A Modern way to Cook by Anna Jones

Always last to jump on a bandwagon (or anything for that matter - I didn't realise I had to do anything with my eyebrows until I was well into my 20s, and dealing with bushy eyebrows is no bandwagon issue), I have only recently come across Anna Jones. Friend and erstwhile employee of Jamie Oliver; Slender of leg, blonde of hair, vegetarian wholefood enthusiast...

You might have thought I'd be more than a little dismissive. I am, after all the person who sent Deliciously Ella back whence it came (my mum) a few short months ago for reasons too numerous to mention (oh, OK then - I found it irritatingly smug, couldn't connect to the writing style or the writer, there was, frankly, far too much quinoa in the first few pages for her to be credible, and what I really wanted was Diana Henry's 'A Bird in the Hand' but obviously I hadn't been hinting hard enough.)

But we're not talking about Deliciously Ella or A Bird in the Hand (although I will return to Diana Henry in a later blog). We're talking about Anna Jones and A Modern Way to Cook and, swoon, my latest food crush.

I'm never going to be a vegetarian but I flirt with reducing the amount of meat in our diet for numerous reasons. I am conscious that there are calories and there are calories and I need to make them count. A Modern Way to Cook seems to tick both boxes. There are many vegetarian cookery books that I've tried and enjoyed but are very cream and cheese laden, thus defeating the object of my latest quest to make my calories count in the right way. Anna Jones' approach to food seems to be easy and straightforward. Ditch the refined sugar, choose alternatives to dairy, cut out the meat. Yes, my cupboards now groan with a wider selection of pulses and unrefined sugar options (Agave syrup, anyone) but get your head around that and you're laughing. And feeling lighter and generally more energetic. Really. Couple this shift in culinary preferences with a surprisingly successful Dry January and I'm feeling perkier than I can ever remember for this time of year which usually drags me right down. To top it all - and probably crucial to this feeling of well being - is that I don't feel like I've been hard done by in the food department. AND I'm half a stone lighter than I was at the end of December.

So what have I cooked? Admittedly, I've majored on the baking section in A Modern Way to Eat - I am after all trying to lose a bit of weight, but I love a treat, so if I can make the contents of my cake tins healthier, that's got to be a good thing. There's a totally divine 'Ultimate Pecan Banana Bread' combining bananas, oats, pecans, maple syrup - as a connoisseur of banana loaf this comes in very close to the top of my list of banana loaves to bake; 

A Carrot Cake Flapjack which somehow combines the best of both carrot cake and flapjack without eggs, flour or refined sugar; 

Dark Chocolate Goodness Cookies - who would have believed you could use cannellini beans to such amazing effect?! If you've read any of my blog before, you'll know how much of a cake fan I am. Of course, these don't taste the same as my usual bakes, but different is good, and I am converted.

I served up celeriac, bay and mushroom ragu the other evening - it disappeared. And if comfort food is what you need, rhubarb apple and maple pan crumble is a revelation - scrummy crumble topping with none of the heaviness to leave you groaning afterwards for hours...

Honeyed rye bread was delicious (despite a slightly over-enthusiastic crust - it's a few months since I've baked bread and I need to get my mojo back) especially topped with avocado and roasted tomatoes with a cheeky fried egg on the side.

And if this is all seeming like it's too good to be true, well, I have had one disaster. I made some lush kale pesto (inspired by lunch in a local cafe, of which more another time) and decided to 'knock up' some chick pea pasta - from A Modern Way to Cook - to serve it with. The very idea of 'knocking up' fresh pasta, chickpea or otherwise, on a week night when I was tried from work and had hungry mouths to feed, shows just how much confidence Ms Jones had instilled in me. Of course I ended up with a sticky unworkable disaster that I had to chuck away before reaching for the dried pasta. But I feel this was probably more down to user error than anything else. My chickpea flour was somewhat old, and I didn't have ground flax seed as required, so tried to whizz up ordinary flax seed in a food processor to use instead. Disaster, disaster, but I will try it again another day.

There are still plenty of the recipes in A Modern Way to Cook that feel a little too worthy for me, a step too far down the road to kale oblivion, but I'm getting over that. Anna Jones puts together really delicious flavour combinations, and her useful charts suggesting combinations for salads and the like are worth digesting (pun intended). My meal plan for this week includes lentils with roast tomatoes and horseradish, and I can't wait to try frying pan Turkish flatbreads with spoon salad. Some of the ingredients are something of a challenge to locate here in very rural West Wales, but there are ways around that. In the same way that Nigella seems to instil the confidence to experiment, so I feel I can enter our local health food shop, Go Mango in Cardigan, with my head held high and ask if they might possibly stock freekeh...


