It's apparently blue Monday. The day that people are most depressed. And I am. It's only the nitpickers amongst you that would point out a) that it's Sunday and b) blue Monday is at the end of January not the beginning. However, I am blue and so it is with a heavy heart (but strong arms) that I picked up Hugh's weighty River Cottage Veg that Heather gave me for Christmas. But the prose and the lovely pictures soon made me forget (to some extent) my Blue-Monday/Sunday-ness and just reading his section on Comfort Food made me realise that if I picked myself up and did a bit of cooking then I might feel a whole lot better.
The chosen pick-me-up recipe was Pinto Bean Chilli - which looked warming, comforting, just the thing. I had all the ingredients (well, I didn't have courgettes but that didn't seem important and I'm not that keen on them anyway) and so I have been cutting up veg, opening a couple of tins and mixing, gently frying, and pestling and mortaring myself into calmness.
I hauled out the last couple of peppers from the fridge and used the second as a substitute for the missing courgettes. It's after Christmas and I couldn't divulge the sell-by date on the packet but let's just say they needed finishing. I am doing some buttery leeks and cabbage with it (River Cottage Everyday), which is one of my favourite recipes.
Out of the oven it comes...
...and after lunch the verdict.
This really is comfort food. I wanted to serve it up in nice rustic bowls but I didn't have anything like that, and maybe a nice chunk of home made bread to mop up the juices - but the cabbage/leek combo was lovely. I am very pleased that I only added about half a little red chili rather than 2-3 green chilies (to taste), as it is very hot. What is striking is that it seems to be a very versatile recipe. Hugh recommends serving it up with a lot of little accompaniments, and I think that would work really well. Or adding a poached egg would be really nice (Hugh says that a poached egg would go well with practically anything), but you could add chorizo or a bit of pork or even chicken and it would be lovely for meat eaters too.
So the blues are now chased away and I still have enough in the pot to make at least another full meal for 2 of us. From now on I will make sure I have a tin of pinto beans in the cupboard if they strike on the last Monday of January!
There is nothing that John likes more than a nice Victoria Sponge and so the Family Cookbook seemed to provide the answer to provide him with favourite cake all ready for his birthday tomorrow. As Heather, Theo and Tristan are still up for Christmas then it makes sense to celebrate before they go home tomorrow so we decided to get the cake made today then we could all celebrate together tonight.
Heather gathered all the ingredients together on the kitchen table and prepared for making the cake, something she is very good at, but even so she struggled slightly with the complexities of the Family Cookbook - which may well be easy for beginners, but seemed to have a lot of steps for the old hands. Note that the tomato ketchup on the table isn't actually one of the ingredients, but is just still there from last night's Shepherd's Pie (Hugh's Mum's recipe).
She had some trouble with my oven and I couldn't quite work out why I noticed straight away that she had put on the top oven when she meant to put on the main one. More often than not, I do the same and never notice for an hour after I have left maybe a good sized piece of lamb in a cold oven while the top oven is spewing out smoke from the burnt bits that are coating the grill pan I keep in there. However, after a little longer than the recipe called for, these 2 golden rounds of cake appeared.
We had some debate about adding whipped double cream or buttercream along with the jam as a filling, but John loves it just with jam and nothing else, so we stuck to Hugh's instructions faithfully. We have some lovely strawberry jam and of course, as everyone in our family never attains an age over 57, we can use the candles yet again (see Pheasant and Chorizo - birthday celebrations).
And the final filled cake (without the candles) with the cook...
...and the birthday boy cutting it with the musical knife merrily playing 'Happy Birthday to you!'
Now he has a new Kobo and a Bjork app for his iPad to keep him quiet for a few hours.
By common consent the cake was voted about the best ever birthday cake anyone could hope for. Seconds all round!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We had our credit card statement through the post a few days ago and it was much lower than usual. Part of that, I know, is my propensity to shop in Primark rather than Monsoon, and my dedication to making my own face cream from bits and bobs I find lying round the house (some beeswax someone gave me, a bit of rose water I had left in a bottle from the Christmas Cake I made a few years ago and some very cheap face oil bought from Walmart does the trick) rather than buying expensive fancy pots at some unlikely price - which even at 3 for 2 would probably feed a family of 4 for the couple of months it takes me to smear it on my skin. But I was triumphant to spend so much less even so. 'It's Hugh!', I cry, 'You see all this cooking actually SAVES us lots of money'. I actually do believe that.
