This was inspired by a Balinese curry recipe I found in Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey. My dinner didn't end up resembling the original too much, it was pretty tasty though.
This does involve a fair bit of slicing and dicing, so maybe one for a quiet evening rather than when you're in a rush. It fed two for dinner with enough left over for lunchboxes the next day.
So, step one, thinly slice a purple onion and as much garlic as you like. Step two, dice two large or 4-5 ordinary tomatoes, a fat thumb of ginger and as much fresh chilli as you like. Step three, slice an aubergine into big bitesize peices.
Finally, step four, skin, de-bone and dice a couple of chicken legs (or buy pre-prepared chicken leg meat, or just breasts) and lightly coat with a little cornflour. That's it, all the tough prep work is done!
Get your rice on to cook - I can really recommend getting a ricebot (aka electric ricecooker, preferably with a delay timer function). My favourite rice for steaming is Japanese short grain.
Heat up a large frying pan on the hob with a little sesame or vegetable oil and fry the chicken peices until you can't see any pink on the outside, then add the aubergine and continue to cook until the chicken is cooked through and the aubergine is softened but still has a little bite to it. Take them out of the pan and put to one side.
Reusing the same pan, add a little more oil and stir fry the onion and garlic until softened, then add the tomatoes, ginger and chilli along with a smidge of shrimp paste. Give it a couple of minutes before adding the chicken and aubergine back to the pan, along with a massive pinch of lime leaves, a big squeeze of lemon juice, 2 tbsp of soy sauce, a decent scraping of palm sugar and a splash of water.
Five more minutes in the pan at most and it should be ready, mix in a big handful of coriander and serve with a nice mound of steamed rice and, if you like it, some hot chilli sauce.
Ragu is a hearty, happy dish with bags of flavour and is a lot less work than might be expected. I do feel that it needs a fresh egg pasta to do it justice, but that might just be me and my penchant for rich food! Tagliatelle is certainly a fabulous type of pasta for this sauce either way.
This is my made-up version of ragu, it isn't nearly as good as my Mum's but hers has a list of ingredients that fills a an A4 page and takes hours to cook... this one is a speedy little number which still manages a beautiful flavour and a great texture. The amount below serves two hungry people, with just enough left over for one of you to have lunch the next day.
So, dice an onion, a stick of celery and a couple of garlic cloves and set them to gently fry in a pan. When they're softened, add in half a pack of mince (about 250g) and give it a good stir. Once that's going brown, add in a tub's worth of chopped chicken livers and keep stirring to brown those as well.
Throw in a diced carrot and a couple of bay leaves, and a glass of red wine. Let that bubble for a bit before topping up with a tin of tomatoes, a squeeze of tomato puree and a large pinch of dried oregano. Add a little water to help form a sauce and leave to simmer for as long as you can manage - a good half hour at least.
Finally, season with salt and pepper before serving with hot pasta.
This is such a simple lunch that there isn't a great deal to write about in terms of cooking, however it was beautiful, tasty and easy to create ethically, so I thought it was still worth posting. These items could all be packed up and taken on a picnic, I think it's nicest eaten in the sun.
Tricolore, in this context, is the famous Italian salad - rather than the French flag! It's just layers of buffalo mozzarella, basil leaves and fresh, ripe tomatoes. Dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper.
Edible flowers have always fascinated and delighted me but I've had to rely solely on being able to find unblemished flowers amongst my garden plants until recently. Now I've found a couple of suppliers who sell them, either with salad leaves or on their own. I've put links to them at the bottom of this post. I used them to garnish a mix of baby gem lettuce, rocket, nasturtium leaves and sorrel for this salad.
Milano salami, in fact any preseved meat, is delicious just as it is. I love it and have been really happy to see how many shops are now selling free range and organic versions. If you are vegetarian mixed olives would very happily take on the salami's role in this meal, as they would provide the same saltiness and fatiness.
Links (Edible Flower Suppliers)
Higgledy Garden
Abel & Cole
Waitrose
Chilli is one of my husband's favourite dinners and I've made a fair few variations of it in recent years; this is the recipe I've come up with after all those experiments. It can be made with beef, venison, soya or quorn mince, but the absolute best mince for this is buffalo.
Although buffalo mince is described as lean, it stays moist and has a great texture. If using buffalo mince you can omit the bacon without disastrous results, if you use anything else I'd strongly recommend frying up a couple of slices of bacon alongside the onions at the start. I didn't have any bacon, so it's a good thing I had buffalo mince.
Fry up a diced onion and some smashed garlic (plus bacon, if using), followed by the mince and while that's browning put together the spice mix. Into a little bowl mix up: 2 tsps of dried oregano, 2 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp ground coriander, 1 tsp hot chilli powder, a large pinch of cayenne pepper, 1 tsp smoked paprika (or ordinary paprika if you've used smoked bacon) and a large pinch of ground cinnamon. You also need a couple of bay leaves.
