Smug mode, on!

Wow, has it really been over 3 months since I last posted? I wasn't intending to quit, but it's been hard to find the inspiration. I was rather annoyingly sick over a lot of winter, and also away on holiday for nearly a month and then immediately sick again when I got back. I did write a birthday cake post back in October, but it was so full of whining that I never got round to editing it to a fit state for publication. But now the weather is warming up and I'm feeling some inspiration at last!

Tonight I'm feeling VERY smug indeed. I got home from work about 6.30pm, and while The Bloke was off helping B1 with a dodgy internet connection, I managed to whip up a lentil and chorizo soup and a "spinach and cheese" damper made with silverbeet from the garden - and have dinner basically ready for 8pm when they came back. And to top it all off, we can have homemade gingerbread for dessert. A three part meal with all parts cooked from scratch! Not bad for a school night, if I do say so myself!

The soup was a recipe from AB, with some slight variation. The damper was a generic damper tweaked around. I'd picked the silverbeet on the weekend, as it was running to seed, and cleaned and steamed it and chucked it in the fridge, thinking of perhaps a mid-week frittata. The gingerbread I made on the weekend, to take in for a work morning tea. It's a recipe from an old favourite book, Elisabeth Ayrton's Cookery of England. A gorgeous fat Penguin paperback from 1977 full of regional and historical recipes; it was the first cookbook I ever had with history. And it has a recipe for home made crumpets which now that I think of it, I must do again sometime.

But first, here is tonight's menu:

Recipe 1: Red Lentil and Chorizo Soup
1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic
olive oil
1 tsp sweet paprika
3/4 tsp cumin
1 bay leaf
1 cup red lentils
120g pre-cooked chorizo, chopped
1 litre chicken stock
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/2 - 2 tsp balsamic vinegar, to taste.

1. Finely chop the onions and garlic, and fry in the oil until golden.
2. Add spices and fry for another minute, then add the lentils and stock and all other ingredients except the balsamic.
3. Simmer for 35 minutes, then mix well and taste.
4. Add the balsamic half a teaspoon at a time, stir, taste and continue until you are happy with the result.

Note: You could fry chorizo slices with the onion if you don't have it pre-cooked on hand. Balsamic vinegar varies a lot in strength so it's best not to overdo it. Also, AB's recipe has 2 finely chopped celery sticks and specifies 800ml homemade stock. I used a tetrapack of Campbells, sorry AB!


Recipe 2: Silverbeet and Cheese Damper
300g white self-raising flour
150g wholemeal self-raising flour
90g butter
300g cooked, cooled, chopped silverbeet or spinach
120g sharp cheddar, grated
about 100ml milk
salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat oven to 200C
2. Cube the butter and rub it into the flour.
3. Add the cheese and silverbeet and mix well.
4. Add the milk bit by bit, stirring well, until it comes together in a soft, but not sticky, dough.
5. Dollop onto a baking sheet
6. Bake 30-40 minutes, until golden and a skewer comes out clean.

Notes: Drain the spinach really well after cooking. Squish it down hard to get as much water out as possible. Also, this would be good with fetta and some spring onions, but I didn't have any.


Recipe 3: Yorkshire Gingerbread
300g self-raising flour
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
120g chopped dates
150g treacle or golden syrup
120g dark brown sugar
90g butter
1 egg
3/4 tsp bicarb soda, dissolved in 3 tsp milk

1. Preheat oven to 160C
2. Heat the butter and syrup in a small saucepan until the butter is melted. Set aside to cool a little.
3. Grease and flour a 25cm square cake tin.
4. Sieve flour, salt and spices together.
5. Add dates and mix well.
6. Beat together the egg and sugar.
7. Add the butter/syrup mix in dollops, to the flour, mixing as you go and alternating with dollops of the egg/sugar mix.
8. Stir in the bicarb/milk mix, and add water if the dough needs a little softening. It should be soft but not sloppy.
9. Dollop into cake tin and smooth out top.
10. Bake for 1.5 hours or until skewer comes out clean.
11. Cool on a rack.