Go back in time a couple of weeks when we were going down to Heather's. As she says in her earlier blog, we like to come with a bit of food to pay our way a little for staying down there and eating her out of house and home and so we usually turn up with a ready meal or two, and the scrapings from our fridge at home which may well be a few tomatoes, a pepper and, almost inevitably, half a cabbage. We stopped off at Waitrose at Sandbach on the way down - a much nicer place than Sandbach Services on the M6, believe me. Waitrose is a bit of a luxury for us as they haven't extended their reach this far north west and Sandbach, some 70 miles away, is about as near as they come. I didn't mean to be long, but I went off to look for something to buy. And here a sudden Damascus moment occurred, right there in the ready meal aisle. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, that I thought would be nicer than I could cook at home using my trusty and increasingly rapeseed and smoked paprika splashed River Cottage Everyday book.
The prices were horrendous - you could pay restaurant prices here for a meal you had to cook yourself, then take out of the foil and arrange on a plate and then wash it all up. There was a lamb thing I quite fancied but it was £8.99 a portion - and that was without any veggies. OK, this was Waitrose and I can see that I could buy packaged meals 2 for £5 in Tesco. But even so would I actually LIKE what I was eating? I kept thinking about the standard ready-meal sauce consistency. What DO they use to make it that gelatinous?
Now there's no question that sometimes I make a meal, even slavishly following the recipe and we both think that it wasn't quite right somehow. I made the Fried Fish Fillets with Herbs and Lemon and it was far too lemony for instance, but overwhelmingly the recipes have been successful - more than successful and in some cases quite stunning. And at least I knew what was in it and I can use less lemon next time - and it is definitely worth another shot.
So since River Cottage I have learnt a few things.
1. Ditch the ready meals - they don't save you much work, they cost you lots more money and they aren't always very nice
2. Eat food - not things that are dressed up to look like food (i.e. most ready meals)
3. And with the money you save, you can buy better quality food and make meals yourself from scratch.
This sounds so prissy and I would be annoyed if I'd read anyone else writing this. And I am lucky enough to have the time to cook - and I am really enjoying it. I thought it would be a luxury being able to buy expensive ingredients like decent free range eggs and meat from the butcher and proper sustainable fish (I haven't quite got that sussed yet but I'm working on it). What I didn't realise is that even if I do that it still saves me money. And I do actually love eating it!
PS I forgot to mention the Blue Vinny and Leek Quiche...
The thing about cookery books which puts me off the most is the long
list of ingredients required to make the meal, usually tantalisingly
illustrated opposite the very detailed, and occasionally wordy,
method. Who has fenugreek, turmeric or chilis on hand? Well,
strangely, and given that I now have a baby to feed who probably
shouldn’t be fed custard creams – note that there has never a custard
cream shortage in our household – I do have all of the above in our
larder. (Note that Tristan doesn’t need a teaspoon of fenugreek on his
banana porridge in the morning to make it go down, but I generally
spend much more time in the kitchen now, and I’m out and about more so
I have built up an impressive selection of herbs and spices.)
So, picking up a recipe book now doesn’t seem quite so daunting, and
when I turned to page 223 of the Everyday book the Chicken Curry
seemed like quite a straightforward dish. Of course I didn’t quite
have everything, but I thought that I probably wouldn’t be able to
taste the fennel seeds so why add them?, and a wilted red chilli which
had been in the fridge for a number of weeks would work in place of
the green chili specified in the recipe. And that I think is what
cooking is all about – knowing when to leave things out, and making
substitutions wherever possible. For a kick off this means that every
time I make the chicken curry it will taste slightly different, and
also I’ll hopefully end up throwing away less food from the fridge.
But cookery writers are loathe to admit that their recipe will still
work without that all important spoonful of cornflour, or that two
garlic cloves will work just as well as three. However Hugh (my mother
and I now refer to him by his first name as we feel that he is already
part of the family) does start off the method with the line … ‘If
you’ve got the time, toast the cumin etc.’ which does seem to imply
that if you want to knock up a chicken curry between the end of
Neighbours and getting the baby prepared for his bath then it’ll
probably taste just as nice. However, if your way of winding down is
by spending time in the kitchen then why not? – you might just end up
tasting that moment of extra trouble.
Well, how did it taste? It was just delicious – the chicken swimming
in a rich turmeric stained liquid and, like Hugh, we served it with a
neat pile of white rice. In fact my chicken curry looked exactly like
the picture in the book! I blended up a few of the leftovers and gave
it to Tristan the next day. He had no complaints either, though I
think he thought I should have added an extra teaspoonful of fenugreek
which I’ll make sure to do next time I turn to page 223.
I am adding a postscript here as I made the Chicken Curry after Heather tried it. We both made enough for two nights and she didn't think it was as good the second night - but we loved it just the same. As Heather says - it comes out exactly like the picture in the book...
Heather's Chicken Curry
My Chicken Curry...
The picture in the book...
Amazing!!!!
