Saturday's curry

You might have noticed that it's been a bit quiet on the slack lasagne front recently. That's for two reasons:

1. We've been on holiday – to France. We ate out a lot, and self constructed meals consisted mainly of bread and cheese and a bit of salad.

2. Other than being on holiday I've been eating a lot of jacket potatoes. These have mostly been consumed with cottage cheese, beans and cheese, or tinned sardines; as you can appreciate there's little blog material there.

On return from our holiday we ordered a big top-up from an online retailer. This was mainly successful but resulted in an extreme over supply of mushrooms. I had selected two packs of the cheapest own brand fresh mushrooms and one pack of dried mushrooms. The delivery driver informed me that the mushrooms had been substituted with premium own brand fresh mushrooms and even showed me what I was now getting. I was initially delighted as this appeared to be a £1 bonus in the mushroom stakes for us. However on further unpacking it transpired that we had been sent the premium fresh mushrooms instead of the dried mushrooms and I was now in possession of 4 punnets of fresh mushrooms.

Now I like mushrooms (and apparently they are very nutritious), but I was going to have my work cut out to use all these up before they turned into a horrible slimy mess. The first punnet (cheap ones) went into a sausage casserole. I hadn't planned to make a sausage casserole because I was catering for a visiting German friend. She's not a typical German so I thought that she might not want sausages. But she did (they were veggie sausages though which I think might be a blasphemy to many Germans), and this was a great use of 350g mushrooms. The next punnet (posh ones) were the main feature of a risotto. Half of the next punnet (posh ones) went onto a pizza (courtesy of Matt, my husband). Which left us with half a punnet of posh mushrooms and a whole punnet of cheap ones. Having eaten mushrooms for 4 days consecutively I wasn't particularly fancying more, but they had to be used or I would risk the slimy mess.

The solution would be curry. I love mushrooms in a curry. The usual would be mushroom,sweet potato and chickpea but I was going to try something slightly different: mushroom, sweet potato and vegetarian “chicken style” pieces. (I don't usually go for meat replacement options much (apart from the mince which I think is fab) but had a few lapses into carnivorism in France (they can just about cater for vegetarians these days but not yet pregnant vegetarians) and since then have found myself fancying that sort of “meaty” taste.)

As usual I started by sweating off a couple of onions (although I heard on the TV that they don't always use onions in India because it displeases the Gods). Usually one onion might do but one of these onions was slightly old and had a slight pickled aroma about it until I peeled off a good few layers and the other had that weird thing where you get a second layer of onion skin a few layers in. At the same time I also added a good lot of fresh ginger that I had finely chopped (maybe about an inch off the piece of ginger root) and a tablespoon of special curry powder. Sometimes I make up my own spice mixture but we have recently replenished with a fantastic product called “Magic Mix”. This is a big pot of a blend of spices which we discovered at a market in Cornwall a few years ago, where we had a taster and met the lady who runs the company. Since then it's become almost as much of a staple beside our hob as a pot of vegetable stock powder. It has no chilli or ginger in it so you add those (and anything else you fancy) to taste.

Next I added chopped sweet potato. Sometimes I chop it big but today I chopped it small. That cooked for as long as it took me to prepare the mushrooms. The remainder of the posh punnet (they were already going slimy) and half of a cheap punnet (still in perfect nick – and they have the same expiry as the posh ones). I added them to the pan along with the “chicken style” pieces. I was a bit concerned as I could smell burning but on closer inspection this turned out to be some grime on the hob ring rather than anything bad happening in my cooking. Once that had cooked down a bit (usually signified by juice release from the mushrooms) I would usually add a tin or two of chopped tomatoes. Today this would be impossible because the pan was already at capacity. So I just added enough boiling water to cover the contents – essential to ensure adequate cooking of the potato – along with a spoonful of branded yeast extract and then left it on a low heat while I got on with other things.

The problem with adding water is that it ended up a bit too liquidy so after a while (once the potato seemed soft) I chucked in a handful of lentils, mainly for the purpose of thickening but with the added benefit of protein and fibre, and left it on a low heat again. Unfortunately I forgot to turn the hob off when we went out for a swim, we could take a gamble and leave it but this would risk a horrible mush on our return. Fortunately Matt was in a chivalrous mood and dropped me off at the pool while he headed back to rescue the dinner. (He joined me about after about a quarter of an hour and as I'm a bit slow at the moment we did the same number of lengths.)

