Jottage from Lancaster - Tupperware Mexican Chorizo

I am surprised, amazed even, that I haven't written a blog about this before as I'm sure this was one of the first recipes I cooked from River Cottage Everyday - it's probably one I have made the most often. I have made it up for guests coming as well as just a weeknight tea and it was the recipe that introduced me to smoked paprika. It's so very versatile and easy to make. I would say that you can't really go wrong - but I nearly always do as I forget that 1 tablespoon of smoked paprika makes it far too hot to eat. A couple of times I have had to add extra meat - a LOT of extra meat - to make it edible. 


Hugh does tell you to break a bit off and cook it so that you can taste it as you go along so that you can add more seasoning if you need to - but he doesn't say how to adjust for LESS. This time I used just a teaspoon of the hot stuff and cooked a marble-sized piece which I have just eaten and established that the seasoning is just about right. 

Meatballs gently frying

Tin of tomatoes for the sauce

Pasta simmering

I am going to make meatballs with half the quantity and we will have that with pasta tonight using a tin of tomatoes reduced for the sauce, then I will make some pizza dough tomorrow morning and we will have the rest tomorrow night on home made pizzas.

The finished meal

Easy, tasty, cheap, and with enough leftovers for another meal!

Jottage from Cambridge: Tomato and Mozzarella Risotto

I gave Tristan some of last night's dinner for lunch today. Although I probably can't claim to be 'weaning' him any more (he's been on solids for over 6 months now) some meals still leave me on the verge of tears. I am never sure how much he's going to eat and sometimes all he wants are bananas and yogurt. He'll always eat cheese and apple on toast (River Cottage Baby & Toddler) but I can't really guarantee that he'll be tempted by a spoonful of something which Theo and I have found appetising the previous evening. It was with some trepidation that I gave him some of the tomato and mozzarella risotto. I blended it up a bit and made sure the yogurt container and fruit bowl were well out of sight. I'm happy to say that he did quite like it, though perhaps not as much as me and Theo.

I adore making risotto as it only takes half an hour on the stove and you can't really go wrong - as long as your saucepans are non-stick. However this recipe from River Cottage Veg really beat every other risotto I've ever made. I was all ready to make the roast tomato sauce but didn't realise that the tomatoes needed to be in the oven for an hour, and all of us were famished. So I used passata instead and cut up a couple of really delicious tomatoes and plonked them in the pot. I added a bit of marjoram and thyme that I had in the cupboard and cut up some Basics mozzarella. The end result was deliciously creamy, and I am not going to bother making any other kind of risotto for a while.

Jottage from Lancaster - Roasted Tomato Sauce

According to Hugh, this seems to be one of those things you should always have in the fridge or freezer and I have made tomato sauce before using real tomatoes but it was rather watery and not very nice. Roasting the tomatoes first seemed to give more hope of some denser flavour. 

I had always been a bit put off making this on the grounds that we don't grow our own tomatoes and so I would have to buy a lot. But the market stall in Lancaster this morning had a tempting offer - big bags of tomatoes that were cheap. I didn't expect them to be nice salad tomatoes but bought a couple of bags and even before fully unpacking the shopping, I had them halved, sprinkled with garlic and thyme, slathered with rapeseed oil and in the oven, roasting. The cooking smell in the kitchen is mouth-watering and I have just taken them out to cool before sieving them to get rid of the skin.

So now they are cooked and I have completed the rather tedious task of squashing them through a sieve with a wooden spoon.

Tomatoes before...

...and after.

The sauce turned out to be quite nice - but a pale orange-y colour and the taste wasn't amazing. I guess that good, robust English tomatoes would produce an entirely different flavour and colour and using what are probably rejected tomatoes from some rather unpleasant polytunnel in a derelict area of southern Europe just doesn't work the same. But not to be deterred I poured it all into a moussaka instead of tomatoes in a tin and it did give a depth of flavour that wasn't usually there. 

It was easy to make and I would definitely do so again - but using cheap out-of-season tomatoes makes even that minimal effort, not really worth it. 

Jottage from Lancaster - Smoky Cheaty Brandade

On Saturday - on an impulse - I bought River Cottage Year which was prominently for sale, hugely discounted, in The Works. I didn't quite mean to buy it, but there was a recipe in it to make your own ricotta. OK, I don't use ricotta that much, but the thought of making it myself was a bit tempting. And another River Cottage book would just about fit on my cookery shelves - but only if I was ruthless and threw away some of the old cookery books that are cluttering it up. 


So I set about and cleared both shelves and chucked away some old books that really I would never use again. It's surprising how much cookery has its fashions. And surprising that some of those books took me back to times when the children were younger. Very much in evidence was my 'Italian' phase when I made something with pasta every week (more often than not hand-made). I seem to remember these as very happy times cooking for 4 with all of us together. Then the American cookbooks began to creep in. There weren't many of these, but enough for an idle onlooker to guess that we had started our long love affair with the USA (a love affair in more ways than one as both Heather and Deborah married US citizens). Sadly, most of these cookbooks have lain unused for too long and will pass to charity shops in the next day or so. I have copied out the odd recipe that I can see myself turning to again - but probably I won't make them.


