Category: food and drink

Time for a recipe, inspired by Giorgio OnTheTelly. This is a tasty dish and also costs about 3p to make – rather fitting for our times.

Ingredients:

• 4 sausages. You want good meaty sausages to get the best outcome for this recipe, but we found it worked just fine with supermarket own brand ones. (If you want to cook with six, then just increase all the other ingredients by 50%).
• 1 smallish carrot – chopped reasonably finely.
• 2 smallish red onions – also chopped. You can use white onion if you like – we just like the colour.
• 1 celery stick – chopped as well.
• 170g lentils – you can use fancy pants lentils if you want, we used standard supermarket own brand jobs.
• 350ml passata – normally I object to using passata and would get a (cheaper) tin of tomatoes and mush them up, but for this recipe it is worth spending the extra pennies on passata.
• 500ml vegetable stock – make your own or use a cube, whatever.
• fresh sage and fresh rosemary – from your garden, of course. Don’t be stingy with this – you want enough to taste it.
• a little olive oil for frying (or you can use butter if you like); salt, pepper.

In a casserole, heat the oil/butter over a medium high heat and fry one chopped onion (not the other one – keep that aside for a moment) with the carrot and celery until a little browned.

Then add the lentils and the stock and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

Whilst that is going on, fry the sausages in a pan until brown. Remove from the pan and keep warm.

Fry the rest of the onion until golden in a little more oil/butter. Add the passata to the onion until warmed  through. Return the sausages to the pan with the herbs and cook gently for 15 minutes.

Then, add the sausage/passata mixture to the lentil/vegetable mixture in the casserole and stir.

Serve with some crusty bread. You’ll find this remarkably filling.

Lifted shamelessly from the Waitrose magazine.

This makes enough for four people – or, as we tend to do, enough for two meals for two people (they keep in the fridge for a couple of days and re-heat nicely).

Per portion: 251 calories, plus the rice or couscous. It’s also low in saturated fat.

Ingredients:

• 2 aubergines
• 250g turkey breast mince (they sell this in Waitrose. They also do thigh mince, which is cheaper but has more calories)
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
• 1 tbsp harissa paste (again, Waitrose – get yourself a loyalty card and have a free coffee whilst you are there)
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 100g soft dried apricots, roughly chopped
• 400g can chopped tomatoes
• Half lemon, zest and juice
• 2 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
• 2 tbsp low-fat natural yogurt (we use low fat Greek yogurt – it’s thicker)
• A little olive oil

1. Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6.
2. Halve the aubergines lengthways. Score a 0.5cm border around the edge of each half and scoop out the flesh. Finely dice the flesh and set aside.
3. Brush the insides of the aubergine shells with a little olive oil, place on a baking sheet and pop in the oven for 20 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, heat half a tbsp of oil in a large frying pan over a medium-high heat. Cook the turkey for 5 minutes.
5. Then add the onion, garlic and diced aubergine and cook for a further 10 minutes.
6. Stir in the harissa paste, cinnamon and apricots and cook for a further minute.
7. Add the tomatoes and simmer for another 5 minutes.
8. Stir in the lemon juice, lemon zest and half the parsley. Taste and season if necessary.
9. Fill the aubergine shells with the turkey mixture – there will be plenty to fill them quite generously.
10. Return the shells to the oven for a further 5 minutes.
11. Spoon half a tbsp of yogurt onto each one and sprinkle with the remaining parsley.
12. Serve with rice or couscous. And possibly a glass of wine, although that rather ruins the virtuous qualities of this dish.

This recipe shamelessly stolen from Eat This Book: Cooking with Global Fresh Flavours by Tyler Florence – a book of recent discovery (by chance) in this house, with excellent recipes on just about every page. It’s quick to prepare (about 30-40 minutes), darned tasty and looks good too – so ideal for dinner parties or for impressing people, although I think it makes a pretty good Friday night dinner too.

INGREDIENTS:

For the sauce/dressing:

• 2 fl oz (60ml) extra virgin olive oil
• 2 fl oz (60ml) soy sauce
• Juice of 4 limes
• 2 good handfuls of fresh coriander leaves, finely chopped (use kitchen scissors unless you have amazing knife skills)
• 1 Jalapeno chilli (or other medium hot chilli), sliced complete with seeds (actually, I think this looks prettier with a red chilli, not a green Jalapeno)
• 1 crushed garlic clove
• 1 teaspoon crushed fresh ginger (I peeled a piece and then crushed it in a garlic press over the mixing bowl, so as to catch all the juice)
• Half teaspoon sugar
• Salt and pepper

For the main dish:

• good quality fresh tuna steaks (there is enough dressing/sauce for four steaks in this recipe or, do as we do, and use this quantity of dressing/sauce with just two steaks)
• 2 avocados, peeled, pitted and sliced
• extra virgin olive oil
• a bag of rocket (or fresh from the garden/allotment if you have it – how we miss summer! Our own rocket was miles better than any we have bought anywhere, ever. Period.)
• cherry tomatoes (allow around 6 per person)

METHOD:

First, make the sauce/dressing. This is easy. Shove everything in a bowl. Stir. Got it?

