Veggie Burgers

I was going to make bean burgers again at the weekend, except I didn't because it's actually way too hard for me to soak those un-soaked chickpeas we've got. And it's not like I have any excuse - the same day I intended to soak the chickpeas, we took the time to create paper ties and scrap-fabric chokers attached with a 21st birthday badge in order to attend Tom's brother's wedding (congratulations to whom, by the way) via Skype. So intead we made vegetable burgers. They were good. And huge. And served with Jansson's Delight.

In other news, would anyone like the recipe for a vegetarian chilli con carne with sweet potato? I based mine off this recipe, but changed it a lot, as usual - my only worry is that I used a packet of barbeque seasoning and curry cubes, as the original spices are impossible to get here. I feel like it would be difficult for you to recreate elsewhere because I used prepackaged stuff.

Anyway: on with today's recipe...

Veggie Burgers

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 6-8 burgers

2 sweet potatoes

1/2 head broccoli

2 cloves garlic

1 tin red kidney beans

1/2 cup milk

2 tablespoons tomato sauce or paste

1-2 teaspoons chilli powder

1 teaspoon mixed herbs

2 slices bread, made into breadcrumbs

1 egg

1 cup flour, plus more for shaping

1 tablespoon oil, plus more for frying

Seasoning

Pasta Layer Bake

After my 100th post, I asked on Facebook if there were any particular recipes people wanted to see up here. Surprise surprise, many people asked for east Asian food, like sushi and gyoza! Currently on the list is sushi (particularly sun dried tomato sushi, which sounds delicious), rice balls, crab rolls, gyoza, and dosa. Tom may not enjoy the next one hundred recipes so much.

In the meantime, though, we have one of my very own brain-childs (brain-children?) to get through. It started with the ingredients for a carbonara, a recent carbonara meal turning me off that particular idea, and a very unenthusiastic teacher who hands round colouring pencils and then doodles dinner suggestions. Aren't my students lucky?

Dinner was great - Tom went back for thirds, claiming that he could just keep eating it (a claim well-proven), and I had it for lunch today, and there's still a serving or two left in the pan. It has creamy pasta, broccoli, bacon, cheese, and some yellow pepper thrown in for a bit of a crunch. I imagine it would make a great family meal, particularly as a way to sneak vegetables to small children. Experiment with it!

Pasta Layer Bake

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 6

200g pasta

1 head broccoli

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 chicken breasts

1/2 cup white wine

400ml chicken stock

200ml cream

Basil and thyme

Seasoning

For layering:

10 rashers of bacon

1 bell pepper

1 cup of crushed cheese-flavoured crisps or tortilla chips

1/2 cup grated cheese

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.

Stuffed Chicken with Roasted Cubes

I now have a new feature on this blog: printable recipes! A (Printable Recipe) link at the start of the list of ingredients takes you to a page where the recipe has been copied up, minus pictures and other frivolities. Scroll to the bottom and amongst all the little blue text ("Sign In, Recent Site Activity, Terms & Conditions") there is a little link that says "Print Page." It should be easy to use, and I hope you enjoy it.

So, a recipe. I decided to re-do one of my essential recipes (the stuffed chicken) and out came this. Ideally, though, the recipe is made with soft and mature cheeses, rather than milk and mayonnaise and the plastic-y stuff here. This is my recipe, but it does come from BBC Good Food's mustard-stuffed chicken which I would much rather eat. Rearrange these words to make the sentence that most often falls out of my mouth these days: Korea no sigh cheese in.

Last night's dinner was fairly easy and pretty tasty. There was a very herbal quality to it, despite only including half a teaspoon of oregano. I felt it lacked cohesion, but then again I'm rapidly becoming a cooking snob so I wouldn't let that bother you. Also, I served it with 'warm broccoli' for a reason: broccoli loses its temperature very quickly, so if you prepare yourself linguistically your dinner won't suffer.

Stuffed Chicken with Roasted Cubes

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2 with extra potato cubes

2 chicken breasts

50ml milk

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 teaspoon mustard

1 garlic clove

1/2 cup grated cheese

1/2 teaspoon oregano

4 rashers bacon

Seasoning

3 large sweet potatoes

4 small potatoes

Water

Salt

Oil

Mix the milk, mayonnaise, mustard, chopped garlic clove, cheese and oregano in a bowl and leave it to sit for a while. The mixture needs to be quite thick.

