Me, yesterday

I have no particular reason to be eating high-fat, high-carb, high-protein dinners. I am not in training for a marathon (and even if I were, I don’t think anyone recommends high-fat meals, unless it’s to cheer you up after running 15 miles in the rain). But last night we found ourselves with almost no food in the house and having eaten takeaway twice over the weekend, we didn’t quite feel able to do it again, so we were forced to improvise. This supper, whilst not the healthiest ever, has the advantage of being quick, yummy and so easy to make that you’ll barely notice you’ve done it.

Ingredients (serves 2)

One small packet of smoked salmon (or half a big packet left over from the weekend)

Half a packet of soft herby cheese, the kind that comes in a roulade (like Boursin, although we used the Co-op’s own-brand version)

Some milk

Enough pasta for two people – fusilli or farfalle work best, but whatever you have

3-4 spring onions (or a handful of chives)

A little bit of lemon zest

Method

Boil pasta as per the instructions. Meanwhile melt the cheese in a non-stick pan over a very low heat, adding a splash of milk to thin it whenever it gets too gloopy. Cut or tear the smoked salmon into smallish pieces and add it to the melted cheese when the pasta is ready. Drain the pasta and coat it with the cheese and salmon sauce. Chop the spring onion into small pieces and sprinkle it over the top with the lemon zest to serve.

The whole thing takes about ten minutes, or however long it takes you to boil pasta.

I haven’t been doing much cooking recently, but this weekend we finally got around to spending our wedding vouchers on, among other things, a blender and a griddle pan,  both of which should arrive this week. So I plan to spend the summer experimenting with cakes, soup and grilled steaks. I will report back.

Today is pancake day, the day when we all stock up on eggs, flour, butter and milk in order to use them up before the start of Lent. I like to use Delia’s recipe because, well, why wouldn’t you? Also, she tells you to do “a test pancake” at the beginning, which is a beautifully elegant way of acknowledging that the first pancake of the batch is always inedible. Here are my other tips.

• Delia suggests stacking the pancakes between greaseproof paper over a bowl of simmering water, so that they don’t get cold. I expect if you are making pancakes as part of a formal dinner this is worth doing, but I have never attended a pancake party where we didn’t just eat the pancakes as we went along. Pancakes are by their very nature an on-the-hop sort of food.

• That said, take your time. You don’t have to do everything at breakneck speed, and if your pancakes cool down, or you run out of batter before everyone is fed, DON’T PANIC. You can always make extra, or have some ice cream instead.

• Top pancake fillings:

1. Emmental with tomato passata (use more cheese than tomato, and season with black pepper)
2. Spinach, garlic and mushrooms
3. Lemon and sugar (Delia says caster sugar, but I prefer the crunchiness of granulated)
4. Ice cream and chocolate sauce (but you really do need a hot pancake for this one)

• If all else fails, order a takeaway and console yourself with the knowledge that there are people who do this for a living, and it is within your power to take advantage of their expertise. My favourite pancake place is the stall at the western end of Exmouth Market on Thursday and Friday lunchtimes. Tell Dominique I sent you.

All of which went through my mind yesterday when I realised with dismay, halfway through marinating it for a stir fry, that I had accidentally bought turkey breast rather than chicken. Oh well, I thought, the beloved will enjoy it even if I don’t. And, feeling rather saintly, I continued marinating it in walnut oil, garlic, ginger, chillies and chives.

(The walnut oil and chives are a little unorthodox, I know: it’s just that unless there’s a compelling reason not to, I put walnut oil and chives in everything, because they are two of my favourite things.)

Later on, with the addition of cashew nuts, mange tout, egg noodles and a splash of soy sauce, I fried it all up and served it with a wrinkled nose and a feeling of resignation. And you know what? It was amazing. The turkey had a richness and a smokiness that I’ve never got from chicken, but was still light enough to carry all the flavours of the marinade without overwhelming them. It tasted almost more like pork than like chicken, and contrasted beautifully with the lightness of the mange tout and the noodles. It was also, contrary to expectations, not in the least dry, but juicy and succulent, even where I’d burned some of it at the edges when I left the kitchen briefly and then forgot to go back until I smelled the smoke.

So there you go: turkey isn’t as horrible as I thought, and it’s worth experimenting with methods other than the full Christmas roast version, because now I have a whole new ingredient to start playing with.

