Potato Surprise Pie

Just as surely as things that go up have to come down, it is also the case that, unless they are incredibly organised and have a bigger freezer capacity than I, people who go out and enjoy themselves 2 weekends on the trot end up with nothing in the fridge and a bit of a crisis - especially given that it's now officially 'Christmas' (having got the Husband's birthday out of the way) and my organisational skills have had to be turned to that rather than the day to day food regime.

I do have a meal plan for December. It's filled in with the many Christmas related events the children are involved with, the Husband's not inconsiderable absences through work-related travel, some parties (more! hooray!) and  a couple of food-related scrawls. I see "salmon?"  against tomorrow. And (rather obviously) "turkey" against 25th. But for the rest of the time? We are doing a lot, and not, apparently eating much.

Actually that's not quite true - closer inspection reveals "leftovers" written in for Monday with an arrow wiggling across the rest of the week (until tomorrow when we are supposed to be having salmon...).

Leftovers on Monday and Tuesday consisted of a rather luscious cauliflower and bacon cheese using up the remnants of various cheese from the weekend, and a sausage and sweet potato casserole, again using up sausages we didn't cook on the beach. The same was on offer on Tuesday, and by Wednesday we had Sausage Casserole left. Left overs from the leftovers, you could say. (I'd over achieved when I bought the sausages). 

Throw into the mix the fact that I've had to scrape together packed lunches and the fridge painted a rather grim picture this afternoon.

But a pot of cream, although a day out of date, was unopened and passed my 'does it taste off' test, and - hallelujiah! 4 slices of bacon. Potatoes an onion and some tired looking tomatoes, and dinner was born. A kind of take on a dauphinoise, I suppose, or a bacon hotpot.

I hesitate to offer a recipe - my dish is, shallow approx 20cm by 20cm, and I thinkly sliced 3-4 maris piper potatoes and an onion, then layered with the bacon and tomatoes plus a grated clove of garlic, salt and pepper and a mixture of 300ml of veg stock and about 100ml of cream, cooked for 40 mins in a hottish oven.

Coupled with some peas (from the freezer) and bingo.

Dinner. 

As I haven't done so for ages, I'm linking this up with Dom's Random Recipes challenge #46 for December. He challenged us to take a photo of our Christmas fridge and post it. Granted this is more the pre=Christmas fridge than the Christmas fridge, but still...Thanks, Dom.

A Loaf of Fresh White Bread - a Random Recipe

I'll tell you the truth - there hasn't been much cooking going on around here - certainly not of the kind that I could in all conscience post up here. I mean, I have been cooking, but repetitive stuff, stuff I've made before, easy crowd pleasers.

Why?

Well, because if there was one thing Blue being ill taught me it was to live for the moment. Now that he's had the all clear, there seems to be even more reason to do so, and given that we've had lots and lots of this

which has led to lots more of this

you'll understand that a gal's thoughts haven't turned to the kitchen that often.

But still. It's been ages since I did a random recipe, and this is the 40th challenge set by Dom at Belleau Kitchen: take the 40th book on the shelf, turn to the 40th page and cook it.

Since the move, my cookery books have been even more dispersed than they were before, and of course, I no longer have my lovely shelf. I started counting in the kitchen and ended up at number 40 in the study with The River Cottage Family Cook Book by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Fizz Carr.

This is not so much a recipe book of family food, as cooking and kitchen related projects for children to undertake. I like it, and it's good for back to basics stuff as well as more challenging projects, including things like making your own sausages, which we have done with the kids. It's got some good stuff about food politics, about reducing waste all that good stuff you'd expect from a book of this provenance, but it's not patronising or preachy.

I pretty much knew where page 40 was going to take me before I'd opened the book - somewhere in the 'Flour' section which includes gems such as home made pasta, sourdough and pastry. And what do you know, page 40 - plain and simple "A Loaf of Fresh White Bread". Actually, page 40 was the pictures, the recipe was on page 41.

I've never used this recipe, and to be honest, it includes both oil and sugar (or honey) which I've long since ommitted from my own bread making. But rules is rules, so I made up the dough using the ingredients specified.

