Guacamole
We’re on holiday this week, but I had to pop into work today. While I was out, Ginger had made some delicious guacamole. It was rather hot due to the birds eye chillies that were in it, but delicious and excellent served with toasted pita bread slices. Yum.
Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake
Fred and I have this week off and don’t have much planned apart from a little cooking and a lot of relaxing. We’re both quite fond of cake but don’t tend to eat them very often or make them ourselves as we always seem to have one eye on the waistline. Being on holiday is a good excuse though so I did a little research and this is the recipe that stood out.
Another reason for the lack of baking is, as I’ve mentioned numerous times before, I’m not much of a baker. I’m a bit of a throw it all in the pot and see what happens kind of cook; baking and all its associated measuring and weighing doesn’t fit well with that kind of mentality and, if I’m really honest, I find it all a bit scary.
This recipe however was very easy to follow and took very little time to put together. I was slightly worried when, 10 minutes before the end of the cooking time, it was very brown on top and wet in the middle but I put some foil on the top and took a few deep breaths. We ended up cooking it for slightly over the one hour but it turned out well. Full of lemony flavour, moist in the middle and crunchy on the outside. Delicious and perfect with a cup of tea.
Recipe courtesy of Nigella via the lovely Penny of Penelope’s Pantry.
Butternut and Parsnip Risotto
For a while now, Ginger has been going on about risotto. In a good way though. She initially mentioned butternut squash risotto, which I thought would be excellent with some added sage. At some point she changed her mind to parsnip risotto, but I managed eventually to persuade her that making risotto with both parsnip and butternut in it would be a good autumnal dish. As it turned out, we ended up adding thyme as we have some in the garden.
It was a fairly typical risotto recipe. We cut the butternut and parsnip into bite-sized chunks and roasted them in the oven with some olive oil, salt and pepper and a dusting of nutmeg. Then when the risotto was almost done, we added them and stirred them in, along with a big handful of grated parmesan.
The result was rather good (which is a good thing after all that stirring…) and the pieces of parsnip and butternut were tasty additions.
Pork Shoulder Braised in Cider
Last week Ginger had pork braised in cider for lunch in a rather good gastropub (Great Queen Street on - you guessed it - Great Queen Street in Covent Garden) and wanted to try to recreate it. We had a look around for recipes but eventually just did our own thing.
We bought a boned, rolled shoulder from our butcher. We were planning to remove the skin and cook it separately to make lovely crackling, but the skin was full of rather dark hairs which didn’t look at all appetising, so we removed the skin and threw it away. This meant untying the string to remove the skin and then tying it up again and of course it didn’t go back into as nice a shape as it had started in.
We scored the fat, then seasoned the joint all over with salt and pepper. One recipe that we found said to make slits in the pork and insert garlic slices, which we do with lamb, but we didn’t do that. Another recipe said to rub it with a mixture of crushed fennel and coriander, which we didn’t do either.
We placed some onions and carrots into the bottom of a casserole dish, put in the pork and then added about 300ml of cider. We had planned to buy some decent English cider but forgot, and at the last minute all we could find was some sparkling French cider, which was interesting but didn’t taste particularly appley.
We braised the pork for two and a half hours, spooning some of the cider over then pork now and then. When it was done, we added some chicken stock and a dash of cider vinegar to the braising liquid to make a sauce. We also added some finely diced carrots, celery and onion to the sauce.
The result was tasty and very porky; probably due to the fact that our pig was apparently a very happy pig. Ginger said it didn’t taste much like the version that she’d eaten recently though; maybe we needed more appley-tasting cider and needed to baste it more often. Served with some yummy mustard mash and some steamed greens.
Pizza
Our dough turned out a bit too thick again but it was a definite improvement on last time. Garlic bread followed by salami, olive, pepper and rocket for me; tuna, anchovy, olive and pepper for Fred.
Creamy Mushroom Pasta
Mushroom pasta is one of those things I’ve attempted a couple of times with no success and I’d pretty much given up on it. This recipe posted by Rachel of What Rachel Ate Today sounded promising though and I bookmarked it to try later on. I didn’t have to wait too long; we bought mushrooms for Saturday’s pie and didn’t end up using them so, keen to make sure they didn’t go to waste, I picked up some cream on the way home and started cooking.
We followed the recipe almost exactly: we used red onion instead of white as we seem to have loads of them, didn’t add lemon and completely forgot about the walnuts until we were half way through eating.
