“How do you store your recipes?” is a topic I frequently see on food forums and one that I will always click on. Stationery and organisation are two of my favourite things and I’m fascinated by how people deal with their recipe collection. I have a very simple system that works well for me but it does require constant attention. I have a ferocious appetite for anything to do with food and am a fiendish collector of recipes. Unfortunately, I don’t often save just the recipe I’m interested in but generally throw the magazine or newspaper into a pile where it will sit until I can no longer close the cupboard or drawer the pile is currently residing in. Working my way through that pile is a long and laborious job that I hate and will always put off in favour of something else. With a little time on my hands this week though, I finally got round to dealing with large, wobbly pile and was left with just a small collection of recipes/ideas that I have now filed away and can use effectively.

I have a box file that is organised into sections: meat, fish, vegetables, dessert and miscellaneous. The miscellaneous file is separated further into: starters, sides, sauces and family recipes. There’s another file for “things to make soon” which is a collection of things I’ve pulled from the wider folders and is suitable for the current season/suits my current mood. When planning meals, this is the folder I go to first.

Of course, on top of that there are the recipe books that I buy obsessively but rarely cook from, the electronic files that live on each of the three computers we have at home where I’ve copied and pasted stuff or scribbled down ideas depending on which machine I happen to be using at the time. Each of those machines also has a long list of bookmarked items that I’ve come across and saved for a later date. Finally, I also have various notebooks full of ideas: one in my handbag, one next to the bed, one in the kitchen and several other dotted around the flat.

I’ve made some progress with the electronic stuff and have utilised Google Docs as a central repository for bookmarked items. Now, regardless of which computer I happen to be using at the time, the plan is to store everything here. This is taking a while though and I still have a lot to get through. I haven’t even started with the notebooks but the ultimate plan is to just have one book that’s divided into sections, similar to those I use for the paper-based recipes, that I carry with me and use at home.

Once I’ve cooked something then I generally blog it and can find the recipe here, via the search facility and then, if I want to cook it again, I can take the laptop into the kitchen (although I’ve been thinking recently that an iPad would be perfect for this). The next step is remembering/forcing myself to actually discard the original clipping once I’ve done that though otherwise the paper-based filing system becomes unwieldy. I find it very difficult to get rid of recipes that I’ve snipped from magazines even if I’m no longer interested in it or have actually cooked it and typed up the recipe elsewhere. I still haven’t managed to get rid of some of the very first clippings I saved years ago, even though in many cases I now own the book the recipe actually comes from. Nostalgia, sentimentality and a tendency to hoard are facets of my personality that don’t really co-exist with my love of tidiness and organisation but I’m working on it.

Anyway, the point of all that is, now that my filing systems are in better shape, working out what to eat today was much easier and this recipe came was found easily in the meat section of the box file. What I do need to remember to do is write down the source of the recipe since I don’t know where this originally came from, it does look a lot like an Olive or Delicious typeface though. I should also put the clipping into some kind of wipeable folder before I take it into the kitchen too, otherwise it ends up grease-splattered like the one you see above.

This wasn’t bad but could do with some modifications, perhaps some stock would help, less tomatoes and definitely more olives, lemon zest and parsley. I was going to type the recipe up so I could recycle the original clipping but it’s quite clear from the picture what the ingredients and method are so I don’t think I’ll bother. I will do the recycling though.

I didn’t think I’d eaten Barnsley chops before but, as it turns out, I ate them once before with a salad very similar to this one. The salad was slightly different this time, I par-boiled the peeled Jerusalem artichokes before leaving them to cool and then slicing them. I then fried them and added them to some cooked grean beans and some toasted hazelnuts. Some goats cheese was then squidged on top. I was planning to crumble the goats cheese but it was too ripe for that.

The “salad” was really good and worked well with the lamb chops but I think it has potential as a stand-alone dish or as a starter. We added a drizzle of oil after taking the photos which brought everything together.

The boulangere potatoes were not so good. I thought since I was cooking them in smaller dishes I could get away with a shorter cooking time but it seems I was wrong. An old post tells me I usually cook them for 3.5 hours which seems a really long time but I do remember them as being very good so next time I’ll remember not to rush things.

