Jottage from Lancaster - Mushroom Risoniotto

I was quite excited about trying this as I had 'discovered' the tiny 'orzo' or 'risoni' rice on one of our trips to Waitrose at Sandbach. Going to a new supermarket always entails new discoveries - it's so easy to sashay past whole aisles in Tesco Carnforth convinced that there is nothing down there that I might like but if I have the time I like to browse a supermarket - rather as in the olden days (almost) you could browse a bookshop to find something of interest you hadn't come across before. I thought that risoni looked interesting and exotic and it would make a good alternative to rice - and cook in super-quick time. So when I saw the mushroom risionoto recipe in Veg Everyday I had to give it a go - and not just because it had quite a catchy name.


In honour of this venture into new territory, I bought a pack of Chestnut Mushrooms. Now to most people I would imagine that this is as much in their comfort zones as baked beans or a tin of chopped tomatoes with basil, but for me it was quite adventurous. Anyway, I cooked, fried, stirred it all up and added the wine and the cream (usefully languishing in the fridge waiting for their moment). All was going well - but I was a bit surprised when the risoni came out in one splodgy lump - rather like rice when it isn't cooked quite right. Separating it out into neat fluffy grains was all but impossible but I did my best.  I added it to the mushrooms in the pan and Lo! I had mushroom risonioto!

The recipe says it's enough for 2, but I think it would do 3. It has quite a delicate taste but the balsamic vinegar gives it a great little kick. Overall one to try again I think.

Jottage from Lancaster - Leek Risotto with Chestnuts

I love leeks, and I love chestnuts, so this was bound to be a recipe to catch my attention. Firstly I had to cook the leeks until they were 'silky'. I wasn't sure what silky leeks were but guessed that maybe it was when they were cooked down until they were at their meltingly, buttery best.

Silky or not???

One of the nice things about vegetarian cookery is that you don't have to bother with defrosting meat. And things seem to come in nice packets all ready measured out. I needed 200g of vacuum packed chestnuts and it was simplicity in itself to find the right packet on the shelf of the right size. No need to find you have 343g of mince when you need 500g, or a chicken breast from the butcher (enough to easily feed 3) instead of the packs of 8 that you buy where an individual one can be minute. 


I had to fry the chestnuts and add salt - which sounded rather good. Meanwhile the risotto was cooking down nicely and I added to chestnuts at the end and it looked vaguely like the one in the book.

But on eating it, it wasn't such an amazing combination. The leek risotto was wonderful - just what you wanted it to be with a delicate flavour and soft texture. The chestnuts simply didn't go with that at all. John (who doesn't like chestnuts as much as I do), kept wanting them to be nice bits of sausage. And indeed the leek risotto with maybe sausage or a few chunky pieces of ham would make a great meal. For myself, I think that cashew nuts may be a better bet than the chestnuts. So it was a qualified success. If you weren't bothered with that extra bit of protein, the leek risotto makes a great (and cheap) meal. And I would save the chestnuts for soup or to tart up brussel sprouts.

Jottage from Lancaster - Chicken, Cheese and Ham

Buying ready meals has changed for me from becoming the norm to something I have done maybe only once or twice since that day in Axminster when we had our encounter with Hugh. It was something that had been on my mind - saving the money that most of us are keen to do at the moment - so it struck at exactly the right time. When we were going down to Deborah's for a few days (Deborah being my other daughter, Heather's sister), I stopped off at Waitrose and bought a packet of chicken breasts with cheese and ham which I thought might be palatable and easy to cook (and ease and speed was what I was after as with 2 rambunctious grandchildren to look after for the day I didn't want to come back and start to prepare food). 

Amelia and Ethan - Tristan's cousins

It was nice to be able to throw the packets into the oven with minimum of fuss. I had even bought a packet of mashed potato to cook up with it and ready-cut veggies. And it was nice - really nice. When you're hungry and have little time, it works really well. But as my mother used to say (or at least I think she might have done at some time) - everything is just time or money - and in this case it was quite a lot of money, but only a little time. I'm not going to tot up what it actually cost, but if the hens had been hand reared on dew-picked corn, the cheese from cow grazed on the finest Alpine grasses then tenderly brought down to the valleys and lightly slaughtered - well, you get my meaning. If it had been the highest quality food then it may well have been worth the cost. As it is, the manufacturers knew I would pay up for the ease of throwing a meal on to the table in super-quick time and charged me accordingly - not for the quality of ingredients used.


