ramtops

Well, rather, autumn is here, and we’re back to more suitable cooking for the season.

I spent a lot of time in the kitchen this weekend; I made bread, pizza dough, and peanut butter and choc chip cookies on Saturday (recipes to come, I promise, but I’m still tweaking a bit), and on Sunday I did lamb and veg soup (or at least the components thereof), plum, apple and five spice crumble.

The soup involved roasting off £1.20’s worth of lamb bones from Morrisons, then boiling them down for stock, then picking the meat off them. There was actually enough meat for two big pots of soup, so some has gone in the freezer. Then I very finely chopped ¼ swede, 1 leek, 2 carrots and 1 courgette (takes bloody ages, but I never feel the food processor does it as well), and put them in the medium slow cooker with a glug of olive oil, and about ½” of water. Then this morning I married up stock, lamb and veg, together with 1 litre of veg soup left over from *last* week. That will do us for lunches for this week, with some crispbread or whatever.

The market stall in Hull was selling 2lbs of plums for a quid – rude not to, really. So I bought them, a *huuuuge* green cabbage, a cauliflower, and two Bramleys, for £3. Most of the plums went into a crumble – I say “most”, because I couldn’t fit them all into the pan. How I wish I had room for another freezer.

I halved them, and laid them flat in a heavy based frying pan, sprinkled with five space, and added about 1″ of water. Simmered until they were soft, then decanted them into a dish, and cooked the syrup right down. Added a peeled and chopped Bramley, topped with a oaty crumble mix and … nectar.

Pete constructed a pizza on Saturday – I use 500g of flour for dough, and it makes three pizzas for us, and freezes well. He used some smoked salami that we discovered in Aldi (along with various other stuff), and very nice it was too.

Sunday we dined on venison steak and braised red cabbage (both out of the freezer), and potatoes roasted with olive oil and rosemary. And the aforementioned crumble. It’s amazing how little meat we want these days – a 300g venison steak was plenty between us, and we used to eat 400g steaks each in the day.

This week, we will be mostly eating cabbage, I suspect. And soup. :)

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

The remains of the haricots from the shepherds’ pie mix. What to do with them?

There was a cabbage in the fridge. There’s nearly always a cabbage in the fridge, and we are very samey with the way we use it, so I thought I’d do a little experiment. So I chopped about 30g of chorizo* quite small, and slung it in the baby slow cooker with a roughly chopped onion and a little olive oil.

Then, at supper time, I steamed some finely shredded cabbage, while the beans, chorizo and onion were transferred to a bigger pan, and warmed through. I added some herbs too.

*Chorizo is one of my go-to ingredients – oil and paprika and garlic in one hit. Delicious. I buy it in rings from Aldi, usually, where it is dead cheap compared to anywhere else. This one I’m using now is a fancy smoked chorizo from the food market, but even this one would have been about 50p for 30 grams.

I finely diced about 30g, and roughly chopped an onion, and slung them in the small slow cooker for an hour or so (I’m getting so much use out of that thing!), with a splash if olive oil. I shredded about 1/3 of the cabbage, and cooked it in very little water and some ground black pepper for about six minutes. While the cabbage was cooking,tThe haricots went into a deep frying pan with a tiny bit of water to warm up, and I added some chopped herbs and the chorizo/onion mix. Drained the cabbage and added it to the bean mix. It was spectacularly good, much better than I actually expected Will be making it again!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Pete manfully did the shopping last weekend, as I wasn’t feeling very well, and amongst everything else, he bore home a cabbage. This went nicely with the cabbage that was already sitting in the veg drawer, but no problem – we like cabbage (just as well, really).

On Tuesday, we had cabbage with mozarella; we eat this a lot. As I’m trying to cut down carbs, we added some pancetta cubes, and I had much less pasta than I normally would.

On Wednesday, we had a mound of buttered cabbage and black pepper to accompany the remains of Sunday’s beef and mushroom pie – the pie filling had been in the freezer for ages, and the pastry was wholemeal. Lovely.

On Thursday, we had a day off, and had stirfried broccoli and courgettes.

On Friday we had sausages, steamed cabbage, and swede and carrot mash (no spuds).

And tonight, we will have South Indian cabbage and rice (another favourite).

Tomorrow, we will obviously be ringing the changes, and having roast pork belly with – oh – more cabbage. But red this time, cooked with spices and apple.

Why am I turning green?

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We normally have this without the pancetta, but I’m trying to cut my carbs at the moment so I added some meat.

I make this in a frying pan with a lid.

Chop and onion and some garlic, and fry it off in olive oil. Add the pancetta (I used cubes – you could use bacon too) at this point. When the onion is soft, add quite a lot of shredded cabbage; anything does – I’ve made this with hispi, with white, with savoy … they all work well.

Stir it all around, then add either some water – about maybe 1/2″ at the bottom of the pan – or a splash of wine. We used about half a glass of home made pineapple wine last night! Season to taste, put a lid on and leave it for about 10 minutes.

Then add some mozzarella – I usually just cube a whole one – and stir it around till the cheese melts.

In the bad old days, I would stir the pasta into this, but last night it went in separately, as Pete had a “normal” helping, and I just had a spoonful. I’ve discovered cabbage is great for bulking up if you’re avoiding carbs.