Upon our return it was already time to think about eating (it's the season for my favourite TV dancing programme so I didn't want to be faffing about in the kitchen while that was on). To me it didn't look like we had much rice left (Matt was cooking the rice) so I got it in my head that we should have something else to go with the curry. I had a quick look at recipes for typical “Indian” breads and decided that chapatis were significantly more achievable than naan in the available time. Even then it would be cutting it fine and I would have to take some short cuts, this was risky as I had never made chapatis before but at least I had nothing to compare them against.

So I mixed 115g wholemeal plain flour with 90ml lukewarm water (in which I dissolved a pinch of salt) and then kneaded. I skipped the “resting” phase and went straight to the forming phase – rolling out to 4 very thin discs (I rolled some cumin seeds into two of them). Then I cooked them in a hot frying pan (no oil required) until they started to get bubbles in them.

It was all ready in the nick of time (and it was a treat of Saturday night dancing). The curry itself was rich and spicy, possibly better for the absence of tomatoes. In the absence of chilli I “hotted” mine up with some lime pickle and we both enjoyed some mango chutney and some of our brother-in-law's delicious home made runner bean chutney. The chapatis were a great success – I can't believe I've never made them before.

Thursday's roast

A small thing made this dinner blogworthy. I will come to that small thing later.

We'd enjoyed fish and chips with my mother-in-law on Wednesday night and I was due out for a hen night meal on Friday so Thursday needed to be a healthy day. The most healthy thing would probably have been a salad, but I didn't fancy that. What I fancied was something that would use up my bargain aubergine that was looking like it wouldn't last much longer. And I didn't fancy another moussaka. So what I decided on was roasted vegetables with lentils. Augmented with some cheese, thus making a highly healthy dinner slightly less healthy, but with the added bonus of cheesy tastiness and calcium.

I selected the vegetables while heating a little olive oil in a big dish in the oven. As well as the aubergine, there was a golden courgette from our garden (it is supposed to be golden) and I decided to use a red pepper too. I could have added some carrot and potato but didn't want to break the theme (which I suppose was loosely Mediterranean). In the time it took to chop all the vegetables the oven had reached temperature (hottish) and so the roasting process started.

Many of my friends frown at me when I extol the tastiness of lentils, but they really can be delicious. Tonight I would be doing some simple braised lentils. I started off by gently “sweating” (sorry, horrible word) an onion, a couple of sticks of celery and a couple of carrots (all chopped fairly small). I didn't measure the lentils, probably about 100g (but I'm not good at estimating weight), enough to come up about half way in a normal size sieve. The lentils go in the sieve to be rinsed thoroughly. I once had a bit of grit in my lentils so at least by rinsing them the risk is reduced to clean grit. The lentils then go in the pan with the onion, celery and carrot and I added enough water (from a boiled kettle) to just cover everything. As is my preference I added some yeast extract (from a squeezy pot that Matt bought – here is not the right forum to go into the pros and cons of yeast extract in squeezy pots versus the traditional jar) and a spoonful of vegetable stock powder. Then all I did was to leave it to simmer on the hob and hope that it would be ready at the same time as the roasted vegetables.

The vegetables looked to be coming on nicely, but needed some seasoning. (Watch out, the small thing is coming up soon.) I added salt and pepper and sent Matt out to the garden to choose some herbs. He chose some oregano (at least I think it is oregano, it might be marjoram, but oregano and marjoram might actually be the same thing). Matt duly washed the herb (we have some unreliable neighbourhood cats) and threw it in on top of the vegetables in the oven.

This was all going on in the background while I topped and tailed some green beans that my mum had sent us home with from her garden. I was disturbed from my top and tailing reverie by a cry of “Quick get some tongs!”. It transpired that Matt's herb washing had failed to dislodge (or even identify the presence of) a caterpillar. Being the animal lover that he is Matt was frantic to save said creature. I extracted the dish from the oven, Matt found the tongs and extracted the caterpillar from the dish. Being the animal lover that he is that was not sufficient for Matt so while I returned to my beans he took the caterpillar to the park.

I wanted tomato to feature somewhere in this dinner – it would probably be ok added to either the lentils or the oven vegetables. If I only had tinned tomatoes it would have been a no brainer to add these to the lentil pan, but I had some lovely cherry tomatoes and decided that I'd put a few of these (minus caterpillars) in the oven. So it would be a kind of oven roasted ratatouille.