Notes: This is quite a dry
gingerbread, and goes very well sliced thin, and buttered. I used a mix of 100g golden syrup and 50g treacle. I varied it by adding 30g of finely chopped glace ginger to the mix, which I definitely recommend.

Drawing Down the Freezer

Next week there's going to be electricity pole maintenance, and we're scheduled for an all day power outage. Yikes! In this weather, the ordinary fridge stuff will be fine in an esky, or just with a bag of ice in the fridge. But I have a stuffed freezer.

And in an added stroke of bad timing, I had just decided to cook up a huge batch of chilli con skippy. What I do with this is make a generic mix of the meat with onion, garlic, veggies and tomatoes, then freeze a batch to convert to Spag Bog later. Mix the rest with your chosen spices and kidney beans, and some more veggies, make an inauthentic but yummy chilli, eat it for 2-3 meals and freeze half for later. This is very efficient. But not so great, actually, if you are going to be without power to your freezer.

So I've started drawing it down. It's time to do a chuck out anyway, and there were definitely quite a few things to be tossed. Gone is that pack of frozen prawns that didn't taste so great, but I thought would be OK for a curry. The kittens can eat the frozen chicken mince that I bought to tempt Shadow, and then could not bear to eat later. The pack of kidneys can go out, too. I turned a bit against them when suddenly we had cats with kidney disease, and my doc was making me have a kidney function test of my own. (No problem, a false alarm.) I'm over it now and would cheerfully make devilled kidneys, but now they are old and freezer burned. And that chocolate cake is at least 2 years old. Out with it!

But most of it is for eating, or for finding a safe stash for the day. I started by making pea soup on Monday, which used up a couple of things. And then I discovered to my shock that MasterChef has stolen my recipe!

I bought the magazine to check it out, and there it was, my pea soup! Oh, they'd disguised it by making it vegetarian, and leaving out the butter and cream and leek, so mine is actually better. But still, it's close. The colour is the same very bright green as in their picture in the magazine, not yellowy-green like an old fashioned pea and ham soup with dried peas.

Recipe: Green Pea Soup
1 leek
1 tablespoon butter
600g frozen peas
2 cups chicken stock
100ml cream
2 tsp mint in a tube
150g chunk ham
* Wash and chop the leek and fry gently in the butter.
* Add the stock and frozen peas, and bring to a simmer.
* Simmer for 15-20 minutes, then add cream and mint.
* Whiz up in the saucepan with a stick blender.
* Thin with water to desired texture.
* Add diced ham.
* Serve with buttered rye toast.


Notes: Adjust the taste at the end - a pinch of salt, perhaps if you're not adding ham. A pinch of sugar if they're cheap overgrown peas with too much starch, but not if they're baby peas or sugar snaps. I did use a mixed bag which had some sugar snaps in it. Obviously fresh mint would be better, but that Garden Gourmet tube mint is OK in a pinch. Vegetarians can use veggie stock and use the MasterChef idea of Persian Fetta sprinkled on top instead of the ham.

So there we go. A frozen tub of chicken stock and a pack of peas gone from the freezer. And I had Maggie Beer lemon icecream for dessert - leftover from Easter, but still good. I took a frozen pasta leftover thing in for lunch at work today, and tonight we're eating sausages, oven chips and more frozen peas.

There's still far too much to eat before next Friday, though I will do my best. I still have roast tomatoes, several packs of rhubarb, some more icecream, some soy-cooked chicken, more chicken stock and turkey stock, and quite a variety of meat and berries. Oh, and some chilli and the makings of a spag bog.

Feijoas, Green Tomatoes and Cauliflower

I've been on a spree to use things up. The things I had were feijoas and green tomatoes from the garden, and an old cauliflower, bought to make roast cauli with almonds, to go with a chicken risotto. But I didn't get around to making it until this week, and the cauli had gone rather limp. I bought a small fresh half to make the roast veg, and relegated the older one to soup.

I was quite happy about this, as we'd had a lovely curried cauliflower soup while visiting friends in Melbourne. It was a novel idea to me: curried parsnip is a classic, but cauliflower? I couldn't quite remember the details, but we had a a brief email exchange and A reminded me that coconut was the missing element. I went on to make a soup inspired by hers, rather than the exact same soup.

