Category: Vegetables

Cauliflower – puree perfection

Actually, I have a bit of a problem with cauliflower. There’s always the potential, I think, when it is served in whole boiled pieces, that you could bite into it and get a mouthful of hot water….. Even making cauliflower cheese doesn’t really help. The cheese is OK, but underneath? Cauliflower.

Then one day I read about cauliflower puree. Smooth, tasty and delicious, apparently. Being curious about anything food related, I was willing to give it a try. I love to be proved wrong about food I say I hate and guess what? I was wrong about cauliflower! Creamed Spinach, cauliflower puree 010

You need (obviously enough) a cauliflower, some cream, butter, salt and pepper.

Break, or cut the cauli into florets, making sure they are of an even size so that it cooks evenly

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Put into a large pan of well salted water and bring to the boil. Putting half a lemon into the pan helps keep it white and just sharpens the flavour a little.

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It won’t take long to cook at all, maybe 5 to 10 minutes. Check with a sharp knife to see that it is tender.

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Drain it in the sink and let it dry slightly… all that steam escaping is water you don’t necessarily want in your puree.

Put the cauliflower florets in a bowl and with a hand stick blender, whizz it to a smooth puree – adding in a good knob of butter and some cream to enrich it and some salt and pepper to season it.  Taste it.. it has a rich and earthy depth to it…..

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Doesn’t that look just lovely? That turned me from a cauliflower loather to a cauliflower lover!

(One of my favourite ways to serve it is with black beluga or puy  lentils and some roast lamb….

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Just boil some lentils with some stock for extra flavour…. the drain…. and serve with the puree

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A nice bit of roast lamb on the top and you have the perfect flavour and texture combination)

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So there you have it.. take something you don’t like and make it into something you do like. 

(I blame school dinners, I really do! )

Roasted pumpkin seeds

As it is getting towards Halloween you see pumpkins everywhere, in every farm shop and greengrocer.

I thought that I would make pumpkin soup this week and then the Bear had the brilliant idea of also making our own roasted pumpkin seeds to have as a snack. They are full of fibre, high in protein and anti oxidants so they are, actually, a health food… despite tasting absolutely delicious.

First of all, get your pumpkin!                               Beans and belly pork 036

Cut it open ……

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 and start scooping out those seeds! They are your bonus – you’re making soup with the flesh and what you would have discarded you are now going to make into tasty little bites. Put the oven on to preheat at about 150 degrees

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 You need to scrape the fibres off

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And then give them a good rinse under the tap because they are very slippery and the gloopy bits rinse away easily enough

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Put them on a clean tea towel and rub them dry… well, you won’t be able to do that but you can get a lot of moisture off them

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You need to think about how you want to flavour the seeds – I fancied spicy ones and looked to see what was in the cupboards that I could use. I regularly make chilli oil by popping chillies into a bottle and topping it up with grapeseed or sunflower oil. It’s not particularly hot but it just adds a hint of heat. Worcestershire sauce would be nice too and I also found some Jerk Seasoning which I thought would just fit the bill as a flavouring dust to help crisp things up

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The oven should now be hot, so get a baking tray and put one of those silicon sheets on…. or cover it with tin foil, sprinkle that with the oil, pour on the pumpkin seeds, add a teaspoon or so of Worcestshire Sauce,  salt and then shake that Jerk Seasoning over the whole lot.

Roasted pumpkin seeds 020 Into the oven with it and that’s where it will stay for the next 15 – 30 minutes.

You need to keep checking though and stirring them round because they can burn easily but you’ll see them turn a lovely toasty colour. Put them onto some kitchen towel to absorb any extra oil

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Let them cool  and then serve those crunchy morsels up. If you served them with a glass of wine, I reckon you’d be hitting every health button there was!

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There you have it – tasty snacks from the stuff you would otherwise throw away. I think we deserve medals for being so creative and cost concious. Cheers!

Butter bean mash

Sometimes I just get fed up with the ordinary things I make to go with a meal. Sometimes I just don’t have time to make the ordinary things… mashed potaoes? All that peeling, boiling, draining and mashing? What if you are late in from work and need something quickly? Or, quite frankly, if you are fed up to the back teeth of mash?

At times like this I make butter bean mash. I always have tins of beans of various sorts in the larder because they are a brilliant standby and you don’t always have the time to soak the beans overnight.