Peel and cube the potatoes and boil them in salted water until soft. Shake roughly in the pan before transferring to an ovenable dish and dousing liberally in oil. Sprinkle some salt over, and put the cubes in the oven for 40 minutes at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) to crisp up.

In the meantime, slit a pocket into each chicken breast and stuff with about 1/3 of the mayonnaise mixture. Wrap two bacon rashers around each breast, and pour the remaining mixture on top. Bake at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Serve with warm broccoli.

Strawberry Mustard Chicken with Roasted Cauliflower

I've joined another food-blog website, called Tasty Kitchen and headed by the indomitable Pioneer Woman. Browsing through the recipes, I found a raspberry dijon chicken, which sounded fascinating - but not quite right for me as it is. For one thing, it's not difficult enough. And I don't have a barbeque. And it doesn't have a sauce! What's wrong with the world? I had to fix this.

And so I thought for a day or so, and came up with: strawberry (I don't have raspberry jam) mustard chicken, roasted in the oven with cauliflower, with a red wine gravy made from the juices. The strawberry/mustard glaze risked being far too sweet, particularly as I originally conceived this dish as a summery take on shepherd's pie (which I may still do later in the year), so I needed something slightly bitter to balance everything out. And thank god for that cauliflower in the freezer. I enjoyed cooking this, though my camera battery died when I went to take a picture of the glazed chicken breasts nestled in a bed of blanched cauliflower pre-roasting, so there's no proof of how easy it was. Sorry!

I served ours with rice, and it was delicious. Tom wasn't a huge fan of roasting cauliflower, as he felt that it spoiled the usually-crunchy texture of the vegetable too much. If you dried the florets thoroughly after blanching, and roasted them in a pan on their own with more oil, they might have gone crispy to make up for this huge disappointment - but that's too much work for a 10pm meal. I, on the other hand, thought it was delicious. I love cauliflower even though I find it a hint too bitter sometimes, but the roasting seemed to draw out the flavour rather than the metallic sourness of the vegetable. It still balanced the possibly-too-sugary fruitiness wonderfully, but without making anyone wince.

Regarding substitutions: obviously I've not tried any myself, having only cooked the original dish about fourteen hours ago, but I can imagine that different meats would react differently to the glaze. Chicken breasts just soak up flavour rather than adding any of their own, so it was a good one to start out with. Chicken thigh might not be as forgiving. Beef would be superb with this, at least in my mind - you wouldn't have to add the cauliflower because of the beef's own bitterness, and the red wine gravy would do wonders for it as well. Also, I can imagine a stupendous vegetarian version, or simply glazing the cauliflower and calling it a side dish. Let me know if you try anything different!

Funnily enough, this meal is really quite easy. And it sounds impressive! Cook it now - with or without chicken.

Strawberry Mustard Chicken with Roasted Cauliflower
(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

Half a head of cauliflower

3 chicken breasts

1 tablespoon jam (mine was strawberry)

1 tablespoon mustard

(basically you want 1 teaspoon of each per breast)

1/2 tablespoon oil

1 tablespoon gravy powder

1 cup red wine

1 pinch each chilli powder and cinnamon

1 teaspoon parsley

Seasoning

Break the cauliflower into small florets and put in a pan of boiling water on a high heat for five minutes. In the meantime, mix jam, mustard and oil in a bowl and add seasoning. Cover each chicken breast in the glaze, place in an oven-proof tray large enough to hold the chicken and cauliflower, and drizzle any left over on top.

Drain the cauliflower and nestle around the chicken. Cover liberally with oil, salt and pepper, and roast at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for thirty minutes. In the meantime, prepare your side dish (I just put rice on to boil and went back to the very important business of sitting around doing nothing.)

When the chicken, cauliflower and rice are cooked, serve and keep warm. Put the roasting tray on the hob on a low heat and stir to loosen all the sticky bits. Sprinkle one tablespoon of gravy powder into the pan and stir, followed by a cup of red wine. Add small pinches of chilli and cinnamon, one tablespoon of parsley, and stir until slightly thickened and hot. There isn't too much of the sauce but it is very flavoursome - you don't need much. Pour over the chicken and some of the rice, and eat.