I got the green tomatoes from my plants. They went all brown and crinkly one night, so we must have had a frost. The feijoas just fell out of the sky. Well, OK, the tree. But you find them on the ground.

Feijoas are very popular in New Zealand, and the trees grow quite well in Canberra. They're bushy and evergreen, and have pretty flowers with a central fireburst of red stamens. They do like a reasonable amount of water to set good fruit, so the one in my back garden closer to the water tank did much better than the one down the side.


The fruit is always green. It simply falls off the tree when it is ripe. If you try to pick it, then if it just falls off into your hand, it is ready. Or you can shake the tree. If the fruit falls onto cement it will get bruised, but a good mulch ground cover is enough to protect most of it.

I've been eating the larger better ones straight. They have a sharpish rather guava-like taste, and as with guavas you can eat the whole thing. I was intrigued to read that if you peel them and mash the pulp you can use it as a substitute for mashed banana in baking. I haven't tried this, and I won't until next season as I've either eaten them all or chutnied them. Unless someone gives me some, that is. There were some in the supermarket this week, but the prices are ludicrous. It's only worth it for homesick NZ expats.

When you cut a feijoa across the middle, the pulp inside is white to cream, with a four-quarter pattern of softer gel-like flesh around the seeds in the centre. It also browns with air exposure: the ones in the picture are just starting. If this centre is obviously brown, it is overripe. Bruised pieces will be brown generally, not just at this centre - these can be trimmed and the good bits used.

I managed to salvage 750g of usable fruit from a kilo of feijoas, and I turned it into a dark spicy chutney with some dried fruit, onion and green tomatoes. I got the idea for the recipe from a NZ morning TV show site, but it was one of those annoying ones with weird quantities. What on earth is a packet of currants, or ginger? I decided to just wing it. Chutney is pretty flexible - it's even easier than jam as you have no need to worry about pectin. It's just boiled down to the texture you want, and that's it.

Recipe 1: Curried Cauliflower Soup
1 medium-large cauliflower
1 medium onion
1 stick celery
1 tablespoon schmaltz
375 ml chicken stock
375 ml coconut milk
375 ml milk
2 tsp curry powder
pinch salt
* Chop onion and celery and fry gently for a couple of minutes in the schmaltz.
* Add chopped cauliflower and stir fry for another few minutes, until golden tints occur.
* Add the curry powder and fry another minute, making sure it does not catch.
* Add in all liquids, and bring back to boil.
* Cook until the cauliflower is just soft.
* Puree to your desired consistency, and add salt to taste.

Notes:
Schmaltz! I love that word. It's yiddish for chicken fat, and I had some from the top of the homemade stock. I actually used the stock to make the risotto, and used a tetrapack for the soup. If you have no schmaltz (or are a vegetarian), some nice fruity olive oil would be good.

I used a stick blender to puree it to a rough porridge texture. You could take it smoother if you like, with a blender. If you like the rougher texture, a potato masher will also work fine.

A's soup has a potato and a bayleaf, too. There's no reason you couldn't use some other vegetables. Parsnip might be good...


Recipe 2: Feijoa and Green Tomato Relish
750g feijoa
530g green tomato
230g onion
200g dates
150g currants
250g crystallised ginger
--
2 cups malt vinegar
1 kg sugar
2 tblsp treacle
--
1 stick cinnamon
2 tsp cassia
1 tsp cayenne
2 tsp garam masala
1 tblsp mustard seed
* Cut the feijoa, onion and green tomato into small dice.
* Chop the dates and ginger into smaller pieces
* Toss in a non-reactive saucepan and add the vinegar and spices.
* Simmer for 20 minutes, or until fruit is softened.
* Add the sugar and treacle, and boil moderately until the mixture is a loose jammy consistency.
* Discard cinnamon stick, and allow to cool slightly.
* Pour while still warm into well-cleaned hot jars.