Where I did deviate, though, was in the kneading (or not). I've become more and more aware of the 'no knead' method of bread making, and having had massive success with this to-die-for Cardigan Bay Buns temptation (which I urge you to try) using the no knead technique, I decided to try a Dan Lepard 'hardly any knead' version on this bread recipe.

It's a revelation: with barely any kneading - just a brief flurry of folds and turns every 10 minutes for half an hour, followed by a 45 minute rise, you get awesome bread. Every brief knead the dough take on more structure, the resulting loaf is light, the crust crusty, the crumb, well, crumby. Just right.

And just because I am a complete pig when it comes to fresh bread and couldn't contain myself in the interests of giving you the whole story, I had to sample the results of the almost no knead method in a scientific manner, I can attest to the fact that it tastes great...

Chocolate Yorkshire Pudding - a Random Recipe

Well, of course I didn’t intend to make chocolate Yorkshire pudding,and pretty stodgy at that, but that’s how it turned out.

What I meant to make was a chocolate cake, in honour of the children’s first day at their new school. 

We packed up on Sunday, and arrived in our new house around 9 that night, ready for our worldly goods to arrive on Monday, which they duly did, despite a small detour around Newcastle Emlyn. We spent the day directing the removals men and unpacking furiously, so that on Tuesday, there was the opportunity to go for a play on the beach in the morning, and on Wednesday, having delivered the children to their new educational establishment, the Husband and I walked some of the coastal path with the dog, before coming back to the new house to sort out the shed and make homemade butternut soup for lunch. The very picture of domestic bliss.

I was feeling so confident that I thought I’d try out the oven and make a cake to welcome the kids home after their first day at the new school. In the interests of entering Random Recipes, with a chocolate theme this month, I first had to find my recipe books – easier said than done, but I located them then spent some time re-ordering them in the absence of a shelf. All set, then the dog was sick … Time ticked on – I don’t expect I’m the only one to think that the school day is shockingly short – I mean, you’ve hardly dropped them off than it’s time to go and collect them – so rather than a leisurely baking session, I was running out of time. Rather than a totally random selection, I ended up with one of my Great Aunt’s notebooks, and a recipe entitled “Chocolate Cake (Jessie’s)”,  copied out in copper plate handwriting. The 'Jessie' in question is my maternal grandmother, and it felt right to be making one of her cakes.

As the lack of time necessitated a dead easy one, this fitted the bill: butter, sugar, hot chocolate powder, flour all mixed together with some boiling water and baked. Except the dog was sick again, and my temperamental scales had definitely run out of battery. I guessed the butter, without being able to verify that I’d got it right, then used a helpful conversion table that I found in my Prue Leith Cookery Bible that told me that a heaped tablespoon of flour was equal to an ounce. As the recipe was (of course) in imperial, I thought I’d got away with it, and banged it all into the new oven.

 Well, I think I’ll blame the new oven rather than the rather random approach to the measurements, or the distraction of a vomiting dog, for the fact that the cake came out of the oven with 5 minutes to go before we needed to leave to collect the kids, looking for all the world like a square and rather stodgy piece of chocolate Yorkshire pudding. 

Still, covered in chocolate buttercream, it had a certain attraction, and the kids loved it, so mission accomplished but not something I’ll be hoping to repeat.

As I am wirelessly-challenged for a couple more weeks, you’ll have to wait for the photographs, until such time as my SD card, my laptop and an internet connection converge.

This is an entry into Random Recipes 37 AND the 'we should cocoa' linky - with a chocolate theme.

Random Recipes #36 - a Hairy Dieters' delight

The Random Recipe challenge for January over on Belleau Kitchen is all about new recipe books. Excellent, thinks I - I have India by Rick Stein to drool over. It is a gorgeous book - page after page in homage to the food of India, with beautiful photography. You can almost smell the spices, the ovens, the finished food. It's mouthwatering. And then, a late gift - The Hairy Dieters Eat for Life. What to do? Hairy Dieters is much less of a visual, or actual feast (the clue is in the 'diet' part) but I don't want to cheat.

