Hobgoblin curry

I know Halloween was yesterday, but I was too busy handing out sweets to eager trick-or-treaters to blog. Anyway the main point of this post is to offer a recipe to anyone with a mound of left-over pumpkin flesh in the fridge or a squash languishing in the larder. There are lots of things I could do with a pumpkin (and when I say pumpkin read any kind of squash big or small), but I always end up making this curry.

This is mainly because it is tasty, simple – thanks to the cheats curry paste – and healthy enough for me to feel virtuous.

I can’t give you specific quantities here because each time I have a different sized squash. Also, I say it is for two because it isn’t quite enough for four but I usually end up with an extra portion that I stash in the fridge for Will to heat up at work the next day.

I serve this with plain boiled brown rice, but a naan bread would be good and last night I had some poppadoms with some shop bought mango chutney and a very make-shift raita made by mixing natural yogurt with a good shaking of dried mint, a pinch of sugar and a pinch of salt (surprisingly tasty and refreshing).

Squash Curry for two – sort of!

A small pumpkin/squash – you know, one that kinda looks like it is for two, peeled and chopped into big chunks

1 white onion, sliced

1 garlic clove, finely chopped, minced or grated

Small knob of fresh ginger, grated

*If you like it hot a green chilli finely chopped or a sprinkle of dried chilli flakes

2-3 tablespoons of Pataks Balti paste

Half can of chopped tomatoes

Half a can of coconut milk (I use half-fat, it’s totally up to you)

Three big handfuls of spinach

Fresh coriander, chopped

Lime juice to taste

1. Gently fry the onion until it starts to soften. Add ginger, chilli and garlic and cook for a few more minutes. Add curry paste and fry off until it becomes fragrant.

2. Add canned tomatoes and coconut milk – if you have quite a lot of squash you might need to add a little bit more tomato and coconut milk, just add in equal quantities. *Freeze remaining coconut milk in ice-cube trays then transfer into a bag to keep until next time you make the curry.

3. Put the lid on and simmer for about 20 minutes, until you can easily put a knife through one of the squash cubes – at the same time don’t be too relaxed and over cook it because the squash can become mushy.

4. Add the spinach and cook until it wilts into the sauce. Taste and season with some salt, a good squeeze of lime juice and some fresh coriander.

What’s your family heirloom recipe?

A recent surveyed revealed that more than half of us value family recipes as highly as we do material family heirlooms.

The survey, based on 1,000 respondents in the UK and carried out by allaboutyou.com, found 58 per cent of people value family recipes as much as material heirlooms, a further 17 per cent value them more.

On pondering this I thought family recipes are a part of our history, whether your mother whipped up delightful and elaborate cakes of her own devising, or if you were given strange concoctions with no name that became a family favourite, food stays in our memories.

My mum was very much of the latter category of strange concoctions. She wonders why I became so interested in cooking as she wasn’t exactly a passionate chef herself. That’s not to say she didn’t care and that we didn’t eat well – we did because she had a wonderful vegetable patch. She was also careful to make sure she passed on basic cooking skills to me and we spent most weekend whipping up copious batches of chocolate chip fairy cakes for my dad’s and two brother’s lunch boxes.

One of our strange family favourite recipes I remember well was a very curious ‘shepherds pie’. I put it in speech marks as it is questionably a shepherds pie. In fact I believe it came from my mum’s mum and she called it a goulash – it is really neither. It was ground up lamb from yesterdays roast (yes sounding like a shepherds pie at the moment) mixed with a can of plum tomatoes, chopped up, a can of baked beans and then topped with mashed potato and baked. We loved it as children, but its not really the height of gastronomy. The rest of the meals I remember from my childhood follow a similar tact, they were strange versions of original recipes such as a curry made with curry powder, mango chutney and stock, canned mushrooms, leftover chicken and raisins?!!

So I guess I hanker after some wonderful family heirloom recipes to call my own, I suppose I’ll have to create my own to pass onto my children. I’d love to here what your family heirloom recipes are, whether they are delicious or rather odd like mine.

