Jottage from Lancaster - Pasta with New Potatoes, Green Beans and Pesto

Heather has been home with Tristan for a few days and so I began thinking about what we would have to eat a few days beforehand so that I would have all the necessary ingredients to hand to save us having to make any emergency supermarket trips. The list turned out to be a double column on A4 paper. For some reason I seemed to think that 12 fully-grown adults would be staying for a month instead of 1 adults + baby for 5 days. I did make some adjustments as I went round Booths following my list, but somehow still ended up with 4 tins full of various biscuits - which weren't on my list at all.

Having bought all this stuff I then had to remember which bits belonged to which recipes. One thing I did remember was that I had bought walnuts for a pesto. I'm not very keen on pine nuts, nor olive oil so pesto is one of those foods that I usually avoid. But Hugh suggests using walnuts as an alternative to pine nuts, and I always have rape seed oil to hand instead of olive oil. And I knew that Heather and Tristan loved pesto so it seemed worth a try. I chucked the ingredients into my blender and ended up with a lovely mush to which I carefully added the rapeseed oil to stop it being too oily. This somehow was very satisfying to make - not least because I had just decided to grow a few herbs on my windowsill and I had a new basil plant which would block the view if it wasn't checked.

One of the nice things about this recipe is that it is easy to make and seems quite a simple dish, but actually it's very satisfying. You have to cut the potatoes up into small sticks like chips so that they cook at the same time as the pasta, then you throw in the green beans, mix in the pesto and that's it but for a sprinkle of parmesan. 

I made up the pesto full quantities but used less of the pasta, potatoes and green beans as there were only 3 of us, but Tristan had the pesto on some macaroni the following night and there's a little bit left for me for lunch today. Considering how cheap it was to make anyway, it has done us well over the past few days. Definitely a recipe to return to.

Jottage from Lancaster - mayonnaise

I love mayonnaise. I know that it's sometimes called 'white death' as it is so full of calories and oil and cholesterol and all that stuff we shouldn't be eating. In my Atkins diet spell I had this feeling that I could eat as much of the stuff as I wanted to as it had no carbs - one reason I think that the sensational weight loss of my first few weeks faltered and died very quickly one I learnt the tricks of finding my way around the diet and sabotaging it. 


Then I read an article that said that eating veg was so important for our health that it was better to add things to make them palatable - even oil or mayo - than not eat them at all. We all know by now that some oils are really good for you so by now I felt that eating mayo had turned from white death into a top health food. But there was a little matter of calories - having too many of the wretched things is something I need to avoid. So then I turned to Hellmann's. Even Hugh says that he uses 'good quality mayonnaise' from a jar so I felt quite justified in buying Hellmann's Extra Light Mayonnaise - all the mayo-ness and fewer cals. But since my HFW encounter I have been more wary than ever of eating anything I can't pronounce so I went to find out just what was in the Hellmann's stuff. This is the list I found:


Water,Modified Maize Starch ,Spirit Vinegar ,Pasteurised Free Range Egg & Egg Yolk (3.7%) ,Sugar ,Salt ,Vegetable Oil ,Glucose-Fructose Syrup ,Citrus Fibres ,Flavourings (Contain Lactose) ,Stabiliser (Xanthan Gum) ,Colours (Titanium Dioxide, Beta-Carotene) ,Preservative (Potassium Sorbate) ,Lemon Juice Concentrate ,Antioxidant (Calcium Disodium EDTA)


Whereas I can pronounce most of it, and some of the ingredients are actually what you would expect to find in mayo (vinegar, egg yolk, salt), I am not so sure about modified maize starch or glucose-fructose syrup. So I reached for River Cottage Everyday and found a mayo recipe and made up a batch. I know just what's in it (wine vinegar, rapeseed oil, free range egg yolk) and overall I think I would prefer to eat a small quantity of what I can pronounce than slather on a list of ingredients which are put together by someone who doesn't even know how to place a comma.