I am still right about jacket potatoes, though.

]]> http://gladallover.net/2011/11/03/lets-talk-turkey/feed/ 1 elsiem http://gladallover.net/2011/07/28/lunch/ http://gladallover.net/2011/07/28/lunch/#comments Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:39:15 +0000 elsiem http://gladallover.net/?p=1724 ]]> As part of my new regime of austerity (turns out having two flats and getting married at the same time as you take a pay cut is expensive), I have taken to bringing a packed lunch to work every day. Some days – the good days – I bring in leftovers from the previous night’s dinner and microwave them. Today I have jambalaya. Today is a good day.

On other days, though, when I have to make something from scratch in a hurry, I have found myself to be sadly lacking in inspiration. I’m not wild on sandwiches, although I will make a cheese or an egg mayonnaise sandwich every few days. (The trick to egg mayonnaise, incidentally, is to make it the day you’re going to eat it, boil the eggs for five minutes so the yolk is set but still glutinous rather than fluffy, and use more salt and pepper and less mayonnaise than you think you need.)

I also sometimes have jam sandwiches, but I’m not going to mention that.

So far, the simplest and cheapest packed lunch I’ve found is some sliced cheese or chicken or both; some chopped vegetables (carrots and cucumber and baby tomatoes, mostly);  a handful of Ryvita or similar bread-substitute and a cheeky chocolate chip cookie, served with a carton of juice and a cup of tea. It’s nice, but it’s a bit boring and eerily reminiscent of the sorts of meals I ate a lot when I was six, so I am appealing to you, wise reader, for some alternative suggestions. Here are the rules:

- I don’t really eat red meat

- although I do eat sausages and minced beef

- it needs to be cheaper than buying lunch, and quicker than cooking a proper meal

- there should be some vague sort of a nod towards a balanced diet

- I don’t count fruit as food

There. I will give a prize for the best idea posted in the comments (or, as is quite likely, the only idea posted in the comments).

(I know!)

And I have several separate blog posts to make about Glastonbury, if I ever get around to them, but I’ve just had a look at the searches that have led people here today, and one of them was “chorizo and halloumi recipes”, which reminded me that we’ve had the same dinner three times since we got back from Glastonbury, because it is easy, tasty and just about perfect for a warm summer evening. It’s inspired by a chorizo and halloumi wrap I bought from a Greek food stall sometime on the Sunday, which was by far the nicest thing I ate all weekend, and it goes like this:

Take two large handfuls of green salad leaves – whichever kind you like best, but sweetish ones rather than bitter ones – and add finely chopped cucumber, red onion (not too much) and the sweetest cherry tomatoes you can find (tip: greengrocers have sweeter ones than supermarkets, in my experience). Then take about half a chorizo sausage, the kind you buy folded in two, and a pack of halloumi (I use the whole thing; the beloved, being more of a meat fan, uses more sausage and less cheese), chop into mouthful-sized pieces and fry them together in a splash of olive oil. When the halloumi has started to brown on both sides, tip the meat, cheese and oil on top of the salad. Add some chopped lemon zest and eat with warmed pittas. Serves two.

I don’t have a photo of the recipe to show you, so here’s another photo of my niece instead:

(I know, right?)

So whenever I’m invited to a barbecue, I bring kebabs, because the best way to get food evenly cooked is to chop it up small, and because even if you don’t like one of the ingredients, it’s not long until you get to the next one. I quite often do veggie kebabs, but this weekend we had some chicken pieces in the freezer and a chorizo in the fridge, so I made about a dozen spicy chicken and mushroom kebabs, and about a dozen halloumi and chorizo.

The easiest way to get grilled vegetables wrong is to let them dry out, so I started by chopping two red onions, two orange and yellow peppers and a handful of what I think were portobello mushrooms, pouring a couple of tablespoonfuls of olive oil over them, adding a liberal amount of pepper and slightly less salt, and stirring it all together.

(Courgettes are another good addition, but I had used up all our courgettes the night before, making a lovely simple grated courgette and lemon zest sauce for pasta courtesy of a proper food writer, the recipe for which I can’t find now but will link to once I’m able to dig it out.)

The halloumi and chorizo kebabs were easy: I just alternated the cheese and meat with pieces of onion and pepper – the important thing here is to make sure the components have a similar density, so they cook at about the same time. And use slices of onion, not chunks, or the insides will make your eyes water.