The taste of Greece in a rural village

Eleon Olive Oil

Cottage industries are popping up everywhere these days. Lots of people are bottling their own chutneys, packaging their own cakes and selling their home grown produce. I live north of Bristol, but work in Gloucestershire where you are surrounded by the beautiful Cotswolds. Here there is no shortage of great food, lots of it being produced and sold on a small scale. But I was surprised to find out about a small company in the quaint village of North Nibley that sold Greek olive oil and honey.

Couple Jacqueline and Tassos Stamatopoulos run the business called Eleon Fine Foods – Eleon meaning olive grove in Greek – from a beautifully converted hay barn on the outskirts of the village.

It is still a small business, just four years old, so Tassos continues to work in the day as a teacher while Jacqueline, a mother-of-two, works on it full time at home.

At present they just have two products, which can only be bought at Stroud market, Bristol Slow Food Market and a few local farm shops. But the two products are so fantastic I predict they will grow quickly and they should certainly make the items available on the internet.

The two products were given a Great Taste Gold award this year and it is thoroughly well-deserved. Their fresh, 100 per cent extra virgin olive oil, comes from Tassos’ parents olive groves in a small village in the Peloponnese region of Greece. It is cold-pressed and unfiltered and for several months of the year it is consider “fresh”.

It is bursting with olive flavour but has a mild and subtle to taste, delicious for dipping bread, but also great for cooking with, Jacqueline told me.

Jacqueline Stamatopoulos with her products from Greece

I was under the impression that extra-virgin oils were not great to cook with but she told me that in Greece they use it for absolutely everything – they even fry their chips in it! Yes it does have a low smoke point, which means it gets hot quickly, but Jacqueline said as long as you keep an eye on it you can use it for just about anything and it will give everything a delicious Mediterranean flavour – plus it’s a healthy choice.

The product I was absolutely seduced by was their Greek honey, which this time is made by Tassos’ cousin, who looks after bees in the Taygetros mountains, where they feed mainly off of pine with a little orange and lemon blossom. The pine diet, which is quite unusual, gives the honey a sublime toffee texture and rich, but not overly sweet, taste. This honey is nothing like the honey you get in the clear squeezy bottles from the supermarket. It would be delicious spread on toast, served with Greek yogurt or drizzled on ice-cream.

I also think there is something to be said for knowing exactly where your food comes from, right down to the tiny village where the olive growers live. It’s not a local product, but no olive oils are, so this is the second best option and I would rather my hard-earned money went towards a small-family business rather than ploughed into a faceless supermarket chain.

(Photos by Steve Richards)

Modern day advice from a 1950s cook

I was sooooooo excited the other day because I found a very exciting thing. While perusing the little shelves of my local charity book shop – The Cotswold Care Hospice Book Shop in Dursley, Gloucestershire, in case you wanted to know – I came across a very old and battered book in the cookery section. It turned out to be an original 1952 copy of Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking. And the best part is it was just £1.50! Such a bargain for such a classic.

I leafed through the delicate pages of this food bible with utter glee. It seems unbelievable that it was written just after the war had finished and rationing had only just come to an end. The recipes and writing is so up to date and the advice still prevalent for today. I have given you an excerpt here in case you are not lucky enough to have a copy of the book. I particularly like this part:

“Good cooking is honest, sincere and simple, and by this I do not mean to imply that you will find in this, or indeed any other book, the secret of turning out first-class food in a few minutes without trouble. Good food is always a trouble and it’s preparation should be regarded as a labour of love, and this book is intended for those who actually and positively enjoy the labour involved in entertaining their friends and providing their families with first-class food. Even more than long hours in the kitchen, fine meals require ingenious organisation and experience which is a pleasure to acquire.”

I really think Elizabeth is on to something here. I am all for the speedy meal after work but I think so much emphasis is put on quick meals that we have forgotten that cooking is something to be enjoyed, it is a skill to acquire over time, it is something to throw yourself into. All the celebrity chefs try to construct new meal ideas for those hard-pushed for time. “You can cook this up in minutes”, they say and “No need for a take-away this meal can be thrown together in less than the time it will take you to order and pick it up”. But what about cooking for cooking’s sake?

