The Untidy Cook

Pork & Sweet Potato red curry

This is derived from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe - Prawn/Shrimp curry from 'A Taste of the Far East - which I've modified a bit to reduce the fat a bit and make use of what I had in the fridge.

Red curry paste:

1 peeled clove garlic

1 tsp cumin & 1 tsp coriander seeds - toasted in a pan and finely ground

3 dried chillies soaked in 3 tbsp boiling water

3 fresh red chillies cut into three, I included seeds

1 shallot (that's eschalot to you Aussies)

quarter of a white onion

2 tsps curry powder

1 tsp smoked paprika

good squeeze of lemon grass from a tube

- put this lot into a blender, including the water from soaking the dried chillies, and liquidise until turned into a runny paste.

- in the meantime, put some light olive oil in a deep pan that's moderately hot and fry the rest of the finely sliced white onion until its almost all caramelised, browned and a bit crispy.  Then add the curry paste, cook it for 5 to 10 minutes until the liquid evaporates and it browns up.  

1 pork tenderloin, cut into 1/2" slices

1 sweet potato, peeled & cut into 1'' chunks

1 400ml can lower fat Coconut Cream

2 tsps tamarind paste

5 kaffir lime leaves

- Add pork and sweet potato to the paste mix and cook for about 5 minutes. 

- Then stir in the Coconut Cream, about a 1/3 of the can of water plus the tamarind paste and the kaffir lime leaves.  Give it a good stir, set the heat to a gentle boil and leave for about an hour.

Served with greek yoghurt and some brown bread, because I was too idle to cook any rice.  This was nicely spicy and very good indeed.  It made enough for two suppers for two people.

 

Bulgur wheat salad with haloumi

Some haloumi from the late 1900's has been muttering squeakily about how its 'best by' date was impending so it made the ultimate sacrifice for our supper.

I put 2/3 cup of bulgur wheat into a bowl with twice the volume of boiling water and left it to steam for 15 minutes.  

Toasted 1tsp each of cumin, coriander and nigella seeds, then ground them finely and put this into a mixing bowl along with two small chopped, seeded red chillis.  The honey and walnut oil mix I did yesterday was so good I thought I'd use it again, especially as I have a fresh tin of the nut oil that needs to be eaten before it goes stale. Expect lots of walnut oil as it gets used up.  I dipped a fork into some groovy hippy raw honey, that we picked up in Mullumbimby on our recent road trip up there, and stirred it into the spice mix along with about a desertspoon full of the nut oil.   It felt like it needed something to lift the flavour so I added 6 finely chopped dried apricots and 2 tbps of raw cashews, toasted.

Once the wheat was cooked, it went into the spice/nut/ fruit mix and sat quietly until the rest was ready.  

The haloumi was sliced into 4, rubbed with a smidge of oil and then fried in the frying pan at a high-ish heat until it was golden brown.  

At the last minute I decided to use up a very ancient avocado, which I chopped up (missing out the brown bits) and stirred into the wheat mix.  

To serve: heap wheat onto plate; add some salad stuff like chopped cucumber and maybe some herbs, and a gob of greek yoghurt along with the haloumi.  

I was concerned that the wheat would be boring, but it was nutty and rather good.  Next time, I would measure 1/4 cup of wheat each rather than 1/3, it was slightly too much.

Good combination of flavours, spice, sweet and sour.  Yum.

 

Beetroot, goats cheese & quinoa supper

We're on a mission to sharpen up our diet, eat more fruit & veg and generally drop the fat, so suppers are now on my list to make interesting but healthier.

Wrap 4 mid sized raw beetroot, with a bit of the tops and the whole tail still on, in foil with a splash of balsamic or flavoured vinegar and a peeled, bashed garlic clove. I used some spiced beetroot vinegar from Nicolsons www.nicholsonfinefoods.com.au. Cook in the oven at 180c for about 3/4 hour until they are cooked through.

I decided, after many years of mickey-taking of it, to actually cook some quinoa (or should that be keeen-waaaah?).  I used 1/4 cup of quinoa with 1/2 cup of water, brought to the boil and then left at a low, covered simmer for 15 mins.  I turned it off at that point and left it covered until I needed it.

Heat a frying pan and cook a teaspoon of mustard seeds until they pop. Put in a bowl in which you've stirred together 1 tspn honey, a dessertspoon of walnut oil and a splash of the flavoured vinegar. When the beetroot are cooked through, cut off the top n tails, scrape off the skin and cut into small chunks. Put into the dressing bowl along with the cooked quinoa and beetroot.  Give it a jolly good stir.

