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!

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.