Friday food links – 19 June 2015

The view from here #nofilter

We’ve been away in Cornwall all week, so there has been no cooking for me since Saturday. We’ve been in Mawgan Porth, stopping off in Somerset on the way down. The weather has been largely sunny, and we’ve done lots of toddler-friendly activities, including time on the beach, and walking around a boating lake, waving at the ducks. It’s been nice to be waited on, cooked for, and cleaned up after for a few days.

Recipes:

  • approximately a Nigella spatchcocked chicken with lemon and rosemary from Forever Summer, with diced, roasted potatoes, green beans and carrots

Without a recipe:

  • Mushroom and tomato pasta, using up the last of the Jennifer Perillo mushroom bolognese.

Other things we’ve been eating:

  • a really nice asparagus soup and Caesar salad at the Salutation Inn in Topsham, near Exeter
  • Slow-roasted duck with pommes Anna and wet garlic at Bedruthan Steps hotel
  • Mackerel crudo with grapefruit at Riverford Field Kitchen
  • a lot of clotted cream 🙂

Reading:

Friday food links – 12 June 2015

I should probably be putting these in a salad for maximum Instagram points - but I kind of like them where they are.

Recipes

Without a recipe:

  • Vegetable stir-fry with peanuts, pak choi
  • Mushroom and bacon pasta
  • Tacos with leftover white chili, avocado, cheese, and spring onions

Reading:

Lots of reading for work about food, and not time for much else

Friday food links – 5 June 2015

Lettuce (chomping snails not shown)

June already? Well, at least in the last couple of days we’ve had a taste of summer, so it feels like the weather is catching up with the calendar again. This week has been a catch-as-catch-can week for dinners, scraping together all sorts of odds and ends to get us through a busy week, and one where bedtime has taken even longer than usual. A roast chicken on Sunday stood us in good stead. Another batch of white chili (this time without the chicken, as it had gone off before I got to it) did duty another night. And, last night, M&S pizza filled the gap. Hoping to get back on track this weekend, with some batches of food for next week, bread and granola.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Chicken salad – with stuffing crumbs, moonblush tomatoes, cucumber and radish
  • M&S Pizza
  • Fresh filled pasta with tomato sauce
  • Chicken curry

Reading:

Friday food links – 29 May 2015

First strawberry from the garden - and it's a beauty!

The week started with our inaugural scheduled Sunday lunch. We have nominated one Sunday each month as Sunday lunch for guests, and invited friends to join us. We were 8 adults, 4 kids and 2 babies for lunch last Sunday, and just barely squeezed around our (new, larger) kitchen table. There was a huge lasagne, made with a beef shin ragu, and another huge dish of aubergine parmigiana for the veggies; asparagus, fennel salad and broad beans with peas. For dessert, hazelnut shortbread, strawberries and cream and dulce de leche brownies. The sun came out for long enough for the kids to play with sand outside, and we had a great time.

The strawberries weren’t from our garden, but it won’t be long now until they are here. The one above is the very first one to ripen. I’m sure that when I planted strawberries, years ago, they were all Cambridge Favourite, but this is definitely a different variety to most of them. It is a very deep, glossy red, with rich colour all the way through the berry, and a strong strawberry fragrance. A strawberry warmed by the sun is a very different proposition to one from a plastic tub in the fridge. For years I couldn’t stand strawberries – the texture, plus the slightly sour flavour of most shop-bought strawberries was a combination I couldn’t bear. But properly ripe strawberries from the garden converted me. Now all I have to do is try and protect the crop from being savaged by the pigeons.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Lasagne
  • Beef stir fry with rice
  • Fish and oven chips, peas and asparagus

Reading:

Friday food links – 22 May 2015

Dulce de leche brownies

A flurry of cooking is about to take place, in preparation for our first all-comers Sunday lunch this weekend. These brownies are the first in line. Now I’ve posted a photo, I guess eating them all before Sunday is no longer an option! There was also a roast chicken last Saturday evening, which provided the backbone for the week’s eating – chicken pie, and risotto with the stock. There were also a good number of meals from the freezer, plus mopping up odds and ends of leftovers from last week.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Leftover pork and bean burritos
  • Pasta with leftover beef stew stretched into pasta sauce
  • Chicken pie
  • Asparagus risotto
  • Roasted rhubarb with orange – served with custard

Reading:

Friday food links – 15 May 2015

An abundance of strawberry flowers

I have a cucumber! A very small one, but there is a bona fide cucumber on my cucumber plant, so that must mean that summer is just around the corner, no? And my strawberries are covered in flowers. It could be a bumper crop, if I can keep the pigeons off them. It’s been a plain and simple kind of food week – lots of Americana. And probably not enough fish or veggies. But it’s all a work in progress. Isn’t every week?

