Home-made pesto

I finally did it! I managed to make a small batch of pesto after this recipe! I found some cavolo nero on the market and some parmesan cheese on special offer, so I just had to add garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper! I cheated a little, because I’m impatient. I basically just briefly placed the cabbage leaves with two garlic cloves into boiling water, then drained everything off. I let the leaves ’steam off’ for a bit and then put them with the oil, the salt, the pepper, to more garlic cloves and olive oil in the blender. Most of the stuff I filled into a jar and put it in the fridge for a ‘communal feast’ tomorrow, and the remainder went onto my very late lunch (or early dinner?) – wholewheat spaghetti!

Verdict: very very tasty! A big thank you over to the folks at ‘…an endless banquet’!

Pepper Tomato Rice Soup

Well I put a bit too much rice in and did not make enough stock, but otherwise it was very tasty! I had to use a bowl of rice and a small bag of pointy peppers up and had a tin of tomatoes in the cupboard. So I thought I’d make soup! After all, my grandmother was very fond of putting rice into all sorts of soups – and they always tasted good!
I started by grabbing a pot, putting some oil in it and adding chopped onions and a few cloves of garlic. I then added the chopped peppers. When the peppers started going soft a bit, I added the tin of tomatoes, some water, herbs and spices. I think I just used standard mixed herbs and a bit of cayenne (maybe some cajun?). After everything was softish and seemed of the right taste and consistency, I got my blender out and liquidised the soup. The rice was added in shortly before serving.
As I also had to use some limes up, I also made a lime-yoghurt drink from 2 limes, brown sugar, water and a few spoonfuls of yoghurt! During that time, my housemate got some bread to go with the soup!

Baked Apples

So finally, I got to make use of my donated apples! I first wanted to make apple crumble (with my trademark crumbly-oaty topping and usually fantasising about some additional, unattainable blackberries), but then I was in the mood for something less solid. So I went for baked apples! Ideally, you make this recipe by coring the apples and then stuffing them with a mixture of raisins, chopped or flaked almonds, butter, sugar and cinnamon. I just had the last three ingredients, so they were not all that exciting, but effective nevertheless! After getting them out of the oven, I spooned them into a bowl, but them into pieces and put some custard (nocturnal impulse buy – was gone in a matter of hours…) with chocolate sprinkles on top. Not bad at all!

Improved Macaroni Cheese & Bread and Butter Pudding

Just to clarify – this is not one dish called ‘Macaroni Cheese Bread and Butter Pudding’. That could be okay, but possibly quite horrific… anyway… As some of you may know, I volunteer about once a month for a charity called The Food Chain. On Sunday mornings a team of cooks gets together (usually one lead cook who plans the menu and everybody else helps to materialise it ;D) to cater for people with HIV related illnesses. About half the cooks are people who already work as cooks (like me). The other half are people who just love cooking and tend to watch a lot of cookery programmes. The mixture works extremely well I think and there is a lot of exchange of techniques and recipes going on. We cook traditional British, but also Indian, African, French, Italian – a lot of it depends on what the people want to eat (we also offer vegetarian/vegan) and a little bit on who the lead cook is. Around midday, the food is then distributed by another team of drivers and navigators.

Today, I wasn’t in charge of the menu, but the person who was had some nice twists on some standard dishes:

The sauce for the Macaroni Cheese was done with a few scoops of wholegrain mustard and creme fraiche (or double cream) and slightly mashed/overcooked broccoli, which made it much tastier than your average bland or stodgy version of this dish. Some people also had tomatoes in their portions.

The Bread and Butter Pudding had some real vanilla in the sauce, raisins and a dollop of marmelade on top. The marmelade just made it absolutely perfect! (I’m strongly suspecting the recipe is a Jamie Oliver!)

There were quite a few other dishes, e.g. a Kenyan fish and coconut stew which in the Food Chain cookbook goes under the name Girliama. I wonder if that is the correct spelling as I have not been able to find any other google hits for this name…

A cottage pie with cheese-mash was also on the menu as a comfort food for a cold and miserable day (the day did turn out much friendlier than expected!). It got transmuted a bit, because after the recipe it was supposed to contain a layer of boiled eggs and halved tomatoes between the mince and the mash… (that could be quite nice with mustard-mash, actually) – a bit like some cooks do it for Fisherman’s Pie.

Thought this might interest some people who want to jazz up some old favourites – or who’d like to become volunteers!