So, in conclusion, A Modern Way to Eat - definitely worth a read. Certainly worth an experiment. A worthy addition to any shelf of cookery books. But you probably already knew that, didn't you...

Pollo Alla Cacciatora (or Hunters Chicken - with apologies to the hunter, the chicken, and Nigella Lawson)

Cooking to the clock - not for me. I can rarely put a meal on the table at the time I've estimated to allow everyone else to get on with other things. All these challenges - Masterchef, BakeOff - where you have to produce your finest in a set amount of time? Putting aside the fact that I don't generally watch them and don't really approve of them, I could NEVER do that. I'd be completely rubbish. May be that's why I don't approve. But I digress. 

You'll remember, perhaps, my fling with Jamie Oliver and his 30 Minute Meals? Definitely stressful, even if the dinner that resulted was rather delicious - and (here's the crux of it) NOT AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE AT ALL. Flinging stuff around, feeling up against it. Cooking is something I genuinely use to relax. It sounds so trite, but all that chopping, stirring, tasting - I love it. But the more time pressure there is on me to get food on the table, the less I enjoy it.

I have, in fact, been feeling very much up against it recently in various elements of life. Combine that with my ridiculous need to cook proper food for the kids (and the Husband, although he's away this week) every night, relaxation or not, and it's not a happy picture. In my last menu planning session, I turned, for inspiration, to Nigella Express. I haven't paid that much attention to Express apart from a rather fabulous cheesecake offering that's graced a number of our smarter occasions in the last few years. Pollo Alla Cacciatora caught my eye (it's on page 296 of my version), and onto the meal plan it went. When you're feeling under pressure, and Nigella says you can have "tea on the table from scratch in comfortably under half an hour" well - it's almost irresistible.

Of course, I had failed to have on hand some of the ingredients that meant the meal could in fact achieve that golden 30 minutes, and I added in some extras, but, as Nigella says, the fact that this is an old recipe "grants a certain amount of licence". Anyway, it was delicious. I'm sure the hunter would have approved. I hope Nigella would too. And it did only take a smidge longer than 30 mins...

Pollo Alla Cacciatora

Serves 4

Olive oil
1 fat clove of garlic, peeled & finely chopped
1 medium onion, peeled and quite finely chopped
100g pancetta cubes
1 sprig of rosemary, leaves only, finely chopped
500g chicken thigh fillets, cut into 3-4 pieces
salt & pepper
125ml red wine
1 x 400g can chopped tomatoes
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp sugar
6 chestnut mushrooms, sliced
1 x 400g cannellini beans

Add a slug of olive oil (about a tablespoon's worth) to a large frying pan, and add the chopped onions and garlic. 

Sweat the onions gently for 5 mins or so then add the pancetta and rosemary and cook for another 5 minutes.

Add the chicken and sprinkle a couple of pinches of salt and grinds of pepper, then tip in the wine and bring it up to a bubble. Bubble for a couple of minutes then add the tomatoes, bay leaves and sugar.

Add the sliced mushrooms to the pan.

Turn down the heat and simmer for a good 20 minutes or so till the chicken is cooked. 

Drain the cannellini beans and stir into the sauce. Leave for a couple of minutes to heat up

Serve.

Pumpkin Ginger Cake with Lemon icing

So a couple of things have irked me this week.

Firstly, at the weekend, the Husband got stuck into the kitchen and produced a much, much better Pumpkin Soup than I did the previous weekend. He followed a Jamie Oliver recipe, right down to frying the sage leaves first in the oil which you then cook your 'base veg' (the carrot, celery, onions type veg, not the ones shouting obscenities as you chop them up). It was delicious. Grrr.

Secondly, I watched an episode of GBBO. 

I know. Shoot me for my hypocrisy.

In my defence, there wasn't even an old episode of CSI Miami (my least favourite of the CSIs) running on 5 USA, and I was too tired to resist I'm nothing if not open to having my ideas challenged. 

What would Messrs Hollywood & Berry say about my icing? On second thoughts, don't answer that...

