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A semi-improvised and non-traditional spinach+paneer curry that came out particularly well - the lime flavour zings the top of it nicely. Makes 2 big portions; takes about 20 minutes.
In a good-sized wok, heat up some oil and add the cumin seeds. Swirl them around and then add the onion and coriander. Let this fry for 2 or 3 minutes (while you chop the garlic maybe) then add the garlic and mix it all around. Let this fry for 2 or 3 minutes more until the onion is nice and soft and then add the chopped tomatoes. Give this a stir then let it simmer gently for 5 minutes or so while you do the next bit.
Heat about 2mm of oil in a frying pan. Chop the paneer into bite-sized cubes. Put the flour and 2 tbsp garam on a plate, then toss the paneer around in it to coat. Then fry the paneer in the hot pan, giving it maybe 2 or 3 minutes before turning it all over and giving it 2 or 3 minutes more. It should fry to a nutty sort of brown colour.
While the paneer is frying, add the juice and zest of the 1/2 lime to the tomato mixture. Tip the paneer onto a plate with a piece of kitchen roll on (to drain some of the oil off). Pile the spinach into the wok - you'll need to add a large volume, cos it shrinks as it cooks - and stir it in, then add the paneer and stir that in too. Let it cook together for a minute or so.
Serve it all with the 1 tsp garam sprinkled over at the last minute, with some alfalfa on top, and warm chapatis.
This is a fairly straightforward mixture of oriental flavours which complements a nice piece of fish really well. Serves two.
Spread the flour out on a plate and generously salt+pepper it. Then coat the fish fillet in it, and leave it there for now. Wash the lettuce.
Get a boiling pan of water and cook the noodles until just done (3 or 4 minutes). While that's happening, warm up a wok or frying pan to a hot heat with a dab of oil, and also warm up a frying pan to medium-hot with a good covering of oil.
Drain the noodles in a sieve. Let them dry off while you slice the garlic and stir-fry it in the wok for a minute of two. Then add the noodles and mix it in, still stir frying.
Chop the lettuce up, and put the tougher stalkier half of the bits in the wok. Stir. Chop the lime in two and squeeze one half into the wok. Stir fry briefly then take it off the heat while you fry the fish.
Put the fish fillets gently into the other pan and fry them for 3 or 4 minutes either side. While waiting for the fish to finish, spoon the noodles onto two plates as well as the lettuce. Sprinkle a little soy sauce over.
When the fish is done, drain it on some kitchen roll briefly before putting it on the plates. Then squeeze the remaining lime over everything.
Philippa is pretty darn good at cheesecake, and this is one of the best - I suggested the honey and ginger combination and she used it to make a fab cheesecake (based originally on her mum's recipe I think). It was semi-improvised so this recipe is a reconstruction...
It uses quark which I hadn't really heard of until recently, but it's the secret to amazing germanic-style cheesecake. It's a bit like cream cheese but it's not. Make a fab cheesecake!
Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Line a baking tin (7" diameter maybe) with greaseproof paper.
Bash the ginger biscuits up into dust (e.g. put them in a bag and hit them with a rolling pin). Melt the margarine in a pan and mix the crushed biscuits into it, then put the mixture into the lined baking tin. Spread it around to make a smooth even base and press it down - the aim is to make the base layer for the cheesecake.
Bake this base in the preheated oven for 5-10 minutes while mixing the other ingredients up:
Beat the eggs briefly. (Or if you have the patience, separate the eggs and beat just the whites, before adding the yolks back.)
Add the quark, sugar, almonds, honey and ginger to the quark. Mix it all together. Take the tin out of the oven, pour the mixture on top, and return it to the oven to bake for about 50-60 minutes. When it's ready it will brown a little on top and won't wobble much when you nudge it. Take it out and let it cool completely before serving.
Nutritional information
I worked out these estimates, just to see if this counts as a relatively 'healthy' cheesecake:
1 slice (out of about 10 slices per cake) contains about 8.4g fat (of which 1.6g saturates, 4g monounsturates, 2.3g polyunsaturates), 24.9g carb, 657 kJ (157 kcal) energy, 0.2g salt, 0.8g fibre.
Percentagewise by weight this is roughly 9.8% fat (1.9% saturates, 4.8% monounsaturates, 2.7% polyunsaturates).
Plum ketchup is a great autumn recipe. I'm publishing it now (spring) cos I made up a big batch of plum ketchup to make christmas presents this year - and I think it went down pretty well... I think it's well nice, at least! Goes especially well on sausages or fish.
