Spanish Seafood Stew
This wasn’t a great success but has potential so I’m typing it up here for future experiments. Less tomatoes and more fish would be a start, parsley to finish would have made a difference too. Stephen also mentioned that an Indian version would work well.
Spanish Seafood Stew
Serves Two
1 tbsp plain flour
1 tsp salt
Assorted seafood (we used squid, scallops and prawns)
Olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 tbsp brandy
1/2 red chilli, chopped
Tomatoes (we used half a tin but 1 large fresh would be better)
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp sweet paprika
Few saffron strands
100ml white wine
100ml vegetable stock (use fish stock next time)
Coat the scallops and squid in seasoned flour and fry until just cooked through. Remove from the frying pan and reserve.
Add the onion and cook until just translucent. Add the chilli and garlic and cook for one minute further.
Pour on the brandy and light, once the alcohol has burned out, add the tomatoes, bay leaf, paprika, saffron and cook for five minutes.
Pour in the wine and fish stock and simmer for a further five minutes. Add the reserved seafood, cover the pan and cook for three minutes.
Season, add lemon juice (and parsley) and serve with crusty bread.
Original recipe from Jenny Chandler’s ‘The Real Taste of Spain’.
Leftovers
This is our second freezer-dinner this week, tonight’s excuse being that the work on our bathroom was finished today and I wanted to spend the afternoon cleaning up after the builders instead of cooking.
This originally started life as Mexican Bean Stew and had a lot more liquid in the final dish than tonight’s version, I reduced this down so that it was thicker and could be rolled up in corn tortillas with guacamole. It seems to me that this is key when dealing with leftovers: rather than treating them as something you eat when you can’t be bothered to cook, they can actually be turned into something interesting if you just put a little thought in. Tonight’s dinner was just as good, if not better than the original version thanks to the “fixings” we served with them.
Sadly, we’re out of leftovers now so tomorrow I’ll have to cook something from scratch, I may well make double though and freeze what we don’t eat.
Pasta Puttanesca
There are a few things we seem to eat on a regular basis: roast chicken, Thai green curry and Puttanesca being just a few of them. Or at least I thought we ate them a lot. Looking back through the archives, the last time we actually ate Puttanesca was on 21 January which makes me feel less guilty about eating and posting the same old things.
One of the reasons we decided on it for tonight’s dinner is due to the interesting spaghetti we received as part of our Christmas hamper from Stephen’s sister, a Pici Toscani from Bottega di Fiore. It had a lovely, rough texture to the outside which looked perfect for soaking up lots of sauce and almost doubled in size on cooking. It seemed to have an eggier taste than the normal dried pasta we buy but the ingredient list didn’t uphold this suspicion, it certainly had a deeper flavour though.
I don’t follow a recipe for this anymore but it’s basically Delia Smith’s recipe with a little more chilli, garlic and basil. I didn’t have any capers today unfortunately so they didn’t go in and they were missed but not drastically so as the increase in other flavours went some way to make up for their omission.
The archive tells me we haven’t had green curry since 9 March so you can expect to see that soon!
Chilli and Baked Potatoes
Having spent most of the weekend in Kent, we arrived back in London fairly late this afternoon and in no mood for cooking. Luckily, we knew there were two portions of bean chilli in the freezer that I had stashed away for just this reason kind of occasion so we didn’t need to worry too much. Not only did this relieve the “what shall we have to eat” issue, it also used up some oldish potatoes and freed up some valuable space in the freezer.
Eaten on our laps in front of Top Gear, it was a pretty good Sunday night meal.
Steak
We spent Saturday night at a Christmas fair in Kent with some friends of ours. It was a particularly wet and miserable night so we were glad to get back to their house to dry out and get on with dinner. We had originally planned to visit a butcher they had found in Canterbury but our plans changed so Stephen and I picked up some rib-eye steaks from our local butcher and took those instead.
The steaks were huge and although I can’t remember where they came from, I do remember they were aged on-site. Stephen simply fried them to medium-rare and we ate them with baked potatoes, salad and sauteed mushrooms. They were good but unfortunately we didn’t manage to achieve the perfect crust, one of the pitfalls when cooking in someone else’s kitchen.
Pizza
We had planned to cook calzone for dinner on Friday night but forgot. This is the second time we’ve planned calzone for a Friday night without it coming to fruition, perhaps we’ll be lucky on the third attempt.
As has become habit when cooking pizza recently, we start with a garlic bread which we eat while the pizza is cooking. As Stephen was shaping the dough, it occurred to us that we could shape the long, sausage-like piece into a round, a little like a Danish pastry. It seemed like a good idea but it didn’t cook through particularly well (which is obvious in hindsight) so we ended up just eating the top and the edges.