Even if you get in from work at 7pm, there is still time to think about what to create for dinner, to calmly chop and slice, then gently simmer and stir the dish until it is complete. Then sit down – with you partner or with the family – and enjoy the meal. Sometimes it is just slosh, stir and plonk it on the plate, but other times we should remember that making a meal is something to take pride in. I know lots people who think that taking time and pride in your cooking is a waste of time, but how can something as important as feeding yourself be a waste of time? The craft of cooking is as old as time and I just hope that generations down the line we haven’t forgotten it. As long as Elizabeth David’s books are around we won’t.

New Year inspiration

A quick note to say; sorry for neglecting the blog over the last month, I have been away over the Christmas period then busy back at work over New Year. Will and I had a lovely Christmas though and this year I even got my hand in the kitchen to help my mum with Christmas diner. We did a lovely roast beef with all the trimmings and on Boxing Day I made a delicious recipe of Nigella’s called spiced chocolate cake, which was to die for, and also conveniently wheat free because my brother’s girlfriend Emma is gluten intolerant. It was divinely soggy and rich and must have made a nice change for Emma from cakes made with rice flour, which can be quite dry. The recipe is in her new book Nigella Christmas but isn’t on her website (www.nigella.com) yet.

Christmas cookery books

But on to my first post of 2009. I want to share with you my collection of fantastic Christmas presents, which aside from a new bike consisted mainly of gorgeous cookery books. Quick run down of the books I received:- Moro: The Cookbook, by Sam and Sam Clarke, Chinese Food Made Easy, by Ching-He Huang, Bill Granger Everyday, Ottolenghi and The 30-minute Cook by the legend that is Nigel Slater.

Moro: The Cookbook

I’ll start with Moro, which I just put down moments ago and I was brought down to reality with a bump after being transported to the souks of Morocco and the tapas bars of Spain. This is a truly original collection of recipes from Spain, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. We are not just talking about paella and gazpacho here (although they do feature) but all kinds of regional delicacies that you have never heard of. Once I am feeling more adventurous there are clear directions for how to make deliciously chewy sour-dough bread and spicy homemade harrisa. I am particularly looking forward to trying the soup and tapas dishes and a yummy looking yogurt cake.

Ottolengi is a cookbook written by the founders of the deli come patisserie come food shop come restaurant in London. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi grew up in Jerusalem but their recipes draw inspiration from all over the world. The book has a fantastic section on vegetables, pulses and grains with a massive variety of salad recipes and then a hunger-inducing patisserie section with a wealth of original ideas for cakes, brownies and tarts. Tonight I am going to try a recipe called Chickpeas and spinach with honeyed sweet potatoes and yogurt sauce (if you could see the pictures you would know why it appealed to me).

Bill Granger always comes up with a great selection of recipes that you could envisage yourself throwing together, although invariably the recipes make me think of summer, which is not surprising as they were written by a man sitting in the heat of Australia. The book Everyday does what it says on the tin, meals for everyday of the week and brilliantly this book includes plenty of breakfast recipes (one of Bill’s specialities), lunch, brunch and lunch-box ideas. I have already noted down at least 10 recipes I want to try straight away.

Hot and sour noodle soup

I don’t know if you caught the series Chinese Food Made Easy last year, but I was really impressed with Ching, both for the great range of recipes she cooked and also with her attitude and style. I wanted to get the book to go with the series because although I like to experiment with food, Chinese food is a complex cuisine to get right and I think you do need to learn some recipes and techniques by the book before going free-style. This book offers a really good little collection of authentic dishes, which are also fresh, healthy and fast. Ching has tried to make it as simple as possible using ingredients you are likely to be able to get your hands on so if you are looking for complex, restaurant style recipes then this isn’t the book for you, but for those embarking on Asian cooking or trying to ween themselves off take-aways this is great book (lovely photos to). I tried the hot and sour noodle soup yesterday and it went down a storm with Will who knocked back two bowls of the steaming broth.

