Sugar and spice…granny smith

Take one granny smith. Cut it into half. Use one half to make a spicy mint chutney and the other to make a dessert filling.

Well let’s start with the spicy mint and apple chutney using a recipe from An Indian Housewife’s Recipe Book . This uses a combination of mint, apple, onion, chillies and some spices to make a chutney. I didn’t have enough mint and was in no mood to blow my head off with the amount of chilies in the recipe. So what I ended up with, whilst still very spicy, was a bit watery. We had it at dinner tonight with some black pepper papads but I’m afraid it was a bit blah.  I’ve stuck it in the fridge and will see how it tastes tomorrow.

That left me with half a granny smith. Well sugar with spice is a bit nice. So I decided to chop the apples up, bung them in a pan with a spoonful of sugar and a smattering of cinnamon.

  

Whilst the apple stewed, I waltzed over to the freezer and took out some ready made vol-au-vents. These are the simplest things to use, heat the oven, brush edges of cases with milk or egg, cook for 15-17 minutes turning halfway through. Unfortunately, sometimes simple is still too complicated. I mean what does turn me – rotate or flip over? Anyhoooo, the first batch burnt. I blame it on our new non-fan electric oven that has a rather odd smell to it. The second batch worked out just fine. After they were cooled, I loaded them up with the apple sauce and put the back in the oven to stay warm …the oven though off would take a long time to cool down.

And the result….Absolutely delicious served with some Mackies vanilla ice-cream which offset the sour apple filling just perfectly. Will definitely be making those again.

Sausage, haggis and bean pie

 

Now calm down, don’t get excited. There is no meat in this recipe whatsoever. Occasionally I eat veggie sausages. I don’t know why as I can never get them to taste as nice as the ones in pubs. I sometimes suspect the ones in the pubs aren’t veggie at all

I usually boil the sausages in gravy then eat them with a huge mound of mash. And there it is… the real reason for the meal….an excuse to have a huge plateful of buttery, creamy, yummy, cheese-y mash.

Today that all changed. I am now converted to veggie sausages and the reason is the Cauldron sausage and bean pie recipe. I only had a tiny tin of beans 120g, so made up the bulk with half a Halls veggie haggis frozen on  Burns night and a quarter can of chopped tomatoes.  I used a packet of Cauldron Lincolnshire sausages.

My goodness the result was delicious. Even meat eating Mr Plummy Mummy enjoyed it enough to have two helpings. I was grinning with full belly smug satisfaction which was only slightly marred when he said it would taste really good with meat sausages and meat haggis. Silently, in my mind and under my breath I blow giant  raspberries at his love of meat – I’ll stick to this pie from now on!

Chocolate covered bretton biscuits

Pah to Valentines. I don’t need a Hallmark holiday to tell me when to tell my loved one that he is loved. He gets told regularly enough thank you. And he gets fed with lots of love on a daily basis. So I say, “don’t buy me a card”, “we won’t be doing silly gifts will we dear” and such stuff. But what I say, is not what I do. I cannot resist buying a silly card and showing him my love through food. This year, the treat was chocolate biscuits using a recipe from the Green and Black’s Chocolate Recipes book which was a Christmas gift from the sister-in-law and has been sat on my shelf unused for a couple of years. Most of the recipes need too many ingredients for an inpromptu bit of baking. But today, I was lucky to have a choice of a cake or a biscuit. The little one chose Breton Butter Biscuits which are an easy biscuit made of butter, flour, sugar and egg. I added in a teaspoon of powdered ginger and topped the lot of with melted Green and Black’s Chocolate with ginger. Hope that he appreciates the burnt fingers as I dipped lovingly into the hot choc sauce. The results – well spicy, just like my other half loves!

  

Ratatouille with lemon and coriander cous cous

I’m was never keen on ratatouille… it’s a bit too much like nut roast in being very “vegetarian”. In the olden days before being veggie was acceptable, ratatouille was often the only offering on a restaurant menu, and it was awful.

However, times have changed (or is it me? or was it the film Ratatouille????). I went for a Delia recipe of oven roasted ratatouille. I started off cooking it on the hob, the moved my casserole pot to the oven to roast it off. I also missed off the coriander seeds because I forgot them but the results were great so I don’t mind. The first time, I cooked it with basil however, tonight I used crushed chili seeds instead. Both were equally yum.

On both occasions, I ate it with cous cous with a healthy squeeze of lemon and 1 tbs of finely chopped coriander stalks. It’s so delicious and a bonus for me is that it can be frozen as for some very mad reason Mr Plummy Mummy will not eat cooked aubergine or courgettes….more fool he.

As it’s a Delia recipe, I can’t copy it here. However,as the pictures I took were just so colourful, I cannot help but post them up.

    

Parsnip and potato parathas

Today is pizza night in our household. I don’t always fancy a cheesy hit so use the night to eat food that hubby isn’t into. So I cooked up my aubergine and potato shak. I usually eat that with rotlis or rice but today fancied a go at making parathas. Mum used to make a gorgeous potato stuffed one – damn I wish I had paid more attention to her cooking when she was around.

