Monday 4th of March 2013

Mondays and Tuesdays present a small problem for me each week. School is in Aberystwyth, Beavers and Cubs are in Aberystwyth and we live 10 miles outside Aberystwyth.  How to get the children home, get a (good!) meal inside them and get the relevant child back to town for their activity? Answer? The slow-cooker!

On Sunday and Monday evenings my 'homework' is to get a meal prepped and ready in the slow-cooker pot and to pop it in the 'fridge, ready to be transferred to the cooker just before we leave the house on Monday and Tuesday mornings.  It can then putter away quite happily until we get home after school, when all that is left for me to do is knock together a quick side dish, if necessary, and set the table for supper.  I have, by now, quite a collection of slow-cooker favourites but, being me I do often try out something new (and regularly give thanks for the wondrous creation called Pinterest).

Probably the best-received of all the meals that emerge from my slow-cooker is my big fat chilli con carne and that is what I served up for tonight's supper.  The ingredients remain the same as in the 'proper' recipe, and are all piled into the slow-cooker pot together, but I do leave out the half-can of water (which is unnecessary in the slow-cooker) and replace the raw sliced onion with some of my slow-cooked onions from the freezer (or, even more easily with a can of EAZY fried onions from the supermarket; another wonderful thing well worth having in the cupboard).  I never feel that onion cooks properly in a slow-cooker and this is the one allowance I make towards cooking things before they go into the sainted machine.

Tonight I served the chilli with rice, soured cream and some grated cheddar; all that we wanted for a basic, no-frills chilli supper.  Then, once again, it was a whirl of neckerchiefs and woggles before dashing out of the door, heading for the scout hut...

Cath xx

Sunday 3rd of March 2013

Another glorious spring day today.  We had a late breakfast of toast with the last of the homemade blackberry jam,   then spent some time in the garden; quite a large portion of which was spent coaxing the rabbit out from behind the shed, where he'd escaped to when he was let out for his regular constitutional.

Needless to say,  I was soon back in the kitchen... 

An early dinner of roast pork was on the cards, so I parboiled the potatoes for my roasties so that they could be steam-dried and cool when I later tipped them into searing-hot fat (beef dripping, as usual). I also smeared our lovely piece of pork shoulder with cold-pressed rapeseed oil into which I'd stirred crumbled bay leaves (from the garden,  dried in the microwave) and garlic.  This was put in a roasting tin, atop a base layer of sliced onions (skins left on),  squashed garlic cloves and more bay leaves.

To help the gravy along, I also put  both halves of a split pig's trotter in the tin under the joint.  I use trotters quite often like this with a pork joint,  their lovely sticky juices, enhanced while cooking with just a splash of white wine at first and, later on, with some water, make for a superlative gravy.  The roasted trotter(s) can also be boiled up again to make a useful stock. Pork-bone stock is, I often feel,  underrated. It's almost as flexible in use as chicken stock and makes a particularly fine noodle soup.

To serve with the pork and potatoes, I roasted a dish of carrot chunks,  tossed with a very little oil,  some dried herbs and a bit of cumin,  which goes so well with carrots.  The other vegetable dish was a mix of peas and sweetcorn (both cooked 'fresh from the freezer'). 

So, another weekend is over. Tomorrow brings work for Husband and me and school for the children (although actually JD has a gymnastics competition for most of the day).  Monday night means Beaver Scouts for JD,  and supper from the slow-cooker for us all.  Hope you've all had a really lovely weekend too...

Cath xx

Saturday 2nd of March 2013

The weekend started well when we woke up to sunshine and a beautiful blue sky. After bacon butties and coffee (yum), we got on with our latest project,  which has been laying new flooring in our bathroom (rock 'n' roll, eh?!).

We stopped for a lunch of bruschette with pesto and tomatoes, topped with parmesan. I scattered some lightly toasted pine nuts over them and served them on a pile of pea shoots, my boys' latest food craze...

The afternoon saw me take my JD for a walk along the pebbly beach in our village.  I feel very lucky to have the beach so close, anyway, but as we passed sun-dappled clusters of daffodils in the lane that leads to the beach, clear blue sky overhead, we realised that Spring may just have sprung (at last).

Supper tonight was a simple affair;  grilled lamb chops, boiled potatoes (an eleventh-hour request from Husband), a dish of bulghar wheat salad and a bowl of mixed leaves.

