Coronation Chickpeas (a year late)

 Ok, so it's now a year since Charles was crowned and I first heard of the concept of Coronation Chickpeas. It's somehow waited until now for me to try them. I certainly won't be leaving it long to make the next batch - it was yummy!

I looked at several recipes and settled on an amalgam of them with some tweaks of my own - I didn't fancy the raisins that many had in, and I felt some garlic would help things along tremendously. Next time I'll add some lemon juice and chopped coriander - I had intended to add those but they somehow never made it into the bowl.

Ingredients

Chickpeas - 1 can drained, or 125g dried, soaked, cooked and drained 

Mayo - 3 tbsp (vegan or not, as you wish)

2 cloves garlic, crushed

20g mango chutney

2 tsp curry powder (I used a mild Madras)

3 soft dried apricots, chopped into 5mm pieces 

Method

Mash 2/3 of the chickpeas roughly in a bowl. Add mayo, garlic, mango chutney, curry powder and apricots and stir well. Add the rest of the chickpeas and stir again. Add salt if you think it needs it.

If you're going to add a squeeze of lemon and some chopped coriander, this would be the time to do it, and stir again. 

Fab as a sandwich filling or on toast.

Roosevelt Beans (vegan version)

 At Roosevelt Lodge in Yellowstone National Park, a few years back, I had Roosevelt Beans, which the server assured me were “completely vegan”. They were delicious, but when I looked at the recipe card she gave me afterwards, they did not appear to be vegan at all. Sure, there were lots of beans in there - but, disappointingly, also rather a lot of meat. So, I had a go at making a fully vegan version. After a few attempts, this is the recipe I’ve settled on. I’ve also omitted the sugar from the original recipe as it was weirdly sweet.

Ingredients:

300g onions, chopped

30mL olive oil

6 cloves garlic, finely chopped 

450g frozen soya mince

2 teaspoons smoked paprika

1 tbsp whole grain mustard 

2 400g cans butter beans, drained

1 400g can baked beans

1 400g can kidney beans in chilli sauce (or taco beans in sauce)

1 400g can kidney beans (not in sauce), drained

400 mL water

8 tbsp tomato purée

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Fry onion in olive oil gently for 10 mins until translucent and soft; add the garlic and fry another 1-2 mins. Add the soya mince, smoked paprika, mustard and stir well for another couple of minutes. Add all the beans, the water and tomato purée and bring to the boil. Simmer for 30 mins or so. Add salt and pepper if needed. Enjoy with a green vegetable and rice.

Agg

Butter bean, mushroom and coriander salad

375g dry butter beans (or you could use 4 x 400g tins, drained and rinsed)
500g button mushrooms, sliced
3 large cloves smoked garlic, finely chopped
1 lemon
3 heaped teaspoonfuls ground coriander
2 tablespoonfuls olive oil
A few sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Salt and ground black pepper

Soak and cook butter beans; drain.
Put garlic and olive oil in large pan (I used a wok) and sizzle gently for 1 minute. Add sliced mushrooms and stir around until they are starting to soften and get juicy.
Grate the zest off the lemon and add to pan, then squeeze it and add its juice to the pan, along with the coriander. Stir well, then add the cooked butter beans and chopped parsley, and heat the beans through. Add salt and ground black pepper to taste.

Plant-based and experimental

As of 9th January this year I thought I'd give plant-based eating a go.
Whole food, limited salt, no added sugar, no added oil.


My cholesterol levels are high, which isn't great news; also, with diabetes and high blood pressure in the family, and having lost my Mum to a devastating stroke in 2014, it was time to start eating to get healthier.


So, I tried it for a week, to see how I felt at the end of it. That was over 9 weeks ago now, and I'm still going (plant)-strong. The biggest surprise was that various long-term aches and pains cleared up or improved significantly; I started sleeping a whole lot better and was able to reduce 2 of the long-term medications I was taking by 50% and 60% with no ill effects.


The Engine2 Seven-day Rescue Challenge group on Facebook has been a huge support and source of inspiration along the way. I've watched Forks Over Knives and a lot of the videos on nutritionfacts.org and going plant-based makes a lot of sense.