And what do you know? 'Dieters' wins in my random selection between the two, but it's not so bad after all because the winning recipe was a 'quick chicken cordon bleu' which looked quite tasty, even if it is 'diet'.

It's pretty straightforward - you split chicken breasts out and bash them thin in between a piece of clingfilm, fill each with a slice of ham and a slice of emmenthal cheese, and fold back over, then pan fry on both sides and finish in the oven.

It was OK. The recipe says to season the filled and refolded breasts well, but actually, with the ham and cheese, it probably doesn't need any more salt and as I'd followed the recipe faithfully, they turned out a bit salty. My version also suffered from having to sit around in the pan under some foil while the kids finished watching the film they had started. Normally, we wouldn't pander to that, but we'd taken them off for a very long and, as it turned out, wet walk, that afternoon, and they'd done very well, and the film was Back to the Future, so we indulged them...

  

Looking forward to the next challenge - which I may have to enter from my new Welsh kitchen...

Meal planning with a purpose

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you had a great Christmas and all that.

So here it is - 2014. One of the really good things about the Christmas break was that I stopped thinking too hard about the move to Wales: not that thinking about it was bad, but in the run up to the holiday, we were mostly doing lots of practical stuff around sorting out our current house, and doing all the Christmas stuff, with a view to dealing with the "where will we move to" bit after Christmas, and I think it was stresssing me out a bit.

Anyway, we had a lovely Christmas, and we've just come back from a whistlestop tour of suitable houses to rent (all 3 of them) which shortlisted themselves to 2 on the basis that one of the landlords wouldn't countenance a dog. While nothing is agreed on paper, this makes me feel a lot happier (not, obviously, the bit about Fred). I also had the opportunity to dine in a number of cafes in the Cardigan area, and stick my nose into various foodie emporia, and my friends, I am officially excited by what I saw. Watch this space.

As a result of this, not only am I happier, I am filled with renewed energy to make it happen.

So filled with energy in fact, that I tackled one of the cupboards this afternoon. In many ways, I only have Dom at Belleau Kitchen, and his last Random Recipes linky, to thank for this, but I've made several references to my hoarding tendancies in the past, and the fact that we could probably survive a nuclear winter on the contents of my cupboards, and the time has come to put this to the test. I know I could pack up the cupboards and move the contents with me to groan and mutter in another cupboard far away (would they groan and mutter in Welsh, I wonder?), but I've set myself a bit of a challenge to see if I can get rid of it all (in a constructive way) - even the bottle of pomegranate molasses, Phil...

So, I have cleaned out my fancy pull out cupboard, thrown away the tin of blackcurrants that went out of date in June 2009 (oh the shame), and I have planned a week's meals based on the the tins and what I have in the freezer (in my aim to get first from 2 small freezers to one).

So here is what we will be eating:

This evening (Saturday) - casserole - using up a pound of stewing steak that was in the freezer. Also rhubarb from the freezer, which I am stewing. Some will go into a type of Eton Mess using up the end of a tin of meringues that's been knocking round on top of the cupboard, and the last of the Christmas cream...

Sunday - Lasagne - will use up some of a kilo of mince that I have in the freezer, that I need to braise first, but it will also do for Wednesday's chilli, and some meals over the next few weeks. Also will use up the remains of a box of dried lasagne pasta, and a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes

Monday - Sausage casserole - 4 sausages in the freezer and a can (one of many) of cannellini beans, and one of chopped tomatoes

Tuesday - chick pea ketchup curry and dahl - chickpeas, ketchup, red lentils

Wednesday - chilli - in addition to the mince, this will use up chopped tomatoes and kidney beans

Thursday - corned beef & sweetcorn hash - using up a tin each of potatoes, corned beef and sweetcorn (this is the last of my camper van meals)

Friday - fish fingers, oven chips and peas (frozen from the garden in the summer. The fish fingers and chips are using up ends of packets in the freezer - there are times when everyone needs a bag of frozen chips, OK)

And I'm sure we'll be able to get through these remnants of the summer of camping some how...

There does of course need to be some shopping, but having planned the meals and worked out a shopping list, it is significantly smaller than the usual 'first shop of the month' would be.