So in the interests of testing whether I was right in my views about this sort of TV programme, I decided to endure it. You'll be pleased (or not) to know that I remain firm in my view that this is really car crash TV for the middle classes, and quite exploitative in the way that it plays on peoples' emotions and feelings. All that smarmy niceness and then killer comments basically telling the contestants that their cakes were rubbish. And I still don't really know what it's all FOR? I mean, for a start they weren't really rubbish - those cakes. And secondly, we all know that there are thousands of amazing bakers all over the country producing stunning cakes (both in looks and taste). So why do we need to allow some of those amazing bakers to sob into their fondant icing potagers in public? Hmm?

Anyway, rant about the premise of the programme aside, I have to say that I found the actual baking very compelling, and I liked the vegetable bakes a lot. I am a big fan of veg in cake, and when I was flicking through some books and trying to work out what to bake for a coffee morning this morning, I was mindful of the fact that despite my soup, the Husband's soup and the curry I made for the Harvest Festival Supper, we had still not got through even one of the great big enormous pumpkins from the veg patch.

Now, I know Dan Lepard doesn't take kindly to having his recipes repeated on anyone else's websites/blogs, but I made so many changes to his Ginger Root Cake that I really think this can be called an original cake. For a start, I used pumpkin, rather than root vegetables. But whatever, I was really REALLY pleased with how this turned out. Light and with a lovely ginger flavour in the cake. And of course, lemon and ginger are a match made in heaven, so the icing was a must - and who cares that my attempts at artful drizzling were less than beautiful...

Pumpkin Ginger Cake 

2 large eggs
100g dark muscovado sugar
100g treacle (see top tip below for weighing)
150ml sunflower oil (plus a little extra for weighing out the treacle - see below)
160g grated pumpkin
4 balls of stem ginger, chopped fairly small
175g spelt flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
150g icing sugar
juice of half a lemon

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/160C fan and line a 20cm round cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Separate one of the eggs and put the white to one side, then beat together the whole egg and the separated yolk with the sugar till thick and foamy.

Add the oil and treacle. A top tip for weighing out the treacle is to grease the bowl you weigh it into very lightly with a little oil, also if you are spooning it out of the tin, wipe a little oil over the spoon too, then the treacle will slide out easily. Also works for syrup. 

Beat in the oil and treacle until smooth, then stir in the pumpkin and chopped ginger. 

Mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarb and ground ginger, then stir this into the mixture.

Whisk the reserved egg white to the soft peak stage, then fold it into the rest of the cake mixture with a metal spoon.

Scrape the batter into the tin and bake for 40-50 minutes.

Allow the cake to cool in the tin, then make up the icing by mixing together the lemon juice and icing sugar. You want a pretty runny icing to drizzle over the cake.

I also made Dan's Lemon Butter Cake - which if you own a copy of 'Short and Sweet' (and if you don't I thoroughly recommend that you get one immediately) is on the next page to the Ginger Root Cake - but I pretty much followed the recipe for that, and I'd recommend you do too...

Winning the leftovers lottery - Caramel Apple Tart

Leftovers.

Either as a repeat of the previous meal (I'd go so far as to suggest that the whole Christmas turkey shebang is much tastier cold the next day -apart from the roasties, which need to be sliced up and fried) , or providing components for the next day's dinner - left over roast meat in a stir fry or risotto, left over veg chopped up as bubble & squeak etc, every fridge should have some leftovers in it.

I hit the leftover jackpot today, with the werewithal to make a mighty fine pudding.

Enough leftover sweet shortcrust pastry from a luscious lemon tart that I made yesterday, and half a tin of caramel leftover from making a batch of flapjack. And apples - still, apples everywhere. I have an idea that this might have started life as a Jamie Oliver confection, but regardless of its provenance, this is a pretty flexible dessert that you could probably adapt, and would certainly double up in size if you had more of the necessary left over, or even if you decided to make it in its own right, without waiting to have the required leftovers...

  Caramel Apple Tart

Enough sweet shortcrust pastry to line an 18cm tart tin
200g tinned caramel
1 large cooking apple
a dessert spoon of icing sugar

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Butter and flour the tart tin, then line with the pastry. Use a fork to prick the pastry all over, and then line with greaseproof paper, tip in baking beans and bake blind in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Remove the greaseproof paper and baking beans and return the case to the oven for another 5-10 minutes till the pastry is golden and biscuity. Set aside to cool a little.

Spread the caramel over the base of the tart, then peel, core and slice the apple into fairly thin slices, and arrange over the top of the caramel. Sieve the icing sugar evenly over the apple slices, and then bake for 30-40 minutes till the apple is cooked turning golden, and the caramel is bubbling. Leave to cool a little before serving. 