Potjiekos (according to Wikipedia) translates as “small pot food” and is the traditional South African method of cooking outside using a small, cast-iron, three-legged pot. The pot sits on the ground and heat is provided by a small fire that’s lit under the pot (or potjie).

I’ve never had potjiekos before but have heard a lot about it. With Stephen’s Aunt and Uncle visiting, it was the perfect opportunity to dust off the pot and light the fire. Stephen’s Mom has a couple of potjiekos recipe books which we paged through but, in the end, decided to do our own thing. We settled on lamb as the meat and started with the usual onions, celery and garlic as the base. Nutmeg, cloves and bay leaves provided the aromatics with butternut squash and baby onions going in later. There was also dried fruit (South Africans are OBSESSED with adding fruit to savoury dishes which can be a challenge for haters of the sweet and savoury combination) and both potatoes and rice (they’re also obsessed with double or even triple carbs, which I didn’t find so challenging) to finish things off.

So, it’s basically a simple stew or casserole? Well yes, I suppose it is but it’s quite a difficult thing to cook. First off things need to brown so the fire needs to be fierce and then you want the stew to simmer for a long time so the heat needs to be kept constant. Stephen opted to keep some charcoal burning on the braai that he could add when things looked like they were cooling down. I think technically that’s cheating, according to what I read in the cookery books but it seemed entirely necessary to me. There was also a lot of discussion over whether the pot should be stirred or whether ingredients should just be added in layers according to their cooking time. We chose to stir.

And what of the taste? Well, it did taste a lot like a simple stew or casserole (apart from the fruit, I definitely don’t put fruit in my casserole) but that’s no bad thing. More than that though it was a really enjoyable way of cooking. We all sat outside while Stephen tended to the pot and, much like the fondue, it was all very sociable. The one thing that really stood out for me was the addition of rice to the pot. I normally serve and cook rice on the side but cooking it with the meat meant it worked as a natural thickening agent and it soaked up all the lovely flavours from the rest of the pot. Something I’m definitely going to try now we’re home and back to cooking indoors again.

Of course we braai’d while we were away. Several times. This was a traditional chops and ‘wors (boerewors) braai that we fancied up with some salad and corn. I think we were supposed to just eat meat really, possibly with some soft rolls for the boerewors, or some pap but the fridge was full of salad and I don’t really like the sound of pap.

This particular boerewors didn’t behave very well and despite Stephen’s excellent technique with the braai tongs, it fell apart. We got it from Woolworths (Marks and Spencer is called Woolworths in SA), perhaps if we had stopped trying to posh everything up and just got it from Pick and Pay then it would have stayed in it’s spiral. It didn’t affect the taste though, obviously, and it was good. Mostly beef I think (again, not traditional I don’t think) and with a good amount of spice.

This was supposed to be a celebratory meal, cooked by me, to celebrate Stephen completing the latest module of his wine exams. I chose lamb chops because they’re one of his favourites and I was planning to make sautéed potatoes too but I got stuck at work and Stephen ended up both shopping for and cooking his own celebratory dinner.

There isn’t too much interesting about this since we eat it a lot but the garlicky greens are our new favourite vegetable and something we’ve been eating a lot lately. In fact, we (well, Stephen) cooked up a whole load of these tonight to use through the week. They’re good but they don’t require a recipe as such, just slice up some greens and rinse them. Soften some garlic in a little butter, add the greens, stir and then put a lid on the pan. Cook for about five minutes on a medium heat and then serve. Chilli works well with the garlic too, depending on what else you’re eating.

This is something Stephen has been wanting to cook for a while. I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I don’t recall hearing him mention it either but my knowedge of Indian dishes is very small and I have a very bad memory so this isn’t unusual. I first heard about it a little while ago when a friend told us his mum used to cook it on special occasions during the seventies. I couldn’t find a lot of information online when I was searching for a recipe but it did strike me as being something of a celebratory dish, simply because of the time and effort required to mix up the spices and leave the meat to marinate. It’s not something you’d have time to do after work anyway.