Serve:  torn up lettuce leaves on plate, scatter beetroot mix over.  Crumble some baked, wholewheat pitta chips over to add some crunch.  Stir together a generous tsp of sour cream and tablespoon of greek yogurt together well, and dot over the salad.  Crumble some goats cheese over the top.

I added some chopped nectarine to mine.  

Next time, rather than quartering the beetroot I will chop into bit sized chunks.  I'd toyed with the idea of added a seared pork cutlet but I think this would have been overkill.

The Loved One declared it to be very good.  The quinoa was the suprise of the piece.  It was nutty and nice, despite sounding immensely pretentious.

Double chocolate chip cookies

Something about the oven was calling me.  Time to do some baking.  I could feel the uncanny pull from a ghostly aparition of creamed butter and sugar.  I tried to control it.  I did.  But it was just too strong.  Just. Too. Strong.  This time I gave into the urge.  It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon and time for tea.

The problem with baking is that I just can't bung things in a bowl, stick in a slug of balsamic vinegar and serve it with a cheese sauce to cover any irregularities.  I need a recipe.  Then, annoyingly, I need to have the majority of the contents of the recipe to enact it.  And then, lovingly annoyingly, the result needs to be something that both The Loved One and I will fall on with gusto and consume.  That generally rules out: lemony things, orangy things, things that are too chocolatey (unless it's the right kind of chocolately),  desicated coconutty things (that's me, that one), bland things (me again), glaced fruit things ... I could continue.

Let's take the lie of the land and then make an assault on the recipe mountain.  I've got flour, butter, sugar, eggs - a good start. Currants and random dried fruit.  Lemons & limes.  Ah, some ancient chocolate chips which I think were once part of a rather posh couverture experiment by TLO. 

Recipe then.  To the old faithfuls first - Katie Stewart, nothing awesome; Delia Smith, nice things but with no bearing on the contents of the store cupboard; Nigella Lawson, fancied the lemon ginger slice; The Book of Afternoon Tea by Lesley Mackley, double chocolate chip cookies sound good.  I have cocoa and bicarb.  The stars are definately in alignment for this. 

Slightly odd measurements

• 115g butter
• 55g granulated sugar
• 55g soft brown sugar
• 1 beaten egg
• drops vanilla essence
• 130g plain flour
• 15g cocoa
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 150g chocolate chips

To kick off with, I don't have gran or much soft brown sugar to beat into the butter so swap it for some brown caster sugar with the fag end of the soft brown from the tub.  

Once beaten to a nice pale creamy brown paste, it's time to gently stir in the egg and vanilla.  I tend to put a tablespoon of flour in at the same time.  Something to do with stopping it curdling, possibly.  Having mixed it together a little bit, sieve/sift (which one, I wonder) the dry stuff into the mix. 

Mix together, then add in the chocolate chip cookies. 
 
I couldn't be bothered to measure them so I just put a smallish handful of a mix of dark and white chips.

Finally, having put greaseproof paper onto two baking sheets (I use a bit of spray oil to hold the sheets down) I put big teaspoon-sized drops onto the sheets.  About six to one sheet seemed to fit and it looked like these little suckers would spread.

Into a 180c oven for about 12 minutes - according to the recipe.  I left them for 15 by accident and it was just that bit too long.  They went a weensy bit blackish round some of the edges.

Left them to cool for a short while (I lie, I actually had to eat one when it had come out of the oven and it was excrutiatingly hot but I had to do it because of the voices ..).  Later, when they'd cooled to a heat less than the surface of the sun we consumed some with a nice glass of cold milk..

The cookies are friable - lovely if slightly sinister word, that - and sweet and, oddly, not enormously chocolately.  Good recipe this one.  Must try to remember it for next time I get a baking urge. 

Quick brekkie baked beans

I love a good English breakfast.  

Must be something to do with my roots, dont'cha'know.  Having spent a lifetime road warrior'ing my way around the Great British Motorways, I rather fancy myself as having some expertise in the 'fry up'. Leigh Delamere, Trowell and Exeter, Knutsford, Newport Pagnell, and Heston. They all hold a place in my heart.  Oh yes, memories of Service Station food that has been seared beyond palatability by food lamps hotter than the face of the sun - sausages with more rusk than pig; bright orange baked beans with congealed sauce; fried eggs with the texture of lino.  All oddly delicious and compelling  after 3 hours sat in yet another traffic jam.  And these memories spur me on to produce the perfect breakfast.

So, you may have noticed in the recent Shepherds Pie recipe that I slung in some leftover beans that I had in the fridge.  These came from our Boxing Day Breakfast.  A leisurely affair with hot toast, good coffee and an obsessively large choice of jams.  

