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.

Saturday's made-up cake

While I was speaking to my mum the other day she mentioned that she had been to a museum café where they had on offer a courgette, ginger and lime cake. I thought that this sounded rather delicious so asked her if she had done anything useful like get a recipe (no), or try some (no). So I had the idea of this in my mind but nothing to go from. Surely the internet would help me out. No. Plenty of recipes for courgette and ginger or courgette and lime but not the three way combination. So I would have to use my imagination.

I have a rather excellent recipe for courgette, lemon, pine-nut and sultana cake, so I decided to work to a variation of this. We had one of my brother-in-law's courgettes left plus two little yellow ones from our garden. This amounted to 220g, the recipe called for 300g. So I decided to augment the courgette with some carrot. Two small carrots made up the short fall.

This was going to be a risky cake, especially as my friend Shelley who was due to visit for the weekend is renowned as a chocolate fiend. Fortunately her boyfriend George is renowned for eating almost anything – he, along with Matt (my husband) and another friend's fiancée formed what they refer to as the gluttony club after their performance with the canapés and puddings (I seem to remember the plum and cardamom mess being a particular favourite) at a wedding last year.

I grated the vegetables along with the contents of a jar of stem ginger in syrup (syrup drained for some other purpose in the future). The original recipe requires 225g of sultanas and the jar said that the drained weight of ginger was 190g and this seemed close enough. The food processor came into its own as I wouldn't have fancied my chances manually grating all the little balls of ginger.

I didn't change the composition of the basic cake ingredients: 150g butter, 175g sugar (although I did use a combination of soft brown and caster rather than all caster), 225g plain flour, 1tsp baking powder and 3 eggs. Once these were all combined in the usual manner a stirred through my grated veggies and ginger. It looked a little bit sludgy so I added a shake of poppy seeds, in the hope of giving it a bit of bite from mouthful to mouthful.

The lime was nearly forgotten, fortunately I remembered in the nick of time and grated all the zest of one into the mix. Sometimes recipes say to use the zest of half a citrus fruit but this always seems a bit wasteful, because what would you do with the other half. I would have liked to have added some lime juice as well but the mixture was already looking quite slopping so I didn't risk it.

I poured the mixture into a large-ish (20cm I think) round spring-form cake tin and put it into the oven at 180ºC. The baking time for the original cake is given as 40-45minutes and I had no reason to think that this would deviate. It started to go golden on the top and the skewer test indicated that it was indeed done after this time.

Next to the icing. As you know, I rarely bother with this, but we had guests and I had a load of lime juice to do something with. I was not going to do anything more advanced than a glacé icing though. I have learnt from previous mistakes and added the juice to a load of icing sugar rather than the other way round. This was a good job because I had a load of lime juice left even after I'd made plenty of icing to cover the cake.

Lunch was reheat pizza and risotto after which we were all rather full so I packed up 4 pieces of cake for us to take on our afternoon walk. We were taking Shelley and George for a walk along part of the Cornish coast path, which would also (much to George's excitement) feature two ferry trips. I was a bit worried about the cake because even though the skewer test had indicated that it was cooked it looked quite wet still when I cut into it. But it was too late to do anything about it now so we'd just have to hope for the best.

The first eaters didn't seem to think there was any problem with under-cooking, and Shelley didn't seem at all disappointed in the lack of chocolate. Seconds were had for pudding on Sunday lunchtime. This is the most made up cake that I've made yet and as such I'm really pleased with it. You can't taste the courgette and carrot – which is good given that they're supposed to add texture and moisture (they did) rather than flavour. The lime and ginger balanced well, you could taste them both but neither to the detriment of the other; from time to time you got a lovely chunk of ginger. Matt took some round to one of his friend's. Thirds and fourths were had by my mum and mother-in-law – more positive feedback. And now it's all gone (this cake probably has to be eaten very soon after baking because I think it would probably go mouldy otherwise – but I guess it might freeze ok).

