Thursday's risotto

In the lead up to dinner today I had consumed only a small apple and a few dried apricots in terms of fruit and veg, so I was feeling a bit low on vitamins. I needed to cook something that would go a decent way to making up this deficit. We were also both quite hungry so needed to fill up on some carbohydrates too. Pasta and potato have already featured heavily this week and I didn't fancy them again. I was going to take a risk and go for rice. I was going to mediate the risk by making risotto. I rarely have success with rice on its own, but usually in a risotto it turns out better.

Matt had done the shopping last week so we had a large butternut squash. I like butternut squash but am yet to find a great range of good applications for it, but risotto is a great application for it. After spending years honing my butternut squash handling skills I think that I have finally decided that the best way is to stick it in a hot oven for a while before you want to do anything with it. This is superior to trying to:

1) Cut it up whilst raw – butternut squash is surely one of the hardest of all vegetables and its girth makes this supremely difficulty and leaves you in constant fear of losing one or more fingers

2) Peel it – the under-skin layer of the butternut squash is remarkably slippery and again the vegetable's girth makes this task both challenging and hazardous (a butternut squash inadvertently propelled at the foot is quite painful).

So the squash went in the oven. I couldn't tell you how long for exactly, but long enough for me to have a shower and take a walk around the local shops to gather some celery (and ready salted crisps). The butternut squash is probably manageable when it's looking a bit golden and the skin has started to blister up. Taking a walk to the shops is not really a very slack thing to do but a risotto without celery is unlikely to be as pleasurable as one with. Plus it was a nice evening for a stroll.

One of the tricks I have found with risotto is to use a big pan. Into my big pan (where I had already heated a little bit of olive oil) went a chopped red onion and two chopped sticks of my newly gathered celery. They need to cook until quite soft. Then I added some mushrooms. I would have used the whole pack but wanted to save a few for the pizza we have planned for tomorrow. Those few are now considerably less as Matt decided that he wanted to eat a few raw – so it might be a less mushroomy pizza.

While that was all cooking I returned to my butternut squash. It was still pretty hot, but easy enough to remove the skin and then chop. I only used half the squash as I didn't want to overdo it comparison to the other ingredients – mainly I was concerned about overbearing the mushrooms. My chopped squash went into the pan too. The veggies sizzled for a while I got the washing in (this is a really got recipe for when you've got other things to do at the same time) and then I added some risotto rice. The amount of rice can be really flexible depending on the rice / vegetable ratio that you're after, I like to aim for 50:50 but it's difficult to tell because of the way the rice swells once you've added the water. I think that it's good to cook the rice for a couple of minutes before adding the water. I add water from a boiled kettle (I'm sure sometimes it's recommended that you use cold water but that seems too time consuming for me – plus you can make a cup of tea at the same time if you boil the kettle), enough to just about cover the contents of the pan. And at the same time I put in a good dollop of vegetable stock powder (I'm coming to the end of the kilo that I brought at about this time last year), a couple of bay leaves from the garden and lots of grinds of black pepper.

I can never remember whether you're supposed to stir risotto constantly or not at all. Therefore I go for somewhere in the middle and stir it occasionally. The method I use to tell when it's ready is when most of the water has disappeared (either through evaporation or absorption) and it looks kind of gooey, but not so dry that any of it starts to crisp up. At this point I added a bit of crème fraiche – it helps to add both a bit of creaminess and a bit of sharpness. You can always add more crème fraiche later but I put some in now so that it doesn't have too much of a cooling effect.

Normally I would finish a risotto off with a bit of grated parmesan for a good salty kick. But we don't have any parmesan in the fridge at the moment (we're particularly depleted on the cheese front at the moment, just some cheddar, cream cheese and mozzarella) so instead I decided to reconstitute some dehydrated sun dried tomatoes (another use for some kettle boiled water). Here's a slack tip: once the tomatoes are rehydrated and drained, leave them in the bowl and chop with sharp scissors, rather than faffing around with a chopping board and a knife. And then I just sprinkled them on top of our portions.

It was a really tasty way of topping up on our carbohydrates and vitamins. So tasty in fact that we both had seconds. And there's still enough for tomorrow's lunch – as long as we're careful with the old rice reheating thing.

As for the leftover butternut squash, I think we might have some soup coming along.

Sunday's Thai experiment

The mange tout peas are proving to be one of my most productive crops. Very nice straight off the plant, or stir fry would be my usual default cook but I wanted to try something different.

Somehow I got it in my head that I would do a Thai curry. I have never done a Thai curry before and to be quite honest I don't really know how it differs from a non-Thai curry, except that I think it should have lemongrass in it. So I picked up some lemongrass at the supermarket the other day, as well as some spring onions which I thought would be appropriate, and hoped that I be able to cobble the rest of the ingredients together from the fridge/freezer/cupboards.

I thought that it would be a good idea at least get some sort of recipe to work to. I found one about how to make a Thai curry paste but had barely any of the components, and another for Thai vegetables with coconut milk. As it was I basically ended up making something up. We are trying to clear a bit of space in the freezer for more ice-cream so I decided to use up some of the white fish that we have stored away from various bargain purchases. Matt kindly helped out by defrosting.

The curry also had in it (in addition to the mange tout, lemongrass, fish and spring onions):

• Groundnut oil – in preference to olive oil, I thought it would be more authentically Thai (or at least more Thai than olives)
• Red pepper – I sliced this thinly and put it in to fry off before anything else. Red pepper never seems to cook enough so I wanted to give it a fighting chance
• Celery – the recipe had this in. I wouldn't usually put it in curry but didn't see that it could do too much harm
• Chilli – I put a whole one in (chopped) and just had to hope that this wouldn't make it too hot. Following my most recent chilli incident I am being most wary of touching my eyes / lips etc
• Cumin – Matt's favourite spice
• Ginger – my favourite spice
• Sweet potato – grated. The recipe suggested one and a half cups
  
  of grated pumpkin. I didn't have any pumpkin but was intrigued by this kind of thing so used a sweet potato instead. I don't like using “cups” as a measurement because it is not specific as to what size cup it should be or how densely packed the ingredient should be in it. So I used one medium sweet potato. It looked just like grated carrot and I am contemplating its possible role in a cake.
• Coconut milk, lime juice and vegetable stock – added as it was all looking rather dry.
• Broccoli – probably not very Thai but I love it. I put this in right towards the end so it steamed in all the vapour.

Due to my inability to reliably cook rice I would have been quite happy to eat the curry without any accompanying carbohydrate, but Matt volunteered to do some rice for us. As usual his rice came out perfectly. When I try to replicate his method I still fail.

We were a bit unsure as to how edible this would be – Matt suggested that it would be somewhere on the spectrum between average and excellent (it did smell good). I had barely followed any recipe and all the quantities were guesstimated. With the lemongrass I had used an ingredient that has never before graced my kitchen shelves, I sliced it up a little bit and crushed it a little bit before putting it in the pan; we decided that we wouldn't eat it and pulled the little woody bits out as we went along. But now I'm kind of curious to know what it would have tasted like.

The verdict on the whole thing was that it was towards the excellent end of the spectrum, but that it could have taken a little more spicing. Matt may regret saying that as next time I'll put two chillies in.

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.