Put tomatoes, plums and onions in a large saucepan with the spices. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 45 minutes or until the onion is soft. (Don't be tempted to add water, the fruit+veg will start to produce enough liquid after a few minutes.)
Cool the mixture for 10 minutes, then blend or process it until smooth. (Some would remove the spices before blending but I don't.) Then strain through a sieve back into the pan.
Add remaining ingredients, stir over a gentle heat (do not boil) until the sugar dissolves. Simmer uncovered until the mixture thickens to the right consistency (about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally).
Pour the hot ketchup into hot sterilised bottles or jars, and seal while hot.
(This is based on a standard tomato ketchup recipe, but with half the tomatoes replaced by plums, and some cinnamon added to complement the plum flavour.)
The shop had some nice-looking mackerel fillets on offer today so here's how I cooked it - and it was blimmin nice! The combination was deliberately made with the vinegar and onion to balance against the oily mackerel and that worked just great. Serves 2, takes 10 minutes.
Turn the grill on to a medium setting, and put a frying pan on a medium heat.
Chop the onion and start it frying in a good slug of olive oil in the pan. Let it soften while you put the makerel fillets and the tomato (chopped in half) onto some greased foil and then under the grill. The mackerel takes about 10 minutes - put it skin-side down at first then turn it half-way through.
Meanwhile, once the onions have softened a bit, add the vinegar, stir, and turn the heat down to very low so the onions can stew gently.
Mix the lemon zest into the cous cous in a bowl, add boiling water to cover, and put a lid on. Let it stand for about five minutes until everything's just about ready. Then stir the cous cous with a fork before serving it all up.
This is an easy quick salad for one:
I was challenged this evening with two ingredients: a stick of lemongrass and a box of pollack (white fish). So I've never tried it before, but it turns out that a tom-yum style soup is actually quite easy. I didn't have all the posh ingredients that I should have done (e.g. fish sauce) but we do have a bag of lime leaves in the cupboard, and the lime leaves give a really nice flavour.
It's a one-pot meal if you stick some noodles in the pot as well - here's what I did (serves 2):
(By the way - if you're not into hot flavours, reduce the amounts of the chilli and the ginger.)
Finely chop the ginger. Bash the lemongrass up and down with the butt of your chopping-knife. This helps release the flavour.
Put the water in a pan and bring it to the boil. Put in the lemongrass, lime leaves, chilli flakes, ginger and sugar, then turn the heat right down and let the mixture sit warming gently for 10 minutes to infuse.
Meanwhile, wash the button mushrooms, and chop the pollack into big bite-size pieces. Add the pollack to the pan, and turn up the heat. (When you add the fish it cools everything down, so you need to bring it back up a bit.) Add the mushrooms too, and when the water's bubbling again, turn the heat back down to a low setting.
Put the noodles into the broth (push them to the bottom so they'll soak nicely). Now let everything cook gently for about 6 or 7 minutes.
I haven't had kedgeree for ages, but somehow it felt like the right thing for a hot summer evening's teatime yesterday. This was partly based on memories of my mum's kedgeree and partly on some online recipes. Serves 3 or 4 people.
In a pan, heat up some oil. Chop the onion up and add it to the pan, with the curry powder. Fry the onion gently until softened, then pile the rice on top. Stir it all around, then add boiling water to come about half a centimetre above the top of the rice. Bring to the boil, stir once, then put the lid on and turn the heat right down. You'll be leaving this for about 25 minutes to cook gently, adding the frozen peas in the last five minutes so that they warm up.
In the meantime, hard-boil the eggs. (I put them in a pan of boiling water, took them off the heat, left them for 12 minutes to cook, then plunged them into cold water to stop them cooking.) Give them time to cool down a bit.
Break the mackerel into flakes, trying to pick out any noticeable bones as you do so.
When the rice+onions+peas is done, stir it with a fork to fluff the rice up. Peel and quarter the eggs, then gently mix the mackerel and eggs into the mixture.
In York I bought a really good book about Northern English food - From Eccles Cake to Hawkshead Wig: A Celebration of Northern Food - and read about "Ormskirk gingerbread". Never heard of it before (nor been to Ormskirk) but it sounded like a good recipe so I made some for the dorks at dorksnow and they went down very well.
