A Fish called Wonder

Are you one of those people constantly wondering which would be the best way to manage your recipes? I definitely am. And it gets worse than that – as much as I enjoy the advanced search and tagging functions of most electronic applications, there is nothing as nostalgic as a handwritten cookbook, enriched with all kinds of personal comments, including what was eaten when and in which context.

I abandoned this blog some months ago, partly due to this reason; but hand-written recipes don’t really satisfy me either, so I’m back. And I handed in my dissertation last week and have returned to live with Buzz, which means a (slightly) larger and clearly better equipped kitchen.

I’ll start with a dish we made over the course of summer, when the days were long and hot and light, fresh food was all I could take.

 

Trout with Ginger, Lime and Coriander

2 trouts
3 limes
1 bit of ginger (appr. 5 cm)
60 g sugar
bunch of fresh coriander

Pre-heat oven to 180°C.

Finely slice the ginger (juliennes) and two of the limes. Squeeze the third lime and cut juliennes from its zest. Clean the trout and pat dry (inside and outside). Fill with lime slices and most of the ginger juliennes. Place on a slightly oiled aluminium foil, close and bake 20-30 minutes until the fish can be easily picked to pieces with a fork.

Meanwhile, make the syrup. Mix the sugar and the lime juice (should be 60 ml) with 250 ml water and bring to a boil. Cook for 10 minutes on reduced heat until the sauce turns syrupy. Add the lime zest and the rest of the ginger juliennes.

Place the trout on plates and garnish with the coriander. Serve with the syrup, and preferably some vegetables and either rice or potatoes.

 
Notes:

We absolutely loved this dish. Its easy to make, extremely low-fat, and super-delicious. You’ll need a really fresh fish from the market or the fish monger, though. Not sure whether we’ll be able to get that once both of us are working full-time (shops around here close at 6 – just imagine!).

One thing was completely unnecessary, though: the syrup. The trout had already produced a lot of juice which was sufficient for the whole meal, and why add sugar and so much sweetness to a dish that doesn’t need it?

Serves 2; adapted from The Essential Seafood Cookbook.

Cabbage casserole and Banana fritters…

Aaargh, who ever claimed to be catching up with recipes? It wasn’t me, was it? Nooo, definitely not me! Anyway, I’m back home with Buzz again, which means more cooking than usual, and therefore more pressure on blogging about it as well…

I already arrived on Thursday and was lucky enough to be able to sit down at a laid table – we finished Buzz’ chicken soup and chicken salad on Thursday and Friday, had a Pizza on Saturday and a Cabbage casserole with blue cheese on Sunday and today. Actually, officially it’s a Savoy Cabbage and Mince Meat Casserole, but we ended up using Chinese cabbage anyway.

 

Savoy Cabbage and Mince Meat Casserole

1 cabbage head (appr. 600 g, but 1 kg will be fine as well); use savoy or chinese (or any other) cabbage
2 tomatoes
1-2 onions
500 g mince meat
300 g Roquefort or any other blue cheese
200 g cream
2 eggs

Clean the cabbage and cut into 1-2 cm thick slices; boil in salted water until done but still crisp; this may take around 10 min for savoy cabbage, says my cookbook, but the chinese cabbage was done within 5-6 min. Drain the cabbage in cold water so that it doesn’t continue to cook.

Drop the tomatoes into boiling water, then peel and de-seed them and cut them into chunks. Chop the onion and fry together with the mince meat. When that is done, add the tomato and half of the blue cheese (in crumbles), and let the cheese melt; but be careful not to let it get burned!

Grease a casserole and fill with half of the cabbage. Mix the eggs and the cream, season with salt and pepper, and pour half of the mixture on the cabbage. Then add the mince meat mix and top with the rest of the cabbage, pour the other half of the cream-egg-mix and scatter the rest of the blue cheese on top. Pop into the oven and bake at 220°C for about half an hour.