Wobbly, gorgeous home-made mayo. Simply the best!

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 Lancaster - Porotos Granados

I put Porotos Granados through Google Translate and it came up with 'Pomegranate Beans'. I'm not sure that that is entirely correct, but nevertheless, even though it sounds rather dubious as a meal, the fact that there were no pomegranates in it (I don't have any here) meant that I could make it for tonight. 


Alas, although I had all the ingredients, tonight wasn't a good night to have it as Hugh says it's better made the day before, so as a compromise I have made it early and put it in the slow cooker to cook in the hope that will give the flavours a chance to develop.


This meal has a bit of a checkered history as it started out as a beef casserole with lots of swede and carrot in it. As there was quite a lot of the stuff I fished out as much of the beef as I could with some veg as well as the juice and we had that for 2 nights. It still left a substantial amount of veg/juice which I put in the fridge thinking I would whizz it up as soup. But today after a couple of days it's still there. As the Porotos Granados needed some squash I thought that swede/carrot in beef-y gravy would form a good basis so I have followed the recipe from River Cottage Veg then added my left-overs.


I hoped that the substantial amount of smoked paprika added to the whole thing would infuse the whole of the dish and make it seem as if it really is Porotos Granados rather than something cooked up with leftovers.


After slow cooking for a couple of hours I tasted it and it was rather nice, but I had the thought that it might go down well in a tortilla. But I didn't have any tortillas. In the spirit of using up what I already had, I tracked down some Staffordshire oatcakes in the freezer, wrapped up some of the Porotos Granados in them, sprinkled on some grated cheese and popped them into a hot oven.


Overall, it's nearly as far from the original Porotos Granados as Pomegranate Beans but in fact it was very successful. There's enough for tomorrow night too - so that would work out well. Hugh's advice to make it the day before eating will be fulfilled and we will have the joy of eating leftover leftovers!

Jottage from Lancaster - making my own pizza

Heather mentioned to me that she made her own pizzas so that was enough to throw down the challenge to me to have a shot at it. I decided to make the Magic Bread as the basis but because I was in too much of a hurry, I chucked the ingredients into the bread maker to let it mix it all up rather than go to the effort of kneading it myself. Lazy, I know, but I ended up with some nice stretchy stuff that I suddenly realised would have to rise for an hour or so before it could be made into pizza. So I postponed the idea of having pizza and put the covered dough into the fridge in the hope that it would be OK to use tomorrow. 


Now tomorrow has turned into today and that bowl brimming over with risen dough seems to be filling the fridge so this morning I took it out and next I had to work out how to make a thin circle. In River Cottage Veg Hugh seems to make out that you can just roll it out very thinly but the dough seemed to refuse to roll and stubbornly stuck to the rolling pin or just shrank back to its original size. Suddenly I remembered a silicone roller I had bought from Lakeland in a sale and I threw the ball of dough on to the baking sheet and eagerly rolled it into shape. It seemed to obey and obligingly stayed in shape.

Nice rolling thing

I then slathered it with a layer of passata, cut up a red pepper very thinly and layered on peperoni, mozzarella and a little grated cheese. I was very spare with everything making one little ball of mozzarella do 2 large pizzas and barely used an ounce of cheese on each. I had put the oven on to very hot, threw in the 2 pizzas (I had enough dough left over to make a plain flat bread-y thing which I'm not sure what to do with yet) and this is what came out:

Now this may not look that appealing or professional - but it tasted wonderful - much tastier than anything shop bought and I would say barely a quarter of the price. Success, I think!

Jottage from Lancaster - Spicy Yoghurt Marinade for Chicken

Although we've been back at home a week from our US trip, and there are no jet lag excuses left, cooking is still something I don't really want to get involved with in any deep way. Not least because I haven't really been seriously food shopping and so I don't have everything in the house. So it was with some relief that I remembered a jar of pasta sauce in the cupboard which would do in an emergency. And today seemed to be that emergency - I definitely wanted an easy dinner that I didn't have to think about much.

