Tuesday's couscous gratin

Having been away for the weekend, and not yet having had the opportunity to go shopping, the food storage areas were looking rather sparse. Matt, my husband, had picked up a few essentials for Monday's pizza (mushrooms) and we had acquired a large number of leeks and apples, plus a couple of enormous wedges of pumpkin from various friends and relations but other than that the range was slightly limited. On further inspection I found a butternut squash that I had bought a few weeks previously, some aged and wrinkly cherry tomatoes and some aged and wrinkly peppers (partially deployed on Monday's pizza).

Mum, who was staying (along with dad), for a few days suggested roasted veggies with halloumi cheese (Matt ensures that we always have halloumi in the fridge since a barbeque incident a few years ago when the shops were all sold out) but this seemed a bit of a cop out that I serve to them frequently. I decided that the squash and the leeks would form the basis of the dinner since we had the most significant quantity of these. I still wasn't sure exactly what I was going to cook, we might be looking at risotto or something baked in the oven, but started off by putting the butternut squash (whole) in to pre-roast. This bought me some time, during which I decided the oven option would be preferable and I imagined up what I wanted to created. This was some sort of gratin, but rather than using breadcrumbs I would make a big couscous topping (that is a big topping based on couscous, rather than a topping made with big couscous – which we discovered does exist!).

I got one of the giant leeks and cleansed and chopped this (the squash was still roasting). Once I deemed that the squash had had enough time (skin going a bit black and wrinkly) I extracted it from the oven and, once it had cooled sufficiently to allow handling, peeled and chopped this too. In actual fact I only peeled and chopped half of it – I'm always amazed at just how far an apparently moderate butternut squash will go. I arranged the chopped veggies in a large oven proof dish. It was looking slightly dull and since I had those half used wrinkly peppers I sliced those thinly and scattered those over. Not wanting to risk under cooked veggies I put it all back in a hottish oven to roast a bit more before adding the topping.

 

It struck me that the whole thing was at risk of being rather low in protein, mum suggested adding sweetcorn (which I don't really think is a high protein food), but I decided on butter beans and tipped a (drained) can of these on top of the veggies. In order to evenly distribute these I ruined my beautiful arrangement of veggies and swooshed everything around in the dish. The ruining of the arrangement was not really too much of a problem as it was all going to get covered with the couscous topping. I covered the veggies and beans with a thin (but complete) layer of (raw) couscous dotted in a few lumps of garlic and herb soft cheese (left over from the pizza) and poured about a pint of hot vegetable stock over the top of it all. I sealed it up with some kitchen foil and returned it to the hottish oven.

This might seem like an unusual way to cook couscous, but I can assure that it works – a sort of steaming. The usual couscous rule applies of using about the same amount of water as couscous by weight, but in this scenario be mindful that the veggies / beans will soak up some of the fluid. So after about 20 minutes I extracted the oven proof dish and removed the tin foil, the couscous looked nearly done but for good measure I added a little bit more fluid and topped the whole thing off with the wrinkly cherry tomatoes that my mum had fettled up. Back in the oven (uncovered this time) for another 10 minutes (until the tomatoes look even more wrinkly and there are a few crispy bits around the edges and it was ready to eat.

It tasted really nice, a good mixture of flavours and textures. Dad even went back for seconds which, for dad, is most unusual. And pleasingly it only used one cooking dish. Really it should have been served with a nice green salad, or maybe some sort of green vegetable but we had only a few leaves left over from the previous day's pizza dinner which mum and I polished off afterwards. And mum pointed out that it might have benefited from some sort of extra sauce. I've been thinking about this and maybe a sort of fruity sauce along the lines of redcurrant would be nice. But that would rely on you having redcurrants available. It turned out to another good dish to reheat for the next day's lunch, maybe even tasting better once the flavours have had a chance to “mature” a little bit.

(In case you're interested butter beans have over twice as much protein per 100g as sweetcorn. My favourite yeast extract has 6.6 times more protein per 100g than butter beans but I'm not sure that I could manage 100g in one sitting and it wouldn't have been very nice in the dinner.)

Monday's potato dumplings

My mum and I had shared the vegetarian sharing plate at a local restaurant for lunch but another dish on the menu inspired me for the evening meal: gnocchi. I had planned to make a lasagne for us all (me, mum and dad, Matt – my husband – and my mother-in-law) but I thought that gnocchi would be no more complicated and a bit unusual. The pressure was on because Matt needed to eat before 7pm. Normally this wouldn't happen on a school night, but I had the day off work so with a bit of planning and the assistance of my mum as sous chef it should be possible.

I've made gnocchi once before (or maybe twice), and they were slightly gloopy so I decided to try a different recipe. My thoughts were that the sauce(s) would be easy (and slack) so I concentrated my initial efforts on the gnocchi. We debated for sometime whether the potatoes should be peeled before or after cooking, the recipe said afterwards but this would increase the time because:

1. They'd take longer to cook if whole rather than chopped

2. They'd have to cool down before peeling

So I put mum to work peeling the potatoes. And then boiling them.

Then I thought I may as well start the sauce. This would be the ideal opportunity to use up the leftover butternut squash. I started off by chopping a red onion and some sticks of celery and putting them in a big pan to sweat. Then I peeled off the skin and chopped up the squash. This was looking more and more like a reprise of the risotto flavours from last week. And it was such a good flavour I added mushrooms to complete. I mixed thing up a little bit by changing the seasoning, obviously some veg stock and black pepper but I also added some thyme from the garden. According to my mum I need to give my thyme plant a hair cut. I also set off a very easy pepper and tomato sauce by chopping a load of peppers and putting them in the oven to roast with a couple of sprigs of rosemary from the garden. I don't think that needs a hair cut.