And lastly to food-writing king Nigel Slater. What is there to say? Another book by Nigel is always welcome and always a joy. Anyone who hasn’t read anything by Nigel Slater must go out and get one of his books from the library right now. You will find yourself salivating as you read. The 30-minute cook can be read as a manual almost, a helpful guide for those who are short of time but want some real food with guts, flavour and quite often plenty of cream ad butter. There aren’t many photos, but you don’t really need them. I also recommend his autobiography Toast: The story of a boy’s hunger, for bedtime reading.

So I feel well and truly inspired for the New Year. I love a bit of foodie reading to excite my senses and get my mind thinking. My New Year’s resolution is to try out at least one new recipe a week, whether that is an idea of my own or one from a book. I also want to learn – and get good at – baking bread. Bring it on!

Interesting greens

I love food; I love all kinds of food – apart from cauliflower – but sometimes it is hard to get excited about eating your greens. I do like greens (broccoli, kale, peas, cabbage and many more) but usually I incorporate them into a meal or lightly steam them and serve them seasoned as a side dish.
But then I stumbled on this recipe for an Indian style vegetable side dish on the BBC Good Food magazine website and all this changed. This recipe really kicks greens into shape and makes them stand out in a crowd. It is delicious as a side dish for a curry instead of rice or bread.

Indian spiced green

The first time I made the recipe as it suggests, with Kale and peas, and served it with an Indian dish of chicken thighs in a creamy yogurt sauce instead of rice. It went so well against the thick creamy sauce and made a much lighter meal than serving it with rice and naan bread.
The second time I made it with some Swiss Chard I had in the fridge. Recently, after being inspired by the series What to Eat Now, with Valentine Warner, I have been trying to eat seasonal local food. I picked up a bag of colourful chard at a local shop that sells organic fruit and vegetable from a farm in North Somerset, despite never having cooked it before. The taste is quite bitter and although I enjoyed it I didn’t relish the thought of eating mountains of it steamed with lemon juice for a week. This recipe really transformed the chard and was delicious as a side dish to a creamy potato curry.
A few notes:
Go for slightly larger portions of the cumin, mustard seeds, ginger and chilli for a better flavour and punch. The lime juice and desiccated coconut are essential, they really lift and sweeten the dish.
Whatever vegetable you decide to use I would still add the peas, they give a lovely sweetness and bite to the dish.
For a healthy portion for two people I suggest a 200g bag of kale, or an equivalent vegetable.
Follow this link, which will take you to the recipe on the BBC Good Food website http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5823/indian-spiced-greens

A Spanish adventure (sort of)

A view of the sea

In a previous post I wrote that I wanted my holiday to Spain to be a culinary adventure, trekking into traditional Spanish towns and sampling real Spanish food.
There was one thing that stood in the way of this plan. When myself and Will picked up our hire car the man asked for Will’s driving license and Will looked suddenly very pale. He just stared at me with that ‘I know I’m in trouble now’ look and I knew he had forgotten it.
Luckily I had my driving license with me but I had never driven on the right hand side of the road before. I don’t want to paint myself as a useless woman driver who is nervous and hopeless at parking, but it did take some getting used to, so I didn’t make any long or complicated journeys in search of the traditional food I was longing for.
All the same we enjoyed ourselves and we did manage to get to one Spanish market and have some good Spanish meals.
Most of all I love soaking in the Spanish culture and way of life. I love sitting, mid morning, having a strong Spanish coffee. I love retreating to the apartment during the mid-day heat to have a large meal and a siesta. I love sitting in relaxed bars and cafes sipping wine and nibbling on nuts and bread to stave off the hunger because everyone eats at 9pm or later. And I love taking two hours over a meal that doesn’t even include dessert (because they don’t really do dessert you know).

A delicious breakfast of fresh fruits, croissants and orange juice.

