Quicky Chicky

We've got to the end of the week and the fridge is a bit bare, so this is what I came up with based on what we had left. 

This is another quick and easy dinner, so long as you can wait half an hour, smelling the roasting chicken and veg with your tummy rumbling...

A couple of chicken breasts go into a foil parcel, with sliced garlic, sprigs of marjoram and some olive oil, pepper and salt.

Into a deep baking tray go a thinly sliced courgette and aubergine (I'm having loads of fun with my new mandolin), a bell pepper, onion, garlic and a little more marjoram, olive oil and black pepper.

Pop both of them in the oven at 200°C and leave for 30-40 minutes.  

Serve the chicken breasts on top of a pile of vegetables, pour the chicken juices over the top and scatter a few black olives around. 

It's really good, I promise! 

A Note on Chicken
A free range or organic chicken breast doesn't need much treatment to taste wonderful and I don't believe that the simple kind of preparation above works well with cheap, badly reared chicken. 
Quite apart from the (I hope obvious) ethical issues around battery chicken, this kind of cheap poultry doesn't have enough natural flavour to carry it off. 

The fillets also tend to turn out dry instead of juicy and I think this could be due to the added water injected into it (up to 37%) which leeches out during cooking. This leaves a tough peice of meat behind, along with residues of the polyphosphates and hydrolysed proteins that were used to get the water to absorb in the first place. Yum.

Links
Panorama - "Chicken Run" (2003)
Transcript of the above programme
Panorama - how chicken is adulterated
Telegraph article (2003)
FSA Report on study into contents of chicken
Headline from the Independent (2009)
Column from the Guardian (2009)
Chicken Out campaign   
Soil Association: Chicken & Turkeys

The Veg Box Cookery School

I signed up to a veg box delivery scheme just over two years ago and it amazes me how much effect it's had on my cooking. It's been absolutely worth the initial period of adjustment and I really believe I've become a much better cook because of it.

It was hard at first, you have to give up following recipes almost completely and learn the mystical art of substitution instead. You don't get to go to the market / grocers / supermarket and choose what you fancy all the time - you have to learn to work with what you've got. That can be intimidating with veg you haven't cooked before (kohl rabi, black salsify) and also offputting if you don't know of a way to turn what you have into what you want.

This week's box contains asparagus, vine tomatoes, cucumber, fennel,
lettuce, green pepper, spring greens and white onions

The box can be a great inspiration though, it forces you to try new veggies and cook dishes you might never have made otherwise. It also makes choosing seasonal food easy, no arrays of tasteless produce flown in from timbuktu to tempt you, which means you get both the best nutritional value and tastiest flavour out of what you eat.

I'm not saying that I never buy produce from the supermarket, nor do I claim to never pick up a non-organically farmed fruit or vegetable. If I need, or really want, a top-up ingredient I will certainly pop to the supermarket and pick it up. I look for organic from the UK or Europe first, and if that isn't there then I prioritise the country of origin and accept the non-organic. Veg, and fruit, flown in from far flug places are usually my last choice, although with some ingredients (daikon/mooli for example) it's hard to avoid.  

When I first signed up to the veg box scheme, it was the hardest time of year to get into cooking this way - I joined in February, right at the start of that period in farming known as "the hungry gap": we're running out of all the overwintered veg but not many of the spring crops are ready to eat yet.

Saying that, my scheme imports some produce from Europe (Spain, Italy and France) during this period with zero airmiles, so I do get to enjoy lots of variety even if it can't all be British. I also get the gourmet box now so they include more of the unusual veg which provides some fun - and surprises.

You can order extra items to come with your veg box, all of it sourced with the same principles in mind.

Expense is an interesting topic. I'm pretty well off these days, although this certainly wasn't always the case - I worked hard from the bottom rung of my career, without higher education, to get the wage I do now. Even in the days when every penny counted I still sought out the free range eggs and chicken, and when organic farming was in its infancy, I would find the organic section (a tiny stack of shelves hidden at the back of the shop). 

It's far nicer to eat better quality, more ethical ingredients and make up for the additional expense by eating meat and fish only when you can afford it. I've been told time and time again how meat used to be a real treat for people, something to be savoured because it was so expensive. These days we can buy whole chickens for just a few quid in some supermarkets and many consumers expect to be able to eat this kind of food at almost every meal. I'd very much like to see a change in this attitude.

I get to feast on some of the best and freshest British produce around, all of it organic, so I can stand smugly in my kitchen knowing I'm not eating (or feeding anyone) loads of pesticides or chemicals and that the farmers who lovingly grew my ingredients are paid a fair price for their goods, freeing them up to show respect for the environment, any animals in their care and any workers employed by them.

Smug and delicious, what's not to like?

Substitution Ideas

• Leeks, red onions, white onions, spring onions, chives and shallots are all alliums, so they can stand in for each other
• Garlic, garlic chives, wild garlic leaves and white truffle oil all have that sort of garlicky taste - they aren't the same, but they can work in each other's place
• Cabbages, spring greens, spinach, kale, pak choi, broccoli, purple sprouting broccoli and lettuces are surprisingly interchangeable
• Potatoes, black salsify, sweet potatoes, squashes, kohl rabi, jerusalem artichokes, cauliflower, parsnips, even carrots and aubergines all bulk out a dish in the same filling way
• Celery, celeriac. Yep. Also celery salt.
• Lemon juice, lime juice, vinegar, alcohol (wine, vodka etc not sweet liqueurs), nam pla. Sour, yum.
• Tomatoes, miso paste and seaweed all make a dish taste "meatier" - that umame taste Heston keeps banging on about. Parmesan does the same thing, add an old rind of it to soup and you're onto a winner
• There are no substitutes for bell peppers, they're just too awesome.
• Throw away the idea that if you don't have what a recipe suggests then you can't make it. Think about what you do have that would give the dish a similar taste or texture and go for it. Mix and match, pick and mix: it makes cooking more fun and less stress. The principle applies to herbs and spices, seasonings, sauce ingredients... almost everything has at least one possible substitute.