We marinated our lamb leg overnight, as per this recipe, but I saw several other recipes that suggested a two-step marinade: dry spices for 24 hours followed by the wet marinade for another 24 hours.

Like a lot of slow-cooked dishes, once you’ve made up the spice mixes and done the marinating, the meat then sits happily in the oven leaving you time to get on with other things. This is one of my favourite ways of cooking, especially on a Sunday when there are so many other things that need to be done. Once we’d finished all our weekend chores, we sat down to the raan which we served with chapatis, dal and spiced cauliflower.

The long, slow cooking meant that the flavours of the spices melded together perfectly with no one flavour overpowering the other. Not too hot but with a good kick and plenty of fragrant notes to lift the rounded, earthy flavours.

Our sauce had dried out quite a lot which I really liked, all those sticky, pan-edge pieces that are crispy and chewy at the same time. It would have been nice to have a little more liquid though.

We have a blackboard in our kitchen that lists the items in our freezer. Sounds a bit anal I know but, even though it’s a really small freezer, I’ve becoming pretty good at filling it full of stuff. We have a selection of different sized freezer bags to use in said freezer, the type that has a handy space to list what’s in the bag. Alongside the freezer bags, there are various permanent markers in the kitchen drawer for doing the listing. All sounds very organised doesn’t it? And it would be, if I remembered to write on the bags and update the chalk board.

Which is how we came to find ourselves sitting down to something we had to look up afterwards to find out what it was. I had meant to defrost the mystery bag this morning but forgot so, when Stephen got home he took the bag out of the freezer and started to slowly heat it through. Thinking it was bolognaise sauce, he put some pasta on to boil too. It smelt like bolognaise sauce to me too but then I looked at it and wondered if it might be leftover lamb rogan josh, since the texture of the meat seemed more lamb-like. It didn’t smell like curry though so we served it up with the pasta and tasted it. Not a particularly strong flavour, possibly veal? Really not sure, until I checked back through the archives and realised it was probably lamb ragu. From January.

It tasted alright and I’m sure it won’t kill us but if I’d known it was so old I wouldn’t have eaten it. Needless to say, the chalk board is all up-to-date now.

The best thing about cooking a half shoulder of lamb for just two people? The leftovers.

You don’t need a recipe for this: just heat up a wrap, add some hummus or tzatziki (or both), some salad and the lamb, roll it up and eat.

Due to our successes with slow roasting a shoulder of lamb with garlic and rosemary, we thought we would try a different slant on it this weekend and give it a Moroccan style treatment. We had half a shoulder and the evening before cooking it, we rubbed it with a spice mix and left it in the fridge overnight before cooking in the usual way. It worked brilliantly, giving the same succulent, deeply flavoured lamb except this time it had a spicy crust and aroma. We served it with couscous and turlu turlu (which is a roasted vegetable dish from the Moro cookbook).

Slow Roast Shoulder of Lamb Moroccan Style, serves 6:

Spice mix:
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tsp sweet paprika
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp ground fennel seeds
1/2 tbsp turmeric
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper

1 whole shoulder of lamb
1 whole bulb garlic (2 if you love garlic!)
1 preserved lemon, mostly rind, finely chopped
Half a handful of olives, coarsely chopped
400ml chicken stock
Small bunch coriander leaves, roughly chopped
Smaller bunch mint leaves, finely chopped

The day before you plan to cook the lamb, prepare the spice mix by mixing together all of the spices. Score the skin of the lamb shoulder lightly and then rub it all over with the spice mix, working it well into the meat. Wrap the shoulder tightly in foil or cling film and refrigerate it overnight.

On the day of cooking, preheat the oven to 150C. Break up the garlic bulbs into individual cloves, but no need to peel the cloves. Sprinkle half of the garlic into the bottom of a lidded casserole big enough to hold the lamb shoulder. If you don’t have one big enough then you can do it in a roasting dish and cover it with foil. Unwrap the lamb shoulder and place it on top of the garlic cloves, then sprinkle the rest of them on top of the lamb. Put into the oven for 3.5 to 4 hours with the lid (or foil) on. There is no real need to babysit the lamb, it will quite happily cook itself slowly, but it’s fun to check on it now and then as you can smell the delicious spices drift through the kitchen.