I cut the chicken into 3cm pieces and marinated them for a couple of hours in an adapted version of a recipe from Nigel Slater, where you mix groundnut oil (I used pistachio oil, because it was the closest I had), chillis, paprika, spring onions, runny honey (I used maple syrup), lemon juice and crushed garlic, and coat the chicken in it.

I soaked the skewers in cold water for as long as I could before I made up the kebabs, which just about stopped them from catching fire, and I transported the whole thing on a plastic tray which I bought at our local Costcutter, having realised too late that I had nothing big enough to put them in:

One tip: halloumi can be quite crumbly when it’s uncooked, and it’s easy to split it when you skewer it. I found it helped if I stabbed it very quickly and firmly, rather than trying to do it gently.

They need cooking for about five minutes on each side, although there’s nothing in the non-chicken ones that will do you any harm if they’re a bit underdone. Colourful, flavoursome and easy to share with newfound friends, they beat a burnt sausage any day.

Potato salad and coleslaw are things you can easily buy in the shops, but they’re usually gloopy with too much mayonnaise, so I plumped for a halfway house, making the potato salad from scratch but buying the coleslaw from a local deli, in the best tradition of the lovely Nigella.

Potato salad can have just about anything you like in it – the only essential ingredient is the new potatoes. For this one I added a finely-chopped raw shallot with fresh parsley and a dressing made from equal parts olive oil and white wine vinegar, with a dollop of Dijon mustard and a dollop of runny honey. I’d use a bit less vinegar than oil another time. Pour the ingredients together in a tumbler and whip them up with a fork into a paste, then pour that over the potatoes, shallot and parsley and stir.

Potato salad is nicest when it’s still slightly warm, so I made the salad first and then let it cool for just as long as it took to grill the sausages. We had a mixture of Toulouse and smoked sausages last  night, but just use your favourites. Add a spoonful of coleslaw and a gherkin and you have a meatily flavoursome summer supper for almost no effort at all.

Since (mostly) giving up booze I have been experimenting to discover which soft drinks go best with different kinds of food. My most exciting finding so far is that ginger beer is an excellent substitute for dessert wine. The ideal non-alcoholic companion to this meal is, I think, a nice cloudy apple juice.

On this weekend’s menu: hot cross buns, Easter chocolate and the rest of the wedding cake tasters that we brought back from Dublin at the weekend. It’s a tough gig but someone’s gotta do it.

This recipe is for my mum’s bread, which means it’s older than I am. Here is my mum:

When I tried to get her to write the recipe down a couple of years ago she didn’t know any of the quantities, so she just gave me the list of ingredients and told me to experiment until I worked out how much of everything to use, which means I don’t know any of the quantities either. But the good news is, it doesn’t much matter: every single one of my experiments produced an entirely edible loaf.

This is a really dark, moist, flavoursome bread: as a child desperate for white sliced bread I used to try to avoid it, but now it’s one of my favourite things to eat. There are only two of us at home so I tend to make a smallish loaf, but you could up the quantities if you wanted to.

Ingredients

1lb wholemeal bread flour

A biggish dollop of molasses or black treacle

A handful of caraway seeds

Lukewarm water (less than half a glassful to begin with – you can add more as you, ahem, knead it)

A biggish pinch of dried yeast

Method

Pour all the ingredients into a large bowl and mix them with your hands until you have a ball of quite sticky dough. Cover the bowl with clingfilm or a tea towel and leave it somewhere warm for 30-60 minutes, or until the dough has roughly doubled in size (but don’t worry if it doesn’t expand that much – as long as it has perceptibly risen by the time you put it in the oven, you’ll be OK).

Grease the inside of a 1lb bread tin and transfer the dough into it. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t sit perfectly level in the tin; wonky edges are part of the charm of home-made bread. Put the tin in an oven preheated to around 200 degrees for twenty minutes, then turn down the oven to 160ish for another half an hour.

(You might want to fiddle with those temperatures and timings depending on your oven: mine is a fan oven, so increase one or the other if yours isn’t. Turning the temperature down partway through cooking seems to prevent the crust from becoming too tough.)