 
Notes:

I quite enjoyed this casserole. I was a little sceptical about how the blue cheese would blend in, but I was pleasantly surprised. Nonetheless, the taste of the blue cheese was quite strong; I suppose it might not have turned out that way if we really had used a Roquefort and not a stronger (and cheaper) Danica Blue, so it’s definitely worth it to either choose a milder blue cheese, or mix the blue cheese with another mild and creamy cheese (Buzz’ suggestion is a goat’s cheese, but somehow that doesn’t really fit my definition of creamy mild cheese…)

Serves 4-6; adapted from Cornelia Adam’s Aufläufe, Gratins und Soufflés.

 

Banana fritters

2-4 bananas
a little flour
more cold (very cold!) water
   (try 1 part flour and 2 parts water to begin with)
2-3 tbsp. sesame seeds
a few tbsp. sugar
a dash of salt
oil for deep-frying

I’m sorry that I can’t give more precise measurements for this recipe. I’ve seen it somewhere recently and really liked the idea, but I can’t remember where I’ve seen it, and so I had to go by memory and intuition.

Anyway. Make a batter from all ingredients except for the bananas. The batter should be relatively liquid. I started out with only a tablespoon or so of sugar, but I kept adding at least two or three more tablespoons of it as the bananas became crisper and less bland. The batter should be cold, so consider placing the bowl in a larger one filled with cold water to keep the temperature down.

Peel and slice the bananas, cover them with batter and fry them in small batches, and serve (warm, preferably).

 
Notes:

Make sure that the batter is liquid, and that it is cold; that will ensure that the bananas are only surrounded by a thin, light and crisp batter. Furthermore, add enough sugar (but not too much, remember that fried bananas release sugar as well!) if you find that your fried bananas are not yet crisp enough. Writing this, I think that letting the batter rest for a short time (anything between 10 and 30 minutes) might have a positive effect as well, so be sure to prepare the batter before sitting down for dinner.

I also rolled the last two banana slices in sesame seeds before covering them with batter – I can really recommend that! But you have to like sesame seeds…

Oh, and one last thing: these are Banana fritters, NOT Finger fritters, so keep you fingers outta there!

Serves 2; adapted from, ehm, my memory.

Rescuing my meal…

I haven’t blogged a lot in the last few weeks, my excuses for that; I have cooked, every now and then, and I will try to catch up with at least some of the recipes.

Tonight, I had Chicken with Creamy Bacon Penne. Actually, I was supposed to eat this dish two days ago; but then I discovered in the very last second that my cream had turned sour, and that the canned peas I bought because I couldn’t find any fresh ones were absolutely disgusting. Luckily, I still had a ripe avocado and a can of corn, so I added those together with a marinade of olive oil and vinegar, and voilà, there was my Easy Pasta Salad (you can throw in a lot of other ingredients if you wish, fresh tomatoes, dried tomatoes, cucumber, carrots (slightly braised?), feta or mozzarella cheese, braised broccoli, …)

 

Chicken with Creamy Bacon Penne

1-2 chicken breast(s), cut in strips
a small pack of bacon
(1-2 small onions, chopped)
4 tbsp. white wine
a few carrots, finely sliced
a small pack of peas
5 tbsp. double cream/1 cup single cream
Pasta

Fry the bacon, the chicken and the onions. If you prefer crispy bacon, fry the bacon first until its half-done, then add the chicken and the onions. Add the carrots, fry a little longer, then add the white wine. When the wine has nearly evaporated, add the peas, the cream and possibly some water, and cook for a couple of minutes until the peas are done.

The original recipe calls for instant pasta which I didn’t have (and never would buy); I had to cook the pasta separately, and so strictly speaking this wasn’t a one-dish meal anymore, as the cookbook’s title suggested. However, if you prepare the double amount of bacon, chicken and pasta, you could end up with a two-in-one meal, eating Chicken with Creamy Bacon Penne on the first day and the Easy Pasta Salad on the next.

Serves 2-3; adapted from the BBC Good Food Series’ 101 One-pot Dishes.

 

Easy Pasta Salad

Pasta
1-2 chicken breast(s), cut in strips
a small pack of bacon
4 tbsp. white wine
1 ripe avocado
1 can of corn
any other ingredient (fresh tomatoes, dried tomatoes, cucumber, carrots (slightly braised?), feta or mozzarella cheese, braised broccoli, … see note above)
olive oil and vinegar

Fry the bacon, and the chicken. Add the white wine and cook until the wine has nearly evaporated. Mix with the pasta, adding the corn and spoonfulls of avocado, and any other vegetable, and serve with a dressing of olive oil and vinegar.

