Chicken and Cabbage
Did I mention that we got a cabbage in our vegetable box again this week? For the fourth week in a row. I used to like cabbage. Maybe I’ll like it again one day but, at the moment, it’s up there with spinach as of my least favourite vegetables (I used to like spinach too until we had it three times in a row).
Anyway, we used up some of it last night in the Chorizo and Cabbage and today, I found a recipe on the Abel and Cole website that sounded promising….Chicken and Braised Cabbage. So that’s what I did. It was ok and actually, with a little tweaking, I think it could be good (it’s got bacon in it, of course it can be good) but today it was just ok.
Fry the bacon with some thyme, add the cabbage, sweat for a while, add chicken stock and serve with grilled chicken. Part of the problem was that the flavours didn’t seem to combine well, I think this is because the chicken is cooked seperately. If (and it’s a big if, because I’ve marked cabbage with a sad face on the vegetable box website so we don’t get it again any time soon) I do it again, I would fry off the chicken with the bacon and add some onion.
Here it is anyway, I’ve really sold it to you haven’t I?
British Sausage Week
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6101430.stm
But also National Vegan Week, what a strange coincidence. I know which one Stephen and I will be supporting though.
Bang* goes the diet 🙂
*bang, like banger, geddit?
Happy Halloween
Chorizo and Cabbage
Stephen was given a huge (and really tasty) chorizo for his birthday and we were given a huge cabbage (again) by the vegetable box people so, in an effort to use up the cabbage, and just because we wanted to eat chorizo, we came up with the delight you see before you. Chorizo, fried with onions, green cabbage added with a splash of water, potatoes (previously boiled) all mixed up with crème frâiche and salt and pepper. It took about 15 minutes to cook, and about five to eat 🙂
Would also be good with sautéed potatoes rather than boiled.
British Tapas
Being my birthday, we decided to have a party. Kerri and I had been discussing the topic of “British Tapas” for quite a while and talking about what sorts of dishes (if any) would both fit this category and be delicious. So we decided to do some experimentation and invited some people round to be guinea pigs.
Unfortunately, with all the rushing around we were doing, we didn’t get pictures of everything. In fact we didn’t get pictures of most things. Hopefully some of our guests took pictures that we can add in later. The menu was, roughly in the order in which dishes appeared (but this was not necessarily the originally intended order):
cheese – Tymsboro
pâté – a salmon one and a game one, accompanied by triangles of toast
smoked salmon on buttered wholemeal bread, topped with a dill
black pudding slices
sausages – very good Duchy Originals sausages, served with two types of mustard
pheasant thigh pieces cooked with cider and crème frâiche
mini yorkshire puddings topped with rare roast beef, horseradish sauce and gravy
baby new potatoes with butter
runner beans
Chantenay baby carrots (very carroty!)
raspberry trifle
more cheese – Stinking Bishop, Montgomery’s Cheddar and Swallet
walnuts
Most things turned out really well. The sausages were really good, the pheasant pieces were good, the yorkshire puddings were brilliant. The trifle was excellent. The cheeses were good. Mmmm cheese.
Pictures that we do have…
Tymsboro Cheese
Game pate
Toast Triangles
Smoked Salmon
Walnuts
Beef Casserole
We cooked this as a wintery comfort-food dish and it worked out well. We cooked it in advance and ate it this evening after getting home from a rainy shopping, tube and bus experience. It was just the ticket.
While cooking it I thought that there was too much tomato in it, it has gone a little too sweet, but the flavours combined better afterwards.
Cod and Tomato Sauce on Pasta
This wasn’t particularly successful. On its own, the tomato sauce was good. On its own, the fish was good. But put together, the tomato sauce overpowered the fish and the fish diluted the tomato sauce so nobody won. The pasta was good, but hard to pick up. Not sure what this sort of pasta is called because we threw away the packet – it’s like thin tagliatelle.
If there was a next time, we would use a fish with a stronger flavour and maybe add olives or capers to the sauce too.
Art Deco Lamb Cutlets
It wasn’t quite my intention to create a strange-looking design on the plate, but after a gruelling trip to IKEA (my first in fact), it somehow seemed like the right thing to do. Trimmed lamb cutlets with some steamed new potatoes and green beans. I added loads of butter to the potatoes and beans after the picture was taken. Mmmmmmm.
Pocky!
Last night we went to dinner in Chinatown and dined on various Shanghai specialties at eCapital. No alcohol-affected trip to Chinatown is complete without a post-dinner pocky trip. We visited two super-happy-fun pocky stockists and chose a selection of their finest offerings. From left to right in the picture: Men’s pocky, almond crush pocky and black sesame pocky.
Garlic Bread and Almost-Pizza
After our successful pizza last weekend, we decided to attempt another one. We had since invested (!) in a pizza stone and were keen to see how pizzas baked on it compared to those on the metal tray.
I followed the recipe exactly. Same recipe as last time. To the last detail. But somehow the dough turned out to be superglue rather than dough and stuck to everything. We managed to make a small garlic bread out of it, but failed to make it into a pizza. So we had nice pizza-like garlic bread with mozzarella, rock salt and rosemary and then put all the pizza toppings onto some olive bread which turned out rather well, all things considered.
