Category Archives: Cookery

Charred Red Pepper Dip

First char your pepper. I used the garden flamethrower again and it did a better job than it did on the aubergine last week.

I shoved it in the blender and added the half carton of soft cheese left over from the Smoked Mackerel Pate. It looked a bit watery as it went in. With hindsight I should have taken it as a warning. I may have said that before.

I think I’ve also said I will look at recipes instead of working from memory. I tried but I couldn’t find the one I wanted, and as I had the soft cheese ready I just blundered ahead.

Add some garlic and smoked paprika and blitz it. Mutter. Add bread. Add more bread. When it looks firmish taste and add black pepper. It needed seasoning but I didn’t want to add lime juice as it was already sloppy. Even with the bread it was not exactly firm so I drained it in a sieve and managed to produce something with a consistency like a soft humous. I note from my spellchecker that the Americans spell humous differently too. You live and learn.

Charred Red Pepper Dip

It was just about firm enough to be acceptable and tasted OK. It needs some work but we ate it all so it can’t have been too bad. The photograph makes it look like something from a post-mortem examination but in natural light it lacked that spongy, moist lung-like quality.

We had it with green leaves, tomatoes, crackers and falafels. I’m going to try making my own falafels. The spellchecker doesn’t like that either. Falafel, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is a variation of felafel. Google prefers falafel. The spellchecker doesn’t like either.

Before I do that I’m going to make sure I have all the ingredients and a recipe.

Flowers – detail

I thought I’d have another crack at the flowers. There’s not much else to photograph when you stay inside.

Lockdown Cookery

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There are, I’m pleased to say, signs that the grocery situation is easing.

I managed to book a Click & Collect slot at ASDA on Saturday afternoon. It’s for April 30th, which left me with a trip to the shops this week.

Or did it?

Browsing the TESCO site revealed some Click & Collect slots for Monday. I suspect they are putting them on at random to spread them round a bit. Or to annoy me. It could be either.

I will be collecting an order tomorrow afternoon, which is awkward because it leaves a 10 day gap, but is handy because it avoids a walk round the shop. After what happened last time I can do without people invading my personal space. I’m not saying that isolation is bad for me, but I’m turning into a recluse. I nearly said “Howard Hughes” there, but didn’t want people to get confused and think I was building an aeroplane in the back garden, craving banana nut ice cream or storing my urine in bottles.

You still can’t get ordinary flour or various random vegetables. Calabrese seems to be off the shelves for the second time in three weeks (that’s purple sprouting brocolli on the plates in the pictures), though courgettes are back.

The problem with flour is that although we have plenty, and the mills are running round the clock, it takes so long to bag it up in small bags that they can’t keep up with demand.

Ah well, I haven’t baked for the last three years, so I can probably survive without flour a bit longer.

Cauliflower Steaks

I cooked cauliflower steaks for tea – not a vegetable disguised as meat, just a cauliflower cut in a slab.

First trim the leaves and stalk, then cut it half. From each side, cut a piece about an inch to inch and a half wide. If it’s a big enough cauli, and you aren’t bothered about your fingertips, you can possibly get another steak out of each side. I didn’t. Tomorrow we will be having cauliflower cheese.

Oil a roasting tray, put the steaks in it, oil and season the top (I used a reasonably conservative sprinkle of cumin and black pepper) cover the tray with foil and cook in a high oven (250° C) for 10 or 15 minutes. This steams it. Then remove the cover, turn it over, season and cook for about 8-10 minutes a side. You might be able to get away with turning it once, when you uncover it, but the recipe left room for doubt so I turned it twice. It needs to be seared to look the part.

We served it with nut cutlets from the freezer, which were very pleasant. Julia thought the meal might be a bit bland without the cutlets, but I thought the cauli was OK as the main item. I served it with cheese/mustard sauce, though there are other sauces and flavourings. I may experiment with other seasoning in future, though it’s a big chunk of vegetable, and my digestive system is currently gurgling hard.

Cauliflower Steak with vegetables and Nut Cutlets

Adventures with a Pan

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We had smoked mackerel pate for lunch yesterday. That involved the use of the food processor, so, for me, was a real technical challenge. I had to ask Julia to dismantle it at the end, because I can never work the catch that releases the bowl. You would have thought that in the 21st Century they would have thought of making this obvious.