Sweet Potato Peanut Stew

My first recipe of the day (yes, there is another to come) began life at Everybody Likes Sandwiches. It's called a "West African Groundnut Stew," but I hesitate to label it that way - I'm British, I got the recipe from a Canadian website, I'm making it with Korean ingredients, and added my own twist based on information found in The Flavour Thesaurus - adding pomegranate juice in homage to Iranian cuisine. My adaptations have, I'm sure, made the dish veer off wildly from its original incarnation, so I would personally feel uncomfortable giving it any label other than 'mine.' Sorry, West Africa.

One thing that's been bothering me for a while is whether it's spelt turmeric or tumeric. According to The Internet, both are valid. So that's that then.

Anyway! The meal was delicious, and took a surprisingly short time to make - from start (peeling potatoes) to end (serving up) took just under an hour of my life. I never thought I'd find a stew that would be suitable to make after work, given that I get home at 9:30 (not that that stopped me from trying, yesterday. Let Tom starve while I create culinary masterpieces!).

Also, a quick word of warning: if you don't have a blender, or the patience to smash two handfuls of peanuts into tiny little bits with your own (no doubt formidable) strength, you may want to skip this recipe. Or just add another spoonful of peanut butter at the ground peanuts stage, or even just not bother grinding the peanuts at all and adding them whole.

Sweet Potato Peanut Stew

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 4

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 green chilli

4 large sweet potatoes

2 chicken breasts

2 handfuls of peanuts

100ml pomegranate squash (or other concentrated fruit juice)

500ml chicken stock

2 tablespoons tomato puree

1 tablespoon turmeric

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon ssamjang

Chilli powder

1 head broccoli

1 tablespoon lime juice

2 tablespoons peanut butter

Seasoning

Chop the onion and garlic and put in a cold pan with some oil, to allow the flavours to heat up together. Peel the potatoes and chop both the potatoes and chicken into similarly-sized chunks. Add to the pan. Whizz the peanuts in a food processor to reduce most of them to a fine dust (or see my note, above) and add this to the pan as well. Stir through for a few moments, so that most of the chicken is browned, and add the pomegranate syrup. Allow the mixture to bubble for another couple of minutes before adding 500ml boiling water mixed with stock. (I used six chicken stock ice-cubes) Mix in the tomato puree, turmeric and cinnamon, and leave the mixture on a medium heat for twenty minutes or so.

Simmering stew.

Then add chilli powder and ssamjang to taste, along with the head of broccoli, broken into small florets. Cook for fifteen minutes, then add the lime juice and peanut butter. The stew should be fairly dry by now, so turn the heat down and let it sit for a moment to incorporate the extra peanut and lime. Stir again and serve - I served ours with rice.

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.

Milk Chicken with Roast Vegetable Mash

I feel like I've not been in the same 'cooking' frame of mind, recently, as I have been for the last... well, year, I suppose. I didn't enjoy the second chilli con carne meal because it felt like a microwave meal, which (it turns out) I am oddly averse to. I've made simple meals, like a carbonara pasta bake, which I didn't post because I've made both carbonaras and pasta bakes in the past. Nothing special.

Last night I was thinking of doing chicken enchiladas, which we've also done before (but which I didn't write up because Tom was the main chef that night - my original enchilada recipe is here, though), when I decided that this slump must end - at least temporarily. I found this recipe from Everybody Likes Sandwiches, and read it, and all the other recipes it links to, and decided to put it with this recipe from BBC Good Food.

It was good. Not mindblowingly awesome, like so many of these recipes promised - I was disappointed that it wasn't the best chicken either of us had ever tasted, but I suppose it might work better with an entire bird (as intended) than three breasts (as I used). Tom's superior mashing skills played a major role, as always, in making the mashed vegetable mix absolutely delicious. Next time I would try properly roasting the sweet potato in peeled chunks, as suggested by the original recipe, but yesterday I simply didn't want to peel the sweet potatoes. Or cut them. I don't like dealing with raw sweet potato.

