ramtops

Half a bag of spinach to use up …

Diced two rashers of back bacon, a few mushrooms, half a green pepper* and half a red onion, and put them in the shallow pan of the Remoska with a little olive oil for 15 minutes (switched it on, obviously!).

Beat four eggs with some seasoning and a splash of water, stirred in about 30g of Gruyere and poured that in. Added the spinach leaves and stirred it about a bit, and cooked for another 20 minutes. It made a very fine breakfast.

*I’m not especially fond of green peppers, but They always put one in a mixed bag. The other half has been diced up and put in This Week’s Soup.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

bag of spinach

A bag of spinach is currently £1 in our local Sainsburys, and it’s remarkably versatile. Tonight, we shall be having half a bag with some mushroooms fried up in Indian spices, one of our stalwarts. The other half a bag was left over from the lasagne we had on Wednesday.

Spinach is delicious thinly sliced into an omelette, or stirred into pasta and and feta, or made into a salad (if you must; I don’t really see the point of salad, to be honest). Make your own sag aloo – it’s dead simple. Add spinach to a chickpea curry. Be adventurous!

It’s cheap, nutritious, packed with iron – what’s not to like?

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We’re going to be away for a couple of days, so I’m Using Stuff Up. Aldi had some smoked salmon at half price last week, so I bought a pack. About 2/3rds went into a pasta dish, and the rest was still in the fridge. As was about half a bag of baby spinach.

I won’t tell you how to make an omelette – you’ll all have your own way, and anyway, I’m not very good at them :) But I made a 4-egg omelette, scattered the salmon, spinach and about a quarter of an Aldi goat’s cheese over the mix, folded it, and we scoffed it. And it was dead good.

About 410 calories, as far as I can tell.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

About half a punnet of chestnut mushrooms and some spinach needed eating up, so I deliberately made last night’s cabbage dish with only half a mozzarella ball, and saved the rest for today’s lunch.

Finely chopped the mushrooms and set them to cook down slowly in some olive oil. Put the wraps on individual plates, and scattered some raw spinach leaves on them. Chopped the mozzarella quite small. When the mushrooms were done, added salt and black pepper and the rest of the spinach, and stirred till it wilted. Then added the mozzarella.

Bunged the resultant gloopy mess onto the wraps – as always I’d made to much, so some of it oozed out, but that didn’t affect the fab flavour one iota!

About 360 calories, I reckon.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

We eat a lot of this sort of thing – cheap and tasty. This one started with a tub of lentils from the freezer – no point in cooking just one meals’ worth. I finely diced carrot, red pepper and onion, and some garlic, fried them off, then added some ras el hanouh, and cooked it all through for a couple more minutes.

Then about a mugful of red lentils, and probably three mugs of water (although start with two and check as it goes). Sometimes I put a splash of red wine in; it’s a remarkably versatile base recipe. Bring to a slow boil, and cook for about 40 minutes. That will do us at least four servings, and probably six, depending on how much veg went in it. So that was the lentils.

I sliced an aubergine, put it on a tray covered in tin foil (saves washing up), drizzled with olive oil, and bunged in a gas 8 oven for about half an hour. Made a white sauce (with wholemeal flour – always use that for pretty much everything) while that was going on.

Then into an ovenproof dish: half the lentils, half the aubergines, a layer of spinach, half the white sauce, then the rest of lentils, aubergines, white sauce, and topped with grated parmesan. At least it should have been topped, but I got a bit confused :) and put the parmesan on before the last bit of white sauce. No matter. Baked in a hot oven for about 25 minutes.

This was using up a wrinkly aubergine, some spinach that doesn’t look as though it’s going to last long, and some grated parmesan I bought for our camping trip – I’d normally put feta on top of this.

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

Using up: aubergine, some red wine that had gone vinegary, 1/3 of a bag of spinach

We love this sort of food, and eat it often. In the fridge was an aubergine, spinach, and some feta cheese, and Pete had opened a bottle of red wine last week and inexplicably failed to drink most of it, and it had gone over, despite being properly stoppered.

So … I fried a roughly chopped onion and some garlic in a pan until it was soft, then put in about 1 tablespoon of Ras El Hanout spice mix, a fab standby in the cupboard, and fried that round.

Then I added two mugfuls (mugs full?) of red lentils and stirred, 2.5 mugfuls of water, and about 2/3 mug of red wine. Stirred well, brought to the boil and set on a low light to cook for about 45 minutes. You might need to add more fluid - lentils can go splurp and stick to the pan in an unexpected way.

While the lentils were cooking, I sliced an aubergine fairly thinly and fried it till browned, in batches, in olive oil, and set to drain on some kitchen paper. Then I made some basic white sauce with nutmeg grated into it.

Then into an ovenproof dish went the lentils, then the washed and drained spinach, then the white sauce, and topped it off with the aubergine slices. Then we put half a block of feta cheese, diced up small, on top of all that, and bunged it in a hot oven for about 25 minutes.

Cheap (because it works perfectly well with water, or vegetable stock, rather than wine) and delicious.

That amount of lentils made enough for six servings, by the way, so two tubs went into the freezer. You can use it for a faux lasagne too, should you wish - works very well.

And I split the rest of the red wine into two small boxes and froze that too - it might not be good enough to drink, but it’ll be fine to cook with!