Smoked Mackerel Pate

It was a simple recipe, involving two bits of smoked mackerel (about 200 g) and half a pack of cream cheese. I pulled the fish off the skin and broke it up, added the green bits from a large spring onion, a big spoonful of wholegrain mustard, some black pepper and then gave it a whizz in the food processor. Then I opened it up and pushed the big bits of fish down into the mix before having another go. I think that if I’d broken the fish up more I could have omitted that last step. I will aim for pieces about the size of a finger top joint next time – some of the ones I tried were nearly the size of my thumb and managed to ride up to avoid the blades. People often use horseradish, as it is traditional with mackerel, but I didn’t have any so I tried mustard and it seems to have worked.

I’m saving the last lime to make an avocado dip, so didn’t use any citrus, but it didn’t seem to make a difference – the mustard and spring onion gave the mix a good, fresh taste without citrus.

We ate it with toast. There was plenty of pate for four thickly spread rounds of toast.

Smoked Mackerel Pate with Toast

Today’s lunch was vegetable soup with warm rolls and smoked mackerel pate. The rolls were Paul Hollywood part baked rolls and there was enough pate left to be generous, though the rolls weren’t exactly huge.

The soup recipe was four manky carrots (though I suppose good clean ones would be just as good), a chunk of swede (rutabaga) that was starting to change colour at the back of the fridge, the potato offcuts from the oven-baked chips (keep reading for details of them) and some leftover peas. Boil it up with water and a stock cube, reduce to soup with a hand-blender, season, eat. It probably needed onions but we only have enough to last until the next shopping trip so I left them out. I also added garlic from a jar, but should have put more in as we couldn’t really taste it.

Vegetable Soup with Rolls and Smoked Mackerel Pate

Yesterday’s tea (sorry to wander about so much), was chunky oven-baked paprika chips, with fish fingers and mushy peas. It’s not great food, but it is a change as we haven’t had fish fingers for a month. I arranged them like something off Masterchef for the photo. I’m not sure it looks any better than throwing a pile of food together. It just looks like an idiot has been playing with his food.

Paprika Potatoes, Fish Fingers and Mushy Peas – Gourmet Fodder

As they were cooking, I made a pot of curry (chickpea and sweet potato – using a base of last night’s chilli) and the previously mentioned soup.

Tomorrow I will use the rest of the cream cheese in a charred red pepper dip and we will also have an avocado dip using the lime I saved by not using it in the pate. It can be quite tricky cooking when you can’t nip out to the shops.

Burnt Aubergine Vegetarian Chilli

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We had Burnt Aubergine Chilli tonight. It’s not the first time that the word “burnt” has entered the conversation about my cookery, along with its synonyms – charred, scorched, over-cooked, cremated, incinerated and inedible. It is, however, the first time I’ve it’s been a deliberate choice.

The recipe is ‘low fat and four of your five a day,’ according to the website.

I didn’t quite follow the recipe – life is too short to cut carrots into tiny cubes, but I did use tinned tomatoes, red kidney beans, green lentils, onions and aubergine. As I recall, you can only count the beans and lentils as one portion, and it’s possible we have to discount the onions as not being a full portion. Call it 3½ portions, even without the carrots.

It wasn’t great, but to be fair to the recipe, I used it as a guide rather than a recipe.

I missed out the carrots because I’m lazy and some of the soy sauce because I’m an idiot (I forgot that a tablespoon is the really big one, not a dessert spoon – I’m always doing that). To be honest, I’m not sure that missing out a few mls of soy sauce was the main problem.

I also missed out the red lentils (replaced with extra green ones), the coriander and the cinnamon because I didn’t have any. (It turns out we did actually have cinnamon but ‘men can never see anything even when it’s straight in front of them’). Again, I’m not sure that missing out a few sprinkles of spice was a major problem.

The major problem may well have been that I was hungry, so I omitted the 800 ml of stock and most of the cooking time. I was using tinned lentils so it wasn’t as if they needed a lot of cooking. This may have deprived us of a great deal of flavour and texture. Or it may just have meant we ate sooner.

It was, as I say, not great. The spicing was quite hot, though acceptable by our modest standards, and the flavour was not as good as I would have liked. On the other hand, it wasn’t bad either. In truth, I’ve never really rated vegetarian chilli so I wasn’t particularly disappointed by the result. I will try it again and see how it goes.