Unfortunately I seem to have failed to take a picture of the cake. Here's a nice view of the south-east Cornwall coast instead.

Maybe I should try making some more experimental cakes.

Wednesday's gratin

We had ended up with another high veg situation in the fridge. This included:

• Courgettes – bargain in the shop the other day.
• Mushrooms – seemed like a good idea at the time but I haven't had a chance to use them yet and they were almost getting to that horrible slimy stage.
• Spinach – I have no recollection of acquiring this. On questioning Matt said he picked this up some time ago when I was away and he didn't think there was enough green stuff in the house. On further questioning he didn't have any particular plan for it.
• Broccoli – because broccoli is really good.

We were talking about what we might have for tea whilst in the changing rooms at the swimming pool. But in terms of other useful ingredients we were somewhat depleted. When I say other useful ingredients I mean cheese – the last 60g having gone into some scones at the weekend. We did have some branded cheese triangles but these have limited culinary application. I suggested that with a bit of cheese I could do anything. Fortunately Matt had to take a trip out to the sorting office so was able to tag on a trip to the shop.

In the meantime I got on with cutting up the courgettes. I still had no idea what I was going to cook. A pasta dish would have been the obvious choice but I didn't really fancy pasta.

I put the courgettes in a large oven proof dish (I actually chopped up more courgette than needed to line the bottom of the dish – the rest will keep in the fridge for another day).

And then in a moment of inspiration decided to cook some sort of gratin. This not only provided the potential to use a lot of the vegetables but also:

• sour cream – purchased as a bargain at the same time as the mushrooms and surely not going to last in a healthy manner much longer
• bread crumbs – finally a use for the vast quantity we have in the freezer following the purchase some months ago of some extremely cut price sliced bread.

The question mark remaining over the meal now was protein. It would be quite acceptable to have some fish fingers or veggie sausages on the side but I didn't really fancy that. I decided to integrate some butter beans into the gratin. We have lots of tins of beans and pulses in our cupboards, most commonly they go in casseroles or curries and I was rather excited about using them for something different.

I narrowly avoided making a significant omission. Fortunately Matt called to ask if we needed onions. We didn't, but this did remind me to chop an onion up and put that in. I used a red onion, which I have subsequently learnt contain more quercetin than other types of onion (although how scientific this fact is I'm not sure and what the benefit of quercetin is I'm not sure). And for good measure I added some cloves of garlic too.

By the time I had layered up all the veggies (and beans and sour cream, intermittently adorned with black pepper and herbs from the new herb grinder that Matt's mum had brought us back from her holiday), Matt returned with the cheese. I grated a generous amount and mixed it up with the bread crumbs (and some more black pepper) and then poured this over the top of everything else.

I had no idea what temperature to cook this at, so I went for the default of 180ºC. I had no idea how long it would take, but long enough at least that I could hang up pretty much our whole household's worth of underwear and socks. I decided it was done after about an hour when it the top was starting to look a bit crispy (I love crispy things) and then put the broccoli on (I decided that would be better as a side than in the main dish).

I was a bit worried that it would be a bit soggy (I had poured over just a little bit of hot stock before it went in the oven) so got bowls out just in case. But it held together remarkably well. It tasted great, although I'm not sure what the sour cream added, but then I don't know what it would have been like without the sour cream. Maybe it would even have benefited from more sour cream. I had cooked vastly more than was needed to feed the two of us – probably more like enough for 6. So we both had some for lunch today (leaving it in a lunch box in a hot car is actually a rather effective (and free) re-heating method) and there's some more for picnic tomorrow.

Friday's pine nut double bake

There are several things which indicate the arrival of a warmer season. This may include the outside eating of ice-cream, blossom on trees, turning the heating off, getting my legs out, hanging washing outside. 4 of the above have happened this week. Additionally the lip balm that I have been carrying in the inside pocket of my car door for the last couple of weeks melted today resulting in an unpleasant splodge of grease landing on my lips today during my new(ish) lip care routine. As well as making me reconsider my lip care routine this unexpected heat in my car made me think about summery cakes. Still having half a net full of small courgettes in the fridge my thoughts inevitably ended up with the “dolce zucchini cake”. A tried and tested recipe but one that just doesn’t work when the weather is cold.