Favouring the traditional I'd planned ahead and laid in stores of orange juice, bacon, sausages (pork with apple & sage), good eggs, fresh bread and mushrooms.

Now, I'm a lover of the classic Heinz bean as much as the next child of the sixties.  And Hoops.  And Alphabetti Spaghetti.  And Spangles.  And Lava Lamps. (I could go on).  But focusing on the topic in hand, I fancied some beans to bring a small sensation of health to the food fest and my cupboard was bare of HB's.

Into a saucepan I put a can of rinsed Cannellini beans and a can of chopped tomatoes.  Whilst they were coming up to heat, into the mix went a desertspoonsful of soft brown sugar, salt, pepper and a squeeze of tomato puree.  It was topped off with a smallish dash of cider vinegar.  A good stir and this was left to bloop away over a pretty high heat to get it all mixed together and thickened up.  

I have absolute confidence that you can all knock up a breakfast so I'll not dwell on that bit.  Suffice it to say that the meal was a quiet affair punctured with the occasional request to pass something or other with the diners taking the chance to get on with making headway through their Christmas reading heaps.

Beef Fillet

Well, it is Christmas.  OK, it was.  But who needs an excuse to cook something as delicious as a neat little piece of beef?  Anyway, my best friend asked me how I'd cook a fillet so I was practically made to do this.

My second excuse is that it was sat there in the butcher's glass fronted display looking all lost and forlorn.  It was just begging to be picked and subjected to some heat treatment. In my defence I didn't get a big bit - that would have been simply greedy - even if you can eat it cold, in secret, with some mustard on it.

I'm a bit of a born again meat eater - as a youth I used to weep in butchers shops, or at least gag at the smell.  But now I love a trip to the meat counter.  It's partly to do with the quality of produce.  Australia has most excellent ingredients and the meat is just the start of it.  The other part is the flirty butchers. Lovely solid chaps in blood stained pinnies asking if I prefer rump or loin.  Just how does one answer with going ever so slightly pink and sniggering?  Must be my age you know.

Having dragged my meaty lump back to my lair I was in two minds about frying or baking it.  Settling for baking, because I find it hard to get consistent results when I fry it, I turned the oven up to really rather hot and let it get up to speed. 

I avoided cooking anything steak-like for years.  I either seemed to cremate it to a pallid greyness or leave it so blue that it was positively pulsating.  But I figured out that lots of people seem to be able to cook it and so could I.  Some reading up on the topic resulted in a plan that I've found works for me, pretty much every time. 

Firstly, I rub the meat in some dry spices.  Currently I'm favouring chinese five spice powder along with some coarse ground black pepper.  I read somewhere, or heard, or saw, or whatever, that if you salt meat before you cook it you draw out the juices and make your lovely cut all dry and horrid.  However, I just read/heard/saw that it doesn't make a blind bit of difference.  Anyhow, I've left it off for so long and it doesn't seem to affect the result negatively.  Sometimes I smear a bit of soy, or ketjup manis on it, but sometimes not.  Then I leave it until I'm ready to cook.

 
Heating a frying pan to seriously searing hot, I rub a smidgeon of oil into the beef and then quickly sear it on all sides.  Seared so that it's good and browned without leaving it to cook for too long.  Then I stick it in a small (or appropriate sized) roasting tray and put it into the equally dang hot oven. 

For this small piece I'm going to give it about 10 to 12 minutes.  For a bigger bit - say a kilo's worth - I'd give it about 15 to 20 mins.   Then I whip it out of the oven and sit it under a (hopefully) clean tea towel to rest for at least as long as I've cooked it.  You can leave it for hours and serve it tepid in a salad type affair if you like.  This way it will have nice crusty ends (for those who can't bear pink stuff) and then gently pink middle bits (for the more bloody minded).

 
As to gravy I've finally got to grips with just using whatever seeps out of the joint as it cooks and cools.  It's savoury, uncomplicated and unclaggy. 

The Loved One's not a huge potato man so I've opted for a some fettucini and a few sliced mushrooms cooked quickly in butter.  The beef, cut into nice thick slices gets cheerfully polished off with bang bang sauce*.  All in all a rather nice way to farewell Christmas and prepare for the New Year.

 

*bang bang sauce? During one of my low fat/high fibre moments I took to mixing a teaspoon of finely grated parmesan with a tablespoon of skinny yoghurt to use as a dressing.  Turned out, it was savoury yum and to my mind just that much better for you than mayonnaise.  It's morphed, somewhat, over time.  This time round it was a tablespoon of thick full fat biodynamic bunny hugger yoghurt (it's actually got a cream top, like the milk used to get before they went and homogenised most of it), a teaspoon of mayo, a teaspoon of sour cream and a tablespoon of grated parmesan.  Not so low fat.  Tastes nice though. 