Everything was sort of looking ready so I took a chance and put the green beans in to cook. I also added a splash of balsamic vinegar to the lentils, it adds just a little sharpness otherwise they can be very rich. All that was left for me to do was to chop the feta (almost any strong / salty cheese would probably be fine but we had two blocks of feta for some reason) and beckon Matt to serve it all up (I am useless at serving food).

As usual Matt made a beautiful job of serving the food, and as usual this combination tasted delicious. There was no trace of caterpillar, which was a good job for a vegetarian dinner.

Tuesday's mushroom rejuvenation

I was thwarted in my intention to come home for lunch today due to never predicted but often occurrent Tuesday busy-ness. So lunch was a sugary drink from my favourite bargain supermarket and a just-about-enjoyable cheese scone from a local chain bakery.

So my planned lunch was to become dinner. Which in itself was a modification of Sunday’s dinner. Which had been substantially modified yesterday morning, further modified (unsuccessfully in my opinion) by Matt, my husband, yesterday evening and served up in its final guise tonight, after Matt had made another (successful this time) modification.

Sunday’s dinner was a mushroom stew with dumplings. We have a large store of  vegetable suet due to a misadventure a couple of months ago. I can’t think of much to do with suet except for dumplings and Christmas pudding. I have investigated the Christmas pudding option but it seems that I’m 6 months too early. That also gives me 6 months to get some breadcrumbs.

Normally I would put celery in the stew but our weekend visitor, Glen, makes no secret of his dislike of celery so it consisted of mushrooms, onion, carrot, garlic, thyme from the garden (still disproportionately exciting) and stock. And more mushrooms. To make it really mushroomy you use some normal mushrooms and some of those preserved mushrooms. The dumplings were a tiny bit mustardy (I was careful with the mustard powder but will be more liberal next time). The stew was served with veggie sausages and lots of brocolli (Glen likes brocolli almost as much as I do), which soaked up the juices in a most delightful way (to paraphrase a song from one of my favourite Disney® films).

The first modification was the addition of a load of (green) lentils to the stew leftovers (all the dumplings had been eaten), all simmered up until they were soft (approximately the time it takes to do a load of non-dishwashable washing up and then all blended up. This did not look very nice, but did smell very nice. I was looking forward to having some later in the day.

Matt offered to get the dinner ready – the modification being the addition of enough hot water to turn the mixture from mush to soup and then salt / peppering it. Unfortunately he was perhaps too liberal with the salt for my liking (and I am a bit of a salt fiend). Fortunately he had only modified a enough for a bowl each (about a quarter of the mush). So after a few mouthfuls mine went back in with the rest of the mush.

I now had 30 minutes to get dressed, put on some make-up, tweak my instant fake tan (an impulse buy from earlier in the day – I do not usually “do” fake tan but was pleasantly surprised and it even smelled quite nice) and get my stuff ready to go out to a wedding reception. A wedding reception is a strange thing to go out to on a Monday night, but it was one of the most enjoyable Monday nights I’ve spent in a long while. There was no capacity for further soup preparation prior to the anticipated arrival of our lift. Instead I jammed up a scone (leftover from Sunday afternoon’s tearoom visit) and managed to eat this in the back of my friend’s car with minimal (although not absent) crumb-age.

Tonight Matt did the same modification but this time without the salt. I added my own. As I said I’m quite a salt fiend so I added quite a lot but it still tasted of delicious mushrooms rather than the sea, so I dread to think how much went into last night’s bowl.

A bowl of soup seemed somehow insufficient following the day’s busy-ness. So I put some peppers in the oven to roast up while we were slurping with some vague idea that I’d put them into a wrap (a lot of wraps have somehow appeared in the bread bin).  The idea matured while I slurped and I was aiming to assemble something featuring tomatoes, feta and sweetcorn as well as the peppers (basically all the things that needed using up). I was aiming to assemble them into something resembling a quesedilla. I put all the fillings between two wraps and pan fried in the griddle pan (a rare outing for the griddle pan and it may have actually been more of a toasting since I didn’t actually put any oil in the pan).

The serious flaw here was that quesedillas generally rely on being held together with lots of stringy cheese, versus tonight’s creation which was relatively cheese light. And feta is not renowned for its adhesive properties. So after a few accidents with bits of filling falling out whilst turning the creation (fortunately I had fairly recently cleaned the hob so they could be safely reinserted) it really ended up being more like a toasted sandwich with really thin bread. I cut it into triangles. I’m sure serving food in triangles makes it taste better but it was good whatever. And because we had to use knives and forks to eat it (due to the risk of filling loss) it felt more like a meal than a sandwich.