Today's challenge was to see if I could make a version of the warm Puy lentil and cranberry salad that I've been making for a while that was better compliant with E2 7DR guidelines.
I reduced the oil from 45 ml to 15 ml and the salt to 1/2 a level teaspoonful and it still tastes good. This time, I didn't put in the parsley (because I didn't have any) but the leaves from the celery went in instead.

The Baked Beans Experiment

Yesterday I had baked beans on toast for lunch. I was struck by how overwhelmingly sweet they were. Reading the can label, I saw that there were 5.5g sugar in every 100g which is pretty dreadful - so a 210g portion contained about 12g sugar. Why would anyone add this amount of sugar to a savoury food?

Today, I thought I would have a go at making my own baked beans. With no added sugar.

340g dry beans, soaked overnight, then boiled until done (I used a mix of beans which contained chickpeas, haricot beans, flageolet beans and aduki beans)
160g chopped onion
200g diced carrot
130g diced celery
4 cloves garlic
1tbsp vegetable oil
1 can chopped tomatoes
500g passata
1 teasp ground cumin
1 teasp dried oregano
1 teasp salt

I softened the veg in the oil for about 10 mins, then added the chopped tomatoes, passata, salt, cumin and oregano and simmered, covered, for 30 mins.
Then I liquidised the sauce, poured it over the cooked beans and simmered for another 30 mins.

Verdict: a bit on the sloppy side - the sauce to bean ratio was rather too high - but it tasted good. I had a ladleful of the beans over a slice of toast in a soup bowl for lunch. I've since added a can of chickpeas to the remainder.

French Onion Soup

I'd been meaning to make this for a long time. On Saturday I stocked up with sufficient onions etc to construct some this Sunday for lunch, as well as having enough onions for the rest of the week. We do seem to get through a lot of onions in this household.
I did some research before starting to cook, which left me somewhat confused. To flour, or not to flour? Wine, or beer? How much sugar? And should it be white or brown? Delia Smith, or an untested recipe from the internet? And what had happened to the piece of French bread I had earmarked for the croutons? Turns out Younger Son had consumed that already, so  it was good old English bread. But at least that meant that I felt less guilty about using cheddar rather than gruyere.
As usual, I ended up with a hybrid... but it tasted good.

800g onions, peeled and thinly sliced. This resulted in a lot of tears.
50g butter
3 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
1/2 level teaspoon granulated sugar
One can of beer (I was too mean to use wine; Tesco Everyday Value Bitter was fine)
2 pints of beef stock (2 elderly Tesco beef stock cubes and one beef Oxo cube)
Salt and pepper

And, for the cheese croutons:
4 slices bread
160g grated cheddar

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan, and cook the onions, garlic and sugar gently together for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Delia assured me that it would be browning nicely after 30 mins, and this browning would improve the colour and flavour of the soup. It wasn't even starting to look as if it was browning after 30 mins, so I turned up the heat for another 5 mins, stirring all the time. The onions reduced in volume somewhat, but stubbornly refused to brown.
I shrugged, poured the stock and beer in, brought it to the boil and simmered gently for a further hour and 15 minutes, then assembled the croutons, as follows:
Toast the bread; put it on a baking tray and cover with grated cheese. Try not to leave any bare bits. Pop the tray of cheesed-up bread under the grill for about 3 minutes until it is bubbling and starting to brown. While the cheese is grilling, put the soup into bowls. Float one "crouton" (or "cheese-on-toast", as we call it around these parts) in each bowl. (Yes, I know you're supposed to put the soup in bowls under the grill with floating croutons in it, but my soup bowls are wide and shallow with big rims and I don't think I could fit even 2 under at once.)

The family were somewhat bemused by the concept - "Cheese-on-toast? In onion soup?? but tucked in with gusto. I will definitely prepare this again, but next time I think I will slice the onions in a food processor as slicing them lovingly by hand was a rather tearful experience.