Notes: The exact amounts are merely what I had once I'd cleaned and chopped the fruit & veg. Roughly similar quantities will be fine - chutney is so flexible. Swap in any dried fruits you prefer, use green apples instead of green tomatoes. Use cider vinegar for a lighter flavour.

I bought some crystallised ginger to do this, as the lot I was given by my Easter houseguests is so good that I am eating it as an after dinner sweet. I whizzed the ginger and dates in the food processor to chop them finely. You can leave the mixture part-cooked during the reducing stage, and heat it up again next day to finish. (Pan must be non-reactive - enamel or stainless steel - or the vinegar will attack it.) Ideally leave it for a week or two before eating, but if you have some nice bread and cheese waiting, well, what can you do?

Roast Tomato and Red Lentil Soup

My favourite soup recipe, recovered! Woohoo! I lost it - I was sure it was in my notebook, but no. I remember posting it on a bulletin board, but I got banned there. (Long story; if you fancy a bit of netdrama it's part of the IIDB debacle) Beth thought she had it, and very helpfully sent me three similar recipes, none of them quite the same as my fave. But finally I tracked it down in an old sent-email folder. Here it is for your delight. This is a most excellent soup.

We're having a variant on it tonight, because I couldn't find the recipe and improvised. I only had about 650g of tomatoes, and I used more lentils. And I forgot about halving the tomatoes, which does matter as you get more caramelised flavours. It's still good, but not the excellent balance I remember.

I expect we'll have some cheese toasts on the side, to make it more dinner-ish. Or just plain cheese and crackers. We have a lot of good cheese around, for some reason...

Recipe: Roast Tomato and Red Lentil Soup
1kg tomatoes.
1 litre good vegetable stock
180g red lentils
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil (or just a teaspoon works)
2 tsp oregano
salt, pepper

Halve the tomatoes, arrange in a single layer on a deep sided baking dish, roast in a moderate (160C) oven for 40 minutes. They should be well done, but not dried.

Gently fry the onion & garlic in the oil until onion is golden. Add the lentils (washed & picked over as needed), stock, tomatoes and oregano. Also add any juices from the bottom of the tomato baking dish. I slip the skins off my tomatoes, which is a little extra work but not much. I'm a bit weird about tomato skins.

Simmer until lentils are done - these are the type that go to mush, not the whole ones. Run through a blender to get a smoothish texture. Thin down with water or more veggie stock to your desired consistency, and add salt and pepper to taste.

Easy!

Pea and Ham Soup

We've had frost overnight; it must be time for soup. I've made a classic pea and ham, with a small twist, to have for lunches and quick dinners this week. I've also had a good weekend for all things food. A good shop on Friday at Choku Bai Jo; Margie & David's wedding on Saturday - with reception at Alto, up the tower; Sunday brunch at Cream; and some decent gardening and cooking sessions.

Tonight we had a vego dinner - giant mushrooms baked with garlic and thyme; home grown baby potatoes; and a warm salad of roast beetroot, marinated fetta and rocket. I've also got some African dishes ready for tomorrow, so when I get back from yoga it's just a mater of heating it up. There's a lemon chicken dish, and a mung bean dhal. I may post recipes later if I like them.

Soup recipe follows:
Recipe: Pea and Ham Soup
1 ham bone with plenty of meat on it
1 onion
1 carrot
1 stalk celery
2 bayleaves
6 cloves
12 peppercorns
1 cup dried split peas, green
1 1/2 cups frozen green peas (optional)
Put the split peas in a bowl, cover with water and leave to soak overnight.

Take your Christmas ham bone out of the freezer, and pop it straight into a pot of water. Add everything else in the list, up to the peppercorns. Put on the stove to simmer for 3-4 hours. Strain, and refrigerate the stock. Discard vegetables and spices, and shred the meat, throwing out bones, gristle and fat.

Next morning, cook split peas until tender. Drain, discarding the water. Scrape fat from the stock, and combine with the peas. Add frozen peas if desired, and cook until thawed. Whiz up with a stab blender. Toss in shredded ham. Taste for salt & pepper and adjust to your taste.

