Creamy and Dreamy

A proper, old-fashioned cream-style soup is a real joy to cook and to eat.  At this time of year it also allows for judicious using up of leftovers in a way that they seem freshly comforting and welcome.  It's nice, also, when hanging around the house, to have the rhythms that cooking can bring to your life; it is all too easy to allow oneself to flop, unoccupied, in front of the television  at this time of year.  Getting up once in a while to potter in the kitchen provides a focus and, in some ways, an escape.  Here, I've infused the milk with some 'bread sauce' flavourings to the milk to bump up the festive factor!  Making stock with the turkey carcass is an annual job for Boxing Day; most of goes for soup of one sort or another, though I do siphon off a little to make a velouté sauce for a Turkey and Ham pie filling.

Cream of Turkey Soup

500ml milk
1 small onion, peeled and halved
few cloves
few peppercorns
2 small bay leaves
grating of fresh nutmeg
450ml turkey stock
30g turkey dripping (or butter)
30g plain flour
leftover turkey meat, cut into small shreds
a splash of double cream, if you have some to hand (well, it is Christmas!)
white pepper and salt, to taste

Stick a couple of cloves into each onion half, then place all the ingredients into a saucepan and bring just to boiling point.  Remove from the heat and set aside to infuse. Add the turkey stock to the cold milk, then add the fat and flour and bring to the boil, whisking continuously.

When it is smooth and combined, add the shreds of turkey meat and then, when it has returned to boiling point, turn the heat down and simmer until thickened.  Swirl in the cream and then season with white pepper (to keep that creamy beige unspeckled) and add a little salt if you think it needs it.

 Lovely, creamy soup like this with homemade bread, could only be improved upon as a meal by a tranche of this year's Christmas cake and a fine chunk of Stilton... Bliss!

Cath xx

Friday Night Noodles

Of course, you don't have to cook them on a Friday night but I find, more and more, that we have them as a kick-off to the weekend. I do the shopping towards the end of the week, so there's always a good selection of vegetables to choose from. The recipe is only a blueprint; I vary the veg according to what we've got and rotate between chicken, turkey, beef and pork depending on what I fancy when I'm shopping or what someone else fancies when I'm planning the week's meals and making the shopping list.

Kinda Chow Mein-ish Noodles

200g dried egg noodles
2 tbsp sunflower oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
2cm piece ginger root, peeled and minced
3 spring onions, finely sliced
400g diced turkey thigh meat
4 tbsp dry sherry
2 tbsp tomato purée
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp cornflour
2 carrots,
1 stick celery
1 x 225g can bamboo shoots
1/2 green pepper, sliced
1/2 yellow pepper, sliced
100g sweetcorn, defrosted if frozen

Soak the noodles in boiling water from the kettle until soft, then drain them and separate the strands. Put the garlic, ginger and spring onions into a large pan with the cold oil, then heat up until sizzling. Add the turkey meat and stir-fry until sealed all over. Meanwhile, whisk together the sherry, tomato purée, soy sauce and cornflour. Pile the vegetables and noodles into the pan, then pour over the sauce and mix well. Add 200ml water and cover the pan. Simmer for 5-10 minutes until the turkey is cooked through, the sauce has thickened, and the vegetables are just tender. Give it a good stir and serve straight from the pan.

Perky Turkey

It's been soooo hot today; not that I'm complaining, you understand. I've been shivering in "It's Spring, dammit!-denial" for weeks now, so it's rather nice that the weather has finally caught up with my wardrobe. James and I spent the afternoon (while Chris was at school) outside, playing and sitting, chatting to friends, respectively. I wasn't sure, on the way home, if the meal I'd planned for this evening would go down terribly well because of the heat. I'm happy to report that it did, after all - clean plates all round.

This is definitely a throw-it-together kind of meal. You can vary this in all sorts of ways to make it suit your mood and (in my case, anyway) what needs using up from the freezer.

Turkey Enchiladas

300g turkey, sliced
400g can mixed beans, drained and rinsed
2 x 400g cans chopped tomatoes
6 flour tortillas
100g cheddar cheese, coarsely grated

Heat a little oil in a large pan and fry the turkey strips until just cooked through. Add the beans, then stir in half of one can of tomatoes. Use this mixture to fill the tortillas, laying the 'wraps' side-by-side in an ovenproof dish. Tip the rest of the tomatoes into the pan, along with 100ml water, and bring to the boil. Pour this sauce over the tortillas, pushing the edges down to cover everything well. Top with grated cheese and bake at 180°c for 25 minutes until golden brown and bubbling.