I've been so enthused, that I have even re-ordered the shelves so that all the necessary tins are now to hand and organised for each meal. ready for me to use as intended, on one separate shelf of the cupboard.

Sometimes I even surprise myself.

Random Recipes #35 - Dare to Bare

Random Recipes - how I've missed you. Life has been manic, and although I've chosen my recipe for the last few challenges, I have never quite got round to making them.

But this month, a challenge that suits my current situation: to photograph the contents of my food cupboards and reveal all.

I'm trying to clear out, to reduce the amount of stuff we will shortly need to move from rural north Hampshire to even more rural West Wales. The food cupboards are not exempt. So let's examine them more closely - after all, Dom at Belleau Kitchen just wants to have a good old nosy...

You may remember that I did have a good old clear out of one of my cupboards almost exactly a year ago. Let's see if it's still ordered and tidy. Hmm, Thought not. Bread flour on both shelves, baking powder and bicarb of soda where they shouldn't be, an almost empty bag of pasta shoved in at the back. It's not looking good - but at least there's a couple of boxes of marzipan ready for the Christmas cake that I finally got round to baking tonight...



Where to next? Well, directly above what I notionally think of as 'the baking shelves' is the jam and chutney cupboard. Quite full at the moment, as they should be at this time of year - it'll be a different story come March, when the jars will mostly be empty. And look! I spy some of the Husband's chilli pickled gherkins in there. Oh yes indeed. Remind me to make some bagels some time, you know, when I have a spare 5 minutes, and get in the pastrami...

1 - take a photo of your ingredients cupboard or larder
2 - pop it up on your blog or twitter or facebook and tell us a little bit about what you have in stock
3 - email a link to me at dominic at belleaukitchen dot com
4 - tweet me @belleaukitchen using the #belleaukitchen hashtag and i'll retweet all I see
5 - include a link back to my blog and the random recipes logo in your post
6 - deadline in the 28th December - See more at: http://www.belleaukitchen.com/#sthash.F83pAd3G.dpuf

1 - take a photo of your ingredients cupboard or larder
2 - pop it up on your blog or twitter or facebook and tell us a little bit about what you have in stock
3 - email a link to me at dominic at belleaukitchen dot com
4 - tweet me @belleaukitchen using the #belleaukitchen hashtag and i'll retweet all I see
5 - include a link back to my blog and the random recipes logo in your post
6 - deadline in the 28th December - See more at: http://www.belleaukitchen.com/#sthash.F83pAd3G.dpuf

Moving on, to the spice cupboard (but which you'll notice has the 'current' jars of jam, marmite and peanut butter too), and it's no tidier than the others. The smoked paprika is at the front of course: La Chinata '3 chilli' hot, and a supermarket's own brand bog standard smoked, plus my old friends, ground cumin, coriander, ginger and cinammon. Jostling at the back, all manner of ground this and seeds of that. There's a box of Maldon sea salt in there, the mustard (English, powder), and some cardamom pods. I used them recently in a stove top rice pudding that I made. It was utterly divine.

Finally, dare I enter the corner cupboard of doom? An ingenious pull out contraption which makes the most of what would otherwise be a dead corner in the kitchen (thank you Howdens, for that). 

This, this my friends, is the cupboard that will see me through a nuclear winter. All the guilty secrets are here too - the pack of ready made custard and a tin of steamed sticky toffee pudding that we didn't eat while we were away house hunting at the weekend; some corned beef and some tinned potatoes (mmmm hash); baked beans, tinned tomatoes, chestnut puree, cake icing accoutrements, tinned caramel, some lentils and a bag of porridge oats, along with a number of packets of what the Husband likes to refer to as 'comedy tea'. 



And what on earth did I buy pomegranate molasses (see, in the photo below, the tipped over bottle next to the barrel of Birds custard powder) for? Ottolenghi has got a lot to answer for...

May be I'll do a follow up post, just before we move in a couple of months, to see how much of it all I've managed to use up. What do you think?

Grab & Run - oh yes - it's Chicken Paprika for Random Recipes

Ok - you have 10 seconds to save 1 - just 1 cook book. You're leaving (for somewhere - a new pad in London, in Dom - of Belleau Kitchen -'s case) and you have time to dash in, grab and run. Which one do you choose?