When the mince is almost completely browned, add the spices and fry for a couple of minutes before adding a squeeze of tomato puree and a tin of chopped tomatoes. Leave to simmer for 5 mins or so, then add a tin of kidney beans. It's worth emptying these into a seive and running under the cold tap before using them; even organic tinned pulses tend to be in a briny, preservative solution that you probably don't want to taste. Pop the lid on and leave to cook for 20 minutes.
After this, take the lid off and add a chopped bell pepper and a peice of 90% cocoa chocolate. You could use 70%, I did before I found the stronger stuff, but do it a little bit at a time and keep tasting - you don't want the chilli to taste of sweet chocolate, it should be just a background hint.
Once that's all melted in, season with plenty of salt, pepper and lemon juice. Finally mix in a load of chopped, fresh coriander.
Ingredients summary: mince of some kind, onion, garlic, bacon (optional), dried oregano, ground coriander, cumin, cinnamon, smoked or ordinary paprika, chilli powder, cayenne pepper, bay leaves, tin of tomatoes, tomato puree, kidney beans, >70% dark chocolate, lemon juice, salt, pepper, fresh coriander.
Aaah, a nice easy supper with a storecupboard feel: lentils and sausages. I love it, it's tasty, filling and cheap, plus it's comforting on a chilly evening when your boiler's broken!
Pop the kettle on to boil first thing, to make up a pint of stock, and chop an onion, a couple of sticks of celery, a few cloves of garlic and a pepper.
Stick some oil in a pan to heat up and add the garlic, celery and onion. After they've softened a bit, add in a sprinkle of dried chilli and, if you have any, a slice of bacon cut into the pan with scissors. Stir it up and leave it to cook for a while. I would usually add a bay leaf too but I forgot today.
Get the sausages under the grill pretty sharpish, to make sure they're cooked through around the same time as the lentils will be - sausages always seem to take longer than I think they will! I wish I had proper Italian sausages but normal ones are still lovely. There's no need to peirce most modern sausages, there's less water in them these days so they don't actually go bang!
Throw a cup of lentils into the pan with everything else and stir them, let them warm up a bit before adding a tin of tomatoes, the pepper peices and a cup of the stock. As it cooks, add more stock when needed.
When the sausages and lentils are almost done, around half an hour or so, add a couple of capfuls of vodka, salt, a tiny amount of sugar, the merest drizzle of red wine vinegar, pepper and chopped thyme. Give it 5-10 minutes at a simmer then take off the heat and mix in some fresh, chopped basil. Lovely.
We had some friends coming over and I wanted to cook something tasty for them. I hadn't ordered enough lamb to make that go around, so I ransacked the fridge and found a couple of courgettes and a pot of ricotta - that'll do! I already had flour, eggs, a tin of tomatoes and so on, which made cannelloni an obvious choice.
First, the pasta. Quick and easy, using the method that Chef Steve Watts showed me. Stick 500g of "00" flour into the food processor, add 3 eggs and two yolks and whizz until it looks breadcrumby. It's perfect, squidge it into patties in your hands, flatten them a bit and wrap in clingfilm to rest in the fridge.
Then, tomato sauce, which couldn't be simpler. Fry up some smashed garlic, a small amount of chilli, some celery and some onions until softening. Add a tin of tomatoes, some tomato puree and a liberal scattering of oregano. Bring up to a simmer, add a squeeze of lemon and a shot of vodka and let bubble away for a while. Then season with salt, pepper and a little sugar. Done.
For the filling, I had two courgettes in the fridge and one in the garden, so to bulk the dish out I also used a few handfuls of frozen peas; having tasted the result I'm always going to include peas now. Grated the courgettes (well, got the other half to do it), then fried up the garlic and chilli with the celery and onion until softened, then added the peas to cook through.
Once cooked I put them in the food processor, because otherwise the texture of the canelloni would be a bit weird. Then back on the stove and the grated courgettes added, cooked gently for a while to evaporate most of the moisture. I added salt and lots of pepper, then left it to cool.
When cool, I added the ricotta and put in the fridge while I rolled out the pasta sheets.
I'm not going to lie - this dough is harder to work with than my previous wetter style dough, but the results are great and it is worth the effort. I've found that giving each peice of dough a good flattening with a rolling pin first is helpful, as is splitting the dough up into small manageable peices. Then pass it through the pasta machine on the widest setting. If bits fall off, or it goes a funny shape, press them back together and pass it through again. This isn't masses of fun but it does come together eventually!
Then you can pass it through the smaller settings until you have a long strip of pasta. Lay this on a teatowel, cover and do it again until you've run out of pasta.
For the cannelloni, I lay out each strip and put a line of filling end to end. I brushed water along the lowermost edge and rolled the pasta over to make a tube. Repeat until out of filling. I used the left over pasta to make farfalle for later in the week; it stores nicely laid out with a coating of semolina flour.
Coat the cannelloni with tomato sauce, dot the ricotta over the top and sprinkle with grated parmesan. Bake for about half an hour at 180 degrees, and enjoy - it really is a lovely meal.