I soak the bulghar wheat for the salad, rather than cooking it.  I do this by putting it in a large bowl and covering it with water.  When it has absorbed all the water, taste a grain and repeat the process if it hasn't softened enough for your liking.  Drain the bulghar when you like the texture.   I do this in a muslin, squeezing out as much water as possible,  but you can easily use a fine sieve. Fork through chunks of (both peeled and deseeded) cucumber and tomatoes, finely chopped spring onions, pomegranate seeds and masses of herbs. I usually use parsley and mint, though today I only had parsley,  so I used that and added a good squidge of squeezy mint sauce (one of my favourite 'secret ingredient' kitchen helpers).  I also chucked in some more, scissored-up, pea shoots tonight

This salad also makes a lovely, sunny-day lunch (do I dare to hope in the garden?) if you also fork through some crumbled feta or some leftover roast lamb, if you are lucky enough to have some.  I particularly love roast lamb (hot or cold) lately, and am always thinking of things I need (want) to do with it.  This is how my mind works...

Cath xx

Friday 1st of March 2013

Tonight,  I cooked chicken fried rice with leftover roast chicken from Wednesday and some rice that I cooked last night and left to go cold. Fried rice always tastes better and has a nicer texture when you start it with COLD rice,  rather than still-warm rice that you've only just cooked.

I heated some groundnut oil in my largest le Creuset,  then quickly fried a few chopped spring onions with a little garlic and ginger. I threw in a couple of handfuls of shredded, cold, cooked chicken and stir-fried it briefly. The rice went in next and was stirred around with my wooden fork.

When the rice is coated in the oily juices from the pan, push the rice to one side and slowly pour in, bit by bit,  2 eggs that you have beaten with a splash of light soy sauce.   Scramble the eggs around, flicking them through the rice as best you can. Stir through a couple of handfuls of defrosted frozen peas with another little splash of light soy and a good drizzle of sesame oil.   I'm sure that it's this last touch of sesame oil that gives this rice such an authentic 'carry-out' flavour.

Serve with some bought-in prawn crackers and have dark soy on the table for those who want more of its savoury saltiness.

                                              Cath xx

Molto Veloce!

My children love their Saturday suppers.  Because we eat our main meal of the day at lunchtime on the weekend, this means that the order of the evening will generally be something-on-toast, a bowl of soup or a quick pizza. These pizze* are easy enough for the boys to assemble by themselves, only needing my help to slide it into the searingly hot oven and to remove it a few minutes later.  They take hardly any time to make and therefore can easily be provided for a crowd; their being so thin means that you can squeeze quite a few shelves into the oven at once to hold them!  The pizza sauce, I've written about before and always keep a batch handily stashed in the freezer, in a flattened ziplock bag so that I can break off a bit when I need some.  Being so thin, it defrosts quickly, meaning that I can reasonably consider this an almost-instant supper...

A Very Fast Pizza

One large flour tortilla
1 tbsp love-it-and-leave-it pizza sauce
your choice of favourite toppings: sliced olives, torn-up salami or ham, chopped mushrooms, roasted peppers or aubergines (from a jar!), anchovies, etc.
handful grated Mozzarella or (my boys' preferred option) Edam 
sprinkling of mixed dried herbs

Put the tortilla on a baking sheet and spread it with the sauce.  Arrange your chosen extras on top and cover with a good layer of cheese.  Scatter a pinch of herbs over the top and transfer to the oven.  Four to five minutes should be plenty, then slide the tortilla off the baking sheet and directly on to the oven shelf for a minute longer, just to crisp up the underside.  Remove to a board, slice and serve!

Cath xx

*Yes, I know I'm a terrible old pedant, but it is the correct plural for pizza.  Seeing signs advertising "pizzas" or, even worse, "pizza's", drives me, possibly unreasonably, mad with irritation...

Honey-Mustard Chicken

When you look at this in the clear light of day, it is actually, rather disturbingly in some ways, pretty close to being 'chicken pieces baked in salad dressing'.  Mmmm, sounds nommy...  However, I would add, somewhat pleadingly, that it is simply not done justice by that description.  For a dinner that takes mere minutes to get ready to cook, and under half an hour in the oven, it is a very tasty treat and tarts up cheap chicken thighs a treat.