Now, from previous participation in Random Recipes, it seems that my collection of cookery books is fairly pitiful compared to some, but even so, it was an almost impossible challenge.

I tried several times. Well, mentally, at least. I dashed in, stopped, and missed the train/bus/boat. I even pretended the house was burning down - but I stood there and burned alive a couple of times, paralysed with indecision.

The trouble is, I may not have THAT many books (well, relatively speaking - the Husband would disagree) but I love them all for different reasons. Hugh, Nigella, Jamie. Thomasina, Claudia, Yottam, Rose, Harry, Ruth & Rose, Alain, Sophie, Rick, Delia. They are my friends. Well, perhaps not Delia, but I tolerate her, for I see her worth, but how to choose?

  
In the end I had to go back to first principles, and rescued my battered copy of Leith's Cookery Bible by Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave. First published in 1991, my mum must have given it to me when I first moved south to London.

It has come with me everywhere, has lost its back cover, and in fact during the making of this Random Recipe, it actually split in half :-( .

It is an intensely practical book - with hardly any glossy photos, no suggestion of silky dressing gowns, a Vespa or a football club. What it does have, though, is page after page of classic recipes. It has pages of things to do with chicken, pork, beef. First courses, sauces, puddings. It's where I go if I want to remind myself how many eggs to how much milk a sensible person would put in a quiche; cooking times for meat, fruit to sugar for a summer pudding. 

I don't tend to get inspiration from this book, but when I have an idea, or a longing for something that I know I've had before, but can't quite remember, this is usually the first place I'll look for an idea of how I might go about it.However, it's not a book that I pore over, drooling, and I don't think it has ever made it to my bedside for night time reading.



I decided to choose the recipe where the book fell open, which gave me 2 options Jambonneaux de poulet or Chicken Paprika.Chicken paprika won on the grounds that I really didn't want to bone out chicken thighs, and we needed something for Sunday dinner.

Basically a pot roast chicken in a tomato and paprika sauce, the chicken was lovely and moist, and I thought the sauce was lovely, if a slightly alarming shade of orange.

"...a slightly alarming shade of orange..."

For reasons far to complicated to go into here, I didn't take any pictures of the finished dish, only of the left over sauce - of which there was a lot, but then, we only ate about half the chicken. 

Guess what we're having for supper this evening? Chicken Paprika Pasta.

Chicken Paprika

Serves 4 with plenty leftover depending on age and appetite of the '4'

10g butter plus a tablespoon
10g flour
pinch mustard powder 
145ml milk
salt & pepper

1 tablespoon of oil
1 chicken (mine was 1.9 kg)
1 onion, finely sliced
2 tbsp smoked paprika
200g can chopped tomatoes
100ml white wine
500ml chicken stock
1 bay leaf
2 slices lemon
handful of parsley stalks

First make a white sauce: melt 10g butter, then stir in the 10g flour & mustard powder and cook out for a minute.

Off the heat, carefully stir in all the milk a little at a time, then return to the heat and bring to the boil. Simmer for 2-3 minutes, season with salt and pepper, then set aside. You can put a piece of greaseproof paper onto the surface to stop a skin forming if you like.

Pre-heat your oven to 200C.

In a frying pan, heat the oil and remaining butter, and brown the chicken all over, then put into a casserole which has a good fitting lid.

Add the onion to the frying pan and cook till it's beginning to brown, then reduce the heat and add in the paprika. Cook for 2 minutes, then add the tomatoes, wine and stock, followed by the bay leaf, lemon slices and parsley. Season.

Bring the sauce to the boil then carefully pour over the chicken. Put the lid on the casserole and put the whole lot in the oven for about an hour, or when the chicken is cooked. Mine did take just over an hour.

Remove the chicken and set it aside. Take out the lemon slices and bay out, and remove as much of the fat from the surface of the sauce as you can. Liquidise the tomato paprika sauce, then beat in the white sauce you made earlier until the sauce is smooth.

Serve with the chicken. We had it with new potatoes and a medley of beans from the garden but it would be good with rice too, I think.