Serves 2-3; a family recipe.

Quick Meatball Casserole

I’m back in London since beginning of this week, and desperately need a way to cook around all my limitations: no oven, very few herbs and spices, and one person only to feed (although the latter might more be a problem of lacking inspiration than of anything else). Ideal preconditions to make a one-dish meal.

 

Quick Meatball Casserole

500 g turkey (or any other) mince
small bunch of parsley
2(-4) onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
450 g carrots, quartered and cut into chunks
450 g potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
1 tbsp. paprika
500 g can passata/ chopped tomatoes

Make sure you have at least chopped half of the vegetables, if not all, before you begin. Don’t chop the carrots too finely; they will be cooked as long as the potatoes even though they have a shorter cooking time, and still need to be crisp.

Mix the turkey mince with half the chopped parsley and some salt and pepper and form small meat balls. Heat some oil in a casserole and fry until the meatballs are done. Or just buy ready-made meatballs from your local supermarket as I have, in order to avoid having Spaghetti Bolognese yet again (see this entry).

Add the chopped onions, carrots, and the garlic and fry shortly before you add the potatoes and 300 ml (or two large glasses) of water (– the original recipe says nothing about frying in this step, but I just enjoy the taste of fried onions, and I had already mixed them with the carrots and the garlic when this step occurred to me). Bring to a boil, cover (or not, but make sure the potatoes are immersed) and simmer for 15 min.

Stir in the paprika, passata/ chopped tomatoes and half the remaining parsley. Bring to a boil, cover (or not; I had no choice, I had no lid for my casserole but it went just fine; just don’t forget the potatoes) and cook for a further 10-15 min or until the potatoes are tender. Season to taste and sprinkle with the remaining parsley.

 
Notes:

It will be crucial for this recipe that you end up having nicely boiled potatoes without having flabby overcooked carrots. As I said above, try not to chop too fine chunks of carrots but make an effort with the potatoes (relatively, that is – mine were approximately 2×2×2 cm). I could only find cans of chopped tomatoes instead of passata, and it went very well – you could probably also add other vegetables, or passata plus fresh tomatoes, as long as you add enough liquid.

I’m not yet really sure whether I should award this recipe three or four stars – I guess the problem is mainly that it tastes too much like typical kids’ food. Don’t shy away from this dish because of this comment, the food is tasty, and anyway, it’s ideal for kids…

And check your cupboard for any ingredients you believe you don’t have before cooking, not after…

Serves 4; adapted from the BBC Good Food Series’ 101 One-pot Dishes.

Catfish with a Lime-Crust, Flambéed Grapes

Last week Thursday it was my turn again with cooking, and I was far too late again; at 6 o’clock Buzz would come home, having had an extra difficult day because of application talks, and at 5 o’clock I still hadn’t had the faintest clue of what to do, nor the ingredients I would probably need.

I quickly reached out for Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food – if there was anything I needed now it was exactly that. I opted for fish, because we hadn’t had any fish all week, and I was delighted to find a recipe that wouldn’t require me to go to the fish monger and wouldn’t need any special ingredients either. For dessert, we were about to repeat Valentine day’s Flambéed apples when we decided to try it with any other fruit we had in house – grapes in our case. And to my great surprise, it worked!

 

Catfish with a Lime-Crust

4 large trout fillets (or other white fish)
2 tbsp. fresh breadcrumbs
(2-)3 limes
4 tbsp. fresh mixed herbs (parsley, dill, tarragon)
25 g butter
salt (and pepper)

Preheat the oven to 200°C (I always forget that if I don’t mention it in the very beginning).

Grind or grate an old bread roll for the bread crumbs, if possible. Grate two of the limes and add the zest to the bread. Finely chop the herbs and add them as well, then place on a flat plate.

Melt the butter in a pan and add the juice of 1-2 of the limes. Press one side of the fish fillets firmly onto the herbs so that they will stick, then place them on a baking sheet, herb-side up, I suppose, and spoon over the butter and lime.