I finished work late and had pretty much written off the possibility of making cake tonight. It wasn’t the end of the world; I could always make cake tomorrow. The plan for tonight was pizza with Matt, my husband, and Barbara, his mum; so my Friday night desire for carbohydrate would be met. Pizza is Matt’s realm (he even has a pizza chef hat) so while he was getting on with making it I decided to make myself scarce with a trip to the swimming pool.

It’s my big swim tomorrow and I hadn’t been for over a week. I didn’t want to exhaust myself but I needed to make sure that I could still 1. float 2. kick and 3. breathe etc. in order to feel confident for the 200 lengths. The breathing one was particularly worrying me as I’ve been having some upper respiratory tract symptoms for the last few days. 40 lengths later I had proved that all the above functions were fine. I also decided that the upper respiratory tract symptoms must be hay fever (yet another sign of the seasons beginning with “s” arriving), as they completely resolved whilst my face was mostly submerged in chlorine solution and didn’t come back again until I was exposed to teenage boys’ aerosol spray in the changing rooms.

Friday night is youth night. I have discovered that this mostly means that there are lots of teenage boys trying to impress teenage girls who are clearly not interested in them but find it amusing to tease them into thinking that they might have a chance. It also means that mostly the swimming lanes are empty as they do not lend themselves to teenage flirting. But the changing rooms are full of teenagers. Mostly I find their antics amusing but the one thing I cannot stand about teenage-boy behaviour is the excessive use of unpleasant aerosols. Quite how smelly they think they are after lurking around in a swimming pool is a mystery to me. As is how the smell of their aerosols is supposed to be (as the adverts would have you believe) alluring to the girls.

I was mildly impeded in my return journey from the pool by some dogs which seemed to find me alluring. The first was odd looking and had scary eyes. I didn’t have my glasses on which made it probably seem scarier than it was. The owner responded correctly to my verbal cues (yelping, which my friend who I was on the phone to mistook for back spasms) and called her dog back. The second was an imminent attack by two big bounding black labradors. The owner responded to my cries inappropriately with the words that dog fearers hate “they’re really friendly”. That’s as maybe but they may well knock me over / maul me before our friendship was consolidated.

I used my dog handling techniques – walking on, avoiding eye contact, not aggravating owners – to make it home safely. The pizza was well off being ready and Barbara was yet to arrive. The compulsion to bake summery cake was overwhelming. As well as courgettes the cake consists of butter (or lower fat alternative), sugar, flour, baking powder, sultanas, raisins and pine nuts. It’s a recipe that I would never have considered making in my before-food processor days as it requires 300g of grated courgette and courgette is very challenging to grate. But now I can grate all that in less time than it takes someone to go to the toilet.

The cake went in once the pizza was done. As usual the pizza was mostly Matt’s work – my contribution being a little bit of vegetable chopping (with a knife this time, not the food processor). Tonight we had “Greek salad pizza”: spinach, tomato, feta, black olives & pine nuts; and vegetable & tuna pizza. Both were amazing (not a term I use lightly in the description of pizza), but the Greek Salad one was my favourite. Matt pre-toasted the pine nuts which was very effective. There’s enough leftovers for lunch tomorrow which is just what I’ll need pre-swim. (At least it will taste nice. Unlike for running, there seems to be a lack of information about how one should approach a long distance swim from a nutritional perspective. Or from any other perspective for that matter.)