Chestnut cookies

Photo: another humble cookie…

Two of my friends decided in the same week to donate some leftover food to me, because they are temporarily going to be out of the country. I now have to use up 2 gigantic packets of nuts, 1 half-empty net of chestnuts, a small bag of cooking apples, a glass of Belgian white chocolate and hazelnut spread (less fancy than it sounds – Belgian readers might recognise the name ‘blanco’…), coconut milk and some Thai curry paste. I managed to redistribute two of the curry pastes (which still leaves me with two!), but now I still have the other stuff, which I’m actually very happy about! So, tonight, I roasted the chestnuts – but suddenly I my appetite for chestnuts disappeared as soon as they were out of the oven. I waited a few hours, but still no chestnut hunger.

Around midnight, I gave up and threw them into my housemate’s food processor along with the one egg I had left, some vanilla sugar (another donation) a few scoops of butter and some flour. I then remembered the white chocolate and hazelnut spread and, because it is very sweet, I added a few scoops of that instead of sugar. I added enough flour to make a firm dough and speedily formed a few makeshift cookies, because it was getting a bit late! Could not be bothered to decorate them either, so I just whacked them into the oven and took them out about 15-20 minutes later when they were sliightly browned. Also no great lookers, they turned out quite tasty! I read somewhere on the net that ground chestnuts taste best within a meringue-type dough, but I would only follow this kind of recipe if I had a plan for the remaining egg yolk. Maybe I can try them during my Christmas-cookie baking marathon at my parent’s house this year… must not forget to receive more chestnut donations!

Beetroot Burgers

For those who have asked me about the exact steps of how to make beetroot burgers, here is a little photo series…

First, put the beetroot into the juicer for yummy beetroot juice (or you can simply grate some old beetroots). Add orange juice or apple juice or other juices to the beetroot juice.

Add spices to the juicer leftovers. I always use mustard powder and paprika, and then whatever I feel like on the day or whatever fresh herbs need using up… I sometimes let the beetroot mix marinate over night.

Soak old bread with vegetable stock and/or spice mix. Squeeze out bread, add to the beetroot mix. Add garlic puree, chopped onions and eggs. If mixture is too runny, add some flour.

Put beetroot burger patties in a pan with hot oil (medium heat).

Fry until firm and slightly browned. It’s sometimes quite difficult to spot when beetroot burgers are ready, because they always look raw! If you add mince meat to the mix, it is even more difficult to tell…

I usually let the burgers cool down and then put them in the toaster or under the grill when I’m hungry. They are nice in a bun with mustard and/or ketchup and/or salad!

Sandwich & toastie fillings

Hmh, I wanted to call this post ‘great baps’ at first, but I know too many people who have other associations with the word ‘baps’, so I opted for the more PC ’sandwich’ (hey, just thinking, it might have generated more readers for this post…). What I am basically referring to are these soft squishy buns… er, here we have another of those words… and also the crusty rolls, as I am not a fan of what is considered ‘normal’ bread which mostly seems to contain air, clogs up your intestines and ironically does not even withstand the harsh procedures of sandwich making (you either end up with holes from buttering or holes or major sogginess). Anyway…

After this grand speech, here are some more humble sandwich fillings! When I grew up, whenever we had leftovers, they were hardly ever thrown away (or ‘given to the birds’ outside). Instead, it was always ‘we can eat that tomorrow in a sandwich’. And literally, anything from fried potatoes (mash potato was reformed into potato cakes) and omelettes to fish and meat was eaten on bread or in a sandwich. I’ve kind of kept that tradition (although I’m not too sure about my last chinese takeaway sandwich…), but mostly, I make them with the ‘normal’ ingredients. As I haven’t made any sandwiches for carnivores for a long time (and the ones I made might scare people…) and I cannot possibly cover all possible fillings, feel free to add stuff via comments!

My current favourite is a toasted unbuttered roll with cheddar and ketchup. The cheddar is put under the grill (on the bun!) briefly, then ketchup is squirted on top of it… yum! I started making these sandwiches a few years ago to substitute for chip butties at a time when I didn’t even have enough money for chips… and not, as some people may suspect, to wean myself off chip butties

My previous favourite was grated cheese with honey (butter toasted roll, then spread honey on it and cover with grated cheese). I have also made someone addicted to grilled camembert with cranberry sauce sandwiches (make like the cheese-ketchup sandwiches, add lettuce if you wish). You can also use goats cheese or brie for this combo.

Feta cheese is great as a Greek salad filling (with onions, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic & oil), but I’m sometimes not patient enough to make the latter. Sometimes I have a feta cheese omelette (or Spanish omelette) in a bun instead.