By the way, I added brazil nuts to the recipe, which is totally and utterly non-traditional but I fancied it. You can include them or leave them out - I've done both ways, both are good, but I recommend adding the brazil nuts.
Cream the marge and sugar together with a fork. Add the golden syrup too.
Sift the flour and ginger and cinnamon in. Be generous with the ginger, and stingy with the cinnamon - you don't want the cinnamon to be noticeable.
Also add the brazil nuts. It's OK if there are some larger bits of brazil nut, that adds to the texture.
Mix it all together well, then shape with your hands into flat rounds, say roughly about 1cm thick and 6cm across.
Lay them out on a floured baking tray and bake at 170ºC for 25 or 30 minutes, until they just turn a baked colour. They'll burn easily so don't overdo them. Apparently a "falling heat" is a good way of doing them: I tried both ways, a constant temperature the whole time, or turning the oven off halfway through, didn't notice much difference.
Put them on a wire rack to cool. (This stage is important cos that's when they firm up and get that nice crunchy texture on the outside, while still being cakey in the centre.)
This made 18 nice big biscuits when I did it.
I was searching around for a decent sticky toffee pudding recipe to add to the Wikibooks UK Cookbook. Ended up making this recipe today, based on recipes I read online. It was dead nice.
Note: Finely chopping the dates helps make a really gooey cake - but some people prefer to chop the dates roughly, so that they're more obvious in the finished pudding.
For the cake
For the toffee sauce
Method
Serve with cream, custard, or ice-cream.
A couple of days ago I made the Hairy Bakers' brown ale bread. It's pretty nice (but I recommend you only use half as much cheese as they do!).
It's the kind of bread that goes best with a nice light soup so here's what I made, it's nice (serves 2 or 3):
Warm up the veg oil and marge in a big pan, while you chop up the onion. Add the onion to the pan and leave it for a few minutes on a low heat, to soften - don't let it brown. Peel and chop the garlic and add that half-way through.
Add the cardamom pod and the fennel seeds to the pan and stir it all around. Rinse and roughly chop the cabbage then add it to the pan. Also add the brown ale and hot water, just enough to almost cover everything.
Bring it to the boil, put the lid on and turn down to a very low heat. Let it bubble for 15-20 minutes.
Take the pan off the heat, add the frozen peas, and stir it all around. The frozen peas will have lowered the temperature enough to be safe for the blender. Put about three-quarters of the mixture into the blender and blend it until nice and smooth (won't take long). Return this all to the pan - so you should have the smooth liquid combined with the remaining lumpy bits - that makes a nice texture.
If necessary, put it back on the heat to warm it up slightly, before serving with brown ale bread and butter.
I would never make gnocchi myself (tried it once, it took hours and wasn't worth the effort), but you can get packets in the supermarket which take literally 2 minutes to boil so it's really handy. Normally we make them with a tomatoey sauce (like a pasta sauce for example) but here's a nice light summery way to do them. Serves 2 and takes less than 15 minutes from start to finish.
Warm up some oil in a pan. Slice the onion as finely as you can and add it to the pan. While it fries for 3 or 4 minutes (stir occasionally), chop the tomatoes into dice. Add the tomatoes and the wine to the pan. Once this starts bubbling, let it bubble for a minute or two before turning the heat right down to minimum and putting a lid on. Let it cook gently for about 5 minutes.
While the sauce is cooking prepare the gnocchi according to the pack. When they're ready, drain them and stir them into the sauce. Serve it all with a few salad leaves on the side.
This is really easy to make, given how posh it looks coming out of the oven. Serves 2 or 3 people for lunch. It's a pastry-less quiche which makes it much simpler to do, and a bit healthier too probably.
Preheat the oven to 180ºC, and grease a metal baking tin of some sort whose edges go up at least one inch. (Or you could use a ceramic pot, probably wise to preheat that in the oven if so.)
Warm some marge/butter up in a pan and gently fry the red onion, with the rosemary sprinkled on top, stirring occasionally. It'll take about 10 minutes to soften nicely, so while that's doing, steam the asparagus: chop it into 3--5cm pieces (use the whole asparagus except for the hard bit right at the base) then put it in a sieve and suspend over boiling water for 5 minutes. Then run some cold water over the asparagus to stop them overcooking, and set to one side.
Whisk up the eggs, milk, salt & pepper, and parmesan cheese, whisking for about 3 or 4 minutes so there's plenty of air in the mixture. Then tip the onions into this mixture, and pour the mixture into your baking tin. Then put the asparagus in/on the top of the mixture, spreading them out in a nice even layer.