All my cookbooks are hidden in a moving box at the mo so I resorted to googling a recipe and settled on this simple Potato Paratha one. I substituted part of the potato quantity with parsnip mash as I love the creamy sweet combination of potatoes and parsnip. 150g of parsnips and 150g of maris piper potatoes (this is the washed and peeled weight). I also used a little less coriander. I found them really difficult to roll out as the stuffing kept squeezing out so in the end did it mum’s way but rolling out two rotlis, spreading out 2 tbs of stuffing, sealing the edges and cooking on the tawa.

The result was nice but didn’t really go with the shak. Whilst I was cooking them, I nibbled on the first one that I cooked. It is better without shak so I’m looking forward to tucking into a warmed up one with a sweet cup of tea for Saturday breakfast.  I wonder what other vegetables would go well?

Gingerbread men

Christmas is a brilliant time for the craft obsessed. You can come out of the woodwork and be celebrated for being wonderfully creative compared to the rest of the year when the non-crafty view you as somewhat of a geek (ooooh I sound bitter but it’s O.K. I have a lovely handcrocheted pillow to cry into so never fear).

We had a go at salt dough decorations last week. It’s very easy and if you don’t have glitter or paints, you can just use food colouring in your dough. There is a good guide on Kirstie’s Channel 4 page.

They were good practice for the gingerbread men we made yesterday. I used a  Netmums recipe and added an extra 1tsp for cinnamon for extra umph.  As the dough uses butter, I put it into the fridge for half an hour to firm up before getting the little one to help roll it out and cut out Xmas shapes. A quick bake in the oven (alas a bit too long for some who were rather dark) and then a cool down later we all mucked in decorating them. Mr Plummy also joined in and seemed to get as much, if not more, fun out of it than our kid. She was busying putting sprinkles on the tree followed by sprinkles in her mouth. To make it easier, I added a thin layer of icing before sprinkles and chocolate buttons were added. We also tried to use Dr Oetker’s Designer icing sugar but they were a little hard to control. The best sprinkles were the Asda ones which are in glittery cream, green and pinky-red. Lots of fun then all gobbled up!

 

Pickled chilies

Don’t these look lovely. So shiny and big. Each chili is about 4 inches long. Dad brought a large bag of them from London last week as I haven’t been able to find any decided bullet chilies up here. Unfortunately, they have been sat in the fridge waiting for transformation. Last night, one went into our spicy pasta. Today, I’m going to attempt to work with the rest. I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep them – a couple have gone into the freezer. And I decided to pickle these 4 using a very simple Pickled Green Chilies recipe.

I used Mizkans rice vinegar from the local Asda which is just over 1 cup full. Plus, I used brown sugar. It was all very easy to do – apart from the bottle sterilising…the first bottle was too small. In future, I’ll put the mixture into a glass pyrex jug as it was a bummer to pour out the mixture into the bottle.

So far the chilies haven’t lost their green colour but lets see what they look like tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward to trying these out on a margarita pizza!

UPDATE 16/9/11

Well these were a huge disappointment – the vinegar was so strong that it overwhelmed the flavour of the chilies. I was expecting something along the lines of pickled silverskin onions. So the hunt is on for a better pickling medium.

Purple mash

Not cooking at all but a review of the Purple Majesty – the new potato with lots of anthocyanins in. It’s grown in Scotland dontchaknow. We got some of these potatoes with our weekly shop this week. Last night we made sausage and mash. Two pans of mash – one with King Edwards and one with Purple Majesty.

Now idiot me forgot to take a photo. I love the novelty of the purple spud. Peeling it was just bizarre and hubby thought I was strange for sniffing them. Well as mash, the purple potatoes taste like POTATOES MASH. Yep no difference but the lilac coloured mash looked great on the plate and my tot gobbled it all up.

Can’t wait to make oven chips or aubergine and potato shak with the rest of them .. as you can tell I am very easily pleased.

Jam Tarts

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts based on a recipe from the Icons. a portrait of England site.

She got somewhat annoyed the butter in the mix didn’t make the breadcrumb consistency the recipe calls for and that the dough ended up very sticky even though she only used one tablespoon of water. She then ended up annoyed with the dough sticking to the surface while rolling out and the little Queen’s helper who kept eating all the jam or spending ages filling one tart tray. So much for a good way to relax. In frustration, she dumped the tarts in the oven, logged onto her computer and fell rapidly down, down, down into the rabbithole that is the Internet.

The tarts were forgotten for just a while, enough time for them to burn slightly but they tasted very nice nonetheless. I used up my Hartley’s best Strawberry jam which in my opinion is not the best for the toast in the morning.

The bods that be on that site decided that Alice in Wonderland is very English. I jolly well agree what!

New Ingredient: Stem ginger

I like ginger but have never had stem ginger…until NOW!

I like crumble, esp rhubarb crumble so why not combine the two.  That’s exactly what I did following a Louise Pickford Vegetarian Cooking recipe for Rhubarb, Apple and Double Ginger Crumble. And what did I think????? Hmmmm well I’ve learnt that I need to chop the stem ginger rather more finely than the huge chunks I put in. I liked the addition of ginger but not as much as Louise. Next time I do this recipe, I’ll use less. But my oh my, the crumble topping was delicious!