Know what you’re doing

It’s been a while since I last posted, my excuses for that. I had to hand in an essay that was more challenging than I had expected. As goes with essays and other deadline-commitments, there was little time (not to speak of inspiration) left for cooking, and I lived off the weekend’s leftovers and bread.

However, essays always call for a reward, and in my case, a reward nearly inevitably means a new cookbook. I strolled of to a budget bookshop where a friend of mine had two day earlier bought a book we needed for uni – you see, I still needed an excuse to go there. I entered the shop, slowly and sheepishly made my way towards the cookery shelf, and what did I see? Tessa Kiros’ Falling Cloudberries for less than half the original price.

Seriously, I have waited for years for this moment to happen. The one check that I have always had on my cookbook-spending was price. It’s silly enough to buy so many cookbooks if you don’t use them (sufficiently), but buying expensive books to make your shelf look nice would be sheer insane. Well, I suppose it’s not even so much about how the shelf looks than about how I feel having another cookbook, but it would be insane all the same.

Unfortunately, though, there were many other cookbooks calling for my attention, so many cookbooks begging me to give them a home – I felt like standing in a animal cookbook shelter. I couldn’t help myself but buy another cookbook, The Good Housekeeping Institute’s Step-by-Step Cookbook. And it’s not something I have regretted so far. (Actually, I am secretly planning to go back to the bookshop, buy the other books as long as they are reduced/in stock, wrap them in paper and wait for my next essay. Would that work? I’ve never looked forward so much to an essay…)

The downside of these marvellous cookbooks is that few of the recipes are really feasible if you have little leeway. I don’t necessarily mean cooking utensils – I could live with that – but as I’ll probably only be staying in London for six months, I am little inclined to buy too many ingredients I know I will not be able to finish. In other words: I’ll keep it simple during the next few months, but after that…

Today’s recipe is from the The Good Housekeeping Institute’s Step-by-Step Cookbook – I couldn’t have gotten away with any source other than one of these two newbies, could I? I slightly adapted it to suit my needs, and my supermarket’s offerings, e.g. using sweet chilli sauce (not in the original recipe) before I went back to the supermarket and discovered that they actually did have red chillies.

 

Pork and Noodle Rice Stir-fry

1 tbsp. sesame oil
2 tbsp. soy sauce
1 tbsp. fish oyster sauce
1 tbsp. chilli sauce
1 red chilli
a large chunk of fresh ginger, finely sliced
250 g pork, in strips
some sugarsnaps
2 red bell peppers, in bits
some babycorn (eg. one can, if your supermarket doesn’t offer any fresh ones), in halves
beansprouts
noodles rice

Mix the top seven ingredients (the pork and those above) and leave to marinate for at least 10 minutes, preferably longer (but not longer than one day, believe me!).

Prepare the rice. Heat oil in a wok, add the pork with as little marinade as possible, and stir-fry until just done. Add the sugarsnaps, stir-fry for several more minutes, then add the marinade and the rest of the veggies and give it two more minutes. Toss in the rice, and done. Sprinkle with fresh coriander, if desired.

Serves hungry 2; adapted from The Good Housekeeping Institute’s Step-by-Step Cookbook.

Food with friends

Lentil Aubergine Salad

We had a busy day yesterday: we went out for lunch with a friend of mine and had incredibly delicious Dim Sum, and were invited to a friend’s place for dinner in the evening and continued feasting. We had a lentil-aubergine-salad as a starter, Pasta all’ Arrabiata as a main and ice cream with apple sauce for dessert, all of them very good.

Both the main course and the dessert were quite straightforward, so there’s little sense in describing those here, but I hadn’t had anything like the salad yet. Apparently, it comprised of onion chunks, cubes of aubergine, small strips of red bell pepper, puy lentils and chopped mint leaves which were all fried until done, then left to cool, and served on a bed of fresh mixed salad leaves with a simple salad dressing. Very delicious, and very creative!

Obamania

It doesn’t seem to be any great news any more, I’m afraid, but nevertheless I will still post the link to the menu which Barack Obama could enjoy during his inauguration luncheon today, a menu inspired by Abraham Lincoln culinary preferences. Note that on that website you will also find the menus of both inauguration luncheons of George Bush in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Some of the dishes will definitely end on my plate one day!

I’ve had chicken salad yesterday and today (and perhaps still some leftovers tomorrow), prepared according to an old family recipe, which I won’t post here – sorry! I’ll post something else in the next couple of days.

The 55p meal

Roasted Vegetables with Poached Eggs and a Slice of Bread

I found myself a really cheap meal this weekend. My supermarket had reduced the price of a bag of vegetable selection (potatoes, carrots, turnips and onions) to 69p, which was enough to prepare two portions of roasted vegetables. Cube the vegetable, add some extra garlic (whole), place in an oven proof dish, add a marinade of honey, lemon juice, oil and some salt, stir and pop it in the oven. Or, in my case, into the microwave – it was the first time I prepared something with the microwave-grill-combo function, so I was glad that all went well. In the mean time, poach one egg per person (see my – very very very – basic description), prepare some bread, wait until the veggies are cooked and crispy, and enjoy.

