Tag Archives: curry

The All-Purpose Recipe

Boiling vegetables

Take vegetables. Cube them. I use carrot, parsnip, leek, onion, turnip, swede, sweet potato and potato. Sometimes I use garlic. This, when boiled, possibly with a stock cube, is “Vegetable Stew” and is served into bowls with a ladle. I sometimes add red lentils or pearl barley and also sometimes add shredded greens. If I transfer it to a wok and added fried onions and perhaps shredded greens and corned beef and season it with Henderson’s Relish it becomes “Hash”. If you give it a day and hit it with a hand blender it becomes “Vegetable Soup”. If you tweak the vegetables slightly (I’m not convinced of the merit of turnip or swede in curry, for instance, and parsnips can be disconcertingly sweet, it becomes “Curry”.

Liquidise

In days gone by it would probably have been called “pottage” and would have been the staple food of much of the population. Looking back down my family tree, it’s clear to see that I am just the latest in a long tradition of peasants. Fortunately I have not yet been reduced to gruel.

Yesterday, as I believe I mentioned, we had mixed vegetable soup. It was the surplus veg from the hash with added black pepper and a cheese and tomato sandwich. A posh meal for peasants, but simple compared to the things you see on cookery programmes.

Serve. Just like yesterday and the day before . . .

In the evening we had a variation on the stew theme – Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry. I often use a can of tomatoes in it, but this time I used the leftover tomato soup from a couple of days ago. We also use vegetable soup for the same thing when we have it. Not sure if I’m brave enough to use broccoli soup or not. Probably not, it just doesn’t seem right.

I use bags of ready chopped onions – my hands aren’t what they were and buying like this avoids much frustration and cutting of finger tips

I was reminded last night, whilst watching TV, that writing things by hand engages different parts of the brain than typing. I was also reminded that it’s important, when checking things up, to avoid reading technical papers on the subject. I just spent ten minutes going through one paragraph. It turns out that writing with a western alphabet is different from writing in hieroglyphics or Chinese. I didn’t want to know that, or bend my head around so much Latin, and I know if I see “et al.” I have taken a wrong turn down the rabbit hole. It is written by a man with much knowledge and very little control of his words. They form paragraphs of brick wall proportions and clusters of words like thickets of thorns, holding me back rather than helping me on my way.

Cursive handwriting is better than writing in block letters for a number of reasons (which I skimmed. My decision on those two forms of writing is based on whether I want people to be able to read what I have written. Even I have trouble reading my own handwriting after a few hours, as I forget what I wrote and the squiggles that remain are of little help.

Inions and sweet potatoes – the suspense continues . . .

I’m going to have to look for a simpler version. I know handwriting is better than typing and want to go back to it (even though I hate typing my notes afterwards) but I can only vaguely remember what was said on the subject and can’t take much of any use from the paper I’m currently reading. I am feeling very stupid as I admit that, but that’s just the way it is. Think of Brave New World, we don’t all pop out of our test tubes as academics, some of us have to operate machinery.

I just found a simpler version. Writing by hand enhances memory and learning. The control of the pen, and sensory involvement, contribute to elaborate brain patterns which enhance memory and learning. It is important to include writing by hand in education, using pens and pencils instead of digital devices.

Add chickpeas and garlic paste as the sense of jeopardy escalates . . .

That is my sort of academic – knows stuff, connects it to real life and helps people learn. I feel more intelligent now. I am also going to make notes my hand rather than typing or cutting and pasting.

Add leftover tomato soup and simmer as tension reaches breaking point . . .

It’s a small step forward but a journey of a thousand miles etc. . . .

The final result – brownish food on brownish rice, with beige naan bread. I feel the end result may not have lived up to the sense of tension I tried to create.

Back to Basics

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Onions and celery

I’ve let things slide a bit over the last year. The last few months have seen my writing and my diet fall into disarray, and my personal grooming could do with some attention.

The last one was easy. Julia bought me an electric head shaver as an early Christmas present and a few days ago I gave myself a good going over with the trimmers then had a go with the head shaver. It doesn’t produce a smooth and shiny bald head like a wet shave, but it’s quicker and easier and, let’s face it, safer. There is always a danger, when impersonating an octopus and wet shaving my head, that I’m going to do a quick van Gogh impersonation. When you see what some people can do to their chin with a wet shave and a so-called safety razor, you have to wonder what I could do if I slip whilst contorting to do the fold at the top of my neck.