Bake at 180ºC for 25 to 30 minutes until it's looking nicely coloured on top. I served it with spinach & tomato salad, plus bread & butter.
You can put anything in a stew but here's a combination that turned out nicely. It's cooked slowly (you ignore it for about 2 hours), which means that the starch from the potatoes thickens the broth up nicely, and also that the flavours from the leek/apricot/etc all melt together nicely. That's why the stew doesn't really need any flour or stock.
Warm up a couple of tablespoons of veg oil in a large deep pan on a medium heat. Remove the green bit from the leek and save it (added later), then finely slice the white bit into lots of rings. Add the rings to the pan and stir them round. Let this fry a little bit while you peel & slice the garlic and add it. Stir around and let fry for a couple of minutes until starting to soften.
Add the diced beef to the pan and stir again. Let it fry for a minute or so while occasionally stirring, then leave it to cook a bit more while you do the potatoes. Peel the potatoes and chop them into bitesize chunks about the same size as the pieces of beef. Add them to the pan. Chop the apricots in half and add them to the pan too.
Then add enough boiling water to cover everything, and turn the heat up. You can add the marrow now or you can wait for an hour or so if you'd prefer to avoid it going too mushy. Either way, you just chop it into large pieces (a bit bigger than the potato pieces) and add it to the stew.
When the stew is bubbling nicely, put a lid on and turn the heat right down as far as it'll go. After a couple of minutes you can tell by feel/sound that there's still some bubbling going on in there despite the low heat. Leave this to bubble on its own for two hours.
Optionally, half an hour before serving, take the green bits of the leek, get rid of any manky bits, and slice it all up, then add it to the pan and give it all a stir.
More beetroot fun, this time using one of those sealed packs of cooked beetroot rather than raw beetroot (much quicker to cook).
This soup is a delicious thick soup, filling and with a nice warm sweetness from the spices and the beetroot. (The spices are important for the flavour, by the way.) Serves 2 to 4, takes about half an hour but only 10 minutes of work.
Heat up a tablespoon of olive oil in a deep saucepan, and start the onion frying. Add the cumin and turmeric. Chop the garlic and add that too, and stir and fry for a few minutes until it all smells softened and pleasant.
Add the uncooked rice and stir it in briefly just to let it catch some of the flavours.
Open the bag of cooked beetroot. Put the liquid into the pan if there is any, and chop up the cooked beetroot and add it to the pan too. Add boiling water to cover the contents by at least a centimetre or so. Stir it around.
Now put it all in a blender and whizz it up. (Or take it off the heat and use a hand-blender.) The rice will still be hard and it will break into small pieces rather than being completely whizzed, but try to get only just to the point where the beetroot and onion pieces are liquidised.
Return to the heat and bring it up to a boil. Then turn the heat down, put a lid half-on and let it bubble gently for about 20 minutes until the rice is cooked.
Turn off the heat, stir in a tablespoon or two of plain yoghurt (optionally) and serve.
Beetroot is in season so I tried cooking with beetroot this week. (Fresh, I mean, not cooked/pickled.) It's tricky cos it can be rock-hard if you cook it as if it was potato or something. Just now I found a nice trick: you can treat it as if it was onion and use it as the basis of a stew. Frying it in olive oil at the start softens it nicely and flavours it nicely too; then if you make a wine/tomato stew on top of it, the slight acidity of the wine/tomato complements it nicely.
This recipe serves 2 and takes about 40 minutes all included. If you want more protein in it, adding beef (browned first) or chick-peas, after the garlic, would work really well with the flavours.
Warm a deep pan with the olive oil in. Chop the stalks off the beetroot, then peel them (using a knife is probably easier than a peeler, since beetroots are a bit soft). Chop them into thin slices (2mm thick?), then chop the slices into matchsticks. Put these into the pan and allow the beetroot to fry gently for 5 mins or so. In the meantime, peel and slice the garlic, and wash the cauliflower and cut it into big bitesize pieces.
Add the garlic to the pan and stir around. Also add the cauliflower. Let these fry for a minute or two until the garlic has softened. (If adding beef/chickpeas, do it at this point.) Add the chopped tomatoes and enough hot water to cover the cauliflower bits, and bring it to the boil. Add the wine, stir things up, and continue to boil for a minute or so (to let the alcohol boil off the wine).