Milk Chicken with Roast Vegetable Mash
Serves 2, with extra sauce

3 chicken breasts
Seasoning
1 teaspoon butter
1 heaped teaspoon cinnamon
1 heaped teaspoon oregano
1 tablespoon lemon juice/vinegar
2 cups milk

2 large sweet potatoes
3 garlic cloves
4 potatoes
Milk
Seasoning

I pricked the sweet potatoes and put them on a baking tray with the garlic cloves with a little oil. Put them in the oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, I sprinkled salt and ground black pepper into a bag with the chicken breasts, and rubbed the chicken through the bag until it was lightly coated in seasoning. Melted the butter on a low heat in a saucepan and fried the chicken on both sides until each breast was white. (I didn't bother draining the fat as there was barely anything to drain.) Added cinnamon, oregano, lemon juice and vinegar (the lemon juice ran out while I was pouring) and the milk, and heated through for a moment. Tipped the chicken and warmed sauce into an oven-proof dish, covered with foil, and put in the oven. By now the potatoes and garlic had been in the oven for twenty minutes - I removed the garlic, and put the chicken and potatoes on at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for thirty minutes.

I peeled the normal potatoes and cooked them in water at a fairly low heat for thirty minutes. After half an hour, the foil came off the chicken and the heat was increased to 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit). Twenty minutes later (at which point the chicken had been cooking for 50 minutes and the sweet potatoes for 70 minutes), I removed the sweet potatoes from the oven. The chicken stayed in. Added broccoli to the boiling potato pan and cooked for ten minutes. Drained the potatoes and broccoli, and removed the broccoli on to the foil, leaving some green broccoli residue in the pan. The garlic cloves were squeezed out of their skin and added to the normal potatoes along with the flesh from the sweet potatoes, and the vegetables were mashed together with milk and seasoning.

The chicken was removed from the oven (after having been in for roughly an hour) and served.

Chicken Stuffing in Pumpkin Bowl

I haven't actually cooked anything properly since Tuesday. Wednesday was the lazy carbonara, Thursday was Tuesday's leftovers; on Friday we spent hours going "no, come on, what shall we make?" and then had frozen dumplings at about midnight; yesterday I made the tortilla pie, which somehow ended up far spicier than anticipated. Oh well.

I blame Christmas. Normally, when my students are writing and I'm waiting for them to finish, I jot down notes and ideas for dinner. This week, I was cutting out snowflakes instead.

So when today came around I was still at a loss for recipe ideas. I had pulled chicken out of the freezer to defrost, and knew there were two pumpkins in the pantry, possibly resenting me for not using them sooner. Suddenly it clicked. I've not really used any recipes for this, except for the pumpkin roasting tips I read before making the pumpkin pie filling, and the stuffing recipe I used at Thanksgiving - which has since been requested twice, and used at least once. I'm very proud. Anyway, both were remembered very roughly, and hence adapted.

This was really good but could have been nicer with more cream cheese, or something similar to give the pumpkin flesh a nicer texture. The chicken could be skipped for a just-as-wonderful meal.

Chicken Stuffing in Pumpkin Bowl
Serves 2

1 pumpkin
1 onion
1 garlic clove
1/2 head of broccoli
2 chicken breasts
2 slices bread
1/2 apple
2 tablespoons cream cheese
1 teaspoon mustard
1 teaspoon each of various herbs: I used basil, parsley, thyme, oregano and rosemary
Seasoning

Cut the pumpkin in half, scoop out the seeds (I discarded mine but they could be saved for other purposes), and lay cut-side down in a tray. Add half a cup of water and bake in an oven at 180 degrees C (360 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, chop the onion, garlic and broccoli and fry on a low heat in oil. Slice the chicken (I cut each breast into about eight chunks) and add to the pot. Using a blender, pulse the bread into crumbs and add to the pan, turning the heat off at this point. Pulse the apple through the blender too and add to the pot. Stir through, turn the heat back on, and add the cream cheese, mustard and herbs. This should stay on a low heat for about five minutes.

When the pumpkin is done, turn cut-side up and scoop half of the chicken stuffing mixture into each hole. Bake at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for thirty minutes, sprinkling grated cheese on top in the last ten minutes if wished. Serve and eat however you like.

Thanksgiving: The Leftovers

The leftovers have lasted us for three meals so far, with very little sign of running out in the near future. Last night we sliced and fried the roast potatoes and ate them with cold meat; for lunch today I made a leftovers soup; for mid-work-snack there are sandwiches and wraps - and still we have half a tupperware of meat, another one of sweet potato mash, and a couple of the biscuits left.

