Jottage from Lancaster - Leek and Broccoli Speltotto

Just when I wasn't sure what to make for dinner, a River Cottage link to the Guardian HFW recipes at the weekend turned up on Facebook with barley and spelt recipes. One of them was for Leek and Broccoli Speltotto. As it happened, I had both leek and broccoli which I was thinking of eating tonight, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with them except cook them and sprinkle them with cheese. So I printed out the recipe and went straight into the kitchen to start making it. Amazingly enough I had all the ingredients, even fresh thyme and a little cardboard carton of wine (though actually opening a bottle and using some of it might have been a nice option as we could have drunk the rest of it tonight). 


Both Heather and I have noticed the amount of washing up generated by cooking from scratch, and I used a non-stick frying pan and a couple of saucepans as well as various knives and a cheese grater but overall it didn't seem to hard to make - in fact it was relatively simple. But the results were really gorgeous. The spelt was nutty and the veg succulent. I added parmesan cheese but it probably would have been good without.

The more I make these veg recipes, the more I love vegetarian food. This one really stands out as one of my top favourites.

Jottage from Lancaster - Brussels sprouts, Apple and Cheddar

We have been geocaching this morning and having made the trip out, it seemed a good opportunity to buy some veggies on the way home. I tend to buy whatever veggies I fancy these days - and lots of them. I use raw fruit and veggies for a big salad that I make for lunch every day, and for anything else I buy, I find some nice recipe from River Cottage Everyday or Veg. 


On the basis that they just looked nice and crunchy and fresh I bought some Brussels sprouts and was pleased to find a lovely salad in River Cottage Veg which would both use them up and be a variation on my usual crispy lunch. 


It wasn't just the sight of the Brussels sprouts that made me think of buying them. We have just got back from a trip to Chicago with my sister and her husband and we went to a restaurant called The Purple Pig (cheese, swine and wine). They had a couple of items with sprouts - one with raw shredded sprouts and one with fried. I had some of the raw sprouts (very finely sliced with parmesan) and loved them. I'm not a great sprout lover - I understand it's genetic - but I adored these. So when I saw them in Booths I was reminded of a happy lunchtime all together on North Mich.

The Purple Pig

Book shopping, Chicago 

So this was my lunch - brussels sprouts, apple and cheddar (actually Red Leicester) with a few walnuts and a slice of my home made wholemeal bread, finished off with a jar of homemade yoghurt. What could be better for me than that???

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 Cambridge: Mushroom Risoniotto

Strangely enough we have also just tried the Mushroom Risonitto. Well actually I just did the eating as my husband decided that he would do the cooking while I took a break from the kitchen. Tristan watched Theo cut up the mushrooms and measure out all the various ingredients from his high chair – I think Theo thought he had eaten a raw mushroom but I found it later stuck under the washing machine. I had bought button mushrooms and chestnut mushrooms, and we happened to have a selection of dry mushrooms too. I had just been to Tesco and bought a few of those handy cartons of white wine so we didn’t need to open a bottle.

I adore mushrooms, but goodness this dish was almost too mushroomy even for me! The orzo didn’t stick together thankfully, and the dish was deliciously creamy. However I’m not sure I would make it again or, if I did, I would use fewer chestnut mushrooms. I hadn’t realised that button mushrooms have pretty much no taste at all – a bit like cheap tomatoes which aren’t cut from the vine. You seem to pay extra for flavour these days which is a bit depressing. Sainsbury's use the label 'Taste the Difference' on their premium products which perhaps does hint at the fact that, unless you're willing to dig that bit deeper into your pockets, what you're buying really won't taste of much at all.

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.