River Cottage Year has a nice fish recipe in it. Now I am a little sensitive about fishy issues at the moment - but there's no way I'm going to relive my nasty episode with cold callers on the doorstep yesterday. Luckily I had bought some lovely oak-smoked fish from Booths to make Smoky Cheaty Brandade for when Heather and Tristan come tonight. It looked like a simple recipe and one which Tristan might enjoy. The smoked fish might be a little salty for him so I left out adding any other salt in the hope that all the added mashed potato would bring it down to a low level. It seemed to need something else adding - maybe an egg, or some nutmeg. But I kept to the recipe faithfully and it's all made up, ready to cook tonight. I wanted some nice veggies to go with and spent a pleasant 10 minutes leafing  through River Cottage Everyday before I homed in on green beans and tomatoes.


The brandade turned out to be good - but a bit uninteresting. Tristan seemed to like it anyway, and I enjoyed it too. But it really needed the green beans/tomatoes to give it some interest. It's not something I would make again I don't think.

Jottage from Lancaster - A Fishy Dilemma

Fish as a subject is something I don't think too much about. Whilst being vaguely aware that eating fish is good for you, we don't actually do it much. I always have this resolution in mind to eat it once or twice a week, but I can't say that I have ever kept to it. 


I don't really know much about buying fish or cooking it. But I was very tempted by the Foil Baked Fish with Fennel, Ginger and Chili, even though the picture in River Cottage Everyday looks to me as if the fish is raw but the veggies cooked. I cooked it and it was blissfully easy to make and really succulent. Buoyed up by the triumph I thought I would try another fish recipe from the book. I had in mind Fried Fish Fillets with Herbs and Lemon. However I had forgotten that I had finished off my ancient little bottle of capers for the lamb chops with garlic, thyme and capers (really scrumptious), and so I had to remember to buy some more. But I had totally forgotten and the chances of the local village shop having some were so minimal that it just wasn't worth getting the car out. So I was searching for another recipe and the foil baked fish is probably the best I can do - but I don't have any fennel. So I might substitute tomatoes - or I might just try roast fish fillets with roast potatoes.


But those dilemmas are nothing compared to actually buying a bit of fish. Ever keen to expand my culinary knowledge, yesterday I got round to reading the Fish Forever preamble to the fish recipe section of River Cottage Everyday. And here I first encountered what I should have known before; Hugh has a real thing about fish. I know he goes fishing as I have seen him do it on the telly - and I now know he is deeply concerned about all sorts of fishing-related issues. So it was with some hesitation that I stood in front of the fish display at Marks and Spencer (I know I should have gone to a proper fishmonger but yesterday just wasn't the time or the place). There seemed to be a bewildering amount of choice and I was desperately trying to remember Hugh's list of fish to avoid/fish to eat more of. All I could remember was that cod-bad and mackerel-good.

Packet of sole, lemon

In the end I came back with a pack of lemon sole and with some trepidation turned to page 138 to see if it was on the black list. In fact it didn't mention sole of any kind - good, bad or indifferent (although Megrim and Witch, members of the sole family, are, suprisingly, good). So I turned to the website www.fishonline.org which Hugh assures us (on page 139) is 'very easy to use'. I found myself well out of my comfort zone here as I typed in 'lemon sole'. I was very confused to find that there were no results found. Perhaps this was some kind of fish that didn't really exist - a kind of chicken kiev of fish - a ready-meal I didn't need to prepare in any way. But no, this 'very easy' website wants to to put in 'sole, lemon' (note the all-important comma which is a vital part of this creature's name otherwise 'no results found'). Hmmm - not such an easy site then. But then it got more complex as there are 3 sole, lemons. 2 of them were probably OK and one was rated as a no-no; 'based on available information these species should probably not be considered sustainable at this time'. Ah.

Forever Fish (albeit fuzzy)

All I knew from the packet was that it was caught in the North Atlantic but it was labelled 'Fish Forever' which is some new kind of M and S initiative to keep up fish stocks (so they say). But on the M and S website it says 'Lemon sole has not been certified by MSC'. So what does that mean? Does MSC mean the Marine Conservation Society with a bit of a typo? In which case it may be that it doesn't quite meet up to the standards of someone like Hugh? I have no idea what it means, but it seems to me that if you are buying fish, because the situation with fish stocks and fishing methods changes all the time, you are better befriending a good fishmonger and keeping away from supermarkets. 

Fish Forever

Meanwhile I haven't considered buying the River Cottage Fish yet - but even now I am thinking that maybe one day....