As I write this I am eating my second portion of leftovers soup - it gets better with age. This soup is actually brilliant, as my usual problem with soup is its thinness. Last week's sweet potato soup was delicious, and I had two servings of it for lunch at 1.30, but by 4.30 I was faint and dizzy with hunger. This soup is much chunkier and feels like you're actually eating something - I was full for hours.

I'm considering using the rest of the sweet potato to make a version of butternut squash macaroni cheese. I've seen about a hundred recipes for that over the last couple of weeks, but this is the only example I can pull up now. So that will make a fourth leftovers meal!

Oh: also, I can now report that persimmon chutney does taste great with poultry.

Thick, Tasty Leftovers Soup
Makes 4 small servings

Note: everything starred (*) was already cooked in my version.

1 onion
2 handfuls broccoli*
2 handfuls chard with garlic chips*
2 cups mashed sweet potato*
1 1/2 cups of Thai chicken soup (from a 'cup a soup' sachet like last time)
1 cup cream
1 glug red wine (I would have used white but the red was open)
1 teaspoon garlic sauce
1 handful of shredded chicken or duck*
Seasoning

If you are not using leftovers, you will have to do this following: boil the broccoli, sauté the chard with garlic chips, boil and roughly mash the sweet potato with some cream, butter and seasoning, and fry, bake or roast some kind of poultry before pulling it to pieces. It'll be worth it.

I chopped the onion and threw it into an oiled pot with the broccoli, chard and garlic to fry for a while. Added the sweet potato and stirred for a minute before adding the stock. Added some cream, wine and garlic sauce and allowed the sauce to simmer for about ten minutes, using the spoon to break up larger clumps of broccoli and sweet potato. Turned off the heat for a minute and then ladled about half of the soup into the blender, in batches, to purée before replacing back in the pan - you could do more or less depending on how chunky you like soup to be. Mine had no large lumps as I'd focused on getting all the broccoli and chard into the blender, so I still had small bites of, for example, garlic and onion. I reheated the soup and added a handful of small pieces of meat from the chicken and duck. Served with buttered bread but was just as brilliant without.

Thanksgiving: The Sides (part 2)

There were a lot of side dishes yesterday. Along with corn and eggplant from our guests, we served roasted white and purple potatoes, baked sweet potato mash, homemade stuffing, homemade biscuits, broccoli, chard with garlic chips, and maybe even something else that I've forgotten since.

Roast Potatoes
Serves 5 with leftovers

10 large potatoes
Seasoning
Duck fat

I peeled and chopped each potato into three good-sized chunks before boiling them in salted water. Once soft (this took longer than necessary as I purposely kept the stove on a low heat), they were drained and Tom 'fluffed' the potatoes by putting them back into the dry cooking pan and shaking them roughly. It's a Delia trick, apparently, and one he swears by. At this point the duck had been removed from its cooking tray, and the potatoes were put into this. The duck fat was spooned over the potatoes and they were roasted for roughly two hours at 160 degrees (320 Fahrenheit).

Baked Sweet Potato Mash
Serves 5 with plenty of leftovers

A huge sack of sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons cream
1 tablespoon milk
2 tablespoons butter
Seasoning

First of all, regarding the amount of potatoes used: I have no idea. It took me about half an hour to peel all of them. They were of varying size and came in a big heavy bag from the school's bus driver, which I mentioned a few days ago. Sorry.

I peeled the potatoes, boiled them, and mashed them with cream, milk and butter. The mash was spooned into a large baking dish and baked for twenty minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit). The best mash I've ever tasted.

Stuffing
From this recipe
Serves 5 - I don't think there were any leftovers of this

4 slices white bread
4 rashers bacon
1 onion
3 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 egg
1 handful dried cranberries
Seasoning (every herb in the kitchen)

I tore the bread into chunks and blitzed these chunks in our mini-blender. Meanwhile, I diced the onion and garlic, and tore the bacon into small bits over a hot oiled pan. After a few moments of frying, I added the onion and garlic, turning the heat off a minute later. I left the bacon mixture in the pan to cool for about twenty minutes before adding it, along with the fat, to the breadcrumbs. I added the lemon juice, a ton of seasoning - as mentioned, every herb we own was used liberally, plus salt and pepper - and an egg to solidify everything a bit more. A handful of dried cranberries was later stirred through. The stuffing was left on the side for probably three hours, perhaps longer, before being baked for twenty minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit).

