ramtops

I made a batch of these for a friend’s curry evening, and they were so nice, I’ve just made another huge batch for us! I might have gone ever so slightly overboard with the quantities, so think on if you’re going to try this :)

1kg black-eyed peas (£3.69 for 2kgs from our local Indian shop)
1 carton Sainsburys passata (£0.55)
2 chopped onions (£1.80 for 4kgs from the Turkish shop so – 30p max)
⅓ big carton of Aldi mushrooms, sliced thinly (about £0.50)
groundnut oil (about a dessertspoon)
various spices to suit (listed below)

12 generous servings for a fiver, absolute max.   I made this in the slow cooker, but if you don’t want to/don’t have to, I’d give it a couple of hours on the hob to get the flavour right through.

Put the black-eyes in to soak for about 12 hours/overnight. They do say you don’t need to soak them, but I always soak beans and peas. They will absorb water at a rate of knots, so use a bowl rather bigger than you might think you’ll need.

Put them in the pot, add the mushrooms and passata, and about half a passata carton of water.

Grind/mix some Indian spices; Pete always does this, but it’s not writ in stone. Cumin, coriander seeds, cardamon, bit of chilli, turmeric – whatever works for you. But we tend to go for Lots, because you want the taste. Fry off the onions in some oil (i use groundnut) until they’re just starting to catch, then add the spices and cook them off a bit. A small splash of water is a good idea here. Decant that lot into the pot, add a bit of salt and black pepper.

if slow cooking, about eight hours on low. If hobbing, bring to the boil then a very gentle simmer for a couple of hours. Sprinkle fresh coriander on top if you have any (ours has bolted, sadly).

Freezes beautifully, makes a tasty vegan meal on its own, or a great accompaniment for a curry.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

The mystery butcher’s bag in the freezer turned out to contain about 150g of sausagemeat, clearly bought for sossidge rolls for the festering season. Hmm … what to do?

I added some chopped mix herbs to the meat, and mixed it all together. Into the slow cooker went onions, garlic, a diced courgette and some mushrooms, and I formed the sausagemeat into eight small balls, and laid them on the top. The last of the tomato paste had a slosh of red wine, and some water, added and went on top. Into the slow cooker for six hours, and very nice indeed.

There’s a fair bit of the sauce left, which we shall have tonight with the addition of some Matessons* sausage (no, not gourmet, I know, but dead handy as a standby!).

* or Aldi equivalent

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

I soaked and boiled some chickpeas on Wednesday, in preparation for a vegetable tagine. But then I didn’t fancy the tagine, and our schedule for the next few days doesn’t really accommodate it, and anyway, we had no soup left for lunch. Shocking, I know.

So into the medium slow cooker this morning went some chorizo, red onion and a bit of olive oil. An hour later, I added the cooked chickpeas, a little boiling water, some lemon juice, and some chicken Bisto granules. And some sea salt and black pepper. And then some Ras el Hanout, because it seemed to be lacking something. Left it another couple of hours, added some of the enormous bunch of parsley, chopped, and consumed it with a mini naan bread. And there’s enough for a second round tomorrow.

Tonight, I shall be experimenting with a Philips Airfryer; not sure it’s my sort of thing, but I’ve been given it to review, so it would be rude not to.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

image from Real Foods

I’ve been meaning to try this for ages, so here you go.

1 cup barley (you should strictly speaking, use pearl, but I used what was in the cupboard, and it was fine)
1 butternut squash, peeled (ugh) and diced
3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed
3 cups water
1 chicken stock cube (or use stock, if you have it handy)
1 shallot, finely sliced
some thyme, fresh or dried
about ½ small glass white wine (or cider would work, or vermouth)
some feta cheese (optional)
seasoning

Soften the shallot and garlic in a little oil or butter, add the thyme, (or sage, in our case, as Pete had a mad moment and picked the wrong herb from the garden),  and then the barley. Cook  until the grains are toasted.

Put that in a slow cooker on high, add the squash and the water/stock cube, bit of salt and black pepper.  Leave well alone for 4-5 hours.  At that point, I thought it looked a bit dry, which is when I added the wine, and ⅓ of a block of feta cut into cubes, and left it for another hour or so.

Feel free to garnish with flat leaf parsley; having sallied up the road to buy a huge bunch (because the Indian and Continental don’t sell small ones), I completely forgot, so will have to think of something else to use it up.

Very nice indeed., and a great alternative to a rice risotto for those of us who aren’t supposed to eat many carbs. Um.

This was supposed to feed three; it fed two greedy folk, with a bit left over, which went into the soup pot.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

image from Wikipedia

I love butternut squash. It has a lovely texture, and works in so many things: risotto, roast veg, Thai currys, soup, etc. But there’s no denying that it’s a faff to deal with due to the peel. So I did a little experiment.

I wanted some soup to come home to on Saturday, and astonishingly, there was no mongrel soup on the go (which I must address). And there was a squash in the fridge. I cut the top off the squash, and then chopped the rest in half, scooped out the seeds, and put it in the medium slow cooker with about ½” of wine (all there was left in that bottle, although obviously in this house, other bottles were available). I then added about 1″ further of water. Switched it on, went away. Returned after a couple of hours and added a diced and peeled Bramley, because it struck me that it would work rather well.