The cake should have been coming out about the time we finished our pizza, but my first skewer test suggested it needed a bit longer. So we put on some early 1990’s comedy-drama set in Kent to pass the time whilst waiting. Second skewer test indicated further cooking necessary. Further plot development / cringe-worthy character interactions. Third skewer test showed the cake was getting there but still not quite ready. I was getting inpatient by now (as was everyone else) so cranked up the temperature a bit. Bit more TV but couldn’t really concentrate due to thoughts of imminent cake. Fourth skewer test: success. This was fortunate as the top wouldn’t take much more browning.

Unfortunately it needed to cool before it could be cut safely. It was getting late and Barbara had to go. Matt and I should have gone to bed (I suppose I need to make sure I’ve got plenty of rest before my sporting endeavours and Matt’s supporting role) but now the cake was there it was just too tempting not to stay up so we could try some. So we let it cool just a little bit more before Matt sliced it. And it was worth staying up for. And given the lack of any other nutritional advice I can’t think of many better sources of energy for my swim tomorrow; but I will deliver a slice to Barbara first.

Monday's chilli incident

Again, I find myself in the position of having a surfeit of courgettes. They looked so nice in their little net the other day and I am determined to use them while they are relatively nice, before they get to that pre-slime stage.

It being Monday I had to do something quick. This is because Monday night is band night. And given that we only have pathetically tiny baking potatoes (based on my knowledge of potato farming this is probably because of sub-optimal potato growing conditions recently), and that courgette doesn’t really go with baked potato anyway it would be a pasta evening.

A pasta dish would also be a good opportunity to use up some feta cheese, which has been open in the fridge since a friend wanted it on a crumpet a few weeks ago. Matt, my husband, deemed that this was still fit for human consumption.

So the pasta sauce would consist of red onion (x 2, sliced), courgette (x 4 small, “ribboned” with the peeler), chilli (tiny bit, chopped up really small), thyme (few sprigs, from the garden, still uncommonly exciting), feta (about half a block, chopped in dice sized bits), low fat soft cheese (tablespoon or so), sundried tomatoes (x 8, quartered) and black pepper (few grinds). The most difficult part was deciding what pasta to use; the options being twists, tubes or spaghetti. I went for the twists, purely on the basis that there was about the right quantity for dinner for two, which would have the consequence of freeing up a plastic canister for some pasta bows (my favourite pasta shape).

It took longer than planned to make. Mainly because I wanted to make sure that the onions were nice and soft before adding the rest of the sauce ingredients. I would not be making it to band on time and so was really hoping that my improvised cooking delay would be worth it. From somewhere I had the inspiration to add a few pine nuts just as the sauce was nearly finished. I would have grated over some parmesan before eating if we had some. But we didn’t, and low fat cheddar seemed somehow unfitting.

Even if I do say so myself it was one of the best pasta dishes I have had in ages. Based on the “mmm” sounds, Matt agreed. I was especially pleased because I seemed to have got the chilli just right for my husband’s delicate palate. It gave it a nice warmth, but didn’t make his mouth hurt or my nose run. And the pine nuts were a good inspiration, giving it just a little bit of crunch in random mouthfuls.

It was gone 8 by the time we had finished and I umm-ed and ahh-ed about whether to go to band as I was feeling very tired. But I decided to venture out (mainly to leave Matt in peace with his skirting boards).

It was a particularly comical rehearsal. I do my best to keep “smut” out of these blogs but these sound bites from our fabulous conductor just have to be shared: “Does anyone have the horn?” and “You’ve really got to feel each other”. It would have probably gone un-noticed (not the most innuendo loving room of people you could get) but for the clarinettist I was sat next to who pointed these out to me and had a little chuckle. And for some reason the mood I was in I descended into hysterics.

Having composed myself the rehearsal proceeded uneventfully for a while. And then I got a little itch in my eye, or maybe my eyes were feeling tired. Either way I gave my eyes a little rub. I had clearly not removed all traces of chilli from my fingers. I think I let out a little yelp. The chilli in the eye thing is one of those things that you always hear about but can’t really believe ever happens, or at least not to you. Well it does. And it really stings. It is one of the most sting-y things I have ever experienced.