The pizza itself wasn’t brilliant either which was disappointing given our previous success in the new oven. We need to work out a way to prepare the pizza in advance and slide it on to the hot stone so that it doesn’t cool down too quickly. We did have some brilliant French salami which Stephen’s sister had given us (which we think was flavoured with fig) as part of a Christmas hamper though which softened the blow somewhat.
Paprika-Coated Haddock
We really need to choose some dishes that are more presentable soon; this one looks particularly unappetising. However, it did taste good. We had originally planned to coat the haddock in breadcrumbs, but when it came to doing so we discovered that we didn’t have any eggs so it wouldn’t have worked very well. So instead, we mixed some paprika and salt into a little flour and dusted it with that instead.
The bits that caught on the pan slightly went crisp and deeper orange and tasted delicious. We served it with some mashed potato that had steamed cabbage and sauteed leeks mixed into it; a sort of muddled up colcannon.
Indonesian Chicken Curry
I got this recipe from a friend who described it as “similar in sweetness to a tikka masala but with Thai style spices”. I know nothing about Indonesian cuisine and have never cooked or eaten it before but was intrigued by the description and have been planning to cook it for the last couple of weeks.
The original recipe is a little more straightforward than the method I ended up employing. I decided to make a paste out of some of the ingredients and fry the chicken in it, much like we do with green curry as I thought this would be a good way to maximise the flavours. I also increased some of the spicing as I haven’t eaten much recently and wanted something full of flavour.
It turned out well. The flavours were subtle and warming without the heat of a Thai curry but very similar due to the lemongrass and coconut milk. The cardamom added a smoky, aniseed note which gave the dish a rounded flavour.
Indonesian Chicken Curry
Serves Two
Paste
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
2 stalks lemongrass, chopped
3 green cardamoms
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 can coconut milk
2 chicken breasts, cubed
1 tbs tomato puree
1 tbs light soy sauce
1 tsp soft light brown sugar
1 tsp fish sauce
I started off by making the paste. Once that was ready, I removed the cream from the top of the coconut milk and fried that until it started to separate. At this stage, I added the paste and fried it until it began to brown – about four minutes. Add a little oil at this point if it starts to stick
Add the chicken, ensure it is well coated in the paste and cook for about five minutes, turning all the time. Again, add a little more oil if necessary.
Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 25 minutes.
I did this ahead of time and found there was a lot of residual oil (my fault for adding too much at the beginning). Once the dish had cooled down, I removed the excess oil and heated it back up slowly. Add some extra cooked vegetables and serve over jasmine rice.
Oaxacan Black Bean Soup
Another recipe from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen and one that was always going to be a challenge to photograph well given the ingredient list. This was really simple, almost unbelievably so given the amount of flavour in the final dish, and was just a case of putting all the ingredients into a pot and leaving them to cook. A quick blitz with a hand-blender and that’s it.
I didn’t actually get to eat it due to an unplanned dental emergency but I enjoyed what I tasted while I was cooking it. Stephen said it was deep and earthy and enjoyed it with a squeeze of lime.
Oaxacan Black Bean Soup
Serves Two (but not that generously)
1 cup black beans
1/2 bulb fennel, roughly chopped
1/4 cup chorizo (I used four small sausages)
1 small white onion, finely chopped
Salt, to taste
Corn tortillas or chips, to serve
Place the beans in a pot and cover with three cups of water. Bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer.
Add the fennel, chorizo and onion, partially cover and simmer over a low heat until the beans are tender (about 1.5 hours). Add more water if necessary.
Blend, season and serve with toasted corn tortillas or chips. We added some mozarella too which isn’t strictly authentic but it worked well.
I didn’t blend this until completely smooth but you could do if you wanted to.
There was some confusion over the fennel: the original recipe calls for “1 rib fresh fennel” which I assumed was one bulb and, since I halved the recipe, I used half a bulb of fennel. Stephen thinks the “rib” may refer to one leaf. Google can’t help us. I don’t actually like fennel but thought this could do with increasing next time since it added such a fragrant note.
I would increase the chorizo next time too and I think some chopped coriander and that squeeze of lime that Stephen added would be good too.
The original recipe suggests shrimp would be a good addition, these just need to be added to boiling soup and cooked for two minutes before serving.
Yorkshire Pudding
I’ve had a stomach bug for the last few days which means I’ve mostly been eating dry bread and drinking water. Despite our dedication to posting almost everything we eat, we both felt that was pushing the concept of Dinner Diary somewhat which is why it’s been a bit quiet around here lately.
Feeling better yesterday, we decided to cook roast beef but, unfortunately, it all went a bit wrong. The meat wasn’t very good and ended up over-cooked, the cabbage was undercooked, the gravy too thin and the potatoes less than brilliant. Even the pictures were terrible. What did turn out well though was the Yorkshire pudding so here it is.