Tin and label

I just had a look on the internet to find the correct term for this. You’d think it would be easy enough, but it’s a bit tricky. I don’t want to get it wrong, so I’ll just say that the back of my skull has a prominent ridge of the sort associated with thugs, gorillas and cavemen. It’s supposedly a sign of neck muscle attachments, but to me it’s a sign of deficient social skills and a slightly lower position on the evolutionary scale than I would like to occupy. It’s strange that of all the deficiencies in my body and appearance, I fixate on the back of my head. Apart from that, it’s not easy to shave. A smoother skull would be a definite advantage in head shaving.

I realised, when reading about skulls, that although I am familiar with many of the names of skull parts from my viewing of CSI, that I don’t actually know where most of them are. There are 22 of them, all with long names – parietal, occipital, temporal, sphenoid, and ethmoid for starters. I’m going to admit defeat on this – I really don’t have time or brain cells to assimilate it all. If I ever need to describe a head injury to a doctor I will stick to simple terms like front and back and trust that they know the rest.

Simmer

Anyway, that’s what it is. Next, I will trim my beard, but I like to take my time over that.

The writing is a permanent mess that never seems to run well for more than a few months at a time, so we can leave that for a while.

So it’s diet now, and as the title suggests, I’m starting from scratch. Soup.

Last night’s soup was tomato. Onions, celery, a tin of tomatoes and a tin of water. If you use boiling water it saves heating the whole pan again, and also makes it easier to take the label off. Hand blender. Note I used a steel saucepan after my casserole misadventures. Today I will make broccoli and blue cheese soup, and use the leftover tomato as the base for tonight’s curry sauce. Sweet potato and chickpea curry tonight. A simple staple that we have drifted away from after discovering biriyani seasoning in a kit from TESCO. That’s the thing about getting organised, it makes things easier. It’s also cheaper than buy seasoning and sauce in a box, and contains fewer chemicals.

All done

And a tuna sandwich garnish . . .

Hands free can opener – one of my devices for coping with arthritis. Most days I am OK, but some days I just don’t feel like wrestling with a can. JML also made my head shaver. They seem to be the modern RONCO.

Carrot Soup, Curry and Cushions

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The day is nearly over and I have completed the first draft of the new villanelle I discussed a couple of days ago. It’s still a bit rough around the edges but it now has all the lines and all the rhymes it needs. The lines are nearly ll the right length, and the rhymes nearly all work, so it’s coming closer to being ready and looks quite like a poem.

I spoke to a bird watcher I know a few days ago and told him about the kites we saw on our drive through Northamptonshire. He was unimpressed. He’s only been doing it for around a year and he has never known the kite as a rare bird. What is a thing of wonder to me is a commonplace event to him. It’s strange what a difference twenty years can make.

After a lazy day, we had sweet potato and chickpea curry, which was quite tasty. It tasted all the better for being the culmination of a plan, and was quite an easy meal – just needing warming up to be ready. I am at work tomorrow and have just made sandwiches using the mackerel paste I made on Thursday. Tomorrow Julia will have the rest of the carrot and parsnip soup for lunch. Not sure about tea, but e will then have the leftover curry. We won’t have it for tea, I expect, because Julia has a fixation about not having the same thing twice in a row. Women, in my experience, are like that.

As a child I once expressed an opinion that I wished I could eat nothing but cheese and pickle sandwiches for the rest of my life. My mother said i would soon tire of them if that was all I had. I wasn’t convinced. Sixty years later I am still happy to have them every lunchtime, but my digestion does require me to take a break every few weeks, at which point I try something else for a while. We’ve just had a couple of weeks of tuna mayonnaise, corned beef and now mackerel paste, but I still find it hard to beat cheese and pickle.

I honestly believe that is one of the main differences between women and men. They like cushions, children and variety in their menus, wheres I could happily live without all that frippery.

And just like my food, I have little difficulty in reworking old titles and photos.

Kites, Curry and Carrot soup

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I now have all the paperwork assembled for claiming my pension. Now I need to assemble the documents so I can give money to one of my own children. It’s all very vexing. The pension company ws happy to take my money and hang on to it, why do they suddenly need to know who I am? As for the “money laundering” regulations, I’m sure they would all melt away if solicitors were not able to charge for doing then checks. They would suddenly remember that the law relating to gifts isn’t quite clear and may not apply.