Biscuits
From this recipe
Makes 9 biscuits

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon active dried yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1 cup milk with 1 teaspoon lemon vinegar

I mixed the flour, baking powder, yeast, sugar and salt in a bowl. Melted the butter in the microwave before adding the milk and vinegar to the butter bowl (this makes buttermilk). Stirred the wet ingredients into the dry and left to sit for, again, about three hours before baking for 15 minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit). Drop biscuits like this are brilliant, because all you do is take a spoonful of the dough and drop it straight on to the tray (hence the name). No rolling out dough or anything. They were, however, slightly too salty.

Vegetables: plain broccoli and garlic-chip-chard
Serves 5

2 heads broccoli
2 large handfuls of chard leaves
8 garlic cloves
Seasoning

I chopped up the broccoli, reserving the lower woody part of the stem for another time, and boiled it in salted water. Once cooked, I drained it and kept it warm before serving.
I sliced the garlic cloves into 'chips' and put them in a cold pan with oil. They slowly cooked on a low heat until slightly golden. The chard leaves were then stirred into the pan to sauté. Once wilted, the heat was turned off. This was possibly the least successful part of the meal, but at least it was only a small part. The chard was still slightly wet from having defrosted, and should have been cut into smaller pieces - each leaf is really big!

Tortillas Galore

Two vegetarian recipes - one good, one mind-blowingly brilliant - for lunch and dinner. Both are extremely easy and can generally be made with what's on hand. The pizza was my idea, although no doubt it's been done before, and the pie came from this recipe. I had planned on using two or three tortillas in the pie, but in the end we only had one left, and it worked well anyway. It's so filling that it's almost shocking that this is vegetarian!

I've used this post as an excuse to add a 'potentially vegetarian' label to all posts that are, or could easily be (by skipping on the meat rather than replacing it), vegetarian.

Tortilla Pizza
Serves 1

1 tortilla wrap
1 tablespoon tomato sauce/passata
1 tablespoon garlic sauce (or minced garlic, or just leave this out)
Handful of grated cheese
Handful of chopped onion
1 tablespoon cream cheese

Use the back of a spoon to spread the tomato and garlic sauces lightly over the (flat) tortilla, leaving a slight margin at the edges. Top with the grated cheese and chopped onion. Blob (yes, blob) bits of cream cheese over the pizza and put in an oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for 5-10 minutes, depending on how crispy you want the 'crust.'


Tortilla Pie
Serves 2

1 1/2 cups rice
1 onion
1 green chilli
1 cup tomato sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon ssamjang
1 tin red kidney beans
1 green pepper
1 broccoli stalk
Seasoning
1 tortilla wrap
Grated cheese
Cream cheese

I put the rice on to boil while I chopped the onion and chilli. Fried those for a few minutes before adding tomato sauce, sugar, chilli and curry powders, and ssamjang to make a salsa. Allowed to simmer for a few minutes before adding the kidney beans, chopped pepper, and chopped broccoli stalk. Seasoned, and drained the rice. Once heated through, half of the bean mixture went into a deep dish, and was covered with rice. This was covered with grated cheese and several teaspoons of cream cheese. The remaining bean mixture went on top, was covered with the tortilla, and more grated & cream cheeses. Baked for 15 minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) and served.

Chicken, Mash and Greens

We were running pretty low on food last night, and as we were both working till 10 neither of us were feeling the 'cooking' that much. After finding some curly mallow in the fridge, and this recipe on the internet, and discovering that I wanted mashed potato, dinner was easy. And delicious. Tom was less enthusiastic about the meal but I really enjoyed the flavours.

Unfortunately, my head is currently full of tonight's dinner and I'm not sure how much of last night's I can remember. I knew I should have written it down at the time!