Monday's medley of soup

After a leisurely start to the day it was all systems go to equip the garden. The leisurely start included reading an old book – I’m sure I’m enjoying it more because it smells old.

The equipping of the garden first involved removal of junk from the boot of my car at the dump. This included:

1. An enormous and cute, but slightly mouldy teddy bear, that had been freed from our loft by my cousin, Alastair, in January. It had been sat around in a black sack in various locations since as I had been intending to fettle it up with a trip to the launderette but finally thought better of it.
2. A whole load of VHS tapes which I had discovered whilst spring re-arranging (more enjoyable than spring cleaning) yesterday. Both mine and Matt’s and none of them viewed in at least the last 7 years.
3. My condemned sandwich toaster.

Items 1 and 2 disposed of according to plan. Item 3 disposed of causing Matt great hilarity. Today I was fulfilling the role of dumping whilst Matt watched from the car. This is often beneficial as the men at the dump are generally quite keen to help ladies with their dumping. I was duly assisted with items 1 and 2 but today the electrical waste was unmanned.

Taking health and safety seriously I called out before throwing the sandwich toaster into the skip to check that there was no-one inside it. There was no response so I went ahead with the launch of the sandwich toaster. Unfortunately I didn’t launch with quite enough force and the sandwich toaster rebounded from the side of skip, plug flailing and narrowly avoiding my head. It was whilst I was picking up the bits that Matt wound down the car window and told me, between fits of laughter, to walk round the other side of the skip. Where the side was down and I could just place in the sandwich toaster with no risk of head injury.

A successful trip to the garden centre ensued and 8 terracotta, mosaic encrusted pots later we began the return journey. Matt had seat belted the larger pots into the back seats with the rest in the boot so there was limited capacity for shopping from a “luxury” supermarket. One of the best things about said luxury supermarket is that when they reduce things they do really good reductions. Today’s best bargain was watercress and I picked up 4 packets. I also picked up a packet of reduced salad which when put together with some reduced beetroot, the remaining salmon & prawn leftovers and a homemade dressing made a very nice lunch.

After lunch it was back out to another garden centre where we successfully equipped ourselves with garden tables (that sort of match the pots) and a hose. And what appears to me to be an extravagant hose attachment but Matt assures me that we will not regret it.

Once home I needed to turn the watercress into soup while it was still nice. I think that potato is the traditional thickening to go with this but I prefer lentils to add some protein.

Realising that we’d had watercress in the lunchtime salad I thought that I should mix up the day’s flavours, I decided to make another sort of soup too. I got a leek and potato one on the go. 

Then I thought: why stop at two? We had eaten the last portion of frozen soup yesterday (the parsnip and apple one) so there was scope for restocking.

One of my other luxury supermarket bargains was a pot of sun ripened tomatoes and I thought I’d try these with some slightly wrinkling peppers. Having started to heat some olive oil to sauté an onion I noticed that there was quite a bit of oil in the tomato pot and not wanting to waste this I got out another pan and heated that instead.

So now I had a spare pan with olive oil and the only logical thing was to use this to make another soup. I had used up nearly all of the fresh vegetables in the house but there were still some carrots. And I had a little knobble of ginger so decided to try carrot and ginger. To improve the flavour I oven roasted the carrots before adding to the onion and ginger. Whilst the carrots were roasting and I was pondering this creation I felt inspired to add orange juice. This would be the perfect opportunity to use up the oranges and satsumas etc that had been sat, unloved, for a good long while (some I fear since 2012) in the fruit bowl. This is because I love nice citrus and am often tempted to buy. But if I buy a pack, eat one and it’s disappointing then it puts me off the rest. But I hate wasting food so the citrus stay there. (If it’s nice the whole lot may well get devoured in one sitting.) Matt can usually be counted on to help consume food but he isn’t keen on oranges due to the peeling issue (not that I’ve ever perceived that as a particular issue). So I was pleased to be able to squeeze some semi-decent juice out of my languishing fruits, which I added with some stock and red lentils to the other ingredients.

The tomatoey-peppery soup was looking rather insubstantial so I added a tin of tomatoes to that. And some red lentils.

