lamb, leek and barley soup

I don’t normally bother with recipes for soup – they’re a bit mongrel here. But I’ve started tracking what I eat on MyFitnessPal, so it’s worth writing stuff up, just for that. So hopefully there’ll be a lot more appearing here now.

We make this quite often, as Morrisons do three lamb bones for about £0.85, which make a fine soup. I roast them off in the Remoska for half an hour, then boil them up in some water. Let them cool, fish them out, and strip the surprising amount of meat off them and shred it. And there’s the basis for the soup.

In the slow cooker (or a big pot), put the stock and meat, two leeks and some carrots (couple of big ones, or five smallish assorted, as I did this morning), which have been chopped finely. I use the Magimix for this as a rule, but sometimes I will stand and chop; it can be quite therapeutic, particularly if you imbue the veg with human personalities :) Add 200g ish of barley, a couple of teaspoons of salt, and a good sprinkling of black pepper. Top up with boiling water if there is insufficient liquid.

About four hours in the slow cooker will do it, less if you’re in a pot on the hob. It’s very nice, and exceeding warming, which given the thermometer says -1C here today, is just what’s wanted.

	calories	carbs	fat	protein
total	363	54	6	17
per serving	36	5	1	2

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

steak

Image from wikipedia – thanks.

Posts here are a bit like buses, aren’t they? – none for weeks, then three in a day. That’s because downstairs I now use an iPad rather than a laptop, and a) I can’t remember the password, and b) it’s too slow to type a lot. I do have a bluetooth keyboard for it, so I should really fish that out, then I could post more. We’ll see.

Anyhoo … there are more and more blogs around covering frugal living and cooking. This isn’t one of them; I don’t like waste, particularly food waste, but we’re not living a frugal life. Although we probably should be :) As a demonstration, I give you our steak dinner last weekend.

In a fruitless attempt to clear freezer space (how I hate being a one freezer household – it simply isn’t enough), I found a few, just a few, frozen chips. Now we only eat chips with steak, so what was I to do? I took myself off to Normans, of course, and asked for a piece of sirloin. The butcher looked at me askance – possibly. Did I really want sirloin, he asked? I asked what his alternative was, and he disappeared out to the back (I tell you, it’s like Hilary Briss’ shop in League of Gentlemen in there; I fully expect to be offered Special Stuff soon).

He returned with a lump of beef, which he informed me was rib eye. It looked good – nice and dark brown. “Just show it a pan”, he said, which is how we like our steak. So he cut me off a slice, weighed it and charged me £5.20, which seems like a bargain to me for a bit of steak.

We had it with the oven chips, and some frozen peas from a bag we had to buy specially.

Reactive we are, frugal we ain’t :)

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.