It was very tasty with some left over soured cream... 

I'm linking up my leftovers pudding to this month's Credit Crunch Munch run by Helen on Fuss Free Flavours and Camilla at Fab Food for All hosted in October by Michelle at Utterly Scrummy

& some mushy peas with that please

The mushy pea. Or, realistically, mushy peas. Once the mush has happened, it would be hard to find them in the singular.

Like marmite, they divide people.

I will never forget the day my mum took my French exchange and I for a day trip into the Dales. We stopped at a pub for lunch, and my adventurous Gallic chum insisted on having whatever was traditional. We deliberated and explained as best we could. In the end she selected the 'pork pie and peas'. Mum and I exchanged glances. In truth, whatever we might have been expecting, a cold, whole pork pie floating in a sea of mushy peas was not it. Nor was it anything that Sonia could have envisaged - marrowfat peas - green mature peas that have been allowed to dry out naturally in the field - soaked overnight then simmered with salt and pepper to make a thick green 'soup'. After 2 weeks in the south of France a year previously, introduced to the delights of steak fondue, merguez flavours, wonderful cheese, and this is how repay her in terms of English gastronomy? I cringed.

For the record, though, she ate it with gusto (for all its strangeness, it tasted pretty amazing) - it's no wonder the exchange was such a success and we are still in touch.

A few years later, I worked in a tiny rural pub in my own corner of Yorkshire to pay a bit of my way through law school. Fran in the kitchen would eat mushy peas mixed with vinegar and black pepper. Bowlsful. Nothing else (apart from the squirty cream for the desserts which she squirted onto a plate and ate with a spoon. Classy, she was - I squirted it onto my finger).

They seem to be a peculiarly Northern taste.

Sure, they can be purchased at establishments across the country, but they aren't taken seriously.  Recently, with the gastro-pub revolution, mushy peas have become something of a retro curiosity, pimped up by our favourite celebrity chefs: Nigella likes hers made with petits pois and creme fraiche. Hugh's are tarted up with garlic and chives Jamie adds mint. That's all well and good, but I've never found them embraced in the the same way as in a decent Yorkshire chippy.

An almost smoky unctuousness; easy to eat; comforting. You can tell which camp I fall into.

On Thursday, Pink and I indulged ourselves. Haddock & chips. Bread & butter. A pot of tea (with cups & saucers and hot water to top up). And mushy peas. In a separate bowl. A portion each. Sigh.

Chicken Pie - because real men (and boys) don't eat couscous

Normally, when the Husband is away, I descend pretty quickly to the "can't be bothered" level of cooking. Why his presence or otherwise should matter, and what that says about me is probably something I should spend some time considering, but not here. The kids are happy to eat pasta till it's coming out of their ears, and I'm happy to oblige, supplementing it with various cheap and cheerful vegetable combinations with the occasional bit of left-over meat or, prize of prizes, some bacon. If he's away for a long time, I might offer some mood boosting fajitas mid-week to lift the gloom, but like my housekeeping generally (which is scratchy at the best of times) it can pretty much all go to hell in a handcart, there's so much else to get done when it's just me at the helm. I salute people who do this on a more permanent basis for what ever reason.

Normally he's only away during the week which means there are the easy distractions of school and other activities. However, he snuck off at 6 on Sunday morning this time leaving me with a whole day of them potentially dwelling on his absence. With the help of some friends, we got through most of it, and I headed off the late afternoon melancholy that I was fearing with a DVD session and roast chicken. Desired effect (happy children) achieved, it has also meant I have had superior pickings in the fridge to see us through the beginning of the week.

The kids were out on Monday anyway, and so last night, armed not only with some left over chicken, but also some chorizo, I put together a particularly tasty version of my cold chicken standby. This is basically a one pot meal - dry couscous, cold meat, chopped tomatoes, frozen peas, whatever you have to hand, to which you add stock flavoured with ground coriander, ginger and smoked paprika (because I didn't have any harissa), cover the whole lot with foil and bung in the oven for 30 minutes. I didn't have quite enough couscous, so supplemented the carbs with a can of chick peas. Pink loved it - she can be fickle and picky but I have never seen a plate clear so quickly. Blue, he of the bottomless stomach and hollow legs, picked out the meaty bits then started pushing it around his plate, trying to engage me in ever more spurious conversations. Then we got the 'If I don't finish this, do I get any pudding?' - this when he still had half a plateful left. He ate on, reluctantly, and we eventually compromised at '9 more mouthfuls' (it would have been 8, but he was 9 on Saturday so the number of mouthfuls goes up!).

