ramtops

iphone timer

As my regular reader will know, Tuesday night is pasta night. I just open the fridge and concoct something from its contents. For people who don’t have time to cook, here’s a 15-20 minute supper.

Bear in mind I have an ceramic hob, so you can skip the “put the rings on” bit if you’ve got gas.

Switch on the big ring, put a deep frying pan on it, add a slug of olive oil
Switch on the medium ring, put some cold water and salt in a pan, set it on the ring
Slice up a big leek and put it in the pan with the oil.
Weigh out the pasta (if you do such things – we do, because carbs/diabetes)
Slice up some mushrooms, and add to the leeks
Notice pasta water is boiling – add pasta, set timer for ten minutes (this is dried pasta – your pasta may vary)
Remember you haven’t put any garlic in, so quickly peel and chop two cloves and throw them in with the vegetables
Put a colander in the sink for drainage purposes
Grate black pepper into the veg
Open the fridge for some lemon juice, find a bottle of white wine open, and add some of that instead. Too much, so turn up the heat to boil it down a bit
Remove block of feta from fridge and cut up about one third of it
When timer goes, drain pasta then add it to vegetables, together with the feta.
Stir it all together, decant into bowls, scoff.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Actually, that’s unfair, because we haven’t had a risotto in ages. But we did last night.

We bought a pack of chicken thighs in Aldi last week. Pete manfully skinned and filleted them on Saturday, and they’ve been stowed in the freezer (yes, for this was just *before* PumpkinGate) for stir fries or whatever; the cats had the skin, with much enjoyment but no gratitude *at all*, and I slung the bones in the baby slow cooker with some water, with a view to soup making. But then, after the Graet Pumpkin War of 2014, soup was already well over-catered, and I couldn’t freeze this stock either.

I reboiled the bones yesterday, and it made a lovely gelatinous stock. Which seemed absolutely ideal for a risotto, especially as there were little shreds of chicken as well. So I strained the bones out, and rinsed them off with boiling water, to get every drop of chickeny goodness from them, and then topped that up to a pint*.

Sliced a leek and a red pepper, and set them to saute off in a little olive oil and butter. Then added 5oz of Arborio rice and stirred it round to coat it, and then started adding the stock bit by bit, stirring all the time. During the process, I discovered that making risotto is yet another thing that doesn’t go with watching Borgen with subtitles; no wonder it’s taking me so long to get through it. I digress.

When about 75% of the stock was added, I seasoned with salt and black pepper, and when all the stock was absorbed, I added half a block of feta cheese and stirred until it was melted.

And I can tell you that, although a bowl of risotto in those quantities (we halved it, obviously) doesn’t look much, it’s plenty, and it was delicious.

*This is one of the few recipes I still cook in imperial – easier to remember the mantra of 1 pint / 5 oz.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

So – 2/3rds of a huge jar of roasted red peppers. Opened. What to do?

Finely chopped an onion and about three cloves of garlic, and fried them off in olive oil, then added a slug of red wine and deglazed the pan. Sliced up the peppers and threw them in till they were warmed through thoroughly. Liquidised it in batches, then “cleaned” the goblet with about a glass of water and added it to the sauce; it made enough for at least two meals for us, and possibly three.

I cut up a thin leek into thin rings (we have just started a veg box again, so there might be interesting (or not :) posts re that soon). It went into a pan with some olive oil, and was fried until just caramelised. There were some chickpeas left over from the tagine, so I added them, some seasoning, and some torn basil leaves from the pot on the windowsill at the end. I could have taken some chilli, I think, but was really delicious eaten with fusilli pasta, and I shall freeze the rest of the sauce today. So nice we shall have it again, and possibly again after that.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We decided last night that, come what may, we should make an inroad into the remaining Christmas pud, so a light supper was called for. I made it to the greengrocer yesterday, so we were stocked with veg.

So, trimmed a leek and cut it lengthways, then cut into thin slices. Set to cook off in some olive oil, and added three finely chopped cloves of garlic. Put some pasta on to cook.

Towards the end of the pasta cooking time, added to the leek mix some black pepper, the end of a tub of cream that was just going over, and the juice of half a lemon that was lying about. Dumped in lots of parmesan and stirred everything together with the pasta. Nice, light, tasty.

The pudding was good too! (Luxury one from Aldi, with candied orange slices on the sides. I love Aldi).

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

I have a constant and ongoing battle with my freezer. I used at one point to have three freezers – the one in our USAnian fridge, a 3/4 height one out in the shed, and an under-counter sized one that lived under the stairs, and was entirely filled with minced oxcheek, which we bought in bulk and fed to the cats.

The oxcheek supply fell through, and we gave that (elderly) freezer to some friends. Then in the spring of 2009, we sold the 3/4 one and replaced it with a new under counter under the stairs, partly because our supplier of wonderful Dexter beef was no longer farming cattle, and so we weren’t buying half a cow at a time. Then we moved here, and had no room for anything but the USAnian beast, which in truth is plenty, but I still cannot get out of the mindset of being a three freezer owner, and thus am constantly struggling to fit things into its thankfully Tardis-like interior.

Anyway, I ramble. But we need to actually, you know, *eat* some stuff from the freezer, rather than trying to stuff still more in, so I am on a mission to clear some space. With this in mind, I rummage in its bottom drawers (ooh er), hurling aside the beef mince, the lamb mince, the pork mince (who put that there?), the chicken breasts, seeking the pork steaks, and after all that effort, I got one just one.

Just one because we don’t eat a lot of meat these days, and one is plenty for two of us. When it had thawed, I cut it into cubes, browned them in some olive oil, fought Lilith for possession of the cling film, transferred them to a bowl on a temporary basis, and put the bowl in the grill (then watched Iggy doing his damnedest to open the door of said grill). Then I chopped the white part of two leeks (the green went into the soup pot) and a couple of cloves of garlic, added some butter to the pan, and softened them down, adding some chopped fresh sage leaves.

Then in went a heaped teaspoon of grain mustard (I’m very much in love with this as an ingredient right now), a dessertspoon of flour, and stirrred it round, then added a good slosh of cider, the pork, and the contents of a carton of haricot beans. Seasoned to taste.

Cooked it for about 25 minutes with a lid on, then removed the lid for the last five minutes or so and turned it up to reduce the sauce. Ate with sautéd potatoes and some brussels sprouts.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Last night’s supper was already planned, insofar as I knew we needed to use up some of the veg in the fridge, and we’d been eating rice for a few days, so it was time for pasta for a change.

I chopped up a fat leek, a red romano pepper, and several cloves of garlic, and set them to sauté down in some olive oil. Then I went to answer the door, as someone had just knocked. It was a friend from up the road, who wanted to watch himself on the local news (he doesn’t have a television). So we offered him supper.

I added another red pepper, and some strips of pancetta, while Pete grated up lots of parmesan. Boiled some big pasta shells, chopped some sage from the garden, put it all into the pan and served in bowls. Instant supper, and very nice.

Well, we thought so!