Bake until the fish is done (should be 6 min for trout but can be longer!), and serve. Nigel Slater chose crispy green beans for accompaniment, I opted for broccoli. Go for some Caribbean vegetable accompaniment to make it a bit more special and get that summer feeling.

 
Notes:

Because I couldn’t find trout, I bought two filets of Catfish (Pangasius) instead, a fish that, as I found out, needed more cooking time than a trout (which might be down to the fact that catfish fillets are larger, apparently…). Also, I didn’t really manage to get a crust, I probably used too much butter and/or lime juice (I never measure those things precisely; I must have used less lime juice anyway because I only had two in place of the required three), as the crust was too soggy to be crispy. So, next time I’ll definitely reduce the amounts of liquids.

Be careful not to use too much parsley, as the taste of parsley is far stronger than that of dill, and beware of the intensity of the lime juice as well.

Serves 2; adapted from Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food.

 

Flambéed Grapes

Basically, this recipe is identical to that of the Flambéed Apples, with the apples replaced by, well, grapes, and no Calvados.

a bunch of grapes
Caster sugar
some Rum
Ice Cream/ Crème Bavaroise

Pick and slice the grapes. Melt some butter in a pan, add the grapes and cook for a short while. When you think they are ready, sprinkle caster sugar on them, add the rum and ignite. Small grapes will take the shape of contact lenses, might be a nice idea for a Halloween joke later this year.

Some tips for flambeing: Some alcohols, such as certain brands rum, contain just about enough alcohol to make flambeing possible. To help the process, make sure the food you want to flambé is hot, and preheat the alcohol in a ladle above a flame before igniting.

Serve with ice cream or Crème Bavaroise (we had Speculaas-Ice cream, ice cream with bits of spicy cookies mainly eaten around Christmas and Sinterklaas, making it a typical winter dish – excellent!).

Serves 2; adapted from Hedwig M. Stuber’s Ich helf dir kochen.

Be my Valentine: Cheese Fondue and Flambéed Apples

Again a lot to catch up with this week.  Let me start with the weekend:

Buzz had a very sweet savoury surprise for me when I came home this weekend. I was greeted by two red roses when I opened the door, and I was finally told what he had planned for Saturday evening: He would make Cheese Fondue for me. Now you must know that Cheese has always been a favourite of mine. When I was a kid, we used to eat Raclette every now and then, and even though I was still small, I was one of the most eager to begin, and one of the last to stop eating, making my grandmother feel full by merely watching me.

 

Cheese Fondue

pp. 100 g Emmenthaler or Gruyere
pp. 100 g of a softer cheese, such as Raclette
white wine
a lacing of kirsch
cornstarch

Heat the white wine in the fondue pan. Grind the cheese and let it melt bit by bit in the wine, stirring continuously. Add the kirsch, and add some cornstarch to bind the cheese mixture.

Serve with bread, pickled cucumbers, pickled onions and corn salad.

When Buzz bought the cheese, the lady in the shop recommended to calculate 200 g cheese per person. He bought 500 g for the two of us, and hadn’t it been for the dessert, I would have gone to bed hungry… but that might just have been me…

Serves 2; a family recipe.

 

Flambéed Apples

1 apple per person (e.g. Granny Smith)
Caster sugar
1 shot Rum
1 shot Calvados
Ice Cream/ Crème Bavaroise

Peel the apples, remove the core and slice them into appr. 1 cm thick slices. Melt some butter in a pan, add the apples and cook for a while. When you think they are ready, sprinkle caster sugar on them, add the rum-calvados-mix and ignite.

Some tips for flambeing: Some alcohols, such as certain brands rum, contain just about enough alcohol to make flambeing possible. To help the process, make sure the food you want to flambé is hot, and preheat the alcohol in a ladle above a candle before igniting.

Serve with ice cream or Crème Bavaroise (we had Speculaas-Ice cream, ice cream with bits of spicy cookies – excellent!).

Serves 2; adapted from Hedwig M. Stuber’s Ich helf dir kochen.

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.