My favourite non-cheesy ones are mashed banana and avocado (separately, not in combination!). The former is just made by mashing a banana, the latter is made by mashing a ripe avocado with lemon juice, salt, pepper, cayenne/chilli, garlic (and, if you have some, a little cajun or other curry-style powder). You can also make a ‘cheesy avocado’ filling. My favourite 24-hour cafe used to do a lovely ‘tricolore’ sandwich which was made by spreading pesto on a crusty roll or ciabatta, layering avocado, tomato and mozzarella slices on top (in that order) and putting it under a grill before closing it. Phwoar! It’s not usually in my budget though. Neither are halloumi sandwiches

Here are also some toastie fillings. Unfortunately, a friend has borrowed my sandwich toaster, so I won’t be able to make any toasties until in about a months time – if she does not forget to return the sandwich toaster! Most popular one in this household is the cheese & chillie toastie, which just contains cheese and chopped chillies. The camembert (or brie) & cranberry combination also works well with toasties by the way. A few months ago, Sainsbury’s had a recipe for apple pie toastie: chop apples into small, thin pieces, mix with cinnamon, sultanas and honey. Use as toastie filling. I’m sure some more fruity toasties can be made that way, e.g. with apples and berries – or apple and custard? Must try as soon as I get my equipment back! One of my colleagues also made a strange chilli-apple filling. Which reminds me, another friend of mine makes kiwi & chocolate toasties (you could use any fruit that goes with chocolate really). Can’t remember whether he uses chocolate spread or chopped chocolate… A popular one at school – surprise, surprise – was kinderriegel filling…

Hmh, will continue thinking what else I’ve made as a toastie or sandwich – there must be more!

Roast Vegetable Potato Salad

I’m not a big fan of potato salads – or potatoes in general (although I do eat them occasionally). One of my task in life is to create a potato salad that even I will like. The first essential ingredient to scrap is obviously my arch-enemy: supermarket-mayonnaise! A friend once made a tasty potato salad without mayo. I ate it nearly 15 years ago, so all I can remember is peppers, potatoes and a vinaigrette type sauce. But it had other vegetables in it as well. So based on those memories, I tried out making a salad with some spare courgettes and peppers that I had. Because in the UK, people always seem a bit wary of raw peppers and courgettes (and the salad wasn’t to be made for me) I opted for a ‘roast vegetable’ potato salad!

I boiled some potatoes the night before and peeled them. The next day, I cut fine my red peppers, courgettes, onions and garlic and roasted them for over an hour (if you have a BBQ going, even better!). I left them to cool and then added them to my chopped potatoes. I also added some olives (half price – special offer!) and some tinned beans. Carnivores could add some ham or roast bacon.

To bind everything together, I made some sort of mustard-vinaigrette with pepper and cayenne (can’t remember what exactly went in there). It would have been great with chives, but some guy grabbed the last pot of chives from the reduced to clear pile, so I only got parsley! People seemed to like the salad, but I’m not satisfied with it as yet. For a start, it was a bit too mushy for my taste. Must continue the potato-salad experiments…

Cookie Cutters

I’ve just read something about cookie cutters on BoingBoing. Somebody is making their own with tin foil. I used to make my own cookie cutters – after failed tinfoil-cardboard-wire experiments – with strips of sterilised scrap metal (I used to live near a scrapyard and also I used to do weird metal sculptures so I always had access to some). Will take some pictures of the surviving ones (Star Trek signs, musical notes etc) when I go to my parents’ house at Christmas.

Anyway, for those who dislike the idea of using big tools – or even a smithy – for making cookie cutters, here is a brilliant solution by Juggling Frogs!

Improved Mushroom Stroganoff

Yes, my experiment worked! Here is the recipe from last night’s party (thank you Mariko and Justin!!)! I had not made this before, and I did not really know what to call it. So I named it after the only mushroom dish I know! The posh mushrooms (organic portobello and oyster mushrooms) and fresh ’stuffing herbs’ came from the ‘reduced to clear’ section, the white mushrooms came from the market.

What went in there?

The rice: brown rice boiled in lots of hot water flavoured with vegetable stock, asafoetida, paprika, salt, cinnamon sticks and some other semi-random spices! After draining it off, I melted some salted butter with some more herbs and spices (more of the same with mixed herbs in there somewhere) and poured it over the rice.

The mushroom ‘thingy’: Fried lots of garlic in the same pot I had melted and flavoured the butter in. Added onions, lots of chopped and fried leeks, a mixture of chopped and fried mushrooms (oyster, white, portobello), veggie mince, stuffing herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme), and bits of red peppers and courgettes (not necessary, but needed using up… you could add anything you like really). I then added more cinnamon, coriander, a bit of turmeric (if you’ve got saffron, that’s even better, but I didn’t have any, so the colour looks a bit crap), pepper and … I can’t remember what else.
Next, I poured in a few pints of vegetable stock, and when I had flavoured the whole dish to my satisfaction, I dropped in some herbed cream chesse, creme fraiche and cheese corners (use any creamy-cheesy stuff that you can get your hands on really). I was tempted to even add some feta cheese to the mix, but didn’t in the end. It’s quite a calorific dish, but then you are not supposed to eat the whole contents of the pot!