Once all the soups were blended up (separately) we faced the dilemma of which to eat tonight. Matt went for the watercress (with a dollop of crème fraiche) – I am told it was scrumptious. I went for the carrot / ginger / orange. It too was scrumptious. I think that I’ll call it velvet carrot soup as the lentils gave it a gorgeous texture (although I did miss a few bits of carrot in the blending process).

Now I’ve just got to find enough containers to freeze it all. And replenish the lentils. 

Thursday's lovely lentils

Bank holidays are all very well but that does mean that lots of us have to get 5 days’ work done in 4. Plus with sickness and holiday in our team it’s been a really hectic week. When I’m feeling busy one of the things that drops off is proper shopping. With hindsight it would have been a good idea to organise Mr Big Supermarket to deliver us a top up but as it was the kitchen was fairly poorly stocked. Tonight’s tea was therefore going to have to feature mainly store cupboard ingredients.

A while ago I’d made a rather tasty rice and lentil dish and tonight seemed a good time to revive this. It’s a very simple recipe. The main drawback is that it requires 3 pans: 2 more than I would like but since we got a dishwasher this bothers me less. It also requires some multi-tasking.

I usually like to make excess portions of dinners; either for the next day or to freeze for emergency reheat meals. But I’m always worried about rice since everybody seems to think that it’ll give you food poisoning if reheated. And I am nervous about rice as it is. So for a change I was planning to stick fairly closely to a recipe, but since my recipe was for 4 people I would need to take care that I remembered to divide everything by 2.

Pan 1:

The rice is cooked up with onion and spices. And really after I’d thinly sliced my onion that was the most taxing part of the preparation out of the way. Once the onion is cooked off nicely you’re supposed to add 1 ½ tsp of ground cinnamon and 1 ½ tsp of ground nutmeg (halved on this occasion). But I have some aging cinnamon sticks (a random purchase from the 2011 Devon County Show) so used a couple of those instead. And rather than getting all my ingredients ready before I started I went to add the nutmeg only to find it wasn’t with the rest of the spices. I am yet to find my perfect spice rack so in the meantime all the spices etc are stored in a shoebox. After enlisting the help of my husband, Matt, who always knows where everything is, the nutmeg was located next to the popcorn (at the opposite end of the kitchen to the spices). Unwilling to measure this I just grated until it looked and smelt about right. Then you add the rice. I used a mixture of basmati, wild and some sort of red rice (all our dried ingredients like this are in plastic canisters so the packet that would tell me exactly what it was was long gone). And then the stock / water. Cue narrow avoidance of adding too much fluid by the omission of dividing the original recipe’s volume by 2 – luckily I realised before it had gone in. And then you just cook it until all the water is absorbed.

Pan 2:

Boil some green (puy) lentils until cooked. (I think that a combination of red and green lentils would probably work ok.) Drain the lentils.

Pan 3:

Make a tomato sauce. I suppose that you’re supposed to use fresh tomatoes but I’m sure that tinned are nearly as good. Today’s sauce also contained a small pepper (going a bit wrinkly), some chilli flakes, a teaspoon of yeast extract (it makes loads of things taste brilliant), some tomato puree and some pomegranate molasses. The pomegranate molasses is even older than the cinnamon sticks, 250ml having been purchased for a specific recipe in December 2008 that required 1 ½ tbsp (for the scientific amongst you I’m sorry about my mixing of units). We are still looking out for opportunities to use it and this was just one of those occasions. Oh, and some black pepper. Today I proved that our new “artistic” pepper mill (long story) is resilient as well artistic; the kitchen floor may have been covered in peppercorns but the peppermill was unscathed after I managed to drop it from a height of about 3 feet (just to mix up the units even more). Boil it all up and keep warm.

To serve you mix the lentils into the rice pan. I needed to reheat a bit (the lentils not the rice obviously bearing in mind my food poisoning concerns) due to partial multi-tasking failure. The tomato sauce goes on the side. The recipe also says to serve with a cucumber and yoghurt salad. I had neither of these but did have an out-of-date pot of tzatziki which I had acquired during a fleeting trip to the shop one lunchtime. It didn’t taste out-of-date and filled the role very nicely.

I think that Matt found the tomato sauce a bit spicy (he does have quite a delicate palate!) but overall a success, plenty of carbohydrate and protein fuel for the long swim I have planned tomorrow. And at least I’ll know where the nutmeg is next time I want it in a hurry.