Put the lid on and let the stew bubble gently for 25-30 minutes. Serve with bread and butter.
Matt if you're reading, you might want to avert your eyes... the onions might offend.
This was a surprisingly nice and easy lunch just now:
In a frying pan or wok, heat a little oil and fry the diced onion on a medium heat for 3 or 4 minutes until starting to soften. Break the egg into the middle of the pan. Break the yolk, but you don't need to stir it all in. Using a spatula, draw the egg/onion into a neat-ish circle towards the middle of your pan (about the same size as your bread!). Sprinkle a little bit of black pepper on top, and turn down the heat a tiny bit. Let this cook for 3 or 4 minutes until the egg is set all the way through. (The onion will caramelise a bit.)
Butter your bread slices and put a layer of spinach leaves on one. When the egg/onion is ready slide it out of the pan, on top of the spinach. Let it sit for a few seconds (to let the steam escape) before putting the other slice on top. Nice sandwich.
A nice gently-cooked stew makes stewing fillet (like this nice lamb neck fillet we bought) turn all melty and delicious. (There's no need to cut the lamb into small pieces - letting a few nice large pieces stew away is the best way to do this. As long as there's at least one piece each!) And this is a very nice one-pot meal.
I used quinoa because Philippa bought it as an experiment, but you could use rice in exactly the same way. This takes a while on the hob but it's easy to do. Serves 2.
Dice the onion finely. Warm a large pan with some vegetable oil in, and add the onion. While the onion is gently softening, peel the carrots and squash and chop them into bite-size pieces.
Move the onions to one side and put the lamb into the pan too. Let the lamb take the oil for 30 seconds or so, then stir the lamb and onions together for a further 30 seconds. Add the carrot and squash, then add the cinnamon, basil and rosemary. Pour boiling water into the pan so that it well covers everything. Mix everything up.
Once everything's bubbling nicely, put the lid on and turn the heat right down. Now leave the pan bubbling very gently for about an hour and a half. The objective here is to let the lamb start to melt and break down, and at the same time to let the vegetables cook gently without them breaking down into mush. That's why we use a very gentle heat for a long time.
After the hour and a half, add the quinoa to the pan and gently mix it into the stew. Turn the heat up a little so that the stew can carry on bubbling without the lid on, letting a little of the liquid evaporate away. Let the stew cook for another 20 or 30 minutes.
This makes a really delicious supper to have with buttered crusty bread, and it's really easy. Serves 2 or 3 depending how hungry you are.
First things first: after chopping the feta into cubes you must dry it off so it will grill properly. Put the cubes onto a plate with a piece of kitchen paper on, and put another piece of kitchen paper on top.
Turn your grill on to its highest setting so that it can preheat while you do the next bit.
Put the mushroom pieces and courgette slices into a bowl, sprinkle the oil on top and mix everything around to get things covered well. The mushrooms will absorb the oil quite quickly so you won't end up with a very "wet" mixture.
On a baking tray with some tinfoil on, spread the feta and the courgette and the mushroom out fairly evenly. Put all this under the grill, as close to the grill as possible (about an inch away, no more). You won't need to turn the pieces over or anything like that, but watch everything very closely. It'll take about 3 or 4 minutes for the feta cheese to brown nicely on top and for the other things to start to cook.
As soon as the feta is nicely browned on top, serve everything straight away - it'll cool down quickly and it's best when the feta is still melty inside and everything's piping hot.
Slow-cooking is always the best way to cook meat. Here's a lovely and easy way to slow-cook chicken with bright fresh flavours. Takes less than half an hour to prepare, but with a two-hour gap in the middle while the chicken cooks.
Serves two, but should multiply up easily.
Preheat the oven to 150ºC. Warm up the oil in a frying pan. Dice the onion and add it to the pan, stirring it around a bit. While it softens, chop the garlic finely and add it, then add the chilli flakes, pepper, and mango pieces. Stir the mixture and let it all soften. After about five minutes turn the heat off and let the mixture cool slightly.
Now bundle the chicken up. On a baking tray place a large sheet of tin foil. Place half of the marinade mixture in the middle of the foil, and spread it out a bit, they lay the two chicken breasts on top. Pour the remaining marinade mixture on top of the chicken pieces, and fold the tinfoil in to make a loose parcel. (It should be loose so that steam can circulate.) Wrap the whole lot up in a second large piece of foil, to ensure it's wrapped up securely (but still loose).