Hidden away.

I suddenly remembered that bit of chicken in the freezer and wondered if there was anything simple I could do with it so I quickly scanned the index of River Cottage Everyday in case there was something I could rustle up without too much effort. To my surprise I noticed Spicy Yoghurt Marinade for Chicken which I had never seen before. I thought that there wasn't a recipe in the book I hadn't at least read through so when I looked this up I eventually found it tucked away at the bottom of the Herby Chicken page. It looked so simple, so trivial, that even opening a packet of pasta sauce seemed complex (just getting the lid off seems to be quite a faff these days). So I took out a little pot of home made yoghurt from the fridge, added curry powder, garam masala and a little bit of lemon juice and mixed them together adding a clove of garlic and dropped in the chicken. I did this at lunch time so that the flavours would develop. 

Marinading

Then I cooked a bit of rice and voila! it was all done. 

Ready to eat!

PS It was, incidentally, lovely to eat too. One of those infinitely adaptable recipes that you can put in almost any combination of spices that you like and it will always be that little bit different.

Jottage from Lancaster - er.....

We have been away on holiday for nearly 3 weeks travelling round the North West USA doing some touristy things like Yellowstone National Park, Jackson Hole, Seattle and Portland. Coming back home after a 9 hour flight without too much sleep was a bit of a culture shock, and adjusting to this time zone some 8 hours ahead of what we have been used to hasn't been too easy. Overall, we haven't felt too ill - just tired at unpredictable times of the day.


I dragged myself to the freezer last night in an attempt to find something light and tasty for dinner that would perhaps make us both feel a bit better. There was an unmarked plastic tub of something tomatoey which looked rather nice. I am always of the opinion that I will remember stashing away these little left over bits and pieces and will know exactly what they are. This time (in truth like all the other times) I had absolutely no idea what was in it. But it looked quite nice and so I pulled out a piece of haddock that I bought some time ago and put the frozen tomato stuff on top, covered that with a bit of cheese that I had put into the freezer before we went away and cooked in it my faithful Remoska. As it happens, it was really rather nice. Now I am trying to rack my brains to work out what that tomato stuff was as I want to do it again. It was certainly a River Cottage something. 


Tonight I have found a chicken breast and I don't have any ideas about what to do with that but I may well mine the freezer again just in case something else turns up...

Jottage from Cambridge: Packed Lunches

Everyday, usually just after 7am when my husband is playing with Tristan in bed, I get up and make up him a packed lunch. The main reason for doing this is because he works on a back street in Angel with no cafes or shops nearby and, although a trolley does apparently go round his workplace with sandwiches on display, I figure that by making his lunch we probably save around £5 a day. (A significant saving now I’m not working.) I like to think too that, like Hugh who writes that his passion for food is equal to his passion for his wife, I am demonstrating how much I love my husband by including things that he likes to eat. On special days, for example, I cut his sandwich into diamonds rather than rectangles, and I get excited in Sainsbury’s when roast beef or mortadella are on offer as I know how much he prefers them to simple tuna mayo or ham salad. I always include something savoury, usually a pork pie, scotch egg or hard-boiled egg though at the moment I’m giving him pieces of the broccoli quiche I made at the weekend for Tristan. (Tristan has become a bit more fussy recently and, although he adored the quiche when I made it first time, he now only really wants to eat bananas –preferably two or three in one sitting.) More often than not though Theo’s lunches are quite bland and, as he’s away from home for nearly twelve hours a day, I’m not convinced that he’s really eating enough of the right things to offset the afternoon sluggishness. 

Hugh lists his reasons for making packed lunches in a chapter titled ‘weekday lunch (box)’ in the Everyday book. Although cost does come into it, for Hugh the main reason for doing it yourself is because, compiled from leftover meat and veg, you’re bound to be able to make something much nicer than a pre-packed sandwich. Certainly at the moment I’m not sure that my efforts are better than an M&S, or even Tesco, meal deal. So, with Hugh’s help, I am going to transform  the contents of theo’s lunchboxes, and I will make sure that he posts up his comments on this blog for you to read!