I think I have talked about this before here - but I do enjoy buying really nice ingredients and making up a meal which even so is still lots cheaper than buying it. Whereas my shop bought chicken meal was all eaten up, it's nice to have leftovers for the next night when you cook up from scratch. They then become a ready meal of their own - just as easy and convenient - but much, much cheaper and much, much nicer.

Jottage from Cambridge - Corner Shop Spanakopitta

Mixing the spinach, onion,
lemon and egg

It was hard to resist making something called ‘Spanakopitta’ even though I wasn’t wholly convinced that I was going to like it. Although I love spinach a dish containing a whole kilogram of the stuff seemed a bit excessive. Anyway as my mother wrote in her last blog Hugh rarely disappoints, and I’ve found over the last few weeks that what I would have dismissed straightaway suddenly seems quite tempting. It’s a truism I think that the more you cook the more appetite you have for cooking and, what would have looked like an alien recipe with ‘they surely won’t sell that in Sainsbury’s ingredients’, seems like a dish that can be knocked up between the end of Tristan’s dinner and the beginning of the game show that I’ve become strangely addicted to, ‘Pointless’. 

Adding the feta and pine nut

The Spanakopitta took about 30 minutes to put together – I am in total agreement with my mother about the amount of washing up that that Hugh’s meals require though and I’m sure it took at least the same amount of time to get my kitchen ship-shape again. It was a satisfying thing to make. I plonked Tristan in the high chair so that he could watch the spinach wilt on the stove, the pine-nuts toast under the grill and the onion gently sauté with the fresh thyme that competes for sunlight with the basil and hyacinths on my windowsill. I put it in the fridge and cooked it later on that evening so that my husband could enjoy a meal straight from the oven: he generally has to warm up his meals in the microwave as I’ve eaten a couple of hours earlier. It was a total success, though Theo thought that it could have done with more feta. We have more filling left over than pastry so I’ve decided to make little pasties with the remainder of the spinach concoction. Unfortunately the pie was a bit too salty to share with Tristan, but we’re planning on making the lamb with lemon and barley this weekend (Everyday book p.220) which I am certain he is going to love. 

The End Result

     

Jottage from Lancaster - Kale and Mushroom lasagne (2)

There's something to be said for trusting a recipe book. To my genuine surprise (tinged with a little horror) I found out that many recipe books just put in random recipes that had never actually been tried out. Many of Mrs Beeton's recipes, for instance, are just made up figments of her imagination. They may work out - they may not. Although I don't know if Delia Smith was the first of her kind to have actually whipped up every recipe in her famous books - but in my mind she was the first cook I trusted. Many of us feel the same I know, as the blessed Delia's Complete Cookery Course must be on almost everyone's cookery bookshelf. I know that people love Jamie and that there are other equally brilliant cooks (mostly of the TV variety) who produce books that people 'swear by'. Since I'm not a huge fan of TV cookery, these have largely passed me by. However, our chance encounter with Hugh changed all that (as you must realise) and I have come to rely on, trust even, the River Cottage recipes. 


In my Delia phases (Marigold stock powder, real Madagascar vanilla essence et al), I was always pleased with the results of what I made - and I never doubted that what would turn out would be palatable, but it was never quite as exciting as I wanted to it be. Now I wouldn't call my self anything but a decent, plain cook. Cottage pie, steamed ginger pudding, Yorkshire pud and decent gravy are my strengths and Delia provided recipes of that ilk that I was quite happy to make. But suddenly when I bought River Cottage Everyday I felt that it was something I really wanted to try. To be able to make things that were a bit different and a bit more exciting. But kale and spinach lasagne would have to be a no-no. It sounded bland, uninteresting and 'not quite my thing'.


However.

Assembled but not cooked

Once Heather had made it and I looked again I thought I would have a go. Just because I trusted the book not to put me through the shenanigans of making it if it wasn't better than half way decent to eat. Bearing in mind Heather's warnings about the lasagne not being cooked, I did what I usually do and made it in the morning in the hope that the lasagne sheets would soften enough before it was cooked to avoid pre-cooking. I had a minor hiccup as I suddenly thought it needed 200g of parmesan and not 20g and I also got completely muddled about which layer was which and ended up just stacking up the kale, mushrooms and lasagne pretty randomly in the dish before I sprinkled on the obligatory cheese. So far so good. It seemed to be a simple recipe (and certainly cheap - especially given that it didn't need much Parmesan. But boy did it make a lot of washing up!

The finished lasagne!