Brown Betty

So, I had some leftover bread to use, and also some cooking apples were lurking shyly in the bottom of the fridge, and somewhere from the deep recesses of my memory came a recollection that making a Brown Betty might be a good way of combining the two. I'd never actually tried making one before, so spent a little while googling recipes before settling on my own take on it. But really - apples, butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, breadcrumbs - what's not to like? Even if I did have rather worrying memories of Michael Crawford playing Frank Spencer, alternating with Ram Jam's Black Betty, playing on my internal jukebox as I made it.

I took:
225g sliced wholemeal bread (all the recipes I saw said white bread, but I had only wholemeal) and made it into crumbs in my food processor.
90g butter
100g brown sugar
1.5 level teaspoons ground cinnamon (it was supposed to be 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 0.5 teaspoons mixed spice, but my hand slipped when adding the cinnamon...)
and mixed these all together over a gentle heat.
(next time I do this I will melt the butter in the saucepan first, stir in the sugar and cinnamon and then the breadcrumbs; it will be a lot easier to mix)
Next, the apples:
4 smallish Bramley apples - about 650g before peeling - I peeled, cored and sliced them thinly, and put half of them in an even layer at the bottom of a Pyrex casserole dish.
1 dessertspoon of sugar sprinkled over these (son #2 grumbles if things are not sweet enough)
Then, I sprinkled on about 40% of the breadcrumb mixture.
Next, the rest of the sliced apples, then another dessertspoon of sugar, then the rest of the breadcrumb mix.
I finished off by sprinkling 2 heaped teaspoons of white granulated sugar over the top of it, which contrasted nicely with the brown breadcrumb mix.
Baked at 170 degC for about 45 minutes - until the apples were soft and the breadcrumbs had crisped up on the top. (If you use white breadcrumbs, they go brown, apparently. If you use brown breadcrumbs, they just stay brown and perhaps go a bit browner. Hard to tell.)

Absolutely delicious, with or without custard, hot or cold. The whole family approved of it, and I have been granted permission to make it again.

A productive afternoon...

It rained non-stop this afternoon, so I spent most of it in the kitchen. As well as cooking dinner (roast chicken, homemade stuffing, veg and gravy) and producing enough bolognese sauce for 4 meals, I decided to rustle up a batch of my Grandma's ginger biscuits, which brought back some great childhood memories.

Lunch at Grandma's was always good - and my brother and I always looked forward to the ceremonial after-lunch opening of the biscuit barrel, which typically contained two sorts of homemade biscuits: ginger biscuits and Canadian cookies. My brother, my grandfather and I were allowed one of each, each. Both were absolutely delicious; next time I bake I shall make the Canadian cookies.

Grandma's Ginger Biscuits

Take a saucepan, and put in it:
170g golden syrup,
85g granulated sugar
110g butter (Grandma used to use margarine, but I thought I would try butter)
and set over a gentle heat to melt.
Weigh out 250g plain flour, and add 2-3 level tsp ground ginger, 1/4 level tsp salt, and 1 level tsp baking powder. Mix together well.
In a ramekin (or similar small bowl) mix together 1 tbsp milk and 1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda.

Once the contents of the pan have melted together, stir, then tip in the flour/ginger mixture and pour in the milk and bicarb mixture. Combine well with a wooden spoon.
Now you have two options - you can either chill the mixture, form it into a sausage shape, wrap it in cling film and keep it in the fridge, cutting slices off whenever you fancy baking some biscuits, or you can bake it straight away, which is what I did.

Line the base of a couple of baking trays with baking parchment (this makes it so much easier to detach the biscuits from the trays when they come out of the oven) and put 6 blobs of biscuit mixture, each the size of a large-ish marble (about a 2 to 2.5cm sphere), on each. You can either get bits of the biscuit mix out of the pan with your fingers, or else use two teaspoons to put the blobs on the tray.
Squish the blobs down so that they are about 5mm thick and roughly circular, then put in the oven (190degC). They will spread out a bit more, and puff up a bit, and go brown. When they are a lovely golden brown all over, take them out, let them sit on the tray for a couple of minutes to firm up a bit, then carefully transfer them to a cooling rack. (Makes about 40).

Fend off hordes of ravening boys who are lured into the kitchen by the wonderful biscuit smell, then hide the biscuits (once cool) in a tin. They keep for at least a week, I am told, but I can't see them lasting that long.