After around fifty minutes, take the bread out of the oven and tip it out of the tin (you may need to employ a knife here if the greasing hasn’t done its job properly, in which case try not to scrape the coating off the inside of your tin, or it’ll be even stickier next time). Tap the underside of the loaf with the edge of a knife or the back of a spoon: if it sounds hollow, it’s cooked. Leave it to stand on a wire tray (I use the grill tray because my bijou kitchen doesn’t have space for anything that isn’t multifunctional) for at least twenty minutes. Eat while still warm with salad and gooey French cheese for a perfect summer supper. Then toast it the next day for breakfast: you’ll need your grill (or toaster, if you are one of those people with space for a toaster) turned up high, because the moistness of the bread means it’s fairly resistant to heat.

Caroway seeds are Mum’s original flavouring and are great, but you can experiment with other additions: black onion seeds, for example, give it a lovely hint of fire. I’d like to try it with dried chillis, too, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.

Here’s this morning’s loaf:

Tip: slice it thinly, because it’s heavier than your average loaf of bread, so a little goes a long way.

I’m not big on seafood or red meat, so my relationship with tapas has been a tentative one over the years. I like manchego, and boquerones, and patatas bravas and tortilla, but show me an octopus or a pork cheek (what?) and I’ll likely run and hide. However, since the Great Cooking Revolution of 2009 I’ve gradually become more adventurous, so I’m a better prospect for a tapas date now than I’ve ever been. And I’d heard good things about Number 22 on Half Moon Lane, even if it does pretend it’s in Dulwich (it is a two-minute walk from Herne Hill station. It is as much in Herne Hill as a thing can be).

Anyway, it was better than I was expecting, and I would be giving it a round five stars (out of five) if I hadn’t been cold all the way through the meal. I am a naturally cold person, which is why one day I am going to go and live somewhere tropical, but I was wearing a wool dress and tights and furry boots and a scarf and I was still too cold; a problem I exacerbated when I ordered the saffron and passion fruit panna cotta for pudding, having gotten my Italian deserts mixed up (I was expecting a pannetone, and by the way, wouldn’t a saffron and passion fruit pannetone be AMAZING?). A chilled pudding is not what you want when you’re too cold.

But rewind, rewind, because I’ve left out all the good stuff. And there was lots of good stuff. The interior is halfway between a wine bar and someone’s living room, with the obligatory bad art for sale on the walls (this is such a feature of Herne Hill eateries that I would feel bereft if it weren’t there). The tables are well-spaced for such a small place, and we had a nook of our own whose only disadvantage was that we had to stand up and wave to get a waiter’s attention, so tucked-away were we. But rather that than one of my pet restaurant hates: the waiter who comes by and interrupts the conversation every few minutes to ask whether everything’s OK, as though you might not have the wit to let them know otherwise. They always seem to arrive just as I’m at the punchline of a joke. I can’t help suspecting they do it deliberately. I’d always rather too little attention from waiters than too much.

But mainly I want to talk about the food, because the food was terrific. We ordered padron peppers and chorizo and potato skewers with bread and oil to start, and then rabbit, clams, seared tuna with fennel and orange, tortilla and deep-fried goat’s cheese for the main course (unlike in traditional tapas bars, Number 22 times everything to arrive together, so they have the dishes divided into appetisers, tapas and extras), but the waitress told us the goat’s cheese was best with the bread and oil and suggested we have it alongside the appetisers rather than with the main course, which we did. I like it when the staff know better than you and politely tell you so.

All the appetisers were good, although if I had to nitpick I’d say that the bread was a bit dull (but then, is Spanish bread a thing? I don’t think it is, really), but the mains were really spectacular. The tuna was cooked in that way that proper cooks cook it, where you just wave it over the heat for a split-second, and I was nervous about eating it because I thought it would be chewy and jellific, but in fact it melted in the mouth like a pâté de foie gras, only more ethical (just). The rabbit was moist and delicious, the tortilla had exactly the right consistency, and the clams, which I only tried out of curiosity, expecting to hate them (I traditionally gag on shellfish), were completely delicious and the surprise star of the night.

It’s not cheap – our bill came to just over £80 with service, and that was without wine, although it did include a bottle of beer and a brandy, and a ginger beer, which I would heartily recommend as a non-alcoholic alternative to dessert wine – but for a special occasion it’s as good a suburban restaurant as I’ve eaten at. Just maybe go in the summer, or pack a spare jumper.