Links

Abel & Cole

Find an organic box scheme in your area

The Soil Association

Lonely lasagne

My husband was out this evening, hence the title! The nice thing is that lasagne makes a great lunch as well, so I can just box it up for him to take to work tomorrow.

You can get six weekday portions, or four giant sunday-lunch portions, out of this lasagne.

Roast veg go with anything!

Lasagne is easy to make, all it needs is a bechamel sauce, a tomato sauce and some kind of themed filling. I had an aubergine, pepper, leeks, half a purple onion and tons of courgettes in the fridge so I roasted them up for about 30-40 minutes @ 180°C with olive oil, salt and pepper.

The bechamel is pretty simple although if you haven't done one before it can seem a bit complicated; do try it though, once you've done it a couple of times it becomes familiar. 

If you don't have all the extra stuff
just make a basic white sauce
following the steps below with plain milk.

[Optional] Stick a pint of milk in a pan with a bay leaf, a few whole peppercorns, a bit of onion (I kept back some of the purple onion for this), some parsley stalks and a peice of blade mace or some grated nutmeg.
Let it heat up slowly on a low heat until it's just starting to bubble up - don't let it boil though! Just turn the heat off and leave it to infuse as it goes cool. At this point it already smells wonderful.

Melt 50g butter in a saucepan and mix 50g flour into it, stirring all the time to stop it clumping or burning. Let it cook for a little bit or the sauce will taste of raw flour, it'll start to go a bit goldy and that's when you start adding in the (strained) milk, little by little. Don't rush this or it'll go lumpy, just keep on stirring. Once all the milk is in, season the sauce and let it cook a while longer until it's thickened up. 


The tomato sauce is possibly the simplest thing ever. Heat up a pan with some oil and throw a couple of cloves of squished garlic in. Add a tin of tomatoes, salt, pepper, tomato puree and bring to a simmer. Add a shot of vodka (trust me) and some fresh basil and take off the heat. 

If you can't be bothered to do this bit, or don't have the time, it's always handy to have a jar of pre-made sauce in the cupboard. My favourite for this kind of thing is Seeds of Change Tomato & Basil sauce.

Mix the vegetables (or whatever other filling you've prepared) in with the tomato sauce. Layer the lasagne in a dish, grate a bunch of parmesan over the top (or whatever cheese you have to hand) then stuff it in the oven for about half an hour at 180°C. Done! 

Make the bottom layer a veg & tomato one, or you might end up with a crunchy base

I also love lasagne made with ricotta, mint and green vegetables like peas, courgettes and spinach. You omit the tomato sauce for that one though, just mix some milk into the ricotta to make it go further.

Links
I get the majority of my veg from Abel & Cole, who deliver a box of goodies to my door every Friday. They also deliver my my milk from Berkeley Farm dairy in Wiltshire.
I've also recently signed up for a mid-week delivery from the local milkman. I get a pint of organic British milk every Wednesday. They state that the product is red tractor assured, although they don't share which specific dairies they get their milk from.

Mayonnaise and a thing that goes well with it

For many years I have been scared of making mayonnaise, it's a very stressful condiment for me. What if it split and I wasted all that expensive olive oil? What if I simply couldn't do it, I would spend the rest of my life branded a terrible cook and a kitchen fraud! The fear was so great that making mayonnaise even made it onto my new years resolutions last year...

A week ago I was staring into the fridge, trying to come up with a meal for a friend of mine, who doesn't like red meat when I only had venison and pork in the house. I found a packet of halloumi nesting behind the butter and decided that roast med veg stacks with pan-fried halloumi and a basic bread salad would do the trick. But what could I do to make the meal a bit more special? Aioli!

After a failed attempt at getting it to work in the food processor I plunged ahead with the traditional method: a hand whisk. 
One egg yolk, a blob of mustard and slowly slowly add a bunch of olive oil - I think it worked out as about half a pint. I did feel like I was going to end up with one monster hulk arm and one cramped up claw hand at one stage but the emulsification did happen and after that it was just a case of mixing in a minced clove of garlic that had been mashed up with a big pinch of salt and some lemon juice, voila - aioli mayo.

I put two quenelles of aioli (okay okay, it sounds pretentious but it really does look nicer than a big messy blob on the plate) next to a stack of aubergines, courgettes, peppers, red onion and asparagus that had been roasted in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. I lay the cooked halloumi slices on top and surrounded each stack with a few spoons of bread salad - this is quartered tomatoes mixed with finely diced red onion, toasted bread cubes, parsley, basil, salt, pepper, vinegar and olive oil, left to chill in the fridge for an hour.

The whole meal took very little graft, didn't cost much and everyone cleared their plates. The mayo lasts at least a week in the fridge too, so we were able to pair it with some other meals as well. Give it a go, mayo really isn't as scary or difficult as it sounds and it is rather satisfying to demystify something that we usually pay someone else to make for us.

Links
For those meals when you don't have time to make your own mayo, you can find the best commercially produced version I have ever tasted here.