Back in one piece and getting ready for Christmas

After an operation this summer, which meant that the family had to take over cooking duties for a while as I was unable to, I have sadly been unable to update my blog at all since I returned to the kitchen a couple of months ago. I have been unable to sit down for prolonged periods with any degree of comfort and so recreational computing has been out, as I have had to devote my energies to necessary computing for work.

However, I have now reached the point where I can sit down for a while and type without wincing, so normal service should be resumed shortly. Hurrah!

I've made a Christmas cake which is sitting in a tin maturing at the moment. I have the family for Christmas - my husband and sons will be spending it with me this year rather than going and sliding down mountains as they have for the last two years (it's amazing what a threat to change the locks while they are away if they go away for Christmas for the third year in a row will achieve), and my parents are joining us, so there will be six of us. So what will we be eating?

Turkey, of course, along with chestnut, apple and sausagemeat stuffing, plus my great-grandmother's recipe for sage and onion stuffing, which is a thing of absolute joy. Sprouts by the bucketful, buttered carrots with basil, and mashed potato. (The mashed potato and sprouts will be cooked in enormous quantities so as to provide plenty of leftovers for the traditional Boxing Day bubble and squeak.) And, of course, Christmas pudding and white nutmeggy custard, with a generous splosh of rum poured over the pud before applying the custard. Although, having had Christmas pudding served with advocaat last year, rather than rum and custard, I am torn...

And, of course, mince pies will be prepared... quite possibly some scones too (pronounced to rhyme with "bones" and "cones" rather than "Johns") to serve with raspberry jam and clotted cream for Christmas Day tea... if I get myself organised, too, I can make some Christmas biscuits to my old schoolfriend Sabine's recipe, which are rather delicious. I can feel a plan coming on.

Roast socks - delicious...

So, the older son has been in Paris this week, and he returned home clutching a whole Reblochon cheese, which the wrapper says is the cheese for Tartiflette.

This is something I've heard of but have never tried, so I did a bit of research on the interwebs and every recipe I found for it was different. There were the common threads of Reblochon, potatoes, onion and bacon, but otherwise just about every aspect of the recipe varied profoundly.

Garlic, or not garlic? (Duh - it's French, so it really ought to.)
Mushrooms?
Cream, or not? And if yes - single, double or creme fraiche? And how much? 6tbsp up to 300ml...
Boil old potatoes and then peel and slice them, or boil new potatoes in their skins and then slice them, or slice them and boil them? And do you fry the potatoes before putting them in the dish? Or not?
Butter the cooking dish, or not?
Lardons or regular bacon? Smoked or not?
White wine? If yes - do you pour a glass over the whole thing before it goes in the oven, or deglaze the pan with it? Or just drink it?

Apache potatoes

Oval Pyrex dish

In the end I stopped reading the recipes, as it was all getting too confusing, added new potatoes and cream to the shopping list (I had bacon and onions in stock already) and then older son and I set to this evening to assemble it. We found some rather lovely Apache potatoes (left) in Tesco today so they were an obvious choice, and decided to make it in a large oval Pyrex dish (below).

This is what we did.

Take 1.2kg Apache potatoes, wash them, then slice (5mm slices) into a pan of cold water. Add salt and bring to the boil. Simmer for 7 mins (according to one recipe, the potatoes should be "tender when pocked with a knife"). We gave them a quick pocking and determined that they were sufficiently done, so drained them and kept them warm.
While the potatoes are cooking, chop a pack of sliced smoked bacon into 1cm slices and fry gently in 15g butter and 15ml olive oil. (I used a 6-rasher pack of back bacon as I had one lurking in the fridge.)  Put the oven on - 200degC.
Peel and slice 2 med/large onions and add to the frying pan. Peel and chop 3 cloves of garlic and add those to the pan as well. Cook gently until the onion and garlic are soft but not coloured. Add a bit of pepper and salt.
Put 15g butter into the dish and microwave it until it melts, then cover the inside of the dish with butter using a pastry brush.
Put half of the potatoes in the bottom of the dish in an even layer, then half of the onion and bacon mixture, then 75ml cream (we used a mixture of single and double). Repeat the layers, then unwrap the Reblochon cheese, and, cursing freely, attempt to cut it into two rounds. Give up on that idea, and cut it in half first into two semicircles, then attempt to cut each half into two thinner semicircles. (It's evil stuff, Reblochon - as the knife passes through it it has a magical self-healing property, so it sticks itself back together again. Son and I both tried  with a semicircle, with varying degrees of success.)
Use the somewhat ragged semicircles, rind-side up, to thatch the top of the Tartiflette, then pour a glass of wine over the top (using a pastry brush to make sure the cheese rind is thoroughly wine-y).