This called for a quick dash out to the toilets but I didn’t really know what to do. My instinct would be to bathe my eye in water but I couldn’t stop thinking about when you eat a too spicy curry and water makes it worse but beer or milk makes it better. Being in the toilets of a church I had neither beer nor milk available to me. The stinging was clearly not going to go away on its own. This called for a quick call to my mum. Although she was clearly inexperienced in first aid for chilli related eye injuries she was calm in her advice to put cold water on it and I felt bolstered to follow this course of action. It helped. So much so that I was able to go back and join in the remainder of the band rehearsal unimpeded (apart from my lack of skill at high notes – there’s a reason I play 3^rd clarinet).

I think I might cook the rest of the courgettes without chilli. 

Tuesday's courgette emergency

I managed to pop home for lunch today and was reminded of the remaining almost festering courgettes. I’m going out for dinner at a local garden centre with Barbara, my mother-in-law, tomorrow and there was no way that these would last two more days. So tonight’s tea would have to use them up.

The courgette is not an inspiring vegetable. The best thing I have ever done with it is an amazing cake with pine nuts, sultanas and lemon. But that requires lovely, sweet, small courgettes. It might feature in the summer, maybe with home-grown courgettes. I once made some courgette / cocoa muffins which I thought were quite nice but my camping companions did not seem to agree, although they were too polite to say so in so many words.

By the time I got home from work I was afflicted by the unfortunate trio of tiredness, hunger and coldness (particularly my feet). I didn’t know which to address first. As Matt, my husband, was due to go out for some stag-do planning the pressure was on for eating so I decided to get straight on with preparing something to feed us. Having, predictably, failed to find any inspiration for the courgettes I reverted back to one of our regular teas. Roasted vegetables. Along with the two courgettes this also involved half a butternut squash, half a sweet potato, a green pepper (also often at a loss at what to do with these but they also put them in those bargain pepper multipacks), an onion, some tomatoes (the ones that had previously been destined for toasted sandwiches) and 3 big mushrooms that were well past their best. There should have been 4 big mushrooms but one of them was irredeemable.

Using this many vegetables produced lots of scraps that would be ideal for our new Wormery. Unfortunately we haven’t got the worms yet. So we’re storing up the scraps in bags / boxes in the kitchen in keen anticipation of their arrival. There is clearly a limit to how long this scrap build up can continue. This limit will probably be tomorrow unless the previously mentioned garden centre is able to supply some worms.

To go with the vegetables I did one of my favourites: camping couscous. First made for me by my mum on a campsite in Devon, this basically consists of couscous and tinned tomatoes. Over the last few years I have made lots of different variations on the theme. Tonight’s included onion, red pepper (left over from the dumplings), and celery.

Tonight’s tea really called for cheese. Having not featured significantly in our diet since the original slack lasagne (although frequently as a minor to moderate addition) I felt it acceptable to have some tonight. The choice was feta, soft goat’s cheese, cheddar or halloumi. Since we had four block of halloumi in the fridge I opted for this (plus it bakes fantastically with the veggies). The large supply of halloumi is not explained by it being either mine or Matt’s favourite cheese (mine is a lovely squidgy brie-like thing called Vignotte, Matt’s a strong cheddar) but by our difficulty last summer in obtaining any on barbeque days. So Matt’s solution is to stock pile it (it has a very long shelf life) so that it won’t matter if the shops sell out on barbeque days this summer (let’s hope there are plenty).

Due to Matt’s early start tomorrow (and I think that I’m supposed to be taking him to the train station) he rescheduled the stag-do planning (which also means he can get a haircut at the same time), so there was plenty of time to allow the veg to cook. I like it when they start to burn a bit.

Despite the fact that I probably let mine cool down a bit too much before eating (distracted booking a bargain holiday) it was delicious.

And now I can deal with my tiredness and coldness in one go: with bed and a hot-water bottle.