Warm Asparagus Pasta Salad

Warm Asparagus Pasta Salad

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 servings pasta

7 asparagus tips

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon oil

4 asparagus spears

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

2 cups tomato sauce

1/2 cup cream

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Grated cheese, to serve

Seasoning

Detox Calzones

Blog note: I have just realized that although I've been editing all my photographs to be clearer and brighter, I have consistently been uploading the dark, unedited ones. Argh! I will be (slowly) going back through and redoing most of the photos because of this. Thanks for bearing with me.

It was a long weekend. When we got back, we were desperate for something healthy and fresh, so I suggested pizzas piled high with fresh vegetables. Luckily, Tom volunteered to make the dough (I do hate the hassle and mess of making dough), and the recipe he used suggested calzones, so that's where we went. We used asparagus, onion, spring onion, tomato, pepper, sukgat (edible chrysanthemum) and some chopped herbs from our balcony garden. We did not put cheese inside the calzone, but on top. You can substitute whatever you have to hand, because this is more a set of guidelines than an actual recipe. It was really, really good, and did its job as health-overload perfectly.

Dough notes: as mentioned above, we used this yeast-free recipe but Tom reports that he had to add way more flour and only used half the amount of baking powder. I have used this SmittenKitchen recipe to great effect before, as well as the SK pizza dough with wine and honey. You could also go pre-made, too.

Detox Calzones

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2 calzones

Dough (see note above)

1/2 cup cream cheese (with garlic and herbs if possible)

1/2 to 1 cup grated cheese

Seasoning

Vegetable filling:

3 stalks asparagus

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1/2 onion

5 spring onions

1 tomato

1/2 red pepper

Handful edible chrysanthemum

1 tablespoon fresh mint

1 tablespoon fresh sage

Creamy Tomato Soup

I have a few backlogged recipes to catch up on, unsurprisingly, but this most recent meal is crying out to be blogged as soon as possible. I've made tomato soup from this BBC Good Food recipe before as a pasta bake sauce and as a soup, and it's worked really well. Unfortunately I don't have any baking soda, although the milk trick works really well, so substituted with cream. A really great easy soup, even better with grilled cheese on toast.

Creamy Tomato Soup

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2 small or 1 large portions

1 tablespoon oil

1/2 onion

2 cloves garlic

1.5 teaspoons basil, fresh or dried, divided

3 cups tomato sauce/passata

1/2 teaspoon parmesan dust (optional)

1 tablespoon cream

(OR 1 tablespoon milk with 1 pinch baking soda)

Seasoning

Potato-Crusted Chicken Pie

This is a sort of inverted shepherd's pie, but with spicy chicken in tomato sauce instead of rich beef in gravy. I liked it. Tom didn't. I won't presume to make any assumptions about whether you'd like it or not, because it's completely your choice as to whether you even want to read this recipe, let alone recreate it. Good luck to you either way. I hope your dinner is fabulous, whether it's a potato-crusted chicken pie or not.

This recipe sees the first outing of my new set of digital scales. I had precisely 678g of peeled potato, so have rounded up a little to account for the skin. How exciting!

Potato-Crusted Chicken Pie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4

700g potatoes

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 cup milk

Seasoning

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 green chillies

1 tablespoon oil

2 chicken breasts

2 tablespoons seasoned flour

200ml tomato sauce

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon mixed herbs

1/2 teaspoon chilli powder

1/2 cup cream

Seasoning

2 slices bread

2 tablespoons butter

Seasoning

Bean Burgers

What to do with a bunch of chickpeas? Whizz them up with kidney beans and turn them into bean burgers. Obviously. I was planning on doing a roast chicken (more on which tomorrow) but as it hadn't completely defrosted, I was stuck with a bowl of chickpeas (which had been soaking for two days, which means I bought them raw and not in a can!) and the knowledge that when Tom came home to bean burgers for dinner, he would be a very happy man. Indeed he was. His genuine enthusiasm was quite endearing.

Anyway, for some reason I'd decided not to blog this recipe, hence the lack of in-process pictures. Also the fact that you may need to play around with quantities a bit to get the texture of the burgers right. Regard the below as guidelines (fairly accurate guidelines, but guidelines nonetheless) and enjoy a meal which is tasty and meaty (except it's not!) and actually - in my case - going to be quite easy to do again, as long as I remember to soak the chickpeas first.

Bean Burgers

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 6 large burgers

1/2 onion
2 cloves garlic

2 cups chickpeas

1 can kidney beans (410g)

1 tablespoon mixed herbs

1 teaspoon chilli powder

1 teaspoon powdered stock

1/2 cup breadcrumbs (I used crushed Pringles)

1 egg

2 tablespoons tomato sauce

1/2 to 1 cup flour, plus more for your hands

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon oil

Seasoning aplenty

Chicken Cacciatore

This dish (which I remembered to photograph!) has a long and obscure history. Before I moved to Korea, I spent quite a lot of time on the BBC Good Food website, and noticed that the chicken cacciatore was always high on their list of chicken dishes. For some reason I never made it, and after I read Niki Segnit's scathing opinion of it, I never really wanted to.

But yesterday at work, I was trying to come up with a dinner. I wanted something simple, something spicy, and would have preferred it to have a name that I could practise writing in shorthard. (I'm just about to start a distance-learning journalism course, with any luck, and I thought I'd give myself a headstart, given that I've got to be able to write 100 words per minute by November.) Cacciatore worked, at least from what I remembered of it (chicken, tomatoes, cream, bake).