The end result had the obligatory bubbling cheese on top. And amazingly it tasted really wonderful. Definitely one to make again and again. Really the pre-cooked lasagne did need to be cooked - it was a bit more al dente than It perhaps should have been. But I don't mind making it again as I want to eat it again!






All that was left was to eat it - and then do the washing up!

Jottage from Lancaster - Carrot Cake

Yesterday was cold - cold and a bit cloudy. Just the day to sit by the fire watching daytime TV and not doing much at all. Suddenly I had this thought that I had some carrots that needed eating up. And some eggs with a 'sell by' date a few days ago and a 'use by' date imminent. What made me put the 2 together and come up with carrot cake I don't know, but a River Cottage Everyday 'Treat' felt just right so I padded off away from the fire into the kitchen to seek out the recipe and make it.


I whisked up my just-in-date eggs with granulated sugar, as I didn't have caster. Then I added the oil and made this gorgeous frothy pale yellow concoction. Next I had to find the flour and to my dismay I hardly had any white self raising flour - least of all wholemeal. So I used the rest of the white and added some organic wholemeal plain flour and a couple of teaspoons of baking powder (out of date by some 2 or maybe 3 years...). So far so good. I had this thing that carrot cake should by spicy so I gaily sprinkled in plenty of mixed spice. Then I grated up the 3 carrots that had been languishing in the fridge and threw the lot into the oven and went off to watch an episode of Spooks that we had on DVD. The cake and Spooks ended at about the same time. Just perfect...



This episode made me think about the difference between home made and shop bought cakes. I'm sure that if I made this cake again it would be subtly, in not totally, different. And this one is interesting to eat. When it's cooked you pour melted honey on it, rather like a lemon drizzle cake, and this leaves it with a glazed and slightly sweet top. The cake itself isn't very sweet but is moist but with this little kick from the sweetness and slight crunchiness on the top. So every mouthful is unlike the last one. Shop bought cakes tend to be uniform and everyone you buy is just like the last one. You may love it once, twice, even three times, but then it gets just too samey. 


This is a really easy cake to make - I don't think it can fail, even with the wrong sugar, the wrong flour a few changes to the ingredients and some sadly not too fresh eggs and carrots. Only when I glanced at the recipe to find out how long it would take to cook did I notice that it was a cake for 12-14 servings. Whoops - there are only 2 of us!

Jottage from Cambridge - Kale and Mushroom Lasagne

There are probably few meals (and I’m only guessing here) that take on the name of the food they are made from, but this is the case with lasagne – the word meaning both sheets of flat pasta, and what is very often a stodgy concoction of meat  and tomato interspersed, layer by soggy layer, between them. Lasagne is the stuff of Home Economics lessons in schools – a very simple dish but, like cake-making, an enjoyable process of building up layers of food which, without any effort at all, melt into each other to make a satisfying whole. Yet lasagne is often a disappointment. The cook eagerly adds in too many layers of pasta or grates a mountain of cheese on top (this is the fault of cookery writers who always insist we use enormous blocks of the stuff when really just a sprinkling of parmesan will do). I have made lasagne numerous times, but rarely really enjoyed the outcome. Yes, it looks wonderful when it comes out of the oven – look at all that delicious cheese bubbling away! -  but the dish rarely tastes as good as it looks. The same goes for lasagnes in restaurants. Generally a lasagne must be served with a pile of chips (I’m sure the Italians would not be happy about this) or a big salad covered in dressing. One final dig: unlike cottage pie or moussaka (themselves nearly always tasty even if the meat is cheap, and the veg are just chosen blindly from the fridge), lasagne doesn’t keep for very long and, unless eaten very quickly, tends to solidify and become inedible. 

Despite all of the above, I always believe that lasagne will taste delicious so I decided to try Hugh’s Kale and Mushroom version (River Cottage Veg). Kale and mushrooms fried in butter take the place of the meat and, instead of using tins of tomatoes, Hugh has devised a very tasty Béchamel sauce with peppercorns, celery, onion, and a bay leaf. The layers are built up (with the obligatory cheese on top) and the whole thing cooked in half an hour, though preparation time was considerably longer.  I was expecting great things but, alas, the lasagne didn’t meet my expectations. The main problem was the lasagne (here I’m referring to the type of pasta) which hadn’t really cooked properly, perhaps because I hadn’t made enough sauce to really soften the layers. However I’ve decided not to give in so easily and have annotated the cookbook accordingly and made a note to try this recipe again. As for traditional meat lasagne, well I think I have tried for long enough and will probably call it quits!