Notes: If you don't have a Christmas ham bone, you might be able to buy one from a deli. Or a ham hock will do fine. Also, you might like to have some carrot chunks in the soup. I prefer not, but it is traditional. I like the extra (totally untraditional) green peas, they add a nice colour and freshness. Also, the ham will be pretty tasteless after its long boil, and is mostly there for colour and to advertise the ham stock. If you have some more ham on hand, it's nice to throw in some extra shreds. Or you could add some sausage, like a nice European frankfurter or rookwurst.

Chestnuts on the menu

This week's menu has the odd bit of chestnut content, surprisingly enough. It's also a good example of how I try to make good use of leftovers and oddments.

Sunday night was Asian spiced beef - marinaded in soy, mirin and spices, then roast. Serve with spice poached chestnuts, pumpkin mash, and mixed stir fried greens. The recipe for the beef came from one of the flyers at the chestnut farms - it worked very nicely, except that my oven is even faster than expected, so I got medium instead of rare.

Tonight we've just eaten Toulouse pork sausage with chestnut and potato mash, apple sauce, and mixed steamed veg. The sausage comes from the City Market butcher; the apple sauce is a simple use-up of old apples that got left in bags for days uneaten. Peel 2 large apples, chop off bad bits, chop up, microwave for 3 minutes, stir. Done.

Tomorrow will be a non-chestnut meal - I'm using up some of the roast beef in a pseudo stroganoff. Stir fry sliced mushroom & onion, add sliced leftover roast beef, light sour cream, a dash of brandy; sprinkle with parsley and serve with fettucine and green veg.

After that it's on to leftovers and scratch meals, with chestnut, pumpkin and potato soup on hand. To make the soup, mix up the leftover chestnut mash with the leftover mashed pumpkin. Add chicken stock and milk, to get to desired thickness. Whiz with the stab blender if it seems necessary. A cup of soup and a sausage or beef sandwich is not a bad lunch.

Recipe: Chestnut Mash
250g peeled chestnuts
500g potato
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon brandy
salt, to taste
Boil chestnuts and potatoes together for 20 minutes. Drain, and mash well with cream and milk. Stir in brandy, and add salt to taste.

Notes: I used broken pieces for this, and used the whole chestnuts with the roast. It was pretty good, though not as smooth and sleek as Christophe's. I used an ordinary potato masher; which I prefer for normal mashed potato. But perhaps a finer puree would be preferable in this case.

Soup and Confessions

After posting that no-waste thing, I had to go and clean out the fridge. I confess to wasting a half dozen eggs and a small carton of yoghurt with use-by dates in February, and about 1/4 cup of stewed quince which was growing mould. And it was Earth Hour last night, too. Tut tut. Shame on me.

Anyway, I thought I'd go into more detail about leftover roast something or other soup, as it is one of those great classics that everyone should have up their sleeve.

Recipe: Leftover Roast Something Soup
1 leftover roast something or other
the baking tray from the roast
leftover vegetables
leftover wine
an onion
a celery stalk, with leaves
a carrot
a handful of herbs
salt, to taste
old vegetables that look like they need using up (optional)
stock (optional)
noodles (optional)
a handful of soup mix or pearl barley (optional)
frozen vegetables (optional)
Remove any huge obvious hunks of fat from the roast and the pan. Discard - or save if it's yummy duck fat or similar. Toss the roast in a very big saucepan, and add the onion, celery and carrot. Pour boiling water over the baking tray and give it a good stir to get up any bits. Add that to the saucepan. Toss in a handful of fresh herbs from the garden, or use a few dry ones. I like to get melodic with "parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme", but I seldom have the parsley. I usually include bay leaves, and some tarragon is nice with chicken. Add more water to cover. No salt!

Bring to the boil, skim off any scum, and let it simmer for a couple of hours. Remove the meat, and set aside. The carrot and onion may be worth keeping, too. Strain the stock, remembering that you want to keep the liquid, not the debris! Apparently this is a mistake that all cooks make at some time in their lives. Since I never have, I'm probably due to do it real soon now. Let the stock chill in the fridge, and remove all fat from the top.