Once that was all under way, I returned to the gnocchi. The potatoes were cooked and now needed mashing. I don't really like mashing potato (which is a shame because I love eating mashed potato), but this wasn't so bad as you're actually supposed to leave it a little bit lumpy. Once that's done you add an egg, flour, cheese, salt and pepper. On this occasion I used a hard goat's cheese – mum had already displayed her sous chef skills in grating this. It looks really dodgy when you first start to mix it up but comes together fine and then you tip it out and kneed it a little bit. This is very messy – wear an apron and remove hand jewellery. When it looks a bit less messy you have to roll it out into long thin sausages (about 1.5-2cm diameter) and then chop into pieces 2-3cm long. Maybe you could roll it all into little balls, but maybe this risks “over-handling” (if this is possible with gnocchi).

When it comes to cooking the gnocchi use the biggest pan of boiling water that you have but they need to be able to move around freely – I did mine in 4 batches. They're done when they float to the top and you need to remove with as little water as possible – I used a slotted spoon. In retrospect a chip pan would have been ideal but I don't have a chip pan. You can keep them warm in a buttered dish in a warmish oven (not the same oven that you're roasting peppers and by now tomatoes too in).

I finished off the butternut squash and mushroom sauce with a load of crème fraiche, and removed the sprigs of thyme. This was a good tea from the point of view that I could put everything in dishes on the table for people to help themselves. As well as the gnocchi and sauces there were some green beans that my sous chef had brought from her garden and prepared for me. It all seemed to go down very well. An improvement on my previous gnocchi, although they would probably have benefited from even more cheese (but what doesn't). No-one had any space for pudding which was a good job because there wasn't any. And we were nearly done by 7pm.

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 experimental dumplings

Today saw the sad demise of the sandwich toaster. Probably inspired by the delicious fried bread I had enjoyed at breakfast, I felt inspired to make some cheese and tomato toasties for lunch. This included the slightly taxing task of purchasing tomatoes. Available were 2 packs (of 5) for £2 or loose for £1.99 per kilo. But the packs didn’t have a weight on them. And I’m dreadful at estimating weights. Having found some scales, weighed the loose ones and worked out that I could get five for just about £1 I went for this option. I don’t know why I bought five as the toasties would only need one.

But upon opening the sandwich toaster (which had lain dormant for at least 2 years), the inners appeared to have decayed. So toasties were off and reheat soup was on. This is always a bit of a gamble as I make soup in big batches and freeze in smaller portions which are invariably unlabelled. Today I extracted a tub at random, reheated and we enjoyed parsnip and apple soup, accompanied by toast with my favourite yeast extract spread. The soup was an improvement on its first consumption when I had failed to add enough water and it was more like eating runny apple sauce fragranced with parsnip. I don’t know why I didn’t think it out previously.

Suitably fuelled for an afternoon swim I left Matt with his skirting boards. My exercise was impeded (quite literally if this word comes from ”ped” which I think means to do with feet) by my blistered feet. Having enjoyed 2 night’s dancing in Torquay (hence the cooked breakfast) my feet were rather the worse for wear. Blisters the size of a 50 pence piece on the ball of my left foot and a 20 pence piece on the right, and on both little and big toes. Which resulted in diminished pushing off from the ends and discomfort from the turbulence of the water flowing around my feet.

And then it was time to think about tea. We had a butternut squash which I’d been intending on cooking today and when I inspected it there was a suspicious looking blemish suggesting that it needed using. We had both eaten butternut squash yesterday – Matt as a soup and me in a pasta dish. So the pressure was on to do something creative. Also present was somewhat of a glut of vegetable suet (due Matt’s supermarket enthusiasm a number of weeks ago) and he was keen for some dumplings today. So I decided to go for a vegetable stew. And I decided that as well as the butternut squash I’d use red peppers and mushrooms.

I set the stew off with some onion, celery and garlic. And when I went to vegetable drawer I was confronted with some rather sorry looking courgettes. So one went into the stew. And then I thought I might be putting too many vegetables into the pot. Hence the idea of putting the red pepper into the dumplings.

Once the veggies were sautéed off a bit I had to think about liquid. I would usually chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes but thought this might be too overpowering for the other relatively subtle veg. So opted instead just for vegetable stock. And then thought I’d add some sherry. This wasn’t totally random. I have made a lovely soup recently with squash and sherry so was this was an extension of that concept. It simmered away, smelling lovely, but not happy leaving well alone I threw in a couple of cups of red lentils.

And so to the dumplings. This was high risk. I am not an experienced dumpling cook but have had relative success when I have done them before so was prepared to be a bit adventurous. I chopped up the red pepper really small and fried it up in the little fried egg pan before adding to the dumpling mixture with some salt and mixed herbs. And then it was just a matter of hoping that the whole thing worked out ok.

Which it did. Not the most attractive looking of dinners but really tasty and the dumplings were lovely.

I’m looking forward to more adventures in dumpling land but first have two dodgy courgettes in urgent need of consumption.

Red pepper dumplings (will make 8 large / 16 small dumplings)

• 45g (vegetable) suet
• 100g self-raising flour½ a red pepper, chopped up as small as you can & fried so it’s soft 
• Sprinkle of dried mixed herbs
• Bit of salt (which is about as descriptive as “pinch”) 
• 70ml cold water

Mix it all up and form into dumplings. Cook in your stew for about 20 minutes, just before serving.