First of all, get a couple of tins of butter beans, open them and rinse the beans till all the gloopy stuff goes

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Then, while they are draining, get some herbs if you have them

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I found some thyme, chives and oregano in the herb boxes on the balcony and, after stripping the leaves from the stems, chopped them roughly

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Then, as I heated some butter in a pan, I squeezed in some lemon juice to sharpen things up a bit

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And if you look closely you will even see a drop of lemon juice perfectly captured as it falls into the pan.

I’d like to say that shot was planned that way, but really it was just sheer luck.

By now the beans were well drained so they were added to the buttery lemon mix and stirred round, with the chopped herbs thrown in to soften in the heat. Once they were good and hot, I gave them a bit of a bashing with a potato masher

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Not too much though because you don’t want a smooth puree, you need something of the butter bean left

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And there you have it… a good, roughly smashed dish of butter beans

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Just right to serve up with whatever you fancied.

On this particular night, what I fancied was some delicious stewed beef and mushroom that I had made a few weeks ago and frozen ready for a night like this….. and served it in a good old Yorkshire Pudding

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It was gorgeous. The butter beans made a lovely change from ordinary mashed potato and were quick and easy. The buttery, lemony, herby tang livened them up brilliantly… and for a side dish that took less than 10 minutes? Perfect.

Well, what else could you ask for on a cold and dark night?

Mmmmmm…. Mushroom soup

 

So. It’s cold. I’m bored and then H rings to tell me I have some temping work when I can work again. That cheers me up immensely but I feel even happier when H says she has been reading this blog. And she has a request – H wants soup, mushroom soup in particular. Well, what H wants, she can have… and that also solves the dinner dilemma. I hadn’t the faintest idea what to cook and now I know.

I set off to the greengrocers to get the necessary ingredients… mushrooms! Mushroom soup is easy and simple but it can equally easily be given extra bits to make it more luxurious.

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I got mushrooms – a brown paper bag full.

An onion and some garlic.

Some single cream

I already have dried mushrooms at home – but you don’t have to add them if you don’t want to.

Chicken or vegetable stock cubes or granules.

And my added extras – I have yoghurt in the fridge and from the cupboard some porcini powder and truffle oil for drizzling

First of all, chop onion and saute it

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Putting salt in keeps the onion soft. You don’t want crispy brown onions as the basis of the soup.

Chop your mushrooms roughly – it doesn’t matter because you will be whizzing them later to get a deliciously smooth soup. Add that to the softened onion and throw in a couple of chopped garlic cloves. You’ll see all the juices start to come out and it starts to smell gorgeous. Add a couple of stock cubes, crumbling them into the mix.

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The next bit isn’t essential but it’s what I’m doing today… I have decided to add dried mushrooms to the soup for extra flavour. Packets of dried mushrooms usually contain, amongst other varieties,  porcini mushrooms which have a deep, intensely mushroomy flavour. Get a jug and put some dried ‘shrooms in… top up with boiling water and let it steep

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Now that soup base is coming along beautifully – how about making it even more delicious?

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Yup. Add some cream.

(But here’s a handy hint.. you can use milk instead or… and this is so handy to know… always keep some dried milk in the larder. It is always skimmed milk powder and that means lower fat, obviously. If you add the dried milk powder to the liquid of the soup, whisking it well, or using the hand blender, then you keep the liquid balance right but add flavour whilst not adding fat! It does make it taste creamy and rich and unlike a pot of cream, it stays in the larder without going off! Result eh? Try it. It works. )

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Then this is when those brilliant hand stick blenders come into their own. Start whizzing it to make a lovely smooth base…

 

 

 

 

Now, if you are using the dried mushrooms, this is where you add the mushroom water

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See how it has taken on the colour of the rehydrated mushrooms? Stir it all in and check the taste… it might need a bit of a lift from something.. salt? Pepper?

I leave the rehydrated mushrooms mainly whole, those I do a quick whizz round to partially chop them (The Bear tells me he prefers it all whizzed smooth but I like pieces of mushroom in it. It’s up to you. Do what makes you happy)

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Now for some added extras – if you want to add them do so. If you don’t……then don’t.

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The truffle flavour oil can be drizzled across the top to give a really heavenly truffley, mushroomy scent and the porcini powder dusted over the top of that for another layer of ‘shroomy luciousness.  Drop a spoonful of yoghurt in the middle, drizzle and dust away and you get this…..

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 So, mushroom soup – as simple or as layered as you’d like.  If you make the foccacia bread to go with it you can expect yet more declarations of love from those around you.

Going to do it then?