When the lamb is cooked, remove the casserole dish from the oven and remove the lamb shoulder to a large plate and cover it with foil to keep it warm while it rests. Be careful when moving the lamb, you might need to get a large spatula underneath it to prevent it from falling apart. Take the roasted garlic cloves out of the casserole and put them onto a plate, then squeeze the delicious roasted garlic out of the skins. Pour most of the oil out of the casserole, then put it onto the hob on a medium heat and add stock and the roasted garlic pulp. Bring the stock to a simmer, scraping the bottom of the casserole with a wooden spoon as you do so, to mix in all of the delicious lamby bits.

Then add the chopped preserved lemon skin and the olives, the coriander leaves and the mint leaves. Let it simmer for a while, stirring often. The lemon should add both a sourness and a bitterness to the sauce, to balance out the herbs and the sweetness of the caramelised lamb juices from the casserole. You can thicken it if you like, but we generally don’t. Check and season with salt and/or pepper before serving.

Then pull the lamb apart with a couple of forks and serve with the sauce and whatever else seems appropriate – we went with barley couscous and “turlu turlu” roasted vegetables and chickpeas. Delicious!

Turlu Turlu
Serves Two

2 courgettes, sliced
1 aubergine, sliced into wedges
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1 green pepper, sliced
1 large carrot, sliced into wedges
Oil
1/4 tsp allspice
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 large tin chickpeas
75ml passata
Handful parsley
Handful coriander
Salt and pepper

Mix all the vegetables apart from the courgettes together with the oil, garlic, spices and salt and pepper. Spread onto a baking tray and cook in a pre-heated oven (220 degrees) for 45 minutes, turning every 15 minutes. Add the courgettes and cook for another 15 minutes.

Heat the pasatta and chickpeas together and then stir in the cooked vegetables, Season, add the herbs and serve.

“Isn’t that a waste of lamb?” my mum said to me when I told her I’d used the half-leg of lamb I found reduced in Waitrose to make a curry. I didn’t think so but then I love Indian food and lamb is my favourite of all curried meats. I have successfully used leftover meats for curry before but you don’t get the deep, meaty flavour that comes from using raw meat that has been browned and left to cook down with the bones. I suppose I could have used neck fillet or shoulder but that would probably have worked out to be more since the half-leg was reduced to £5.

I first thought about leaving the lamb whole but I really wanted to make sure the flavours penetrated the meat so chopped everything up. And then I cooked it. And cooked it and cooked it. The instructions simply said “cook until tender” but I sort of forgot about it while I busied myself with other things around the house. Which meant that the meat was indeed tender but somewhat stewed. It didn’t affect the flavour but the appearance was rather reminiscent of bad curry-house dishes that have been cooked to death. The texture was different too but just different, not worse. We ate it with a kind-of saag aloo that Stephen made with some new potatoes and some methi rothi that a friend gave us. These were really good but I forgot to note down the brand unfortunately.

Lamb Rogan Josh
From Camellia Panjabi’s “50 Great Curries of India”
Serves Four

700g lamb, diced
4 cloves garlic, chopped
Salt
2 teaspoons chilli powder
1 teaspoon paprika
100ml yoghurt
250g shallots (I used onions)
Oil
4 cloves
2 black cardamoms
4 green cardamoms
2 bay leaves
1 blade of mace
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground fennel seed
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric

Boil the lamb (and any bones) with the garlic and some salt in 2 pints of water for 20 minutes. Remove the meat and set aside, reserve the cooking water.

Fry the onions until lightly browned. Add the cloves, cardamom, bay leaves and the mace and fry for one minute. Add the coriander, fennel, ginger, turmeric, chilli powder and paprika with two tablespoons of water and stir continuously for two minutes.

Add the meat, cook for five minutes. Lower the heat, add the yoghurt and cook for another five minutes.

Add salt and the reserved cooking water (topped up with tap water if necessary to make 800ml). Cook until tender Remove the mace and serve.