Put the chicken bundle in the oven. It should cook at 150ºC for an hour, then turn it down to 110ºC and leave it for another hour or hour-and-a-half (it's up to you).
When you're almost ready to eat, get a frying pan hot with more oil, and slice the courgette and the ginger. Stir-fry the courgette and ginger quickly. Drain the noodles and add them to the frying pan, then mix it all together and squeeze the lime juice over it. Mix it up again, and serve.
We buy packets of ready-made "gnocchi" (italian potato dumplings) because they're really quick to cook and they're nice. I made gnocchi from scratch once and it took hours and I got grated potato all over the kitchen. It wasn't pretty. These ready-made ones are really handy to have in the cupboard.
What you need, though, is to know how to make a very quick sauce to go with them. This evening I managed to do this one in pretty much 7 or 8 minutes because we were in a rush - and it's really nice!
These amounts are to serve two.
Start a large kettle of water boiling; and put a tablespoon of olive oil in a saucepan over a medium heat.
Rinse the tomatoes and chop them into slices. Put them into the saucepan. They'll immediately start to soften. Put the tsp of sugar on top of them (don't stir yet).
Chop the spinach roughly (it'll take a couple of minutes, giving the tomatoes time to cook) and put it into the saucepan on top of the spinach and tomato. Stir together and leave it to continue cooking.
The packets of gnocchi that we buy take about 2-3 minutes to boil: start them going now, in a separate pan, using the boiling water etc.
Put the pesto into the saucepan with the tomatoes etc. Mix it all together, and turn the heat right down to its lowest setting.
When the gnocchi are ready, drain them. Pour a tablespoon or so of olive oil over them, then mix them in with the sauce, and serve.
I got Philippa an ice-cream-making-ball for Christmas, so occasionally we get ice and salt all over the kitchen and try and make some ice cream. Here's a really nice one that we made just this weekend:
You just need to squish all the ingredients together and then freeze them, in an ice-cream maker or probably it'd work in the freezer - just stir it every 20 minutes or so, and after an hour at most it'll be frozen.
You need to squish the berries so that they burst at least a little bit and so that some of their flavour comes out into the yoghurt. If you really want them squished, the best way is to mash the sugar and the berries together, before adding the yoghurt. But it's nice not to pulverise them completely.
The slightly tart blueberries and the yoghurt make a really nice flavour together.
Yet another way to make a nice pork stew, that Philippa likes a lot even though she claims not to like pork. Perhaps it's the lovely dumplings we had with ours:
In a large saucepan with a lid, warm up the oil and start the onions gently frying. Add the garlic after a couple of minutes.
Chop the pork into good-sized chunks and add it to the pan. Turn the heat up to medium and stir the pork around for a minute or so so it gets evenly coloured.
Add the red wine and stir around a bit more, then add the vegetables (inc potatoes if using), the stock powder, and enough water to cover everything with a good centimetre to spare. Put the lid on, and when the stew starts to bubble turn the heat right down.
If you're making dumplings then make them up now and add them into the top of the pan. The stew can be given 30-60 minutes to bubble gently before the pork is nice and tender. Don't overheat things or the meat might not come out quite as nice.
Really nice ratatouille is made with the different vegetables done separately, then combined. Here's an easy way to do it, by roasting them so they don't all mush together. This goes really nicely with oven chips and serves 2.
Preheat an oven to very hot - 220 or 230ºC.
Toss the vegetables in the 5 tbsp olive oil, in a big mixing bowl. Sprinkle the balsamic vinegar over and mix around. Spread them onto a baking tray and put in the hot oven for about 20 minutes, until nicely roasted.
Meanwhile, warm up a saucepan (large enough to hold everything) with the 1 tbsp of olive oil. Chop the tomatoes up and add them. Turn the heat down very low and let the tomatoes cook gently for ten minutes (or however long is left before the veg are ready).
Take the vegetables out of the oven and dump them all into the saucepan. Also add the basil leaves. Mix everything around and leave it on the low heat for a couple of minutes while you get the chips out (or whatever else you want).
Peperami and basil go together surprisingly well. You might not expect it, but the two flavours complement each other quite nicely. Shame they put MSG in peperami, but at least they also put "108% pork" into it (as stated on the ingredients). These amounts serve one.
Put spaghetti into boiling water (I prefer to break it in half as I put it in the pan). Boil for ten minutes until just-about-almost cooked.