Next, scoot your tomatoes around a griddle pan in a little oil until they are slightly seared and split. Plate them up with a portion of the rocket on each plate.

Then, add a little more oil if necessary and, over a medium-high heat, sear the tuna for a minute or so on each side. Then spoon over roughly a quarter of the sauce and cook for another minute or two. Turn the steaks over and add another quarter of the sauce (or one-third of what remains, if you follow my maths).

Plate up the tuna. Arrange the avocado pieces artfully around the plate and then spoon over the rest of the dressing in a tasteful fashion. Serve with a long cold drink (gin and tonic, good Belgian beer, whatever – you need something long, as the sauce/dressing has quite a kick to it, particularly if (as we did) you make the dressing an hour or so in advance and let the chilli get to work on the other sauce ingredients).

Definitely the best new recipe I’ve tried for a while. Not that I’ve tried many new recipes lately. With everything else going on around here (I’ll write about it somewhen), the cooking mojo hasn’t been what it was. We need to get that back.

If you spend a lot of time hanging around farmers’ markets or fancy food shops, you will have seen that there are several companies now offering fruit jellies. In our neck of the woods, the market leader is Ouse Valley Foods who make excellent jellies (well, that was the case until they had a bad fire in the kitchens a few weeks ago – hopefully they’ll bounce back from that soon). They can be seen at food fairs cunningly displayed with a light behind them so that you can see the lovely colours of the jellies.

But at around £3 to £4 for a half pound jar, you might baulk at stocking your shelves with a wide array. Fear not! For I have a dead easy recipe for making crab apple jelly and, as the crab apples are in season at the moment, now is the time to make it.

Ingredients

• crab apples – as a guide, when I fill our 24cm diameter pan with apples, we get around four pounds of jelly.
• sugar – ordinary sugar, not fancy stuff with pectin added.
• things to add flavour (chilli, sage, garlic – use your imagination).
• you will also need some muslin or a jelly bag – available from any decent cookery store – as well as some jars.