Chicken, Mash and Greens

Serves 2 (with an extra serving of mashed potato)

2 garlic cloves

2 chicken breasts

1 handful of curly mallow

Oil

Curry powder

Vegetable stock

Milk

Sugar

1 handful of broccoli

Seasoning

6 or 7 potatoes

Vegetable stock

Milk

Butter

Seasoning

Chopped 2 garlic cloves and sliced the mallow into long strips. Mixed in a pan with chicken, oil, curry powder, vegetable stock and seasoning. Put on a low heat and stirred until browned. Made 300ml of vegetable stock with boiling water and a very tiny bit of milk - the amount I used didn't even cover the whole bottom of the jug. Poured in half and cooked for about ten minutes. Added the broccoli, more of the stock, and poured the rest of the stock into the potato pan. Added some sugar to taste and kept on the heat until the broccoli was cooked through and the sauce had reduced a little. It was still very thin but thick enough to eat.

In the meantime, Tom peeled the potatoes and boiled them with a little bit of vegetable stock and seasoning. I mashed them with lots of milk and butter and more seasoning.

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.

Passoto

Friday's dinner began with me craving a pasta bake - something nice and simple and comforting after our second week of work. However, we still don't have an oven. A bit of a look around the internet made me think that pasta cooked like a risotto would be an acceptable substitute. I used that recipe and made my very first passoto. It was good, but I still missed the pasta bake.

It would be good to do this with wine and a cheese like pecorino, as the original recipe suggests. Also sausage bits would have been nice as per my usual pasta bake. Some cream of some sort (cream cheese would have done!) would have made the sauce less intense and more comfort-food-esque.

Passoto
Serves 3 (leftovers! Yum)

1/2 an onion
1 clove garlic
2 servings of pasta (conchiglie)
Splash of soju (any alcohol will do)
Tomato sauce
Water
Broccoli
Seasoning

Random other things I added: small handful of cheese, two splashes of milk, one splash of balsamic vinegar, one small green pepper, and I may have deglazed the pan with lemon vinegar just before adding the pasta.

Chopped the onion and garlic and fried in an oiled pan on a medium heat. Added the pasta and stirred to cover it in the oil. Added some maple soju (the only alcohol on hand: Korean vodka, about 20% strength) and stepped back as it burned off. Poured in the tomato sauce and enough water to cover. Cooked, stirring periodically, until the pasta was quite soft. Added some stalks of frozen broccoli and seasoning and various other additions and cooked for a further ten minutes or so. Served with more cheese, which was a mistake. Leftovers were eaten without cheese and were much nicer.

Last night we went out for dinner with a colleague, to a Korean barbeque place. It was insane (and all-you-can-eat! Yay!). You pick out a bunch of raw, marinaded meat/fish, along with some leaves (lettuce and sesame - the sesame ones tasted kind of like liquorice, I was not a fan) and sauces. The two sauces I tried were a sweet-and-sour tomato-y thing, and a fairly sweet sesame soy thing. (I have no idea what they actually were, in case you can't tell.) You cook the meat at the table, on a heated plate/stove, wrap the cooked meat in the leaves, dip it in the sauce, and eat it. It was unbelievably messy, and tons of fun, and mostly delicious. One particular piece of meat was marinaded in something particularly spicy. But Korean barbeque is definitely  something I'll do again!

Sticky Pork with Lemon Risotto

Tonight's dinner was an odd one. I originally conceived of the idea whilst in a temple, so it's clearly a dish that God meant to exist. My plan was to marinade a large, flat piece of pork in soy sauce, honey and tomato sauce, cook it lightly, put a couple of spoonfuls of cooked rice with vegetables in the middle, wrap the pork around it, and seal it in the pan with some of the sauce draped over it. That way you could cut open a ball of pork and find rice inside! It would be like a giant inside-out rice ball.

Sadly, it turned out that the large, flat piece of pork we'd bought was mostly in little bits. I couldn't be bothered to make a million little inside-out rice balls. So I combined some recipes I vaguely know and steamrollered on: the pork marinade is mostly from my mother, who I think got it from Nigella, and the lemon risotto is from an amalgamation of risotto recipe titles I've glanced at in the past.

We both really enjoyed this meal. Even if the soy sauce-y pork didn't go brilliantly with the lemon risotto, the flavours were stunningly intense. I would be happy to eat this risotto on its own for a lunch, as well - it's the first time I've had a risotto that's been refreshing! It would be nice with chicken.