To restore some calm to my life I have been cooking. I dismembered a parsnip of considerable size, chopped some carrots, softened an onion, added lentils, garlic, stock cube, water and boiled it up. It is now blended and waiting to be eaten for tea tonight with crusty rolls and mackerel pate (Julia is buying the rolls and I will make the pate later). I think it is quite tasty but it’s difficult to tell because I’m also cooking a curry for tomorrow and I tasted that before the soup. Schoolboy error.

I will try again later when the feeling has returned to my tongue. It’s very difficult getting the right degree of bite when adding chilli in the form of crushed chillis from a jar. It also features onion, sweet potato, chickpeas, tinned tomatoes, garlic and curry powder. And the leftover tomato soup from earlier in the week. In turn, we will add the remains of tonight’s soup to the leftover curry and use it as a base for something else, probably curried vegetable soup.

This the first time in a while that I have felt fit and organised enough to get stuck into some planning and batch cooking, so it’s a good sign.

A bad sign of trouble to come is that my WP screen is acting a little differently at the moment, and I cannot access the comments. They are still there, but in a flickering diaphanous form. Probably a sign of more changes to come.

Red Kites in Wales

Day 114

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Did very little today. Julia did a bit of work in the garden, made a rhubarb crumble and cooked lunch despite a bad hip. I was no help. I even have trouble gripping a mug after brewing tea. In the evening I ordered a takeaway curry online. Careful ordering means we will have a slightly different version of the same meal tomorrow. It is reasonably nutritious and more cost effective that way. (That is my way of making myself feel less guilty).

I have a few days left until the deadline at the end of the month and have been turning things over in my had, even if it didn’t make a lot of difference on paper.

I am getting seriously worried by the lack of work that I am doing. On an average day I don’t do enough, but on a slack day I do nothing at all. It isn’t helped, at the moment, by my fingers, but they aren’t really making a lot of difference, just providing a good excuse.

Plans for the rest of the week include lentil soup (I have the lentils ready and waiting) and the search for new recipes. During lockdown we tried quite a few different recipes but we have slipped back into a rut. We were saved by the addition of recipe boxes to our weekly shop, as Number One Son signed us up to some of those services which deliver ingredients to the house. That was how we ended up making Nasi Goreng. I have just looked at that post whilst adding the link, and clicked through on another link, and am even more depressed about my life, as I seem to be writing about the same thing time after time.

Tomorrow I must find a new subject

Variations on a Theme

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When life gives you chorizo that’s perilously close to its use-by date, make sausage casserole.

That’s my new mantra.

I made three meals this afternoon, which will save me time in the long run. The first, mad after finding I had ¾ of a chorizo at the back of the fridge, was to make a variation on last week’s sausage casserole.

This time I managed to find mild chilli powder to use instead of the Cajun Seasoning. I also used black-eyed beans and chorizo. There was a red pepper in the fridge next to the chorizo so that went in too.

We also have vegetable hotpot and Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry in the fridge so all is looking good on the catering front. A lot of it is looking like plates of red stew, but you can’t have everything. If you cook by pouring cans of chopped tomatoes into things, you are going to end up with red food.

The curry is actually reddish with black bits in it, on account of me simmering too vigorously and ignoring the pot as I watched Father Brown this afternoon. A few burnt bits will add texture.

I think I’ve found a winning combination. Cheap, simple, and not bad to eat. It probably won’t pass inspection by the quality and health police, but it will do for me. I have a blog to write and time is too precious to waste on cooking.

The bread in the picture is Corn Bread from TESCO. I was going to use it for Welsh Rarebit for lunch on Sunday, but the arrangements went adrift.

Chorizo and Bean Stew

How do you plan your time?

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I’ve been home for four hours. In that time I’ve read and commented on 10 posts from four bloggers, spoken to my sister, washed up (yes, I know I’m a slob) and cooked. Tea is nearly ready, though I have exploded a baked potato in the oven.

It doesn’t seem a lot for four hours. I’m never going to become a world class poet at this rate. I’m not even going to become a mediocre poet at this rate as I haven’t written anything apart from a few notes today. Well, I did answer some work emails and load four items onto eBay, but there was a distinct lack of poetry associated with all that.

The most complicated word I used was iconic, which is almost obligatory these days if you are selling a Winston Churchill Medallion.