Fridge Soup

Don't you just love soup?  For me, it makes me feel instantly - better, home, calmer, loved, warm, full, safe.  All these things.  Powerful stuff, is soup.

When I was small, I knew when I must be ill because I got fed tomato soup with crustless ham sandwiches on white bread with butter and mustard.  Soup is my mother's cure-all. With it you can shift a cold, flu, glandular fever (ok, even she has to admit that last one didn't work).  

Whilst we're on the topic, other un-patented maternal cure-all's include (1) having a haircut (you'll feel better) and (b) having a hot bath (you'll feel better).  Can you see a pattern here?  Not sure I can, but there you go.

So, to soup.  It's flexible, forgiving and flavoursome.  And now it's my cure-all too.  Here's how I generally approach it.  

Firstly, I open the fridge and see what's in there.  Hmm.  I fear, from the odd odour, that something has died somewhere at the back of the vegetable drawer, I think I'll leave investigating that until I've had some restorative soup.  Right, we've got some mushrooms of varying ages that could do with eating up. Bingo! Some garlic too.  Double Bingo!  One remaining potato that isn't too sprouty or squishy.  I've also got a small brown onion, butter, chicken oxo cubes and milk.   

Here we go - heat butter gently in saucepan, add roughly chopped garlic and onions and sweat gently until transparent.  I'm going to blitz it at the end with a hand blender so you don't have to mince things up.  Peel potato, chunk up and add to onions and sweat them a bit.  You don't want it to brown, but if it gets some goldeny bits in that all just adds to the depth of flavour.  Chunk up mushrooms and add, sweat etc.  

     
 

If you've got some chicken stock squirrelled away in the freezer then use that.  Otherwise, put a couple of stock cubes in and add water until its level with the top of the mix.  You're going to add some milk later so you don't want it too watery.  

 

Stick on lid and leave to simmer for about twenty minutes until the potatoes are squashable and it's all generally infused together.

 

Blend the mix - you could use a hand blender like this type of thing or a food processor.   Depending on how much potato's in it it should be thick but not too gluey.  Thin the soup by adding some milk - I used up some skim milk (urgh!) that had found its way into the fridge.  Check seasoning.  I put in a spot of pudding wine to give it a bit of ooomph.  Vague memories of adding sherry to soups drove that choice.  

Here's the result.  Looks a bit alarming but this one tastes fab.  Mine's the one in the bowl.  The Loved One likes his in a cup.  To mine I added a dab of sour cream, some pepper and a few coriander leaves.  He likes his plain.  It's all set off with toast and some sticks of cheddar. Bloody yum.

I feel all snug now.  The source of the odd fridgey odour can wait for a braver person.  Time to go and catch up on my reading heap, methinks. 

Shepherds Pie

In recovery from Christmas lunch, the leftovers of which still lurk in pots and tubs in the fridge. 

It seemed time to move firmly towards some comfort food and away from a diet of turkey and chocolates (although that turkey could still see the light as a bit of a pie or a fricasse).

With 500g of acceptable minced beef cooked in the frying pan and then drained of fat, I threw in the remains of a sort of breakfast baked bean mix and some cooked mushrooms.  Adding a tin of chopped tomatoes, a squidge* of basil, salt, pepper and a slug of black cherry balsamic vinegar, it cooked down into a nice gloopy mix. 

Mash, from about 5 Desiree potatoes cooked in their skins and then pushed through a mouli, was then beaten with butter and well seasoned.  The skin comes off in the mouli, brilliant for the indolent cook - no need to peel.

The mince went on the bottom of a nice deep ceramic dish with straight sides and was topped with the mash, the top evened out but roughed up and put into a moderate oven to cook until browned and the sauce had bubbled up in small crunchy bits down the edges.

Digging about in the vegetable drawer revealed a glut of carrots.  So I caramelised them - bit of water in the bottom of a saucepan, sprinkle of sugar and dob of butter along with sliced carrots.  Apply the heat and cook with the lid on until the carrots are half cooked, then take off the lid, season well and finish them off over the heat until the water/butter/sugar combo goes thick and caramelly.

Altogether, a very tooth-some supper. 

*what do you mean, squidge of basil?   Sometimes I've got fresh herbs in the fridge, but sometimes I've got either the slimy remains of some ancient herb purchase or none at all.   But do I panic?  I do not!  I've got some tubes of herbs that I keep in the freezer.  What a wizard wheeze these things are.  Last for ages and are proximitous to the real thing.