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

The Oxford Companion to Food and Pollo a la Española

A new year requires a new blog, and a new blog requires a new cookbook, at least if it is concerned with cookbooks and the blogger’s addictions to them. Of course I wouldn’t let such an excellent excuse to buy a new cookbook slip away. A week before Christmas I had discovered Alan Davidson’s The Oxford Companion to Food lying in my local bookstore – discounted from € 65 to € 25… With Christmas in my mind I resolved not to buy it then, but to come back after my Christmas holiday and check if this book was meant for me. And surprise, surprise, what did I see? Anyway, you might gather from the book’s title that it’s not really a cookbook, which gives me yet another excuse. Any suggestions?

We had enough Escalivada over today (we actually still have enough for tomorrow, too..) so I decided to look for a main dish that would complement these vegetables well. Pollo a la Española looked interesting and, even better, used all my leftovers: a single green bell pepper, a lonely tomato, some bacon. All I needed to buy was another red bell pepper and four chicken filets, and to raid my storage for the rest.

 

Pollo a la Española

4 chicken portions
paprika
150 g bacon (alternatively: cubed Serrano)
1 large or 2 small onions
2 garlic cloves
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
450 g tomatoes or 400 g canned tomatoes

Rub the chicken with salt and paprika, and fry gently until done. Fry the bacon in another pan, and add the chopped onions and garlic when the bacon starts to give off fat. Clean the bell peppers and chop them roughly. Add them to the onions, or really follow the recipe, unlike me, and add them to the chicken; either seems to work well. Add the tomatoes and the chicken, season, and let simmer on low heat for some 15 minutes.

Serve with rice.

 
Notes:

In this recipe the chicken seems to be prone to dry out – be careful not to let that happen by frying the chicken as little as possible.

Serves 4; adapted from Pepita Aris’ Spanish Food and Cooking.

Escalivada and Broad Beans with Bacon

A new year requires a new blog, at least if you, like me, are a compulsive buyer of cookbooks, only to hardly make use of them, and have not yet found a method of exploring them in a convenient manner. Thus, my New Year’s resolution: to try out as many new recipes as possible and document them on this blog.

I will start with the first dish prepared this year. Since I’m still enjoying my semester break at home while my poor companion (Buzz, from now on) has to work full-time again, I’m in charge of getting something hot and edible on the table no later than nine o’clock (and preferably earlier). And as we’re still recovering from our holidays, including a trip to meet previously unknown family members, which, as you will know, cannot be made without heaps and piles of food (at one point we actually had a family dinner with 32 people), we opted for something light and healthy today.

Escalivada, Pepita Aris’ Spanish Food and Cooking informs me, is Catalan for ‘Baked over Embers’. It’s a classical side dish, and amazingly easy. Even better, it is perfectly complemented by Broad Beans with Bacon (also known as Habas Españolas) both in nutritional values and in cooking time, as the latter can easily be prepared while the other is in the oven.

 

Escalivada

2-3 zucchini
1 fennel bulb
1 red onion
2 red bell peppers
450 g butternut squash
6 whole garlic cloves, unpeeled and knife-crushed
juice of half a lemon
4 sprigs of thyme
4 tomatoes
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Slice all vegetables (but keep the tomatoes aside as you will only need them later) in large chunks. The butternut squash and perhaps the fennel will probably take a little longer than the rest to be cooked, so consider cooking them for some 10-20 minutes before you add the rest of the vegetables.

Try to find a roasting pan which will accommodate all vegetables in one layer – mine didn’t, but I knew I only had one anyway, and my tiny oven wouldn’t take a larger one, so I had to cook them for a little longer. Place the vegetables in the roasting pan, tuck the thyme between the vegetable chunks and sprinkle over oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Add crushed cumin seeds, too, if you like. Bake everything for 20 minutes at 220°C.

Stir the vegetables and add the roughly chopped tomatoes. Bake for another 15 minutes or until tender.

Serves 4-6; adapted from Pepita Aris’ Spanish Food and Cooking.

 

Broad Beans with Bacon

1 chopped onion
1 garlic clove
50-150 g smoked bacon cubes
225 g fava beans
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp sherry

Fry the onion, garlic and bacon in some olive oil until the onions are browned. Add the fava beans and paprika, and stir-fry for a minute. Lower the heat, add the sherry and let cook for some minutes until the beans are tender, adding more sherry and/or oil if necessary.

Serves 2; adapted from Pepita Aris’ Spanish Food and Cooking.