Sticky Pork with Lemon Risotto
Serves 2.5 (extra pork)

1 400g pack of pork
Soy sauce
Honey
Orange juice
Tomato sauce (passata)
1 tsp wheat flour
Chilli and cinnamon spices
Seasoning

Butter
Half an onion, chopped
2 handfuls of rice
Lemon vinegar
Chicken stock
Rosemary
Lemon juice
Broccoli
Seasoning

Chopped the pork into large bite-size pieces and put in a bowl with quantities of soy sauce, honey, orange juice and tomato sauce. I honestly don't know what these quantities were, although the soy and tomato sauces dominated - I added more honey to the pan at a later point after tasting the sauce. Added the flour, spices and seasoning to the sauce and mixed well. Covered and left for about twenty minutes.

Melted the butter on the stove on a low heat and cooked the onion till soft. Added the rice and stirred. Added lemon vinegar, probably about 1/4 of a cup, and stirred. Put a tablespoon of chicken stock powder and a sprinkling of rosemary into a jug, made chicken stock, and added bit by bit, stirring in between. After about ten minutes I put the pork and the marinade juices into another pan and left on a medium heat. Ten minutes later I added some broccoli stems to the risotto and continued to cook, tasting and adding lemon juice and seasoning periodically. Once cooked, I drained the risotto to get rid of some of the excess starch, served both the rice and pork, and ate with chopsticks.

Chicken 'Parmesan'

I used this recipe, which baffled me to begin with - there is absolutely no parmesan mentioned in that recipe. Oh well. I served it with rice because I noticed that I'd not served rice for the family at least since I started this blog!

Chopped 2 onions and 4 cloves of garlic. Fried in butter (we have run out of olive oil). Chopped a 1kg chicken breast into large chunks and added to the pan, along with 1 cup of balsamic vinegar - I misread the recipe and thought it said 3/4 instead of 1/4 cup balsamic, and rounded up accordingly! Left on a high heat, with some stirring, for about fifteen minutes.
Shredded 3 slices of brown bread into a bowl, added some melted butter, a handful of dusted Grana Padano, and salt+pepper. Mixed.
Added heaps of Italian herb mix, salt+pepper, a few handfuls of broccoli and cauliflower, and 2 tubs of passata. Left to simmer and bubble (on a medium high heat) while I boiled the kettle and sorted out enough rice for 8. Took the chicken pan off the heat, put the rice pan on, and ladled the chicken mixture equally into each dish. Coated heavily with grated mozarella, dusted Parmesan, and the breadcrumb mixture. Put in the oven for 20 minutes and served when the rice was cooked.

Very nice: kind of spicy and rich. The balsamic and parmesan flavours worked surprisingly well together to create a unique dish. The cheesy breadcrumb topping was delicious too. I was concerned that it wouldn't go too well with the rice but there wasn't much at all I would change about this dish.

Pasta Bake

Pasta bake was a firm favourite for Tom and I when we lived alone. (Sigh. Not too long to go now.) It started with uncooked pasta + pasta sauce from a jar + LOTS OF CHEESE in the oven. And was delicious. It developed into cooked pasta + homemade pasta sauce + fried/grilled sausage chunks + LOTS OF CHEESE in the oven. And was even more delicious. In our second year of university we cooked it at least twice a week, which meant I ate it at least four times a week. There were a hell of a lot of leftovers.

So, yesterday I made it for eight with a sauce that was basically this tomato soup, but doubled, of course.

1.5 packets of short pasta, each 500g. Boiled for about fifteen minutes on a medium-high temperature without salt. Several handfuls of broccoli were added after about ten minutes.
Sauce: 2 chopped onions, 2 minced garlic cloves, fried and mixed with as much tomato puree as I could squeeze out of the tube, and a big sprinkling of an Italian herb mix. 1200g of passata plus some water added and stirred on a medium-low heat until simmering. Salt + pepper. The baking soda & milk mix was added as the pasta and broccoli were drained, and stirred on a medium-high heat until the foam dissipated. (Someone commented that it smelt like Heinz tomato soup! Yay!)
Pasta broccoli mix divided into one full and one half-full glass bowl. Sauce divided accordingly. Hell of a lot of cheese sprinkled on each.

The full pasta bowl served very slightly under-average sized portions to all 8. 6 went back for seconds, leaving a portion that would feed my sister (not much) as leftovers.

Delicious, but needed a tiny bit of extra flavouring. Sausages would also not have gone amiss!