It was a resounding success, the mushrooms were bursting with flavour and the earthiness perfectly complimented the sweet, red onion. It was a perfect autumnal dish and I’m really glad to have at last found a good mushroom pasta recipe - thanks Rachel 
Peppers Cashew nuts with Chicken
This is another recipe from the mysterious Thai Traditional Cooking: The Mother’s Recipes by Maria Kanigman Saunders that we used last week to make the beef stir-fry.
Once again, the recipe was easy to follow and quick. I spent a few minutes chopping up the ingredients and Fred cooked it when he got home. It was really tasty and we both commented that it tasted a lot more complex than it actually was. It would definitely benefit from more liquid though, maybe some chicken stock.
2 chicken breasts, cut into strips
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 onion, peeled and sliced
1/2tsp sesame oil
4tbsp soy sauce
1tbsp fresh ginger, sliced
4tbsp whole roasted cashew nuts
2 chillies, chopped
2 peppers, sliced
Heat the oil in a wok, add garlic and ginger and fry for five seconds before adding the chicken.
Fry for one minute before adding the rest of the ingredients (except the cashew nuts).
Fry for 3-5 minutes, add the cashew nuts.
Serve with jasmine rice.
Chicken with Butter Beans and Chorizo
We’d planned to have this for lunch yesterday but changed our plans as the weather was so good. The chicken needed to be used up though so we cooked it anyway and just re-heated it this evening. It was really tasty and very easy to cook, it could easily be done after work…as long as you remember to soak the beans in advance
If we make it again then I think I’d adapt the original recipe so that the chicken was chopped up into smaller pieces.
Final Barbecue of the Year (Probably…)
As evidenced by yesterday’s steak and kidney pie, we seem to have moved almost completely into winter cooking mode already. However, today’s weather was rather good and it seemed like a good day to squeeze in one last barbecue (although we will of course be glad of any opportunity to have another one!).
We haven’t barbecued pork chops together before, so we bought some this morning and marinated them in olive oil with some lemon zest, garlic, salt, rosemary and bay for a couple of hours. We put some baked potatoes into the oven (I know… cheating when you’re having a barbecue and forward planning would give you delicious barbecued potatoes) and also some butternut squash.
The pork chops worked out well, with zesty lemon and savoury herb flavours coming through. It was a bit of a battle to stop the fire from flaring up and turning them to cinders though. The potatoes were delicious, with crispy skins (we had rubbed them with a very light coating of olive oil before baking) and floury insides. Served with a rather nice bottle of white Mercurey.
Steak and Kidney Pie
It’s been a while since we’ve made any sort of pie other than cottage pie, and as we’ve had to much wintery weather lately, we decided that today would be a good day for it. As it was, the weather turned out to be rather nice, but we were so excited at the prospect of making (and of course eating!) a delicious pie that we stuck with our original plan.
We chose steak and kidney pie and were very pleased to find that The River Cottage MEAT Book had a recipe for it. The recipe made rather a large pie, to serve six, but as we only own a rather large pie dish, that worked out fine for us. After flouring and browning 1kg of braising steak and 400g of kidneys and softening half a chopped onion, we simmered the mixture with a glass of red wine, 750ml of beef stock, a tablespoon of tomato puree (for some reason Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall specifies tomato ketchup here…), a teaspoon of English mustard, salt and pepper and a bay leaf for an hour and a half.
Once the mixture had simmered and cooled, we ladled the meat into our pie dish and poured in some of the liquid, but not all. (We are thinking of keeping the rest of the liquid and turning it into some sort of sauce for steak, possibly by adding loads of pepper). With our little pie bird in place, we covered it with pastry and added some letters. We were using some pastry that we had in our freezer, but there were two problems with it - a) there wasn’t enough of it to do both a bottom and a top layer and b) it was shortcrust rather than puff. But we didn’t have much choice when we realised that and just had to make a single layer and hope that it worked out okay.
It did work out okay, in fact it worked out very well indeed. And the fact that we’d used shortcrust pastry meant that our decorations were more readable, so we could almost pretend that we’d done done it on purpose. The pie filling was very tasty - lovely, almost-melting steak, small but delicious bits of kidney, wonderfully meaty and oniony liquid. The liquid was a bit too liquidy - maybe we didn’t use enough flour when coating the meat - but that didn’t detract much from the final result.