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.

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…)

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.