In the small slow cooker, I put a big onion, chopped, three cloves of garlic, and some chopped sage leaves from the garden. Half of this mixture went to make sage and onion tear and share bread (which I baked in the Remoska when we got home),

After four, or maybe five, hours, the squash seemed well cooked, so I scooped a bit out, and lo – even the skin was really soft. So I put it, the apple, the onion and sage mix, into the food processor and blitzed it all. Returned it to the pot with a bit more water, tasted it, and decided it needed some toasted cumin, which Pete obligingly provided. Switched the slow cooker onto medium, and it was all done and dusted when we got home, just half an hour to bake the bread. Splendid.

And then …

I had planned to make Anjum Anand’s Gujarati lamb on Sunday, and had removed half a shoulder of the relevant beast from the freezer. I usually add a squash to this, because the texture is so nice, but there was a bowlful of soup left and it seemed rude not to use that instead. So instead we had a kind of use it up Gujarati lamb, which went like this.

one shoulder of lamb, browned on all sides.
one onion, finely diced
some garlic (I used about six cloves) and a big piece of ginger, made into a paste with some water
a couple of handfuls of dessicated coconut
ground cumin, coriander, turmeric
some chilli flakes
leftover butternut squash soup (I accept that most of you won’t have this to hand)
some chickpeas (I always used dried, so had them cooking in the small slow cooker while this was going on)
lemon juice – about a tablespoon’s worth
salt and black pepper

Soften the onion in some vegetable oil, then add the garlic/ginger paste and fry for about three minutes. Tip in the spices (quantities here are very individual – we like our foot spicy). Fry a bit longer. Put the lamb in the slow cooker, tip the onion mix in, add the soup, and a little water if required – I wanted it to come about half way up the meat. I normally add sweet potatoes, but mine had gone mouldy (oh the shame).

Cooked it for about six hours (adding the previously cooked chickpeas about two hours from the end)  and it was just beautiful. We gorged on it, and there was plenty left for today’s lunch. And indeed there’s still a fair bit of the sauce left, so I shall be adding red lentils and veg to that, and making it into this week’s  mongrel soup.

So there you go – slow cook your squash, and no need to peel. Win win.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

[apologies for the poor quality of the photograph - it looks better than this]

I love shepherds’ pie. I don’t dislike its poorer cousin, cottage pie (made with beef), but much better is a cottage pie, made with lamb mince. So as I have a couple of friends coming for supper tonight, I popped into Normans on Tuesday and bought some lamb mince, enough for tonight and to pop a load of cooked filling into the freezer.

£12. Twelve pounds [falls over]. And it didn’t even look that much meat. Still … Last night I chopped onions, carrots and courgettes, and bunged them in the slow cooker in readiness. And this morning, I browned off the mince (in the wok – free firelighters!); I’ve always been wary of slow cooking mince without browning it first, and I’m not trying it for the first time with 12 quids’ worth of lamb.

The browned lamb went into the slow cooker, and I added some chopped herbs, about ¼ of one of those huge 99p tins of tomato purée (which reminds me, the rest of it is in the fridge), about ½ a glass of red wine, which has been sitting by the hob waiting to be used, some chopped garlic, and one of those little stock pot things. And a very little water, because I’ve been caught out before with sloppy stuff in the slow cooker – the lid fits too well! And that’s it, really – it’s comfort food, not posh.

I used always to add a can of baked beans to shepherds’ pie filling, but flushed with success after the home made baked beans, I took a different tack this time. I’d run out of haricots, and so bought a bag from the Indian grocer up the road; they were labelled as haricots, but when I slow cookered them yesterday, they looked more like butter beans by the time they were done. They also enlarged themselves quite dramatically, so look out for a post in the next day or two involving leftover haricots and tomato puree! Anyhoo, after the mince mix had driven us mad all morning, I added some? most? of these pseudo haricots, and left it all to sit.

I had intended top top it with a mash of swede and potato, possibly with finely chopped spring onions (guess what I found in the back of the vegetable drawer? :) but, sadly, the swede was unpleasantly squishy. So I did a load of cheesey mashed potato, with the spring onions, bunged it on top of the lamb, and put it in a hot oven.

And it was probably the best shepherds’ pie I’ve ever made.

Pudding? Well, it’s a weekday, and I haven’t much time, and Aldi had a 99p Apple Strudel. Nothing wrong with shortcuts when you’re busy, eh? Nobody wanted much more, so it remains in the freezer.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Buried in the back of the freezer, I found 2lbs of sausagemeat, clearly left over from the festering season, and never used. I’m diabetic, and shouldn’t really eat sausage rolls, so I poddled up to the butcher and bought 300g of lean minced beef, and on Sunday we had a meatball cook-in.

Italian: Pete manfully combined the meats, then divided the combination into two equal parts. The first part had garlic, herbs and season added and was divided into walnut sized pieces. I chopped onions, carrots and courgettes, and more garlic. I made a sauce with half of  a 99p (huge) tin of tomato paste, and a good splash of red wine. Bunged the lot in the slow cooker, left for four hours. Gorgeous – made 9 portions.