Creamed Spinach

Despite almost universal condemnation, the winning recipe from Cookery Lotto, was Creamed Spinach from ‘The Prawn Cocktail Years’ by Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham. 

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All I can say is, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Anyway, spinach is good for you.. it says so on the packet. In fact the word “Superfood” is used. And if you were to add cream and butter to it… would that make it a super Superfood? It just gets better and better.

So, let’s get started Creamed Spinach, cauliflower puree 003 – you’ll need

Spinach (at least a large bag full, the recipe in ‘The Prawn Cocktail Years’ says 1.4 kg.. but that really would make a huge amount.

Double cream

Butter

Salt and Pepper

Nutmeg

Cloves

Flour

Milk.

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You will only need 2 cloves and you will need to grate the nutmeg – most jars have a lovely little grater inside!

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 First of all, you need to get a large pan of water boiling away, so you can blanch the spinach

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That only takes a few seconds – you need to dunk the leaves under the boiling water and then get them out and drained and rinsed in cold water.

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Let that spinach cool then really squeeze it dry, ready to chop finely once it has cooled.

Meanwhile, prepare the bechamel sauceCreamed Spinach, cauliflower puree 005.

First though you have to flavour the milk you will be using in it by finely chopping the onion and putting that in a pan with 150ml of milk, along with the two cloves. Get that to simmering point for a few minutes and then take it off the heat and let it steep for about 30 minutes to really get the flavours infused through the milk.

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Melt 50 g  Creamed Spinach, cauliflower puree 016butter      

then add 50 g of plain flour and stir it to make a roux and cook it gently for a few minutes to get the floury taste out.

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Then strain

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the infused milk into the roux and stir quickly and throughly to get rid of any lumps.

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See? Stirring quickly turns it into a gorgeously smooth sauce. It is thick, and you will probably think it is too thick but it’s not. You’ll be adding the spinach to that and you don’t want it to be runny.. the spinach has to be kept in suspension. You’ll see…. keep it on a low heat and cook it for about 15 minutes, stirring every now and then.

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Remember I said squeeze that spinach till it’s dry? You need to chop it finely. No big lumps, eh?

Then…. add the spinach, 50 ml of double cream, a good grating of nutmeg and some pepper and stir it…..look at it……

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Still green… a lovely, bright green. Bound in a delicious cream sauce….. not, as you will be whining ( yes, you know I am looking at you!) not, as I said before, slimy in the least… just the smoothest, most gorgeous, silky, tasty spinach ever.

 Mmmmmmmmmhhhhmmmmmmm…… bliss in a bowl.

No more complaints… go buy spinach!

The Prawn Cocktail Years

In the very first Cookery Lotto, Looby selected “The Prawn Cocktail Years”  by Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham using the completely random method of picking a number and then I counted along the bookshelf. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? We don’t need fancy machines to give us our answers. The National Lottery could learn a lot from us. Cheap and efficient!

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 “Here they all are, fresh as paint, as if they’d never been away. Why did we let them go? Neglected, derided, dismissed as hopelessly naff, in what dismal Midlands eateries have they been waiting out the years of shame? No matter, they’re back. Prawn Cocktail, Steak and Chips and Black Forest Gateau are the signature dishes of The Prawn Cocktail Years, a bravura collection of favourite restaurant dishes from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies–years when Britain was learning to eat out.”  – Amazon

 

How could you not like a description of a book like that?

The next step was to find the recipe in there…. first off the mark was Els, texting in from work …. no 49

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and…. as you can see, the recipe is Creamed Spinach! Bit of a bonus that, for me, because I love creamed spinach. I would eat it once a week at least. Maybe daily.

In essence, it is blanched spinach, finely chopped and added to a creamy bechamel sauce with a grating of nutmeg. An unctuous, smooth, tasty helping of spinachy gorgeousness….

The Bear cries when I make him eat creamed spinach. He’s very odd like that. He has a spoonful and then screws up his face and says he can’t eat it. But he can, you know, and even admits that is isn’t that bad.

That, I think, is the secret to spinach. Make it nicely and it becomes the most delicious, savoury, creamy vegetable with just a bit of a tang to it and it is oh-so-good for you. Serve it with some roast meat and you have heaven on a plate. I’m thinking some roast pork would be good. Sunday lunch it is then!

So tomorrow’s shopping list will include spinach, double cream, milk and an onion. From the store cupboard you’ll need cloves, nutmeg, flour, pepper and some butter from the fridge.

Oh, I’m looking forward to this!