Method

• First, gather your crab apples. Befriend a neighbour with a tree. Check out family members who might have some. Generally these things just fall to the ground and rot, so if you tell the owner of the tree that you plan to put them to good use and perhaps promise a jar of the resulting product as payment, then I’m sure you can find some. It doesn’t really matter what variety of crab apple you use. I’m lucky that my parents have two large trees of the variety John Downey John Downie Dartmouth which has large (3cm diameter) red skinned fruits. Larger fruited varieties are certainly easier to deal with, but smaller ones can be used – you just need a bit more patience to prepare the fruit. Generally speaking, red skinned varieties give red jelly, yellow skinned varieties give amber coloured jelly. Windfalls are just fine so long as they are not too badly damaged. If you are short of crab apples, you can bulk them out with a little Bramley apple, peeled, cored and chopped.
• Sort your fruit. Give it a good wash and chuck away badly damaged fruit. Cut the fruit in half – you certainly don’t need to peel them and it is barely worth removing the stalks.
• Place the fruit in a large pan and add water so that it comes up to the same level as the top of the fruit. Simmer over a low heat, with a lid on the pan, until the fruit has turned to pulp. This will take at least half an hour, maybe twice that (depends on your particular apples).
• Happy that it is pulpy? Good. Remove the pan from the heat and let it cool a little. Then place your muslin or jelly bag over the top of a sieve and rest it on top of a large bowl. Ladle the apple pulp/juice mixture into the muslin-lined sieve and let the fluid drip through into the bowl. You’ll need to do this in batches to stop the sieve getting clogged. You will also need to be patient – this takes quite a while.
• Some recipes caution against getting behind the pulp with a wooden spoon and forcing it through the sieve – they say it makes your jelly cloudy. Not so, in my experience, but I may just be lucky in my choice of apple variety.
• When you have strained all the juice, discard the pulp. It almost seems a shame to waste it, so if anyone has a suggestion for uses for the pulp, let me know.
• Measure the volume of juice and place it in a clean pan. Add sugar at the ratio of (Imperial units alert!!) one pound of sugar to every pint of juice. (For those with only metric measuring equipment, that equates to 800g of sugar for every litre of juice). Yes, that is a lot of sugar. Trust me (and don’t tell your dentist).
• Stir the sugar into the juice until it is dissolved and then, over a low to medium heat, simmer the juice. This will take at least 45 minutes to an hour, perhaps more (again, this may vary according to your apple variety). If you get any scum on the surface of the mixture, just carefully skim it off with a soup spoon.
• Whilst this is going on, put two saucers in the freezer. You’ll need them in a bit. Also, sterilize your jars. You do this by washing them with hot soapy water and then, without drying them, placing them inside your oven at a low heat (80 Celsius is enough) for about five minutes. No hotter and no longer, or else the jars will break. I use the fancy jars with the metal clip-down seals and rubber seal rings when I’m giving jelly away as a gift – but for domestic consumption, recycled jam jars are just fine.
• Now you need to test if your juice has reached the setting point. When I first read about this, I was quite put off as it seemed so difficult to judge – the thought of un-set jelly in my jars was not encouraging. But a quick search online and a peek in old Delia Smith cookbooks gives some handy easy-to-follow tips. Take one of your (now really cold) saucers from the freezer. Put a spoonful of the juice onto the saucer and then put it in the fridge for two or three minutes. Then, take it out of the fridge and gently push at the mixture with your finger as if you are trying to push it across the surface of the saucer. If the surface of the jelly “crinkles” as you push it, then it is ready to put into jars. If it doesn’t, simmer your mixture for another ten minutes before having another go (I’d wash that saucer and shove it back in the freezer – some days, it seems to take an age to reach the setting point, and you’ll need to do this test several times). It’s hard to describe the crinkling – the surface sort of wrinkles up like skin as you push against it – more than just a “bow wave” in front of your finger. But once you see it, you’ll be in no doubt.
• Carefully ladle your mixture into your sterile jars – perhaps wait for it to cool a little so as to avoid shattering the jars. If the mixture is very eager to set and is setting in the pan (this happened to me once when making redcurrant jelly), then just keep the pan on a low heat and keep stirring it to stop it setting until you get the last bit into a jar (you might need an assistant to do that).
• Let the jelly cool in the jars. As it does so, it will begin to set, but you need to do the next bit before it completely sets – and that is to add your flavouring. The crab apple jelly is lovely on its own, but it is even better (in my view) if you add some flavouring. My favourites are chilli and sage, but you could use almost anything – garlic, rosemary, star anise – whatever takes your fancy. I tend to stick to savoury flavours (we use the jelly with cold meats, sausages and cheese) but it could be sweet too.
• Prepare your flavouring. Wash it. In the case of chilli, chop into thin rings. For sage, individual leaves. And then push it into the nearly-but-not-quite set jelly using the back of a tea spoon. This allows you to get the flavouring spread evenly through the jelly (if you add it when the jelly is runny, it sinks to the bottom; if you wait until the jelly is totally set, it either sits at the top of the jar or you spoil the beauty (not the flavour) of the jelly by pushing your spoon in).
• Leave overnight to cool and set completely. Label.
• Admire your handywork. Hold the jar up to the bright light and survey the lovely coloured jelly with the chilli/sage/whatever sitting in it.

Now head off to the local market and flog it. Alternatively, you’ve just got yourself a bunch of cheap Christmas gifts. It keeps really well – we’ve just finished last year’s chilli jelly having stored it in a dark, cool cupboard.

I found this recipe on sausagelinks.co.uk, but their site has been up and down more often than a gigolo’s y-fronts lately, so I thought I’d reproduce it here with my comments and embellishments.

Ingredients

• 8 chicken thighs, skin removed. You could use a half and half mix of thighs and breasts, if you prefer, particularly if your spouse is squeamish about the fat content of thighs compared to breasts. Mind you, the fat content of the thighs is somewhat academic once you get to the next item on the ingredients list….
• 500g fresh, hot chorizo. Look, you need to get this right. This isn’t that horrible dried stuff that they sell thinly sliced in your local supermarket in thin plastic packets. Nor is it the long dried stuff that looks like a red meat horseshoe and has about the same consistency. This is the fresh stuff, which you will find in the fridge at your best local deli, labelled as chorizo picante or “cooking chorizo (spicy)”. And you want the spicy, not the mild, unless you are a total wuss who likes tasteless food. In London, try Brindisa. In Lewes, my good friends David and Eleanor at Say Cheese do a good version, although it is a bit fattier than the Brindisa variety. Cut the chorizo into lengths of about 25-30mm (about an inch or so).
• 2 or 3 slices of smoked bacon, rind removed and finely diced.
• half a bottle of good red wine, maybe a little more. This leaves the other half of the bottle (maybe a little less) for the chef to enjoy. Now you see why I like this recipe.
• 2 onions, finely diced.
• 2 carrots (quite large), finely diced. On the carrot and the onion, take time to make sure that they really are finely diced. Your reward will await you in the next world. If you leave them coarsely chopped, then your punishment will be upon you in this life. Trust me.
• 250g of shallots, peeled but otherwise whole. I think you can increase this quantity a little, if you like. You certainly want 250g peeled weight, not 250g before peeling. And be sure to use the round variety, not eschallion/banana shallots.
• 1 small tin of tomato purée (the supermarkets can’t seem to agree a standard on this – the tins vary between 125g and 150g).
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes (400g) or thereabouts.
• pinch each of dry thyme and oregano (or a little more each of the fresh variety, if you have it in your garden).
• paprika (if you were silly, and didn’t get good quality chorizo).
• oil for frying.