Put in the oven, and listen to the howls of horror from younger son as the house fills with the delicious aroma of roasting socks. Once the top starts going crisp and brown, and it's bubbling vigorously, it's done.

Serve with a green salad.

Cheesy leeky mash

Take 1kg potatoes, cut into even sized pieces, and put into a pan of cold water. Add 1 teaspoon salt. Turn the heat on. Wash and slice 500g leeks (including the green bits) and add to the pan. Bring to the boil. Once the potatoes are cooked, drain, add 150 ml milk, 20g butter and about 100g grated cheese, plus a good sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper to the pan, and mash roughly. Good with oven-ready fish in breadcrumbs/batter portions, and takes about the same length of time to cook. Feeds two starving teenage boys and two adults with normal appetites. I gave up peeling potatoes that I was going to mash some years ago. It's much quicker, tastes good, and gives a dish an appealingly rustic look. Extra fibre too. What's not to like?

Upside-down cake

So, in order to get through the rhubarb in the garden without repeating myself too often, I spent some time today looking at recipes and decided to attempt my own variant of a rhubarb and custard cake. I started off by roasting about 800g of rhubarb, chopped in 2cm lengths and sprinkled with 150g of sugar, in a shallow tin at 180degC for 30 minutes, which reduces the water content greatly and ended up with about 600g of cooked rhubarb in deep pink syrup. I drained this, reserving the syrup. Next, for the cake, I lined a 23cm springform tin with baking parchment, made some custard (11g custard powder, 13g sugar, 160ml milk) then creamed 250g margarine with 250g sugar and 5ml vanilla extract and added 4 eggs, one at a time, before adding 250g SR flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon baking powder and about half the custard, plus some of the syrup from the rhubarb. Half of the mixture went into the tin, and after spreading it out I topped it with half of the rhubarb, then put the rest of the cake mixture on top of that, in rough spoonfuls, then the rest of the rhubarb on top of that. Then I spooned blobs of the custard on the top, and it was ready for the oven. Then, disaster. While I was lifting it into the oven, the base of the springform tin sprung out. The cake mix ended up all over the oven door. I grabbed 3 2lb loaf tins and liners (thank you, Lakeland) and hastily scraped the mix into them, so all my careful layering went completely to pot. After washing the oven door, I put the tins in with crossed fingers and baked them for about 50 mins at 180degC. We had one for dinner, served with the leftover rhubarb syrup, and although it did not look pretty it tasted good.

Salad 'n' soup

What is the correct response when your husband proudly presents you with a strangely misshapen beetroot that he has discovered in the garden? One of the batch that he grew last year, which has somehow escaped being harvested with all the others?

Why, make a salad with it, of course.

So, I peeled it, then out came my trusty vegetable shredder (which looks rather like a mutant potato peeler; something like this one, and which confuses my husband dreadfully - oh, how I laughed when I heard he had been trying to peel potatoes with it once) and shredded it into a bowl along with two carrots and a finely sliced onion. The juice of a lemon, about a tablespoonful of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and pepper went in next, then the whole lot had a good toss and was good to go.

Still in a salad-y mood, as I'd picked up a couple of cheap cucumbers and some tomatoes at the supermarket yesterday, I soaked 150g of bulgur wheat in 300ml boiling water for about 20 mins, then chopped up half a cucumber and quartered 8 cherry tomatoes to make some tabbouleh. A good squeeze of garlic puree, the juice of a lemon, another tablespoonful of olive oil, salt, pepper and a generous handful of flat-leaf parsley from the garden (with the earwigs and ladybirds carefully removed before bringing it indoors) roughly chopped, made the dressing, into which I folded the cucumber and the tomatoes and then the still-warm bulgur wheat.