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 - The 2nd loaf

We managed to eat all the first loaf, which I didn't expect. But apart from being very obviously 'artisan' it wasn't that good. But I was quite excited about having another shot at it. I have some four grain flour which was milled reasonably locally and also the end of a bag of white flour. I was more confident about the recipe, and perhaps being a little freer with the water than the first time and going more with my instincts. 


As it was mostly whole wheat flour I wasn't expecting it to turn out like tights after kneading, but I was a bit surprised when it could have passed for maybe a new Aran sweater and the dough definitely had some stretchy quality that the last lot didn't have. I gave it plenty of time to rise and we went out and I just left it to fend for itself. When we got back it was deep and spongy.

I knocked it back by poking it with my fingers as the book says. I still wanted to physically thump it, but I poked it quite thoroughly into submission so that it was flat like a pancake. 

You have to fold it, roll it and pinch it just so to get it into shape. This is the one process in the 40 pages that he doesn't explain the reason for. In the past, I would just sort of mould it into shape with my hands but apparently that isn't the done thing to do. I thought I would make a baton-shaped loaf and the book says that that is the most complicated to do. Regardless of the difficulty, I had a go and it did make quite a satisfying baton-shape which I am quite proud of.

If this turns out like the last loaf, then it will be a great weapon to attack potential burglars but I am much more optimistic this time. John brought in an old stone flag which must have been on our roof some time in the past and so I put that in the oven to warm up so that this time I can call it stone-baked. At the moment it's in the oven and I am watching anxiously through the glass doors. It looks lovely - hopefully it will taste good too.


Here is the finished loaf fresh from the oven - I only hope it tastes as good as it looks!

Jottage from Cambridge - Chard and New Potato Curry

I happened to watch a little bit of Saturday Kitchen the other week, and they were raving on and on about Jersey Royals. To me potatoes, whether they’re from the Basics range or Taste the Difference, taste pretty much the same though, for aesthetic reasons, I do like it when they’re nice and yellow inside. Well anyway Jersey Royals were on offer in Sainsbury’s so I decided to buy a bag and use them to make the Chard and new potato curry (RC Veg, p.24). It was Theo’s birthday last week and I thought it would make a nice Birthday tea (followed by an M&S Lemon Tart). Although it was very easy finding Jersey Royals tracking down some chard proved tricky. They certainly don’t stock chard in our Sainsbury’s, so Tristan and I trekked down Mill Road on a mission.

 I started at Al-Amin, the largest grocer’s on Mill Road and infamous for its owner who ran for the position of Cambridge University’s Chancellor when Sainsbury’s expressed an interest in the site opposite (Lord Sainsbury was also running to be Chancellor and did, in the end, win the majority of the votes), but the guy at the till clearly hadn’t heard of the stuff. According to Wikipedia chard has a variety of names: Swiss chard, silverbeet, perpetual spinach, spinach beet, crab beet, bright lights – but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t lurking with the spinach and lettuce with this name or any other in Al-Amin, or indeed in Arjuna where they also sell a variety of greener than green green veg. 

Garlic, chilli and ginger being after bashing

Tesco doesn’t stock chard either – when you type it into the search engine the website helpfully asks: do you mean ‘hard’? and brings up a selection of Hard Skin and Nail Files and Hard Skin Remover – not quite what I was looking for. So where can you buy the stuff? Well, certainly in Waitrose where chard appears in their ‘Limited Selection’ range (chard is in season in April and May so I suppose they might only sell it in those months.) With Waitrose being so far away I ended up substituting chard for kale which Hugh himself recommends. I don’t find kale all that interesting to eat but the dish was very enjoyable. The potatoes were as yellow as the pudding to follow and all the flavours came together in a very satisfying way. It was perhaps a bit too hot for my liking so I’d use half a chilli next time rather than a whole one. I would certainly try and make it with chard too as, having learned how nutritious the stuff is, I am determined to find some! 