Method

• Put on an apron. What do you mean, that’s only for wusses? Well, take a look at the ingredient list again. Yes, stains from end to end. So, apron on, unless you like stains and think that they improve your rating as a real bona fide chef (to which you can add cuts and burns, I guess).
• Pre-heat the oven to about 150 Celsius. That’s gas mark somewhere-in-the-middle.
• Use a large casserole dish with a snug-fitting lid. Over a medium heat, sweat the chopped onions and carrots in a little oil for a few minutes before adding the chopped bacon. Scoot about the pan for four or five minutes until all nicely softened and perhaps a little browned. Remove from the pan and keep warm.
• Turn up the heat and replenish the oil in the pan. Brown the chicken and chorizo (and I mean brown it, don’t just show it the heat). Do this in batches so that the pan is never chock full.
• Return all the meat to the pan, along with the onion/carrot/bacon mixture. Add the half bottle of wine and simmer vigorously for a minute or two.
• Add the shallots, the herbs, the tinned tomatoes and tomato purée. Simmer for another minute or two, stirring so that it all gets mixed together.
• Taste. It shouldn’t need much seasoning, but this is where you might add your paprika.
• Bung on the tight-fitting lid and throw the whole thing into the oven. Retire to the comfort of your armchair for at least one and a half hours, preferably two hours. The longer you give it, the better.
• Whilst in your armchair, instruct your minions to prepare some good buttery mash and some green beans or some other nice green vegetable. Alternatively, get them to prepare some good quality rice.
• Check it. Does the chicken fall away from the bone easily? Are the shallots turning soft? Then it is done.

Drinking tips.

Well, you should be nicely warmed up by the time your dinner guests arrive as you will have dealt with the unpleasantness of the left-over half bottle of red. So, I recommend that you continue in a red theme, perhaps with a good tempranillo. Alternatively, try a strong flavoured Belgian beer. Or gin. Whatever is at hand, really.

This recipe is lifted almost unchanged from Delia Smith’s Summer Collection. She credits it to Kathleen Field’s recipe in the Food Aid Cookbook. I’ve added a couple of footnotes of my own and produce it here after promising to do so elsewhere.

INGREDIENTS (makes around 6lb of pickle):

900g/2lb runner beans (weighed after trimming and slicing)
700g/1½lb onion, chopped (or a mixure of onion and shallots)
850ml/1½pints malt vinegar (but see below)
40g/1½oz cornflour
1 heaped tbsp mustard powder
1 rounded tbsp turmeric
225g/8oz soft brown sugar
450g/1lb demerara sugar

You will also need suitable jars. You could use fancy jars if you wish, but we tend to re-use old coffee jars, olive jars, jam jars and, naturally, pickle jars – anything that is glass with a good airtight screw-on lid and a wide opening at the top. Your jars should be washed and sterilised by first scrubbing them in hot soapy water, then rinsing them and placing them in a cool oven to dry and be warmed through.

• Using a large saucepan, add the onions and 275ml/10 fl oz malt vinegar.
• Simmer for 20 minutes or until the onion is soft.
• Meanwhile, cook the beans in boiling salted water for 5 minutes. Drain and add to the onions.
• Mix the cornflour, mustard and turmeric with a little of the vinegar to make a smooth paste.
• Add this paste to the onion/bean mixture. BE WARNED – this stuff stains!
• Add the rest of the vinegar (but see below) and simmer for 10 minutes.
• Stir in both lots of sugar (best done in stages) and ensure it all dissolves.
• Simmer for a further 15 minutes (but see below).
• Fill your warmed jars and seal.
• Store for a month before eating. We usually manage to keep it stored for about a week before we succumb to temptation.

My experience is that you may not need the quanity of vinegar suggested, as it isn’t the only source of fluid in this recipe. Some fluid will comes from the beans – how much will depend on how much rain you’ve had and how watery your beans are. If the beans are fat and juicy, you’ll need less vinegar. I’ve not needed this quantity of vinegar when I’ve made it, perhaps 75% is enough.

I’ve also found that the last stage of simmering can be extended with very favourable results. It depends how you like your pickle, but I like it to be a little soft with the beans still nicely defined (not an amorphous gloop), but not under-done. So I tend to extend the last stage of the simmering to half an hour or more.

This pickle is good with cheese but absolutely wonderful with cold roast chicken or roast ham. Actually, it goes with more-or-less anything. It’s very moreish.