Getting back to England and having to get up and eat breakfast lunch and dinner by 7pm seems so rushed and stressful.
One thing doesn’t make any sense to me in Spain though and that is the Chinese restaurants. I don’t find it strange that they are there, because in England we have restaurants of all sorts of cuisine, but it is the crazy prices. They are so cheap it doesn’t add up. Will and I had a meal at a lovely family Chinese near my parent’s apartment in Spain. This is what we had: An aperitif, a spring roll each for starter, plus some free prawn crackers. To share for mains we had beef in oyster sauce, chicken in curry sauce, Peking duck, sweet and sour pork and some noodles. I had some ice-cream for dessert, Will had a coffee and we were each given a shot of Schnapps. All this with a bottle of wine cost 17 euros! How can this be? The food was excellent, nice flavour, well presented and good portions. We would all eat out more in Britain if it was a little cheaper. All the same I left them a hefty tip because it felt like daylight robbery.

A truly yummy slice of fresh fruit flan from a stall at a local market

Lastly, a few words on the ingredients over in Spain. The fruit and vegetables were the most wonderful shapes and colours, unlike the uniformed produce we have in our supermarkets. They don’t sell ‘free-range’ chicken but all their chicken tastes as good as our fresh free range birds, and in many places they have hot chicken stalls that travel around selling rotisserie chickens (so delicious). Supermarkets always have a good fish counter with plenty of fresh fish and mountains of prawns and deli counters sell piles of roasted vegetables (which I bought on countless occasions), croquettes and stews of chorizo and chickpeas to take away in little boxes – much better than fish and chips wrapped in paper.
Oh and not forgetting good red wine for as little as two euros a bottle. It’s all you need really.

A trip to foodie heaven

Quite frankly only true foodies will appreciate why I’m about to rave about my first ever trip to a Chinese supermarket to buy authentic Asian ingredients.
But being new to the foodie scene (at only 22 and just a few years experience of cooking) this was a real revelation. To be able to buy the authentic ingredients used for Chinese cooking instead of imitation products from the supermarket was thrilling.
Now if you have recently read the post below (The lost art of thrift) you will be wondering why blowing money on lots of new ingredients is in any way thrifty or money saving. But in fact it is the corner stone of saving money in the kitchen.
You see, what I bought this weekend was lots of store cupboard ingredients – sauces, marinades, curry pastes and dried goods. And with good store cupboard ingredients (which also includes dried pasta, canned pulses, spices, herbs, canned tomatoes ect) you can make a few left over scraps into a tasty meal.

Take for example last night. Languishing in the fridge was some broccoli, which I forgot to use earlier in the week. I found a few spring onions and some eggs, which are always hanging out in my fridge. All I had to do was buy a nice piece of beef and I had a Chinese meal straight off a take-away menu – but fresh and MSG free.
I made egg fried rice with some cooked Thai fragrant rice I had just bought in a 5kg bag at the Chinese supermarket (Wai Yee Hong, Bristol), with two whisked eggs for two people, a splash of soy sauce and a dribble of fragrant sesame oil. Just scramble the egg in your wok and set aside, add more oil and fry the cooked rice in the wok for a few minutes. Add the egg, soy and sesame oil – and some sliced spring onions if you have them. Then I made beef and broccoli in oyster sauce.
I marinated around 300g of sliced beef in 1tbsp Shaohsing rice wine and 1tbsp of soy sauce for 5 minutes, then fried it in a wok until lightly browned and tipped it onto a plate. I then fried one chopped garlic clove, a little grating of fresh ginger and three sliced spring onions in the wok, added the broccoli and stir fried for a few minutes. I returned the beef to the wok and added 2tbsp of oyster sauce and 3tbsp of water, plus a little drizzle of sesame oil and a small squeeze of honey for sweetness. Lastly I put the lid of the wok on and cooked for 2-3 minutes until the broccoli had cooked but was still crunchy. It was fresh, delicious and it certainly tasted authentic.

So although I spent around £25 on new ingredients I think they will pay their way by giving me many tasty meals at short notice. Next I need to find somewhere to get good authentic Indian produce. If anyone lives in the Bristol area and knows of a place – or any interesting delis – then please let me know.