Tasty, though a little too hot

Jottage from Lancaster - River Cottage Bread

I bought the River Cottage Bread Handbook. I didn't really mean to, and optimistically put it into my Amazon Shopping Basket in the hope that one day I would get it. Then John ordered something else and it piggy-backed on to his order. So now I have it for myself.

There are 40 pages devoted to the skill of making a loaf (and yet only 15 to making a clay oven in 3 days...). I have made bread before - indeed my grandfather was a baker so I was taught how to make it by my mother, who had learnt by osmosis some of her father's techniques for kneading. However, this book is nothing like that and I am learning it all from new - which is no bad thing as I never could get the hang of baking white bread.  


Armed with a bag of organic unbleached strong white flour (which seems to tick all the boxes) I embarked on my 40 page recipe. I was somewhat disconcerted to find that these 40 pages didn't actually include a recipe at all but it was just a step-by-step account of how to make bread. Some investigation and I found what I was looking for tucked away on page 78. I carefully measured all the ingredients and went in with both hands enthusiastically kneading. This was quite soothing and pleasant for a while, but after about 15 minutes my arms were hurting and it seemed obvious that when I stretched the dough, it would never come out as thin as a pair of tights, as it should. I began to remember nice thick winter 80 denier tights from M and S, but even so it just would stretch obligingly as on the picture. Not only could I not get it down to a pair of tights, I was struggling to get it to look like anything better than an old worn-out Aran sweater. I knew it wasn't right but I just gave up in despair and blamed it on the flour. Luckily, I had used up the last half of the bag and so I can try something else next time.

Ready for first rising

And so the process continued with the kneading and then rising and knocking back. I had always thought you knocked back with your knuckles but I now know better and just poke my fingers into it - but that's not half so satisfying...


I was still worried about the fact that I couldn't stretch it until you could see through it like a pair of tights and so I gave it an extra rising just to be on the safe side. And then I cooked it - and took it out of the oven...

It looked suitably risen and hand-made. Unfortunately, it looked nicer than it was. It's quite dense and so isn't all that comfortable to eat. The troubleshooting bit of the book tells me that it's probably a low gluten flour - and the loaf I made in the machine with the other half of the packet was indeed tasteless and dense in the same way. However, it is eatable (just), and as a first loaf I learnt more about the theory and practice of bread making by having a shot at it - albeit unsuccessfully - than just adding water to a packet in the bread maker. In short - this is the first loaf of many. I am, perhaps, my grandfather's granddaughter after all.

Charles George Layley

Just as a rider - this is my grandfather. But before you panic about the beard and the bread (which could easily get mixed up in all that kneading and knocking back), he's in costume posing for the local rag where he wrote a weekly column as a character called 'Jolly Jarge'. A sort of early blogger really...

Jottage from Lancaster - Chicken, Couscous, Honey and Cinammon

We have been out for a day's caching in the Lake District - tackling some of the country's worst bits of road all in the cause of finding a Tupperware box under a stone in some remote location. The weather was supposed to be awful today, but when we woke up to sunshine and blue sky it seemed too good to stay in.


Although we didn't actually walk very far today. It ended up very blustery and, for a while, very rainy, so when we got home lighting the fire was priority. I had been wanting to make Chicken, Couscous, Honey and Cinnamon for ages and as we had a roast chicken last night, with some left overs, tonight was definitely the night for it. I thought it would be a complicated recipe, but it's been very simple. Here is the couscous swelling up on the stove...

Coucous 'cooking'

The 10 minutes while the couscous practically cooks itself is just enough time to pull some nice bits of chicken from the carcass and chop up the nuts. Drop both these into the pan and it's done!