"Please tell me you will never cook that again" he said.

I was tempted to tell him we were going to have it again this evening, but without the chorizo, but I refrained. Instead, I stripped the chicken carcass, made stock with the bones, and got the little darlings into bed as soon as I could manage...

Anyway, the Husband came back this afternoon, a day early. Instead of rushing round tidying up the house and doing other wifely things, I focussed on the most important issue - how to use up the last of the chicken in a manner that would please everyone. In view of the available ingredients - cold chicken, the stock, a couple of leeks and some lovely thyme in the garden, I  made a chicken pie inspired by a recipe in Jamie's Dinners, a book that I picked up by chance this morning. I get a little annoyed when famous chefs start name-dropping about the tips they've had from other famous chefs/foodies, but in this case, I'm feeling fairly sanguine about it. I mean, if Fay Maschler, the food writer, suggested adding little balls of sausage meat to a chicken pie, who am I to argue?

Jamie uses raw chicken to start with, so I've added my cooked chicken at a later stage in the process and using the lovely stock instead of wine and milk. I've got less chicken than him, so I've added in extra veg, and probably a little more sausage...

Chicken & Sausage Pie

olive oil
2 leeks, cleaned and sliced
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
leaves from a handful of thyme
2-3 tbsps flour
1tsp dijon mustard
approx 1 pint of stock
200g cold cooked chicken
1 small can of sweetcorn
200g frozen peas
4 sausages (300g)
500g pack puff pastry (you may have leftovers)
1 egg

Pre-heat the oven to 220/200 fan

Heat a lug of olive oil in a parge pan or casserole, and add in the leeks, carrots and thyme leaves. Cook, stirring for 10-15 minutes, then increase the heat, stir in the flour and keep stirring for a minute or so. Add about a wine glass or so of the stock, stirring as you slowly pour it in to the pan to incorporate it with the flour and prevent lumps, then stir in the rest of the liquid, the mustard and grind in some salt & pepper. Bring to a simmer then cover and cook for 30 minutes or so, stirring every so often to stop the mixture catching on the bottom of the pan.

If the sauce is too loose for pie, you can mix up a little more flour with some of the sauce in a separate bowl then tip it back into the pan and stir - don't just sprinkle in more flour as it will just lump up.

Mix in your cold chicken, sweetcorn and peas to the sauce, and tip into your pie dish.

Squeeze the sausagemeat out of the skins, and divide up into 12-16 balls. heat some olive oil in a small frying pan, brown off the sausagemeat balls, and scatter over the top of the chicken mixture, then top your pie with the puff pastry. I don't have what I'd call a 'proper' pie dish, so I rub some water round the rim the pyrex dish I use, and put some strips of the rolled pastry on first before laying on the proper sheet of pastry.

Once you've laid the top sheet of pastry on, trim and crimp the edges down so they look pretty, and beat the egg and brush it all over the pastry. Bake the pie for 30-40 minutes when the pastry will be golden brown and flaky and the filling piping hot. There was so much veg in the pie, I only needed to boil some potatoes.

Clean plates all round.

This month's Herbs on a Saturday is hosted on Blue Kitchen Bakes for Karen at Lavender and Lovage and I'm linking up because of all the lovely thyme that went into this pie. 

I'm also linking to the Season of Soups and Stews hosted by Lancashire Food. The requirement is to use stock in your recipe - I made my own chicken stock for this pie.

And last, but not least - This post is part of the #FaveFamilyRecipes Competition with BritMums and Tilda Rice. Every pack sold will provide a meal to an expectant mum in need in support of the World Food Programme’s Mothers Helping Mothers initiative in Bangladesh.

Laying ghosts of dinner parties past - Beef & Brown Ale Casserole

I have a clear memory of a lunch party my parents held while I was (I think) still at college. Friends of my father’s – twin brothers with whom he had served in the Navy, and one of their wives – were in the area and had made contact. As I remember it, it had been some considerable time since they had seen each other. All were out of the Navy – one of the visiting brothers was running a bar in Spain, the other had been flying helicopters in Saudi Arabia. I have no memory of why they were in our part of Yorkshire. 