And the soup: broccoli today.
One onion, chopped and fried gently in 10g butter, with 2 potatoes, diced, then added to the pan with the onion, plus the broccoli stalks from a medium head of broccoli, chopped. About a pint of boiling water, salt and pepper, then after it had simmered for about 10 mins, the rest of the broccoli, and about 8 further minutes simmering. Then a quick whizz in the pan with a hand blender, about 1/2 a pint of milk, and it was ready to serve.

All in all, not a bad lunch!

Rhubarb, rhubarb...

The weather has been a bit dreary for the last couple of weeks, but the rhubarb in the garden has enjoyed the recent rainfall. So much so, in fact, that I think we will mostly be eating rhubarb for the foreseeable future.

I have recently acquired a new crumble dish - the one that I used for my last crumble foray ended up getting used to hold a flower arrangement of anemones for my mum's 75th birthday (happy birthday, Mum! It was a GREAT party!) which she took home with her after the party, and so that my poor chaps at home would not be unduly deprived of crumble, I now have her oval pyrex dish, which is significantly bigger than the one that had the anemones in.

Tonight I gave the larger crumble dish its first outing, with the first crop of rhubarb from the garden.

900g of freshly picked rhubarb, washed and cut into 2.5cm chunks, covered the bottom of it quite nicely. 85g of sugar was sprinkled over that, and that all sat in the dish thinking about things quietly while I whizzed up 300g of plain flour and 120g butter in the food processor, then added 80g rolled oats and 100g sugar and gave it another quick whizz.

Spreading this evenly over the lumpy rhubarb in the dish was a bit challenging - I could have done with more crumble mix, really. Particularly as there is the regular "crumble grumble" in which it is strongly suggested to me that the main point of a crumble is the crumble topping and certain young gentlemen in the house would definitely prefer their crumble with not so much fruit and a lot more topping. As there were some areas where the crumble topping was a bit on the thin side, due to the underlying rhubarb substrate being a little uneven, I popped this in the oven (180degC) for about 50 mins, until the rhubarb juices were bubbling up pinkly through the (all too sparse) crumble topping, bracing myself for the inevitable whingeing when it was served. However, older son and husband both ate it with apparent relish (and a large helping of custard) and younger son will be having his when he gets back from helping at Scouts this evening.

Yes, I'm such a bad mother that I don't even feed my poor son properly before he goes out in the evening these days. But as I didn't get back from work until 6 today, having a crumble that could be eaten by 7 was never really a possibility, and he has it to look forward to when he comes home.

Long and slow...

...that's the best way to cook a casserole.

Today I made a pork and cider casserole which turned out pretty well, despite horrifying both my mother and my husband by my extravagance for using 2 cans of cider in it. But it's enough for 2 meals, and tasted good. Even fussy younger son liked it.

Into my large cauldron went:

1kg diced casserole pork (picked up reduced at the supermarket yesterday)
5 medium-sized onions, peeled and sliced
about 1/3 of a head of celery, sliced finely
8 largish carrots, peeled and cut into thirds
2 cans of Strongbow cider
salt
pepper
the stalks from a good handful of flat-leaf parsley from the garden
about 1tbsp (home grown!) dried sage
400g can chopped tomatoes
250g mushrooms, quartered
After letting it sit for a couple of hours, I added one Granny Smith apple, cored and diced, turned the heat on and brought it to a gentle boil, then turned the heat right down and let it burble very gently for about 3 hours.
I thickened it with a couple of dessertspoons of cornflour, mixed with a crumbled vegetable Oxo cube and a bit more salt and pepper, plus about 150 ml water, then let it burble some more while I cooked rice and green beans to go with it.
Enough for 3 portions today and will comfortably do 4 more portions later in the week, so that's one day I don't have to think about food after work!

Also planned for this week: the legendary Minced Trolley Meat Loaf.