What I ended up with was something slightly sweet, slightly tangy, and very scrumptious. Hugh suggests that it's a nice change from a chicken sandwich, and it would make a lovely picnic lunch. I have enough left for tomorrow and I'm already looking forward to eating it again.

Ready to eat!

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 - Cooking from an App Part 2

My chosen meal for tonight was sea trout in sorrel sauce. Although I am a fish novice, even I worked out that the trout I bought wasn't sea trout, but I thought that it was some kind of trout, so that would be OK. I also remembered that on a tour of the field one rare sunny and dry day I had spotted some sorrel. So far so good. So then all I had to do is to try getting it right using the app.


First of all a trip into the field, which was still covered with a layer of rather large hailstones, even though the sun was shining encouragingly. The sorrel is still there in abundance, but looking more closely at it, it seemed to be a bit the worse for wear. I pulled out decent handfuls of the stuff and brought it into the kitchen, only to find that I had brought in a lot of grass with it, and when I weighed what was left I had about 20g of the stuff - some of which seemed as if it had half eaten by some creature that wasn't interested at all in having it with sea trout.

Only 20g of sorrel

I needed an egg yolk and a tablespoonful of cream so, in the interests of being economical I used the egg white and another egg, as well as the rest of the cream, to make ice cream. I make ice cream all the time in little individual pots. This gets round the difficulty of getting enough for one serving without defrosting the lot. And it gets round paying a vast amount of money for something which is just an egg or 2, a bit of sugar and some cream. What costs me just over £1 to make would be nearer £5 in the shops.

Home made ice cream churning

I cooked what I learnt from the packet was rainbow trout and made up the sorrel sauce, albeit with only 20g of sorrel instead of 100g or so. This was a mistake as in the end it really needed a stronger sorrel flavour but getting more of the stuff seemed too difficult. It just may be that when the weather gets a bit warmer there will be more it. And I think I may pick some for salads if it does begin a spring growth spurt. But I had come to the end of the app recipe and unlike last night, I didn't have any ingredients left over. What I did have was a thick and creamy sorrel-y sauce over some nice succulent fish. But next time I will follow the recipe and put much more sorrel in. 

Jottage from Lancaster - Tunisian Lamb With Aubergine

Of course I have the River Cottage app. I resisted for a while but then in a fit of indulgence I bought it. I often flick through the recipes but until now I haven't actually made any of them. But returning from a short trip down south I began browsing them half way up the M5 and by the time we were past Birmingham I had a few ideas for meals for the next week and I had even written a shopping list ready for what is becoming a regular off-motorway stop at Waitrose in Sandbach.

So armed with my list I bought everything I needed and along with unpacking from our Easter weekend away I had several bags of fruit, veg, lamb and fish.


I was looking forward to this Tunisian lamb and was rather smug about having all the right spices and indeed all the right ingredients down to the almonds and apricots. But alas, I found that making something from an app isn't as easy as I thought it would be. For a start you have to keep dodging back between the ingredients list and the what-to-do bit and this was confusing enough. And somehow it just wasn't as easy to work out what to do when. 


I browned the lamb and didn't take it out of the pan before adding the onions and garlic. I knew that this was I normally did, but I didn't actually see it on the instructions - at least not until it was too late. Then I couldn't work out when to add the aubergines so I just tossed them into the pan at the end. Or, not quite the end. When I had decided it was all finished I remembered that it had apricots and almonds in somewhere. I was sure that I hadn't seen anything about them anywhere. Only when it had all been merrily bubbling away did I realise that I hadn't scrolled far enough down the ingredients list and I hadn't read to the end of the instructions. Here was the missing Aubergine bit at last, but it was all too late.