For an easy first course, I set out a bowl of yoghurt and another of Salsa Mexicana Verde (from a can!), with some shop-bought tortilla chips. The salsa, which came from Mexgrocer, is quite tangy and piquant but nonetheless addictive for that. The boys aren't so keen, but there's time...

Turkey Lurkey

Today I finally cooked some some turkey steaks that were lurking rather mournfully in the freezer. I bought them because they looked lovely; but having any idea what I was going to do with them, I froze them. Fatal mistake; they've been sitting there, mocking me every time I open the drawer, for too long. Combined with some bits and bobs from the vegetable box and a large side of basmati rice (as always, courtesy of the rice machine) though, we had a very nice meal. I won't pretend that this is any kind of stir-fry; for one thing, I did it in an ordinary frying pan on an ordinary hob ring, for another, I only stirred it quite lazily.

The addition of the fresh mint was really quite inspired (she write, modestly). The parsley on the kitchen windowsill was, shall we say, parst it so I used some mint instead. Mint is fast becoming my favourite culinary herb - it's fabulous with tomatoes (for us, it easily trumps basil) and now replaces parsley too. As mint grows like a weed in our garden come summer, I will definitely be trying this substitution in other dishes.

Turkey & Veg Box Fry

garlic-infused olive oil
2 large turkey escalopes
2 thin leeks, halved and shredded
1 red pepper, deseeded and sliced
handful spinach leaves
fresh mint, finely chopped
about 2 tbsp lemon juice

Heat the oil in a large frying pan (or a wok, if you have such a thing). Cook the leeks briefly, then fry the turkey and add the peppers. Pour in the lemon juice and mix well. When everything is almost cooked to your liking, stir in the mint, then toss in the spinach and briefly cover the pan to let it wilt. Serve with rice.

Ice (sort-of) Magic

I have, over the last few days, been making serious efforts to reduce the amount of food in the freezer in the run-up to Christmas. This means using it, rather than throwing it away. I was rather perturbed to read the following advice in a magazine supplement about preparing for Christmas;

"Make space in the fridge, freezer and kitchen cupboards by throwing away anything past its sell-by date"

According to lovefoodhatewaste.com, a third of the food bought in the UK is already being thrown away uneaten, and I think deliberately setting out to advise people to throw food away seems rather irresponsible. Better, surely, to find ways of using things up (ideally, before they reach their best-before) and to encourage readers to plan their shopping and meals to minimise waste. While 'use-by' dates must be strictly adhered to for safety reasons, many 'best-before dates are merely a guide to quality and thus can, within reason, be ignored, rather than throwing away bagfuls of food. Changing our attitudes and habits regarding food is a really easy place for us to start reducing our environmental impact. I feel so strongly about this that for the first time ever, I wrote a 'letter to the editor'.


The only slight downside of this has been that I have had to deal with some, shall we say, interesting finds, mainly from the section of the freezer containing spoils from Hubby's bargain-hunting . Most of these, at least lately, have been meat portions in odd, so-called 'flavour glazes'. They seem to be something that the supermarket adds to perfectly good meat in order to 'add value', but which seem, rather inevitably, to be sold off for 9p a pack just before going out of date. Fine to freeze, though and an economical way to feed the family occasionally. This, coupled with using up the end of last week's veg box before the new one arrives tomorrow means that dinners this week have been a bit Ready Steady Cook chez nous.

Last night's we had turkey, purporting to be 'Chinese Style', which I cut into strips and stir-fried, to be served with parsnip chips, steamed curly kale and basmati rice. Tonight the boys and I were on our own for dinner, so I cooked some 'Smoky B-B-Q' Pork Steaks and served them on top of a pile of my homemade baked beans. I told the boys that it was Cowboy Pork 'n' Beans and Christopher wolfed it down so fast that I don't think it even touched the sides!

We finished our meal off with a slice each of a really damp, tasty banana cake that I bought from my cake stall at the BFN bash last Saturday. Lovely, lovely, lovely. And I'm getting my hair done tomorrow!