They arrived at the appointed hour and conversation ensued. The wife came with the helicopter pilot. Money abounded. She was very nice, but appeared to be rather high maintenance in a way that my mum and I most definitely are not. Long blonde hair. Impeccably groomed. Squashy fur coat. You get the picture.

All went well. Mum had, as usual, produced a magnificent meal. I helped clear away the main course and went into the kitchen to find her in a bit of a state. One of the kittens had walked along the chocolate loaf dessert, leaving beautifully formed kitten paw prints along the top.  As we somewhat hysterically decided that the best course of action would be to sieve icing sugar over the top and add a sprig of holly – we were in the post-Christmas period after all – for a festive touch, the wife came in. Instead of blagging it, Mum burst into gales of laughter and spilled the beans. The look on the wife’s face (I think her name might have been Sheridan. Or Scheherazade. Or something exotic) was a picture. She had the fruit salad in the end.

Why do I tell you all this? Well today, in similar fashion, we hosted an old friend for lunch. A colleague of the Husband’s from when they served in the Army together in York, many moons ago. I cannot recall exactly when the last time we saw him was, but it was certainly when we were living in Army quarters on the edge of Salisbury Plain, probably 10-12 years ago. I remember well the meal I cooked. How could I forget? In joyful and recent possession of The Return of the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver, I decided we would have roasted fillet of beef rolled in herbs and porcini and wrapped in prosciutto. We scoured Salisbury for the meat and ended up paying an obscene amount of money for it in Waitrose. Ditto the prosciutto, which we diligently asked the butcher to slice thinly and lay side by side on some waxed paper – what for assisting the rolling element of the recipe. Oh! The DINKYs we were.

Now, the oven we were blessed with in our army quarter was completely and utterly rubbish. However, being as I was a relatively novice cook, I simply didn’t appreciate the need to be able to cook the finished roll of meat in a blisteringly hot oven. To be honest, I quite like my meat rare, but I would never presume to serve it to guests in that state. Having already cooked it for far too long, I proudly bore my creation to the dinner table and carved. Despite the appearance of being cooked on the outside, it was completely and utterly bloody. Literally. We haven’t seen him since. I’d like to think that was mostly down to life – but there’s always been a niggling suspicion that it was the beef...

Anyway, trying to set that thought aside, we were really pleased that he had got in touch, and jumped at the chance to invite him and his wife and kids (none of whom were around at the time of the previous get together) for lunch.

What to serve has therefore been occupying my mind for some days now, ever since the visit was arranged - typical man fashion – via LinkedIn. Obviously, I was anxious not to repeat the disaster of the last meal, although we no longer live in Army accommodation, and I am far more confident in my oven’s ability to reach a specified temperature. Would it be a roast? I can cook a roast in my sleep but there is always fiddling about at the end with gravy and what not. Should I slow cook a stew? And pudding – what to make?

The pudding will be the subject of another post, although I’ll tease you by saying that it involved pumpkin, but not as you might have known it. In the end, casserole and baked potatoes seemed like the best option, and because the Husband begged suggested that it might be a good idea, I made dumplings too. Along with the baked potatoes, I served roasted cauliflower – I bought a beautiful green romanesco cauli and an ordinary white one and roastedthem with sea salt and olive oil. Gorgeous.  

On a rain-sodden, dreary day, and if I do say so myself, this totally hit the spot. Even if I did manage to turn the oven down almost to off while the casserole was doing its last bit of cooking with the dumplings, causing a minor panic on my part as the children rampaged around, gnawing the furniture... Fortunately, I noticed, and the day was saved. And as the dog only has 3 legs, there was no chance of him getting up on the kitchen table and romping joyfully over the pudding.

Beef & Brown Ale Casserole – served 4 adults & 4 children

1kg braising steak, 3 tbsp plain flour, 1 tsp mustard powder, about 50g lard (yes, I know – you could use olive oil if you didn’t fancy it), 1 large onion, peeled &  sliced and about 10 shallots, peeled, 500g whole Chantenay carrots, 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce, 1 tbsp mushroom ketchup, 1 bottle brown ale (I used Newcastle Brown), a handful of thyme sprigs, 2 bay leaves, 2 beef stock cubes made up with 200ml hot water, salt & pepper.  

If you haven’t already asked the butcher to do it, chop the meat into bite sized pieces. Put the flour in a bowl or plastic bag, add the mustard powder, salt and pepper, mix/shake up then add in the meat and toss it in the flour. 