The lost art of thrift

Love food hate waste

Here’s a statistic that we will all have heard in the last few months: In the UK we throw away a third of the food we buy. That means that out of every three bags of shopping we bring into our homes, we throw away one. We are shocked by these statistics, but are we genuinely doing anything about it?
I don’t want to preach about this but considering how much we waste working hard to use up what we buy is not only good for the environment but it is good for our bank balances. My food receipts are on a scary upward climb and I can’t afford all the luxuries I once bought; tropical fruits, artisan breads, posh biscuits and lots of meat and fish. I don’t want to cut back on the quality of my meat, so I need to find other ways to save money.
I think thrift is a lost art. Today on the whole we are better at creating exciting, healthy dishes, but we don’t posses the skills our grandparents had. They could stretch a roast chicken to make three or four meals.
There are loads of things we can do to cut the waste and cut our costs. One place I really recommend going to is the ‘Love Food, Hate Waste’ website (www.lovefoodhatewaste.com). It has lots of tips on how to store food for longer, portion sizes, how to make food go further and left-over recipes.
I want this post to be the start of a few posts about reducing waste and saving money. It is especially hard for a couple or a single person to reduce waste because so many products are made with a family of four in mind; jars of sauces are too much, loaves of bread go off before they are eaten and my difficulty is being able to eat a whole bag of spinach before it goes soggy because spinach is always sold in such huge packets.
I’ll start with a few tips from the Love Food, Hate Waste website and some of my own. Later I’ll add some recipes that will use up left-overs or that are generally cheap to make. I’d love to hear from anyone with more ideas on how to save money and use up food, so please leave comments with your advice for me.

Top waste reducing tips

1. Can’t use up all your bread? Either freeze half of the loaf and take it out as you need it. Or if you have a little bit of stale bread left then whiz it into bread crumbs put it in a bag and freeze them.

2. Make your own pasta sauces in batches out of two or three cans of plum tomatoes, garlic, salt, pepper, sugar and some basil at the end of the cooking. You will need to cook it for a good 30 minutes so it gets thick and concentrated. Freeze portions in boxes or bags. You can jazz them up once you defrost them by adding some Mediterranean roasted vegetables and some goat’s cheese on top. Or stir in a bit more fresh basil a knob of butter and some parmesan while it is re-heating.

3. Weigh all your dried goods, such as rice and pasta so you don’t cook too much. Two people need around 150ml or rice or 200g of pasta as a rough guide.

4. Freeze fresh herbs whole in a bag in the freezer or chop and put into ice cube trays, cover with water then freeze, remove the cubes from the trays when frozen and keep together in a freezer bag.

5. Always create a meal plan before making a shopping list. This sounds so boring but it will seriously cut down how much useless stuff you buy at the supermarket. Check the cupboards, fridge and freezer first to see what you have to use up, make a seven day list of what you are going to eat, then only buy the ingredients for the meals. I also note down what I will have for lunch so I can use up ingredients that will be left over. Eg Sunday: roast chicken, Monday: lunch, chicken salad, Monday evening: chicken pilaf using the last of the left-over chicken.  

Favourite product this week

Rachel’s Organic Greek Style Yogurt 

You may think I am exaggerating and really over blowing this product’s trumpet, but for me Rachel’s Organic Coconut Greek Style Yogurt is as good as a bowl of chocolate ice-cream (although not as good as profiteroles).

It is not the healthiest of all yogurts because it is so rich and creamy, but the only ingredients in the tub are organic yogurt, organic cream, organic sugar and organic coconut and you can really taste the coconut. For those who love coconut – me – this yogurt is a dream.

I started with a small bowl of the yogurt with two figs sliced up, but even more delicious, the next two nights I had it with some tinned peaches! The last night I just ate what was left out of the tub. If you don’t fancy coconut, I have just got some of the low-fat rhubarb Rachel’s organic yogurt, which is also gorgeous on its own or with a few blueberries.