Meanwhile, chop the peperami into little pieces. Wash the basil leaves. Just before the spaghetti is ready chop the basil into little pieces too.
Drain the spaghetti, and return it to the pan (not on the heat). Mix the olive oil through the spaghetti, then do the same for the peperami and the basil. Serve immediately.
My mum makes the best carrot, date, and walnut cake. It's very soft and moist with a dark sweetness (from the dark sugar) that goes really well with the other flavours - nothing like the flouncy light carrot-cake-with-lemon-icing that seems to be standard. Here's the recipe, based on a recipe in a book but completely changed. It's a very easy recipe. But despite that, I can't make it quite as good as my mum does. More practice needed:
Line an 18cm (7 inch) round cake tin with greased greaseproof paper, and preheat the oven to 180ºC (350ºF, gas mark 4).
Put the sugar into a mixing bowl and gradually whisk in the oil, then whisk the eggs in one at a time (easier to get them mixed in smoothly that way). Add the flour and cinnamon and stir the mixture well, beating out lumps to make the mixture as smooth as you can. Add the carrots, nuts, and dates, and mix.
Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for about 1 hour 10 minutes, until the cake is risen and firm to the touch.
Remove from the oven, leave to stand in the tin for 3 minutes, then turn out onto a wire tray, peel off the paper and leave to cool.
Philippa likes making cake, but we had no eggs, so she found a cake recipe which works without eggs. And, remarkably, it's just like normal cake! Proper cakey consistency and everything, and nice too. Here it is, adapted from the veganfamily website:
Mix up all the dry ingredients, add the wet ingredients and mix well. At the last minute add the lemon juice and pour into a greased cake tin.
Bake at about 190C/380F for at least half an hour, or until a skewer (or a knife) comes out clean.
Two things I bought from the indian supermarket: some raw beetroot and some paneer (indian cheese) flavoured with cumin. I decided to have them for my lunch, and it turned out rather well.
It's like currying anything really: just start off by frying some chopped onion (and some cumin seeds), adding a bit of finely chopped ginger and garlic after a few minutes, then add the main ingredients and some liquid and get currying. I added the paneer first, turning up the heat to get some nice colour on it, and then after a while added the peeled and chopped beetroot at the same time as the boiling water. You need to let this boil vigorously for a while (about half an hour) so that the beetroot softens and the liquid reduces. Serve with rice and/or bread, or as a side dish, and it's very nice.
Tortilla (the spanish omelette, not the mexican bread) can be absolutely gorgeous, and it doesn't require much in the way of ingredients so it's really handy. Because of the potatoes it's really chunky, much more of a meal than your average omelette. The amounts given here serve 3 or 4 and fit nicely into a 12" frying pan when you're making it.
3 or 4 potatoes, washed (but not peeled)
1 red onion
4 eggs
4 tbsp olive oil
A handful of frozen peas
Warm up the olive oil in a frying pan. Slice the potatoes into chunks about 1cm thick and then parboil them - that is, drop them into a pan of boiling water and cook them only for about 5 minutes. While this is happening, chop the onion into thick chunks too, and break the eggs into a bowl and mix them up a bit.
Drain the potatoes in a colander or sieve, and leave them to drain while you gently fry the onion in the frying pan. When the onions have softened (3 or 4 mins?) add the drained potatoes and stir around. Leave these to fry for 3 or 4 more minutes before turning them over. Sprinkle the peas into the pan and get everything evenly spread out. Add some salt and pepper if you like. Turn on the grill to a hot setting.
Pour the eggs into the pan, trying to pour the mixture as evenly as possible. Do not stir at all from this point on! The pan should be on a medium heat as the eggs start to cook at the bottom. Let them cook for about 5 minutes. It's tricky to judge when to stop because you can't check underneath to see if they look done, but you can tell it's OK when the egg mixture starts to look a little bit cakey and set.
Take the pan off the heat and put it under the grill to cook the top (3 or 4 mins). Then turn it out onto a plate. Slice it up to serve, and have it with bread and butter and salad leaves.
Philippa's not keen on pork so I have to find ways to make it taste particularly nice. And knowing that she likes sweet things, I tried pork with plums - in various combinations... here's the one she particularly liked:
2 pork steaks
1 handful of baby sweetcorn
1/2 red pepper
2 plums, not too soft
1 tbsp sherry
Slice the pork into strips about 1/2 a centimetre thick. Do the same for pepper and the plums. Do all this beforehand, since the cooking happens fast.