Trim all useful edible bits off the roast, and throw away the bones and gristle. Put the stock in the saucepan, with any extra stock if using. Add soup mix or barley, if using, and simmer for half an hour, then add any uncooked hard vegetables that you want. Parsnip, swede, carrot, that sort of thing. Keep simmering until vegetables and soup mix are barely done. Add the leftover wine, the meat fragments, chopped leftover vegetables, frozen vegetables, noodles if you want etc. Simmer until done, then add salt to taste, and adjust as you wish. How about some pepper? Perhaps a squeeze of lemon, or some chopped fresh herbs, or a dash of worcestershire sauce.

Soup mix is a traditional English blend of dried lentils, peas, beans and grains. You can generally find it at supermarkets, in the teeny tiny dried bean section. Italian delis often have their own variant, for making minestrone - another great classic of the use'em up school. A pack of mixed dhal from an Indian shop could do well, too.

This will come out different every time. Sometimes it will be brilliant, and sometimes it will just be OK. You go with the flow, and don't try to re-create an especially good one - just enjoy your luck. In the last week, I made two of these soups, and the chicken one was really nice, but the lamb came out overly bland until I added worcestershire and pepper. The main thing is that this converts leftovers and odds and ends into a nice lunch for me or my guests. The bloke, however, is opposed to "soup with bits in". Unless they are tom yum or laksa. Go figure.

To Market, To Market

The growers' markets re-opened last week after their brief Xmas hiatus. Since I was in Thredbo I didn't make it, so yesterday was my first sample of the rearrangement. The parking has changed slightly - there's no access across the market any more; you have to decide on which side to go. Stalls occupy the roadway area where the lucky parking used to be. And it's chaos as nobody can find their favourites any more. There's a table with a list, but if all you can remember is "those nice people with the good apples who used to be over there", you're out of luck. It should all settle down after a while as we get used to it. There are still coffee stands in both buildings, and all sorts of produce all over. There were a few surprises - some of the ones who I would have thought were the genuine growers actually turned out to be their neighbours, or local agents.

I've been missing them, so I may possibly have over-bought. I now have white figs, blackberries, yellow peaches, apricots, new season tart gold apples, sugar plums, new potatoes, capsicum, green chillies, beans, silverbeet, tomatoes, lettuce, japanese cress, sorrel, spring onions, daikon and cucumber. As well as coffee, duck rillettes and sourdough bread. Yum.

With the change in the weather, a soup seems in order. I have a silverbeet and lentil soup on the go. I'm also curing some salmon, with thoughts of posh nibblies at an Australia Day cocktail party next weekend. And contemplating daikon pickles and okonomiyaki, if only I can find the recipe Akiko gave me...

For the soup recipe, follow the link.
Recipe: Silverbeet and Lentil Soup
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1 carrot, finely chopped,
2 tomatoes, peeled and coarsely chopped
100g silverbeet stems, finely chopped
400g silverbeet leaves, coarsely chopped
150g Puy-style lentils
100g brown basmati rice
1.5 litres stock
Salt, pepper, parmesan to taste
Gently fry onion, garlic, carrot, silverbeet stems and tomato in oil, until softened and golden. Add bay leaves and stock, bring to boil. Add brown rice and simmer for 30 minutes. In a separate pan, simmer the lentils in water for 25 minutes. Drain lentils, rinse well, and add them to the stock. Add silverbeet leaves, simmer for another 5-10 minutes, Season with salt and pepper as desired before serving, with parmesan cheese to sprinkle.

Notes: this is quite closely taken from Il Cucchiaio d'Argento. They say to use meat stock, but veggie stock is fine, too. And then for an extra touch, add some chunks of ham.

Tuesday edit: I will add, a few days later, that I don't like the rice in this very much. It was fine on day 1, but by now the rice has soaked up a lot of the liquid, and got really squishy. It's more like a western congee than a soup. It's still perfectly edible, and I did quite enjoy it for my lunch today, with some ham sshreds and a sprinkle of chilli flakes. But I'd have liked it better if it were more soupy. I'd have a bread roll on the side.