make enchiladas. I've written up the recipe before, when I thought my brother would be going to university. It's a fairly long recipe, so click 'read more' at the bottom of this post to see it in full. The rest of the post will be discussing the changes I made to this recipe.


So, the major obstacle today was that the supermarket had no tortilla wraps, so I bought taco shells instead. When I unpacked them, one box's worth was broken, so we broke the rest and made enchilada lasagne. We lined the bottom of 2 trays with tacos, dolloped refried beans on it, spooned the mince mixture over, layered more broken taco shells, poured over the remaining sauce, covered with grated mozzarella.

Quantities used: 5 onions, 3 garlic cloves, 3 boxes of passata, 3 packs of mince, 1 red pepper, other spices/herbs/etc proportionately.

We also made our own refried beans: 1 tin of red kidney beans, heated in the microwave, heated on the hob with spices, salt+pepper, and part mashed. Very easy and very nice.

My enchilada recipe comes from an American exchange student who lived with us in our first term at university. We didn't try cooking it ourselves till we moved to Hawai'i last year, and since then it has been one of my absolute favourite meals. This substitute was also really nice - my boyfriend preferred the thinner lasagne with crispy tacos, whereas I preferred the thicker one where the tacos had gone kind of soggy.


Also, on second thought, it's fairly similar to this Butter & Onions recipe.

Two meals

Lunch:
Pasta salad for two.

Two large handfuls of pasta, boiled with salt for 10 minutes.
Sauce: normally I use a dip as the base, but we didn't have any today, so I made one from scratch. I mixed natural yoghurt with 1 egg and some mayonnaise before putting it on the heat. Added 1 tsp honey, 1 tsp mustard, salt+pepper, more mayonnaise, remoulade and salad cream. Also dusted Parmesan.
Pasta was run under cold water and mixed with sauce. Most of one raw chopped onion was stirred through.

Sauce wasn't quite right but good enough.

Dinner:
'Meatballs' in fresh tomato sauce with pasta, cooked for five/six-ish with some leftovers.

I basically followed the recipe, although I didn't have carrot and celery. After simmering it for fifteen minutes, I put the pasta on (one 500g packet). Fifteen minutes later, the pasta was nearly ready; I cut six Frikadellen (pre-cooked hamburger-esque German things) into eighths and stirred them through to warm them. It was lovely, the sauce was a teeny bit sour, but the whole thing was AMAZING and so more-ish with dusted Grana Padano. Mmmmm.