The dish was simple and good. I served it with mashed sweet potato and cauliflower.

Chicken Cacciatore

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 chicken breasts

2 tablespoons flour

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 large chilli

1 sprig parsley

2 cups tomato sauce

1/2 cup cream

Chilli powder

Seasoning

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.

Golden Tomato Sauce

Happy New Year!

We've been away! And you can read all about it here. Sadly I have no food information to add to my experience, because we ate sandwiches that we'd brought with us, except for when we ate sweet and sour pork from a Chinese restaurant. I ate almost all of the crescent pastries. Those are definitely on the make-again list. (One thing that isn't in the travel blog, though, is how much time I spent in the car daydreaming about bacon jam. Bacon jam. I can't wait to make bacon jam.)

So we got back and I decided to make tomato sauce from scratch, because we'd bought some mini golden tomatoes on Wednesday and I was too excited to wait any longer. I've made tomato sauce from scratch before and loved it; the recipe from 101 Cookbooks has been calling out to me for a while.

Golden Tomato Sauce

(Printable Recipe)
Makes 2 servings

About 30 golden mini tomatoes

(the package doesn't have a weight label on it!)

2 garlic cloves

1 teaspoon tomato paste

3 teaspoons herbs (optional)

Seasoning

Slice each of the tomatoes in half and run your finger along the inside to get rid of the seeds. Keep the seeds in a small bowl for later.

Seed liquid, halved tomatoes, and more tomatoes waiting to be deseeded.

Either chop your tomatoes and garlic finely, or be a cheat like me and blend them together (in two batches). Transfer the mixture to a pan and heat through on low, adding tomato paste and herbs if desired. I would have left the sauce as it was, but Tom isn't the world's biggest tomato fan, so I added a teaspoon each of basil, oregano and parsley to liven things up a bit for him. Season to taste.

If the mixture gets too thick for your liking, add the seed liquid, one teaspoon at a time. After a few minutes the sauce will be cooked - cook for longer if you want it to be further reduced.

Branflake Chicken

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but tomato sauce is only really available in Korea in tins that weigh over three kilograms. We bought a new tin a couple of days ago, and on opening it yesterday, realized that it was actually tomato paste rather than sauce. Great - means it'll last for longer! With our pantry being so cold (it's a couple of degrees warmer than the outside, but stuff has frozen in there), it's brilliant for storing huge amounts of tomato paste without taking up tons of room in our fridge.

The last tin of tomato sauce was disgusting - cheap, and sharp, and with the magical power of making anything it touched inedible. I was very excited to use the new stuff.

Branflake Chicken with Spicy Tomato Pasta
Serves 2 with leftover pasta

2 chicken breasts
2 handfuls bran flakes
1 teaspoon mustard
1 tablespoon grated cheese
1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1 onion
3 garlic cloves
1 green chilli
2-3 tablespoons tomato paste
150ml water
Half a glass red wine
Oregano, basil and seasoning
200g pasta

In one bowl, crush the bran flakes. In another, mix mustard, mayonnaise and cheese. Rub each chicken breast thoroughly with the mayonnaise mixture and then cover with the bran flakes. Put in the oven for twenty five minutes at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit).

Put the pasta on. Chop the onion, garlic and chilli and fry on a low heat with oil. When softened and slightly brown, add the tomato paste, along with water. Simmer for a few minutes and then add the red wine. Add herbs and seasoning and allow the sauce to reduce to the desired thickness. When the pasta is cooked, add it to the sauce pan along with a little pasta water and heat through. Serve with the chicken.

Stovetop Enchiladas

Oh, enchiladas. This is a combination of foodstuffs that will never, ever be bad. You can do absolutely anything to the recipe and it will stay as delicious as the original. I can't emphasize how much I adore the combination of meat, salsa, tortillas of some sort, and mashed beans. This is a stovetop version, and I wish desperately that there were leftovers. Although I'd have eaten any leftovers last night anyway.

I've made a stovetop version of enchiladas before and called those "deconstructed enchiladas", which is a brilliant name for a dinner. That time we put each cooked ingredient into bowls and made the tortillas ourselves at the table. This time the enchiladas were more constructed, so I've gone with a more boring 'stovetop' version.

Stovetop Enchiladas
Serves 2 (but could have served just me)

1 garlic clove
Handful of chopped onion
1 pack chicken mince (I think - some kind of mince anyway)
1 small green chilli, deseeded
1 and a half cups of tomato sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 glug black raspberry wine
Big squirt of mayonnaise
Small handful of grated cheese
Seasoning

1 cup tomato sauce
1 small green pepper
Chilli powder
2 tsp sugar
1 glug black raspberry wine
Seasoning

1 tin of red kidney beans
Chilli powder
Italian herbs
Parsley
Seasoning

4 tortilla wraps

The garlic and onion were chopped and heated in an oiled pan over a low heat. The mince was added and stirred until browned. The chilli was deseeded and chopped into small pieces then added to the pan. Added tomato sauce and stirred. Added wine, mayonnaise, cheese and seasonings and left to reduce.

Added the chopped green pepper to a separate pan with 1 cup tomato sauce. Added the other flavourings and stirred over a low heat until thick.

Drained the kidney beans and microwaved for 1 minute. Mashed with a fork, adding herbs and spices. Microwaved for 1 minute longer before mashing into a pulp.

Spread the mashed beans on the bottom of a tortilla. Topped with a ladleful of mince mixture. Tom put the salsa inside his tortilla. Sprinkled grated cheese over, folded the tortilla, and I put my sauce on top. Two tortillas each.

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.