Creamy Lemon Puy Lentils with Poached Eggs

2-4 spring onions
2 garlic cloves
1 can puy lentils
rind and juice of one lemon
4 tomatoes
1 teaspoon mustard (or more, if wished)
2 eggs
1 large blob crème fraîche

Ok, do your homework first. Chop (or slice) the spring onions, chop the garlic (or use a garlic press), open a can of puy lentils (or, *gasp*, cook them until tender, preferably including a bay leaf for extra taste), rind and juice the lemon and seed the tomatoes.

Then go on to fry the spring onion and the garlic until not-yet-burned. Add the mustard, the lemon rind and juice, and the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes.

In the meanwhile, prepare a saucepan with salted, slightly simmering water (you can also use vinegar instead of salt) and poach the eggs for 2-3 minutes.

Add the lentils to the spring onion mixture, add the crème fraîche, warm up a little, season, and serve together with the poached egg.

Serves 1 1/2; adapted from Nicola Graimes’ 330 Vegetarian Recipes for Health

A Simple Supper

Green Beans with Bacon and White Sauce

Clean beans and boil them for 3-5 min in salted water. Drain and place in a casserole.
Bake a little bacon, with a small chopped onion, if you like, until brown. Place on top of beans.
Melt a spoonful of butter, and add flower. Add a bit of milk and a bit of single cream, stir and cook for a short while. Season with whatever you like (I only used salt, but remember that bacon is salty as well), and pour over beans.
Place the casserole in the oven and bake for 8 min. However, you might consider omitting this last step.

I had this for dinner, nothing else. It was a bit boring, I admit, but I hate it when cooking for a single person means being left with lots of open packages. If I were to serve it as a side dish, I would leave out the white sauce. Hmm. Perhaps I would even leave out the white sauce if I ever were to serve it as a main dish to myself again.

The usual lazy dinner…

Pasta Carbonara with Walnuts

I’m back in London again, and returned to an empty bed and an empty fridge. Which is worse?

Because I didn’t care to look up anything before leaving the house, I decided to keep matters simple and make a simple Pasta Carbonara with Walnuts – just chop 2 small onions and some walnuts and fry them with some bacon, and finish the sauce with an egg. And don’t forget the pasta of course. Keeping with New Year’s resolutions I bought some wholewheat pasta, for a healthier lifestyle (I fear a lot more will have to change, though…)

Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée and Meringue

I hope you noticed that the title of this post is Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée and Meringue, not Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée with Meringue. You have noticed, haven’t you?

Well, basically, although I had no plans to serve the Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée with meringue, it was a good way of using up the three egg whites with which we were left with after having prepared the brûlée.

But let me begin at the beginning. As I’ve written in the earlier blog post today, we had Pomegranate Ginger Saffron Braised Lamb Neck, accompanied by roast winter vegetables and mashed potatoes for dinner yesterday. Remains the question of dessert. For as far as I can remember, I have always only had one favourite dish: crème brûlée. Or to be more truthful: my all-time favourite dish was dessert, and my favourite variant of it was crème brûlée. Astonishing only that I waited until now to wish for a blow torch to make my own brûlées for my birthday. Lucky for me, my wish was gratified and Buzz’ lovely sisters gave me my Hotery Professional Chef’s Torch.

Shortly afterwards, Buzz cooked for me, and we decided to make our own first crème brûlée (together, that is – you wouldn’t expect me to leave something so interesting to him alone?). The crème went fairly well, although it took a lot longer to set, and was covered by a top layer of cream that was slightly thicker than the rest. Still, it was enough to convert Buzz to an equal crème-brûlée-addict as I am, and this, then, quickly settled the question of dessert as well.

Normal crème brûlee has been on our menu only three weeks ago, so we decided to go out and explore brûlée-land, making a start with Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée. Again, all went fairly well – until we discovered that even after 40 minutes of au bain marie, the cream wasn’t set. There wasn’t much we could do, as we really needed the oven for the roast vegetables, so we shoved them into the fridge and hoped that the cold would do the rest.

Of course it didn’t. The cream was still too liquid, and it was too late to do anything about it anyway. In the end, we had some mandarins for dessert; I baked the meringues over night and we devoured them even before breakfast, and we’ve given the crème brûlée a new bath this morning and are now waiting for them to cool down.

Has anything like this happened to anybody else? Any other brûlée-experiences?

2009 – A Pomegranate Odyssey

It’s weekend, and time for a Sunday, ehm, Saturday roast. At the same time, it is (for the time being) my last weekend with Buzz, as I will be leaving to return to my studies on Sunday night. Clearly, we were up to something special.