Cheesy mashed potato and leeks

The protein for tonight's dinner was battered haddock fillets to cook in the oven. I looked at them in the box, decided they were a bit small for my hungry tribe, and thought I had better rustle up something pretty substantial as an accompaniment. Even better - I had only one pan to wash up afterwards.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present - cheesy mashed potato and leeks.

Cut 800g of (old) potatoes into even sized chunks and place in a pan of cold salted water. You can peel them if you like, but I seldom do. Chop 500g leeks into 2.5cm long pieces and add those to the pan. Turn the heat on, and bring to the boil.
Once the potatoes are tender, drain the pan, and add 20g butter, a heaped dessertspoon of low fat creme fraiche, about 120ml milk, 80g mature cheddar (grated) and 1 tbsp chopped chives.

Mash it all together roughly - it will be a fairly sloppy texture - and serve. Delicious, and goes very well with the haddock.

Pea and ham soup

My younger son is exceedingly partial to home made pea and ham soup. Even before he could pronounce the word "soup" properly, and called it "doup". This particular recipe was "Yummy doup". My grandad loved this soup too - I used to take him a frozen container or two up when I visited him. I've been making this soup for (counts on fingers) ooh, probably about 20 years now. Ever since I received an enormous stockpot as a wedding present. This has seen some heavy use. Over the years I've experimented with different things in it - potato - or not? Green split peas - or yellow ones? Chop the veg before putting them in, or bung 'em in whole and liquidise them at the end? This is the version that I generally make (and I get complaints now if I vary from it). It makes rather a lot - enough for 4 hungry people for 3 days - so I generally freeze 2/3 of it. It's great to know you have a pot of it in the freezer for emergencies.

Take a smoked gammon hock or ham bone, put it in the stock pot, cover with cold water, and bring to the boil. Skim off any scummy bits, then reduce the heat and simmer for a couple of hours until it's tender (the meat, obviously - you won't get the bones tender no matter how long you cook them).

Take the hock out and sit it on a plate, then skim the fat off the cooking water, which has now turned into wonderful smoky gammony stock (I put it through my skimmer jug, which separates the fat from the watery bits). Put the cooking water back in the pan, along with 500g of yellow split peas, 3 good-sized sticks of celery, 500g peeled and halved onions, 500g carrots. Bring to the boil again and simmer for at least an hour.

Meanwhile, once the hock has cooled down a bit, remove the skin, the blubber layer, the bones and the gristly bits, and you should be left with about 300-500g cooked ham. Chop this into cubes and put it on one side - NOT in the soup yet.

Once the peas are soft and the vegetables are tender, liquidise the veg. I use a slotted spoon to put them into the 1 litre beaker that came with my hand blender, and whizz them in that. It doesn't matter if you get some split peas liquidised too - just make sure that all the big lumps of veg are gone.

Return the liquidised veg to the pan, and add the cubed ham. Put in a good grinding of black pepper, and taste to see if it needs any salt. Simmer gently for another 5 mins or so, then serve. Makes lots!

If you're feeling keen, you can dice half the veg before putting them in to cook, then just fish out the un-diced big lumps - this gives a soup with a chunkier texture. But it takes a fair while, and the onions make me cry, so I tend to just peel them and put them in. I used to add a couple of diced potatoes as well, but I think I prefer it without. And as for using green split peas - well, if I didn't put so many carrots in, that would be fine, but it turns out a rather unappetising khaki if you have green peas and orange carrots. So we have a bright orangy-yellow pea and ham soup.

Warm Puy lentil and cranberry salad

I can't claim this recipe is original - it's based on the one in the Audrey Eyton F2 Diet book, which in turn is based on a recipe by Leon Lewis. But it is delicious and healthy, and takes about 25 mins start to finish.

It's a real star - the earthiness of the lentils, the crisp but tender vegetables, and the sweet tanginess of the cranberries, wrapped in a garlic and parsley dressing.

My version also keeps the washing up to a minimum - 2 pans, a chopping board, a knife, a colander and a garlic press, plus a tablespoon to measure the oil and vinegar.