So I had all the right ingredients but did all the wrong things with them. But amazingly enough, it's turned out really well. I'm going to add some cous cous and serve it up tonight. There's actually enough for a few night but tomorrow we are having fish from another app recipe. I might take the time to read it all through carefully before I start it this time.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Jottage from Lancaster - Tristan and Amelia's birthday

We went to Cambridge for Tristan's first birthday party which Heather has written about in her own Jottage. Tristan shares a birthday with his cousin, Amelia who was 3, and the celebrations were for her too. By the time we came down to the kitchen on the morning of the party for breakfast, Heather had already put the oven on and was busy preparing the last minute salad and cycled off to the supermarket to buy the final oddments. It was clear she had thought through the menu in some detail, and we were both musing on the difference that River Cottage had made to both our lives  which was so obvious when you looked at the table groaning with made-from-scratch food.


Of course the chocolate cake disaster was the one cloud on the horizon. The birthday cake should be the centre piece of the table, but it was pushed to the back so that perhaps no one would notice just how it hadn't risen. I can't explain why it went to wrong, but in the event the flat cake with candles was mostly eaten (although Amelia didn't actually eat hers, she was the only one). To my dismay, Ethan, who is almost 6 did comment on how flat it was but no one else said a word. 


The original Mary Berry cake, which had been crammed into a plastic box, was brought out later in the afternoon and picked at in small pieces by everyone. It was the nicer textured cake by far, but the geometrical problems made it rather unattractive (burnt and flattish on one side, well-risen on the other, and about 10 percent of it stuck to the budget-priced silicone cake mould). I had layered it with a tin of mandarins and soaked it in the juice then topped it with Greek yoghurt, which actually wasn't bad at all.

The cake, adapted for Amelia's 3rd birthday with a new centre candle

So now the birthday is over and I have a pinto bean chilli cooking on the stove - one of my favourite feel-good recipes from River Cottage Veg. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Heather wasn't already planning next year's celebrations!

Jottage from Cambridge - Tristan’s First Birthday Party!

A lot has happened over the past year. The most wonderful thing has been watching my son grow up from being the tiniest dot to a little boy on the verge of walking and, although not quite comprehensible, capable of babbling out consonants. But over the past twelve months, and particularly throughout the six that I have been weaning Tristan, I have discovered what can be done with herbs and spices, I have made pastry, pasties and soups, created mountains of whoopie pies and gone from eating chicken kievs every other week to never going near the ready-made food aisle in the supermarket. The blender, ice-cream maker, yogurt maker and breadmaker, once tidily packed away in their boxes on top of the cupboards, are now always accessible on the counter. My cookery books, and especially those written by Hugh, are now tired-looking and splattered with colourful spills and blobs. Of course I have had the time to cook as I’m not getting home from work exhausted and hungry but it is certainly true that, with Tristan’s arrival, I have wanted to be more creative in the kitchen. 

I had been planning Tristan’s birthday feast for a month at least – anxious that I had six adults, two children and one baby to feed and wanting to show-off a bit. Last year I would probably have chosen a selection of sandwiches, shop-bought quiches and sausage rolls but, with experience to hand, I decided to try and make everything from scratch. The results are shown in the picture below: Chicken and Leek Pasties (River Cottage Everyday), Couscous Salad with Peppers and Feta (River Cottage Veg), Salmon Tart (Ainsley Harriott), and a piece of gammon. Of course nothing was difficult to make (or very expensive) but I thought the spread looked as if some thought had put into it and that, more than anything, I felt proud of myself for.

Not a ham sandwich in sight...

There is a little story behind the birthday cake. My mother set to work on a Mary Berry chocolate cake which, alas, got completely stuck in the silicon tray and fell to pieces. The cake was subsequently used as a base for the little desserts with mandarin oranges and Greek yogurt. She made up the recipe for the second attempt which thankfully didn’t stick to the cake tin, but did turn out quite flat. 

Flat (but edible) first birthday cake.

The cake, however, was for a three year old and a one year old who were oblivious to the fact that it was vertically challenged, and it did taste delicious. I can’t imagine yet what the spread for Tristan’s second birthday will be like, but I will certainly keep up the baking and I can’t wait to try out lots of new recipes for us all to enjoy. 

Tristan at a year old

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.