Burnt Aubergine Chilli with brown rice

The scorching of the aubergine skin, done using the garden flamethrower, did not produce the smoky flavour I was hoping for, though the discarded skin smelt reasonably smoky as it went into the compost. I was hoping for something spectacular for the photographs, but the camera seemed to filter the flame out.

Another problem is the chocolate. I used some of Julia’s hoard of 80% dark chocolate, thinking that if something is doing it is worth doing properly. It didn’t add anything to the taste, but when I mentioned it, it did add something to the conversation. I won’t go over the entire discussion, but Julia isn’t happy about the idea of me throwing her decent chocolate into a chilli. From the note of indignation in her voice you’d have thought I’d been using puppies, not chocolate.

A Cupboard Full of Treasure

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I have just been rooting through a kitchen cupboard. It’s one I don’t often use as it’s awkward for me to reach. It’s awkward for Julia to reach too, but about a year ago she stood on a chair and rearranged it. She does this sometimes. Usually when I am out.

Tonight, whilst waiting for pasta to boil, I decided to have a quick look through the cupboard. It contains mainly pulses and such stuff and I thought it would be good to have a look through with a view to using some up.

Pasta Bake

Imagine my surprise on moving the first few packets, to find that we had an unopened pack of spaghetti in there. Treasure indeed, in these times of shortage. And behind the cous cous and quinoa, I unearthed a pack of organic oats. Again, in these days of porridge shortages, this was like finding a bag of gold. Well, not quite. If I found 500 grams of gold instead of the oats. I’d probably have reacted in a slightly more enthusiastic manner.

Yes, I admit, I did say cous cous and quinoa. I bought them a few months ago to make healthy lunchtime salads but haven’t quite weaned myself off cheese and pickle sandwiches.

I also found two tins of chopped tomatoes and two more of chick peas plus a bag of pudding rice. This is all stuff you can no longer find on supermarket shelves. I never thought I’d be glad that I have a wife with squirrel DNA but her habit of hiding things seems to have paid off this time.

So, all is right with the world. We have bonus food for several meals and there is a pasta bake in the oven. I will take a picture when I take it out.

After that we will be having apple crumble. I’ll take a picture of that too.

Apple crumble with cream – delicious

All in all, things could be a lot worse.

Lockdown Ratatouille

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Yes, I’ve reverted to writing recipes again. Well, I needed some new photos and this was one way to get them.

It’s a handy recipe which provides two meals for two people. Or one meal for four. As a bonus, it’s all vegetables you can’t really poison anybody with it.

It’s particularly useful for my diet as I don’t really enjoy it so I don’t eat too much. Too many vegetables, too much virtue and not enough chips. I suppose you could serve it with chips but it doesn’t seem natural.

Warning – this isn’t quite the classic ratatouille recipe and if you are a serious cook it probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you aren’t too fussy and have better things to do than cook, it might just suit you.

All anecdotes and suggestions for improvement gratefully received.

Take some onions and start to soften them in a pan with a good splash of oil. I use ready chopped onions because too much preparation makes my back hurt and my fingers start to ache. Use about half a packet. The other half can be used for vegetable curry. I usually cook them on the same night and store the other in the fridge.

The Recipe:

Chop a couple of courgettes. Throw them in the pan. Cut up some peppers. I only had one red pepper and it was going a bit soft at one end so this recipe is for three quarters of a red pepper. I like the the colour of red or orange or yellow peppers. I rarely use green because I’m not keen on indigestion. That’s zucchini and bell pepper if you are American. I believe it’s zucchini and capsicum if you are in Australia and courgette and capsicum if you are in New Zealand.

It’s a good thing we all speak English or this could be quite confusing.

And now we have an aubergine. Chop it and chuck it in. It’s an egg plant in America, Australia, New Zealand and most of Canada. It’s an aubergine in Quebec and the UK.

Perhaps people could confirm that this is correct, it will give us something to talk about while we are in lockdown.

It’s approximately ratatouille

I used one tin of tomatoes, some puree and some water because I’m trying to conserve tinned tomatoes – they are in short supply round here. Add dried herbs. I just use mixed herbs. Sometimes I use Italian Mixed Herbs. I suppose I ought to be using the Provencal mixed herbs, but you don’t always see them around. To be honest, they are all exotic and foreign to me, and my palate is not sophisticated.