Moroccan: The other half of the meats was seasoned with some Ras el Hanout, while I chopped red peppers and onions into thin slices, and cubed three yellow courgettes. I sautéd these down very slowly, with a teaspoon of honey, some olive oil, lots more garlicm and some sesame seeds. Then added the meatballs, a tiny bit of red wine (as it was too hand), and some seasoning. Left on a slow simmer for about an hour. Also made 9 portions.

The empty shelf space in the freezer is disappearing!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Not terribly Reactive, I know, but still …

I had a ham shank in the freezer – they are ridiculously cheap, really; this one was £1.69, I think. And yesterday, our Morris side, Rackaback, was due to dance out in Bridlington, a seaside town on the East Yorkshire coast, where the wind blows straight from the Russian steppes, with nothing in the way to divert it.

So, I sautéd a finely chopped onion in olive oil, dumped the ham shank in the slow cooker with 500g of dried split peas, added the onions, a couple of teaspoons of Marigold bouillon stock, and enough water to cover the lot, switched it on, and went out.

And came home seven hours later, after a cold and rainy afternoon, to a glorious smell. Fished out the hock, and let it cool, then stripped the meat off it, We ate the meat separately (not all of it in one sitting!), accompanied by the soup and some ciabatta. Just wonderful. We shall be doing that again.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We are having the kitchen refitted  in the next few weeks. I cannot tell you how much I’m looking forward to the process, not least because I’m not. I want it to be done, obviously, but oh my … blocking up doors and knocking out walls and moving the gas points, etc. Still, it will be lovley when it’s finished, or so I keep telling myself.

As part of the preparation for this, I’m cooking all the ingredients in the freezer into meals that I can freeze, so we can at least eat well while I weep into the wreckage. So last night, I removed all the minced meat – 2lbs each of pork and lamb, and 1lb of beef. Stuck them all in the microwave to thaw (not to thaw electronically, just as a cat-proof box), then when we were warming the microwave hotties last night (rock’n'roll lifestyle that we live), I stuck them in the oven as it is similarly cat-proof

While rummaging for the mince, I found a box of frozen banana muffin mix: we love muffins, and they’re far nicer fresh, so I often freeze half the batter; banana muffins for breakfast, then! I came down and put the oven on to warm – and you’re all way ahead of me, aren’t you?

Thankfully I realised in time, and removed the meat before anything dreadful befell it, apart from the edge of one packet of lamb, which Iggy and Ron were quite happy to deal with. The pork and beef were turned into meatballs in a sweet pepper sauce quite, but not exactly, like this – only had two fresh peppers in the veg drawer, so added a jar of roast, and bunged honey and a dash of shoyu in the sauce. They’re in the slow cooker doing their thing.

The lamb was fried off and hurled in a big casserole dish (having realised that the first one I started wasn’t going to be big enough – roll on the dishwasher). Fried of carrots, courgettes, onions, celery in olive oil, added some home made Ras el Hanout, salt, pepper, tin of tomatoes, splash of home made wine and in it went with the meat. Added some bay leaves and thyme from the herb pots

I reckon I’ll get about seven meals worth from that lot for the two of us; moussaka tonight, with spinach under the aubergine (works really well) and a half pack of feta that needs eating up.

And now I must go and clean up the kitchen.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

How to turn 500g of stewing beef into six portions? Add 100g of bacon bits, a stack of butter (lima) beans, and a load of veg, thus.

I used shallots in this – if you’re going to do this, they are much easier to peel if you soak them in boiling water for 10 minutes, and you get lovely shallotty water to add either to your casserole, or to your soup pot (the latter for me yesterday).

Cooked off the bacon bits, put them in the slow cooker. Browned the beef in batches, added them too. Fried off the whole shallots until they were caramelising a bit, the into the pan went four chopped carrots, half a courgette and some garlic. They were lobbed into the slow cooker, and then the pan was deglazed with …

Horror! No Stones Ginger Wine! And only 9 in the morning, so offy not open, and I bet the local mini Sainsburys wouldn’t have it, and besides – it was pouring with rain. I improvised.

Deglazed the pan with about 3/4 pint of fiery ginger beer. Added a slosh of brandy for good measure, and the zest and juice of an orange. Added a teaspoon of grain mustard and some season. Brought to the boil, bung in the slow cooker, switched it on.  Went back and added the beans (which had been soaked and boiled the day before), and some herbs from the garden.* Waited for six hours while the smell drove us crazy.

We are having some for tonight’s supper, with dumplings, and the rest will go into the freezer.

* Somewhere – no idea where – I found some reuseable cloth bouquet garni bags, which are dead handy for such occasions, because you don’t have to bother stripping the leaves from woody herbs, or finding the bay leaves afterwards. But do remember to fish it out before someone accidentally tries to eat it.

I also made the Christmas cake yesterday – 1 kg of random assorted dried fruits and a load of Cointreau. I always base it on this Nigel Slater recipe.  What with that, the stew, and the soda bread, the kitchen was an olfactory no-go area yesterday!

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.