Now, before I start this perhaps I must tell a little more about myself. These past few years, I have been living in the Netherlands. A couple of months ago, I decided to do an MA, and my eye fell on a programme that was only offered in London. I applied, was accepted (albeit only two weeks before term started – but that’s another story) and moved to London, where trying to get settled nearly cost me more effort than my studies themselves. One of the great things I encountered there, however, was a fruit stall near to university buildings were even the most exotic fruit was sold for a sixpence. And among those were pomegranates.

I became really exited when saw those pomegranates. I had only eaten pomegranates once earlier, while I was learning Italian in Siena and went for a weekend trip around Venice, Vicenza and Padova with a Japanese classmate. While looking for one church or another, all of a sudden we stood in front of a tree laden with ripe pomegranates. I was shy about picking up somebody else’s fruit, and, even worse, picking up fruit from the dirty street, but she had no qualms, and convinced me to try it too, and from that moment on I was sold.

You can imagine that in the following weeks I lived on more or less a pomegranate diet, eating up to eight pomegranates a week. I was surprised to discover upon my return home in December that fruit stalls here also carried them, masses of them. How could I ever not have seen them!?

Anyway, now that I knew that they were there, and that I was in cooking spirits again (I hate cooking for myself, which I am more or less forced to do in London – not because I live there alone but also because my kitchen is tiny, minimally equipped as I will be leaving after a year again, and not visitor-friendly), I knew that I wanted to cook something with pomegranates. And as my rekindled love for pomegranates has sent me searching the internet for anything related to pomegranates, I had already stumbled accross Habeas Brûlée’s great recipes for Pomegranate Ginger Saffron Braised Lamb Neck. Buzz was sold for the huge piece of meat (although probably any meat would have done), I fell for the pomegranates, so that was settled quickly.

More difficult proved to be our search to find the required pomegranate molasses. I had already inquired, unsuccessfully, in some shops in our neighbourhood. As I needed to return some books to the library, I figured I could pass by some ethnic food shops in the city centre. I called some in advance, to do some prescreening work, but when this resulted in a busy-signal-rate of approximately 50%, I decided to just hit the streets, and to my surprise, right in the first shop I found two bottles saying ‘Pomegranate’ on them. But which one should I take? Both contained a dark, thick kind of syrup; but one said ‘Pomegranate Juice’, the other ‘Pomegranate salad dressing’, neither was what I was looking for. I asked the shop assistant for help, who then explained to me that both were the same. Well, yes, they were of the same brand, but they had different names and different ingredients. In the end I bought the smaller bottle, came home, tasted the syrup – and was surprised at how sour the liquid was.

This couldn’t be what we should be looking for, but it was too far to return to that one shop again, and we were afraid to spoil our lamb with something too sour, so we kept looking. One shop I had phoned told me that they didn’t have molasses, only juice and syrup. When we checked them, the shop keeper explained that the syrup was sour and that it would probably be the same what we had already bought. Apparently, the sour syrup was predominant in Turkish shops, while we were looking for the Persian variant. It took us a while to check every single ethnic food shop we passed until, about an hour or so later, we finally found one that sold pomegranate molasses and could assure us that the molasses were not sour. It was no great surprise, then, that the shopkeeper was from Persia.

As accompaniment, we made some potato mash and roasted some winter vegetables, largely following the recipe of this week’s Escalivada, only using celery root and a small pumpkin, substituting the thyme for some dried rosemary, and adding a spoonful of honey. Delicious!

We, ehm, nearly would have had some dessert as well, but I’ll write about that in a new post.

Saffron Rice with Chorizo

Just a very quick post today. Our freezing compartment is overflowing with food we don’t need, so I decided to clean up and use up at least one item from the freezer. Like for instance one of the two (still unused!) packets of peas.

 

Saffron Rice with Chorizo

200 g Chorizo
2 onions
325 g yellow rice
750 ml bouillon
300 g peas
2 tomatoes

Roughly chop the Chorizo and the onions and fry until golden (that is, if you can discern any colour other than the red the Chorizo will discharge). Add the rice, fry for another minute or so and then add the bouillon. Perhaps I should already mention at this point that my rice was overcooked, but that I had to wait until all liquid was evaporated, so I’d rather recommend to cut back on the bouillon. Boil gently for about 10 minutes. In the meantime, skin and de-seed the tomatoes, and then add them and the peas. Season with pepper, if you think it necessary. Cook another 5 minutes, cover and let rest for another couple of minutes. Serve with fresh parsley.

 
Notes:

I was a bit disappointed by this one. On the one hand it was fun to make, it made me think of some kind of mini-paella, and it was easy. The taste, however, was nothing like a paella; the chorizo was overpowering, and the yellow rice is just not comparable to the taste of real, good rice with saffron. If I were to try this recipe again, I’d really take care to use good ingrdients (normal rice with real saffron, and perhaps a other kind of chorizo), and in general I’d rather go for the original next time (unless I’m really in a hurry…).

Serves 4-6; adapted from a recipe provided by my local supermarket.