Pre-heat the oven to 160⁰C/140⁰ C fan.

In your oven-proof casserole dish (one which has a lid), on the hob, melt half the lard and brown the meat in batches, setting aside in a bowl or dish once browned. If you need to add a little more lard during this process, do. When the meat is browned, and set aside, use a splash of the stock or the ale to deglaze any tasty bits that are threatening to stick to the bottom of the casserole and burn, then melt the rest of the lard and add in the onions and shallots, frying for a few minutes till softening. Put the meat back in the pan, add in the carrots, the ale and all the rest of the ingredients, bring back to the boil, then pop the lid on to the casserole dish and put it in the oven.

Yes, I guess it does look a little heavy on the carrots...

My casserole took 2 hours to cook till the meat was deliciously tender – it might take up to 3 – but if it finishes cooking before you’re ready for it, it will stand on the stove until you need it. You can always pop it back in the oven if needed for dumpling purposes as I did.

Now, I know you're going to ask me about the dumplings. They were exceedingly good, despite our guests' 3 yr old son pronouncing them "Deegushting" much to the general hilarity of the table (grr). However, I totally made them according to a Hairy Bikers' recipe in the October 2012 Good Food mag. The casserole is also based on their recipe from the same feature, but I changed it sufficiently. If you're interested in dumplings (who isn't?), I used vegetarian suet, and mixed in 4 tbsps of horseradish sauce and some cold water as the binding agent. Having slow cooked the casserole in a low oven, I whacked up the heat dropped the dumplings in to the top of the casserole and baked for a further 25 minutes (plus extra when I realised that I'd then turned the heat down by accident). They were very good. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pics.

Egg Surprise Grows Up

A long time ago, the Husband and I regularly consumed a dish with the exotic name of Egg Surprise. It consisted of a tin of chopped tomatoes, and anything else that was a likely candidate for an evening meal, bubbled up in a saucepan. The surprise was whether there was an egg cooked in it or not. I have blogged about this before.

Our tastes have of course developed over the years, and money is not quite so tight, but sometimes, the simple and basic things are the best. Roll on a decade or so, and Egg Surprise still appears reasonably regularly on our table, although it might come bearing an exotic moniker such as ‘chachouka’ or some such. Delicious? Yes. But the bottom line is that in our book, meals like this will forever be known as Egg Surprise.

And what do you know? Even the Goddess herself, Nigella, cooks Egg Surprise – I saw it with my own eyes on Nigellissima last night – billed as a post-night out feast to be gobbled greedily from the pan as only la Lawson can, in a LBD and killer heels, I defy you to tell me that was not, essentially, Egg Surprise.

In a recent post about Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meals, I mused on the fact that my culinary heroes have changed as I have grown older. In the same way, what we have in the store cupboard as a base for Egg Surprise has changed - we have our own chickens, so the eggs are more of a given than a surprise. The ‘surprise’ now tends to come in the form of which vegetable glut from the garden has been chucked in to the pot… And yesterday, quite by chance, and, I can assure you, before Nigella graced our screens last night wafting nutella cheesecakes and other deliciousness in front of us, including her own version of Egg Surprise, guess what I had served up for supper, faced with the spinach in the veg patch?

Grown Up Egg Surprise

1 onion, finely chopped

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

1 dried red chilli, chopped (or a pinch of dried chilli flakes

400g tin of chopped tomatoes

100g roasted red peppers from a jar, drained and chopped

150g spinach leaves

½ tsp smoked paprika

400g tin chick peas, drained

2 large eggs

Crusty bread to serve

Pre-heat the oven to 180⁰C.

Heat ½ tblspn olive oil in a pan and fry the onions and garlic gently till softened. Add the chilli, the tomatoes and swill out the can of tomatoes into the pan with 100ml water. Stir in the chopped peppers and bring to the boil Simmer the mixture for 10 minutes, when it will have started to thicken up. At the same time, wash the spinach leaves, shred them and put them in a pan (or steam) till wilted. Drain and squash out the water.

When the tomato mixture is thickened up, stir in the wilted spinach, smoked paprika and chick peas, and add everything into an oven proof dish. Make 2 hollows in the mixture, crack in the eggs and transfer the dish to the oven. Bake till the whites are set – but if possible, the yolks are still runny. It will probably take around 10 minutes if the tomato mixture was hot when you cracked the eggs into it. 

Serve with crusty bread (LBD and killer heels optional)