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Beef shin stew – from the freezer
  • Grilled salmon, mashed potato, chard
  • Takeaway pizza
  • Leftover dal
  • Burgers and grilled vegetables, excellent white bread rolls
  • Roast chicken, new potatoes, asparagus

Reading:

Book review: Slow cooked by Miss South

  
You may have noticed me going on (and on) about my slow cooker cooking in my weekly Friday food links posts. Faced with an imminent return to work, and the prospect of squeezing dinner preparation for a one year old into a tiny gap between nursery pickup and bath-and-bedtime, I decided a slow cooker would solve all my problems. (Well, maybe not all of them.) Aware of how little spare counterspace I have, as well as the number of appliances in my cupboards, my hand paused over the ‘buy’ button a couple of times, but in the end I went for it. I thought I had best get a book to go with this new purchase, and the briefest of searches through Amazon reviews suggested that ‘Slow Cooked‘ by Miss South of the North/South Food blog was the one to get.

In this instance, Amazon reviewers were right on the money. This is a great book, and I haven’t stopped cooking from it since it arrived. It has only a handful of photos, in a section at the start, but Miss South writes such excellent head notes that I have scarcely missed them. The recipe titles and notes are enough to draw me in.

I had expected a book largely filled with stews of various sorts – and would have been content with this. But she goes well beyond standard slow cooker fare, with chapters on currys, pulses and grains, vegetables, as well as cakes and breads, and puddings.

 

white chili

white chili with chicken and haricot beans

 
So far I have made: meat ragu, stewed beef shin, white chili, chicken mole, pulled pork, aubergine ragout, tarka dal, dulce de leche (heating a can of condensed milk), caramelised onions (a big batch for the freezer), chicken stock and confit tomatoes. Everything has worked, and has tasted good. The chicken recipes benefit from a slightly shorter cooking time – although the white chili makes good use of this by breaking up the chicken into shreds with the beans. The dal took longer, but I suspect the age of the split peas was to blame there. The beans in the chili, cooked from dried without soaking, were beautifully creamy and intact, with none of the fuzziness that comes from boiling.

There are still a lot more recipes I’d like to try out, not least the cinnamon buns, so, thanks to this book, I think my slow cooker has earned a permanent place on my counter.

Friday food links – 8 May 2015

Morning world. Strawberry rhubarb porridge this morning. Glad to see the sun after storms overnight.

It feels a bit like we’re in limbo here at the moment. After a brief burst of warm weather in April, and then chilly temperatures again, most of this week has felt like neither winter or spring. The leaves are green, but we haven’t really had the little glimpses of summer that I associate with this time of year. So we are still eating stews, dal, porridge – the dishes of winter – and waiting for it to feel like it’s time for asparagus, peas, broad beans and artichokes.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Pinhead oatmeal porridge – made a batch, and reheated on several mornings this week
  • Sausages and jacket potatoes
  • Pizza – with confit tomatoes and roasted peppers
  • Lasagne – with slow cooker ragu from the freezer
  • Chicken Mole from the freezer (also slow cooker)
  • Chicken korma – Spice Tailor sauce
  • Slow cooker chicken stock

Reading:

Making lists of things we love

From this Food52 thing based on this book comes the idea of making lists of things that you love, as a way to reflect, to feel better, and to appreciate the little things that brighten each day. So inspired by this, and with no particular theme, here is one of mine.

View of the City of London from Waterloo bridge

Things I love:

    • the view from Waterloo bridge, especially from the bus, especially when the sun is going down.
    • making and icing a layer cake, and sharing it with friends. Precisely that sort of absorbing craft that is so rewarding and you get cake too!
    • apple blossom, cherry blossom

Ah, cherry blossom. It really is spring then.

    • the sound of my daughter laughing
    • good bread with good salted butter – enough butter to leave toothmarks
    • mountains

Untitled

  • rolling up trousers and paddling in the sea, listening to the waves
  • cello music, especially Jacqueline du Pre playing this
  • starting a new notebook
  • the smell of jasmine on a warm evening

Friday food links – 1 May 2015

I have two punnets of raspberries (about 300g). What would you make? I'm thinking cake....

What kind of week has it been? Busy, as I start to get back into the swing of work. Little E still has a horrid cough, so sleep hasn’t been great generally (although we did get only our second ever sleep through the night on Monday night). Lots more slow cooker meals this week. I’ve decided that on my working days our dinner should either be from the slow cooker, from the freezer or something made of leftovers. I can save the more creative cooking for the days when I have a bit more time to play with. I also found myself with some extra berries, so raspberry muffins were made for work colleagues, and there’s either a raspberry ricotta cake or raspberry friands on the menu this weekend.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Roast chicken
  • Sausage bap (for dinner? yes, really)
  • Pumpkin filled pasta (from the supermarket) with pesto and ricotta

Reading:

Very little this week, for some reason – lots of catching up to do this weekend.