I'm trying not to be too prescriptive about the ingredients, because I know from reading certain writers' recipe books, among my hundreds, how irritating it is to be told that you need the best of everything in your kitchen at all times.  Most of my kitchen substitutions are borne of empty-jar-necessity, so as far as I'm concerned, the type of oil and the type of mustard you decide to use are fairly irrelevant.  Certainly the meal will be different, but that scarcely need suggest worse, or better, for that matter.  I use Dijon and wholegrain mustards with equal regularity in this dish and have made it occasionally with English mustard, though I would say halve the quantity specified unless, like some, you like it hot!   Likewise the oil, I am keen on rapeseed oil, especially the cold-pressed variety, but if you prefer olive, sunflower or vegetable oil, I can't see that it would make a huge difference.  I fact, it occurs to me now, as I type this, that you might possibly skip the fresh garlic altogether and use garlic oil instead...

Honey-Mustard Chicken

The number of thighs you use is dependent on your family's needs and appetite; I find one each for children, with two each for teenagers or adults is plenty.  This amount of sauce will easily do six, eight or ten thighs, the only difference will be the size of tin you need and how much juice will be left at the bottom of the dish to pour over your vegetables...

6-10 chicken thighs, bone in and skin on
2 tbsp oil 
juice of 2 lemons
2 tbsp runny honey
1 tbsp mustard 
leaves stripped from a few sprigs of thyme, or 1/2 tsp dried thyme
good grinding of white pepper and fat pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 180ºc.  Mix all the ingredients, bar the chicken pieces, together in a large bowl.  I prefer a whisk for this, but use a spoon or a fork if you prefer.  Turn the chicken pieces in the sauce, then put them skin-side up in a roasting tin or oven dish that takes them snugly.  Pour over the rest of the sauce and bake for 25 minutes.  If you've cooked some sort of (especially green) vegetables or prepared a salad to go with the chicken, I can't begin to explain how lovely it is if you spoon some of the still-warm juices left in the pan over the top...

Cath xx

Pudding Emergency!

Required at short notice to provide a pudding for today's lunch, I fell back on a favourite which can be conjured up pretty quickly from mainly storecupboard ingredients.  This is, I suspect hardly the 'proper' way to make frangipane, but hell, it works for me.  If it's easy and it tastes good, I'm one very happy Distracted Housewife!  The shop-bought sweet pastry cases are a storecupboard staple (actually, they live in the bread bin) and I cannot see that there is any point in being snobbish about them; while I never buy shortcrust pastry in the supermarket because I find it easy to make, I always buy puff and filo because, you know, eek!  Sweet pastry also gives me the heebie-jeebies, I have never managed to get the desirable shortbread texture without everything disintegrating into infinitesimal crumbs like, well, shortbread...

Tinned pears (in juice, never syrup for my tastes) happen to be a fruit that I keep in the cupboard habitually as I love their grainy texture.  They are wonderful with whipped cream or ice-cream and a quick, hot, chocolate sauce as a very basic Poires Belle Helene (which, after holidaying in the Loire Valley as a youngster, remains for me the most respectable way to fill a crêpe).  Pears and chocolate is a classic combination for me; hence the chocolate included here (although you can happily leave it out if the idea doesn't fill you with the greedy excitement that it does me!).  I would have rather like to have a scoop of ice-cream with this pudding today, rich yellow in colour and flecked with vanilla seeds, but sadly no amount of praying to the freezer could force some into existence so we 'forced it down' without...

Pear and Almond Tart with Chocolate

1 ready-made sweet pasty case from the baking aisle at the supermarket
50g dark chocolate, grated or very finely chopped (I used the processor)
1 tin of pear halves in juice, drained
2 eggs, beaten
80g each butter, ground almonds and caster sugar

Heat the oven to 180ºc.  Put your unwrapped pastry case onto a baking sheet.  Scatter the chocolate over the bottom of the pastry case.  Thickly slice each pear half widthways, but keep it 'together', as it were, and arrange them on top of the chocolate.  Melt the butter and stir in the ground almonds and sugar. Mix in the eggs, forming a nubbly paste with the consistency of double cream.  Gently (although this is a counsel of perfection for me, being both clumsy and impatient) spoon and spread this over the pear-and-chocolate filled pastry case and pop it in the oven for 20-25 minutes.  Take it out and leave it to rest for a few minutes as this is SO much better warm than hot.  Any leftover slices (ha!) are perfect with a cup of tea later, but don't put them in the 'fridge, something awful seems to happen to them if you do!

Cath xx