I should use garlic but I’m out of the bottled stuff at the moment and couldn’t be bothered to slice any of the fresh stuff.

After that you simmer it a bit. If you are lucky it comes out rich and gloopy. If you aren’t lucky you just have to say “it’s supposed to be crunchy” or “in some parts of France it’s traditional to serve it as a soup” or “If you’re so clever, you can do the cooking.”

Divide it into two lots, reserving the cooking liquid, if any, for the second lot.

Serve the first with sausages, veggie burgers or baked potatoes. Or pretty much anything you fancy – those are just my three main choices. As you will see, I served it with garlic bread and broccoli last night – we had some left-over garlic bread slices and the broccoli was looking a bit the worse for wear at the back of the fridge so it all went on the plate.

That broccoli looks really bad when photographed…

The second lot should be mixed with cooked pasta. If possible have this portion a bit more liquid than the first lot so it coats the pasta. When you are ready to eat, sprinkle cheese on top and reheat it in the oven. Now it’s pasta bake and you can’t be accused of serving the same thing twice in two days.

Preparation time – about 20 minutes for the ratatouille, about 15 for the pasta bake (mostly boiling pasta). Cooking time – about twenty minutes I suppose, I never really check.

Ingredients – onions, courgettes aubergines, peppers, tinned tomatoes, tomato puree, mixed herbs, garlic, possibly water. You can get by without aubergines and peppers if necessary and you can put mushrooms in, though I’m not sure you are meant to.

And that, dear reader, is another part of the mystery. It’s not my money or my cheerful disposition, and as you can see from the recipe, it’s not my cooking. What does Julia see in me?

Parcels,Pate and Pakora

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Disclaimer – there is not much pakora in this post – but I’m a slave to alliteration so I lied. Sorry about that. I did have pakora in my sandwiches last week so I do at least have a slight excuse to mention them. They were sweet potato pakora and, to my mind, much nicer in sandwiches than the falafel we also tried.

Yesterday I breakfasted on porridge, took Julia to work, cursed several cyclists for their ridiculous strobe lights and arrived at the shop far too early.

I had to use a lot of old self-adhesive stamps where the glue has dried out. This means they have to be fixed using a stick of glue. In turn this means that several of them have to be detached from my finger tips. They were a really bad idea as the glue either dries out or forms an unbreakable bond with the backing paper. I’m sure they are good when they are new, but we, as you know, use a lot of old stamps.

They are First CLass Stamps, but no longer self-adhesive.

My first parcel of the day was a selection of gum cards bound for America. Imagine my surprise when my fourth parcel turned out to be a group of gum cards. To America. It was the same man, who quite clearly hadn’t thought things through.

Fortunately I have strong nerves and a steady hand so I was able to open the parcel with my trusty scalpel and add the second lot of cards. Two lots of cards. one lot of postage and a substantial refund. Hopefully he will be happy with that.

After parcels (and no more mishaps) I proceeded to do more banknotes. This an ongoing project. I have photos loaded up until Myanmar and will be moving on to Nepal tomorrow. I’m looking forward to Zimbabwe…

Nepal – bank notes and an unusual head-dress

In the evening I read and replied to other bloggers, wrote a blog post, then wrote a second blog post, though it was actually too late in the end.

Between the two I cooked ratatouille and sausages, made a batch of smoked mackerel pate and did the sandwiches.

The pate recipe is simple and I’m not sure why I don’t do it more often. Mackerel, cream cheese. yoghurt, spring onion, lemon juice, lemon zest, horseradish sauce and dijon mustard. Quantities range from two bits of mackerel and quite a lot of cream cheese down to juice and zest of half a lemon and a teaspoon of each of the seasonings. Next time I may leave out the yoghurt and add more horseradish. Or I may just buy the pate and avoid the epic amount of washing up it generates.

It has worked out rather well and Julia can have the third bit of fish. She likes fish. I eat it because it’s good for me. I used the small blender and two bits of fish was enough to fill it. I haven’t used it for a while and couldn’t work out how to get the bowl off . Julia eventually sorted it for me.

You can also make fish pate with smoked haddock, though I seem to remember you can do that with a fork. There’s a look of the shoe sole about a smoked mackerel fillet if you aren’t careful. So far it has provided a decent depth of filling for four medium cobs and will probably do at least two more.