Put 300g puy lentils in a pan with a generous teaspoon of veg. bouillon powder and 850ml boiling water.
Bring to the boil then turn down to a simmer and cover.
In another pan, warm 1tbsp olive oil and add 3 chopped celery sticks (about 7mm dice). While the celery is sizzling, peel and chop 2 good-sized carrots - again, about 7mm dice - and add them to the celery and stir. Then peel and chop 2 onions - I used 1 red, 1 white - and add those to the veg pan. Stir some more, then chop a courgette into - you guessed it - 7mm dice and add that to the pan. Stir again.
Next, go out into the garden and pick a generous handful of parsley (5 or 6 chunky stalks). Wash the parsley, and chop the stalks finely and add those to the veg pan (stir!), then chop the parsley leaves and put into a large bowl. Add 2 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar, a good grinding of black pepper and about a level teaspoon of salt, and stir. Peel 3 chunky garlic cloves and squidge them through a garlic press into the bowl, and stir again. Add 100g dried cranberries and stir.
The veg will probably be tender (but with a bit of bite still) by now - perfect. Turn off the heat and let them cool for a couple of minutes. Test the lentils to see if they are cooked - you want them yielding, not bullet-like.  When they are cooked, drain them, and leave them to cool for a couple of minutes.
Add the vegetables to the bowl, and stir well to mix with the parsley and garlic and cranberries. Add the lentils and stir again.

Serve warm, and if there is any left over, it is wonderful cold too the next day.

Crumbling...

Two hot puddings in a row. Luxury!

Following a trip to Newmarket yesterday, when I went past the veg stall at just the right time (when they were selling fairly random scoops of assorted things for £1) I came home with various things, including a cucumber, three vine tomatoes, a couple of onions, one cooked beetroot, a large head of garlic, four carrots, a cabbage and four sticks of rhubarb, all for £2.

So, the rhubarb has now gone into a rhubarb crumble which is cooking at the moment alongside a shoulder of pork. (we'll be having the cabbage and the carrots with the pork later on, and some of the garlic and an onion went into the soup).

225g plain flour
85 g butter
50g oats
85g sugar
rhubarb (I'd normally put more than 4 sticks in, but 4 was all I had)
more sugar

Whizz the butter and flour together in a food processor until looking like breadcrumbs; add the oats and sugar and whizz briefly until mixed. Chop the rhubarb into even pieces (about 2 cm long) and put in the bottom of a dish - my crumble dish is an oval pyrex one without handles, a bit like this - I used to do crumbles in a narrower, deeper dish but the family prefers flatter ones.  Sprinkle a couple of tbsp of sugar over the rhubarb, then spoon the crumble topping over evenly.

Cook at about 180degC until the top is browning gently and the rhubarb can be seen bubbling away at the bottom of the dish.

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, Waiting in a hot tureen!

I've long been an Alice in Wonderland fan and returned to this masterpiece many times through my childhood and again in later years.

I've also long been an advocate of soup. Wonderful stuff. I have battled for years against a husband who likes Cup-a-Soup - which to my mind has all the nutritional value of over-salted wallpaper paste and is an abomination. But if he wants cup-a-soup, that's fine. I prefer not to pollute my body with such rubbish, and often make a cauldron full of soup at the weekend. Weekend lunch is generally soup and bread and cheese and things.

Today was a leek, cauliflower and potato soup day. It came out a delicate pale green colour (hence the Lewis Carroll quote) and was really rather good. Here's how I made it:

Into a large pan, melt 20g of butter and put 500g washed, trimmed and sliced leeks in. Stir the leeks around, keeping the pan partly covered so that they sweat rather than frizzle. While the leeks are sweating, peel and slice a couple of garlic cloves and add them to the pan, then fill up the kettle and then chop up a cauliflower (I used all of it except for a couple of the outside leaves which were a bit manky) and put that in too. Peel a couple of medium potatoes (about 250g), slice, and put them in as well, then add boiling water to not quite cover it all, crumble in a couple of vegetable Oxo cubes, and grind in some black pepper.
Let it simmer for about 20-25 mins until all is tender, then liquidise (I do like my hand blender which I can use in the pan to liquidise soup). Mix 50g skimmed milk powder with about 150ml water and add that as well, then check the seasoning.

Serve hot!