We had a chicken curry made with a spice kit last night – grilled marinaded chicken breasts with rice and yoghurt dressing. The chicken was good, though messy to prepare, but the rice was not impressive. I couldn’t actually detect any flavour in it, though that may have been my fault for using brown rise instead of white.

The yoghurt dressing was good to. Two out of three ain’t bad, as they say. Maybe I will make meatloaf later this week.

Tonight it was Cornish Pasty with beans and baked potato. It wasn’t sophisticated but I did enjoy it.

We had crumble for the last two nights, made with plums from the garden tree. I see Julia has brought some apples home today so I’m hoping for apple crumble later this week. Tomorrow we will probably have fried rice with courgettes. We have plenty of courgettes – green ones, yellow one and ones that think they are marrows.

The car is in for servicing and MOT tomorrow, which seems to get more expensive every year. If I’d had my MOT in July I would have been given a 6 month extension, but as it’s in August I have to have it as normal. Ah well, it’s the same the whole world over, ain’t that a blooming shame – it’s the rich wot gets the pleasure and the poor wot gets the blame. Or words to that effect.

A final thought – according to Waking up on the Wrong Side of 50 she has her blog posts planned out until 20th September. The woman must be a machine – I have a couple of ideas noted for future use, but when I started writing this I didn’t know what I was going to write about when I started and wasn’t sure how I was going to finish it.

How do you plan your blog?

Photo by Kirsten Bu00fchne on Pexels.com

I thought I’d use the cats again today as they are generally acceptable, and because I’m too lazy to find new shots.

The Secret Life of a Blogger

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I’ve just been looking down the list off drafts for the last week. They are also known as false starts, ideas and notes and are there for various reasons.

Last night’s effort stalled after 200 words on the grounds that it was depressing. I can’t see much in it worth salvaging and when I have a clear-out it will probably go. It falls in the gap between being entertaining and cathartic, and that’s a very dull and self-indulgent gap.

The one before that has a copy of Agatha Christie’s Great War VAD record Card, and I have not yet written anything to go with it. I may or may not develop that. Again, it’s just going to be a re-hash of available facts and I’m not sure I can add anything useful to the amount that has been written about her.

The third is my drfat for the 12th May Mass Observation Diary. I’m not sure whether it would serve any purpose if I sent it in.

Fourth is a five line false start on dead badgers. It probably needs a recipe to get it going again. That was originally going to be about blood tests but it was overtaken by the phone call requiring a repeat test. When I returned I started the post again.

Fifth is the start of the original 1926 post. I started that the night before my 1926th post, which ended up being about blood tests. It was not as good as the opening I eventually used. This is saying something, as the opening I used will hardly go down in history with “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

For more good opening lines read here. I must try harder. It’s slightly depressing that a search for ‘best opening lines’ resulted in six sites offering conversational openers for Tinder. They aren’t all great lines, though I did like – “Do you have an ugly boyfriend? No? Want one?”

I’m going to try that on Julia.

The next two are about regimental brooches. Whether they are attempts to bore my readers or drafts for articles, I’m not quite sure, but I have plenty of photographs and I may well put something together to teach you about regimental brooches and the depths of a collector’s soul.

Finally we reach back to Scone Chronicles 38. It was written just before lockdown and I lost the photos. It features scones and Sir Bradley Piggins.

This isn’t quite an accurate account, as I cleared out a few weeks ago and these are just the eight most recent. The real stinkers get binned regularly.

Do you have a similar system, or are all your starts true sparkling jewels of blogging excellence? Or do you clear out more often? I still have some from years ago, where I’m hoping to use a title or a well-turned phrase at some point in the future. I am, in psychological terms, a hoarding optimist.

Finally, the pictures are from the chickpea and peanut butter curry we had from the boxes last night. It was the one I’d looked forward to most eagerly, and the biggest disappointment, as it was tasty but not spicy. I liked the meatballs and the pork steaks better. However, we will be incorporating it into our menu rotation as a variation on the veggie curries we already make. The two photos show natural light and flash versions of the same meal. The one with flash (seen here) is much more welcoming.

Thai red curry – chickpeas and peanut butter

I could have done without the roasted broccoli, which seems to have been a feature of the three meals (it’s covered in sauce in this picture) and there was enough lime with the grated zest on the rice, without using the wedges provided.

Of course, as soon as I say that, WP decides to stop showing me my photographs…

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.

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

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Life after the Care Farm