It’s really quite amazing. Some smoked fish and stuff in a blender and I’m already daydreaming about a Michelin star.

Tonight we will finish the ratatouille, add some “French-style lentils” from a packet, bake a potato and have some veggie burgers. This week I have bought the burgers – next week I will be making them. I am also going to start cooking my own lentils. I have become very lazy.I always used to make my own but have drifted off course somewhere.

I’d better try making my own pakora too…

Banknotes of Laos

Hasselback Potatoes – the Final Photograph

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This, at last, is the final photograph. The potatoes don’t look too bad, though I’ve never really mastered the art of making food look good in photos. The stir fried sprouts and broccoli look, to be honest, burnt, but they were actually very tasty. The other, orange, bits were roast carrots and sweet potatoes. The pink bits are gammon.

That’s all for now. I’m just in and need a cup of tea and a warm fireside.

Some Cookery Confessions

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So, you ask, how was the vegetable soup last night? You probably aren’t asking that, but I’m going to tell you anyway and it seems better if I pretend someone is interested.

Well, the vegetable soup, consisting of some festering ready-chopped carrot and swede, some greying carrots, a wrinkly parsnip, quite a lot of onion and some green bits from leeks, was excellent in parts. It was nutritious, tasty, sustaining, wholesome and almost additive free.

The additives came from a garlic and thyme flavour pot I threw in.

The parts that weren’t good came from the seasoning. It was, to say the least, a schoolboy error. It needs a bit of spice to give it a lift, I always feel, and I decided to test out the new jar of smoked paprika. I’ve only just started using it again, I never think of it as particularly hot and… you can already see where this is going can’t you?

A lesson I learned long ago is to test out each new jar of spice unless it’s one you’ve used before.

This one was quite a bit hotter than the previous one and despite attempts to cool it down with honey and extra dilution, it remained a little hotter than is usual for vegetable soup.

Despite this, the basic recipe was good and it used a lot of slightly manky veg.

Tonight we are having gammon, Hasselback potatoes and vegetables that are still to be decided. I’ve been meaning to do Hasselback potatoes for a while, and once I actually read the recipe I was amazed at how easy they are. They always look much more complicated when you see them served on TV.

This could be a case of “famous last words” because they are still in the oven.

Meanwhile, bubbling away on the hob we have a vegetable curry on the go for tomorrow. It’s onions, sweet potato, chickpeas, some chilli from a jar, garlic from a jar, curry powder and five ladles of spicy vegetable soup from yesterday, because it would be silly to waste it and if you have soup (or spicy vegetable sauce as it is now) you may as well put it in a curry.

You can probably tell from the nature of my ingredients that I’m not one of the world’s most industrious cooks, and that I have trouble with stock control and portion sizes, but I keep on trying. Cooking and writing are both similar in that you have to keep trying, and once in a while, possibly by accident, something good happens.

The photos tonight are chickpea and sweet potato curry and half-finished Hasselback potatoes. If I wait until it’s time to serve I’ll eat them before I remember to take the photos.

Chickpea and Swee4t Potato Curry, and steam

An Easy Meal

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Cut some veg into bits.

Tonight I used sweet potatoes, carrots, swedes, onions and sprouts.

Oil them and chuck them in the oven for 30-40 minutes at 180 C (250 F or Gas Mark 4)

Then add the chicken thighs.

Give it another 30-40 minutes.

Whip up some gravy (Julia insists on gravy) and serve, pretending it’s a proper roast dinner.

Make a mental note that next time I’ll put the sprouts in at the same time as the chicken.

The timings are approximate, as I was watching the Strictly Come Dancing results. That’s why it looks a bit burnt. I think burnt food is more tasty. Apart from sprouts. Burnt sprouts aren’t an improvement.

So there you go – roast dinner, negligible thought or work.

My sort of meal.

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Life after the Care Farm

Category Archives: Cookery

Charred Red Pepper Dip

Lockdown Cookery

Adventures with a Pan

Burnt Aubergine Vegetarian Chilli

A Cupboard Full of Treasure

Lockdown Ratatouille

Parcels,Pate and Pakora

Hasselback Potatoes – the Final Photograph

Some Cookery Confessions

An Easy Meal