Put a wok on a high heat with a dab of oil. When very hot, put the pork in and stir it around quickly until it loses its raw colour.
Push the pork to the side of the pan, add a dab more oil, and place the sliced plums in the pan. Don't stir them around - let them caramelise slightly, then turn them over and do the same on the other side.
Then stir everything around, adding the pepper and then the sweetcorn. Stir for around 1 minute. Then add the sherry and stir again, while the sherry bubbles down slightly.
Serve with noodles.
Very nice combination (serves 2, takes less than 20 minutes):
2 pieces cod
1 onion or 3 shallots, sliced
1 tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/2 tsp coriander powder
1 small bag of green beans
1 tbsp wine vinegar
1/2 a lime
1 beef tomato, chopped into chunks
Heat some olive oil in a wok or large pan, and also some olive oil in a frying pan. Put the onion/shallot in the wok and stir-fry it for a minute. In the meantime put the cod into the frying pan and let it cook. While it's cooking, do the following:
Add the chickpeas to the onions and stir well. Let them cook for another minute or so before adding the coriander and the green beans and stirring again.
When the cod has cooked for about 5 or 6 minutes drizzle the vinegar and squeeze the lime over. Let it cook for another minute and then take the fish out of the pan. Put the tomato into the pan and stir it around to warm it and absorb some of the vinegar/lime/fish juices - then serve.
Philippa liked this one a lot. Serves 2 or 3 people, and it's quite easy too. Make sure you do the chopping/slicing before you start cooking since it all happens quite quickly.
2 tbsp olive oil
2 chicken breasts, cubed
1 butternut squash, peeled and cubed
1/2 an onion, sliced
3 cloves garlic, sliced
2 tbsp tomato puree
1/2 beef stock cube
For the dumplings:
50g suet
100g self-raising flour
Heat the olive oil nice and hot in a deep pan. Put the chicken breasts in, stir them around quickly for a second or two, and then put the onion in too and stir-fry for a couple of minutes. Add the garlic and squash and mix.
Add the tomato puree and the crumbled-up stock cube, then pour over enough boiling water to cover and mix everything well. Cover and bring to a simmer, then allow to bubble gently for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the dumplings: mix the suet and flour with just enough cold water to form a doughy mixture and shape into balls. Put these into the pan on top of the stew when there's 20 minutes cooking time left.
This is nice and wholesome and filling. "Munchy" said Philippa. Serves 2 hungry people or 3 normal people.
4 or 5 sausages (veggie ones in this case, but meat or veg is fine)
1/2 onion
3 cloves garlic
1 tin pinto beans
1 tin butterbeans
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 cup red wine
Drain and rinse the beans. Preheat the oven to 190C. Start the sausages grilling/frying so they'll get nicely browned.
In the meantime, fry the sliced onion and garlic in some olive oil for a few minutes until softened but not browned. Then add the drained beans and mix things around a bit, just until the contents of the pan have warmed back up.
Add the tomates and the wine and stir it round, and let it start to bubble. Then chop the sausages into bitesize chunks, mix them into the pan, and pour everything into a casserole dish. Cover and bake in the oven for 10 or 15 minutes.
This was an emergency-running-out-of-ingredients improvisation but it turned out remarkably well! If you want turkey without the plainness of taste try something like this:
Some turkey breast
2 sun-dried tomatoes
4 dried apricots
4 cloves garlic
1/3 marrow
2 tsp tomato puree
Dash of sherry or vodka or other spirit
1 tsp chilli flakes
2 flour tortillas
The key to getting this to cook together nicely is slicing everything into nice matchstick shapes that will cook quickly and eat nicely. Slice the marrow, apricots, tomatoes, and garlic into matchsticks, and the turkey into strips about 1cm wide.
Get a wok or pan very hot and start the garlic, apricots, tomatoes, and chilli flakes quickly for a minute or two. Add the turkey and fry, stirring, for about two minutes. Then add the marrow and stir-fry for about two minutes. Add the puree, the spirit, and a dash of water and simmer, stirring, until the liquid reduces down (about three minutes).
Warm the tortillas in a pan (takes about 15 seconds per tortilla) and serve them with the stir-fry. Philippa doesn't like sun-dried tomatoes so try not to put too many on her plate, although they're really important for the overall flavour.
Serves two
