Happy meals - nature's bounty

We've been lucky this week; a good friend gifted D some of the produce from his lovely garden, which meant we had a huge tub of tomatoes that were just on the verge of overripe and some lovely plums and greengages. Although we meal plan to the point of almost obsession, the original plan was jettisoned to ensure that this got used.

And what a lovely supper it was too! I cut the tomatoes in half and placed them, cut side up, in an oven proof dish, seasoned liberally with not only salt and pepper but onion granules, garlic granules and a few chilli flakes too. Drizzled with balsamic glaze and added a few thick slices of butter. Then roasted for 50 minutes until the tomatoes were collapsing into themselves and the buttery juices. Stirred through 4 finely chopped anchovies, a small handful of capers and a flurry of Parmesan before adding pasta and some starchy pasta water to create a clinging sauce. More Parmesan and, voila. 

This was followed by a greengage dessert cake, made from this recipe, warmed through in the microwave and served with a good splodge of cream. We don't often have pudding midweek, but this seemed warranted. I liked the texture of this cake very much, a good, dense, buttery crumb with a sweet crust, and the sharp greengages contrasted well. 

The remainder of the fruit has been transformed, by the very talented D, into a spiced compote which will be delicious with yogurt in the coming weeks. I am very tempted to do some homemade granola as well - Nigella has a couple of recipes that look interesting, including one with olive oil.

Happy Meals - Variations on a Sunday roast

Before the food - the pedantry. I have noticed that in some post titles I use a hyphen and in some I use a colon and it is irritating me. To the extent that I may spend all day tomorrow going back through hundreds and hundreds of blog posts to try and achieve uniformity. That is all.

Yesterday, D roasted a splendid piece of rolled pork belly, low and slow initially and then blasted with heat so that the meat was juicy and tender but the outer skin crunched loud enough to hear across the room when you bit into it. Just as it should be. The pork sat on a trivet above a tray of apples and onions and cider, and the resulting concoction was just as flavourful as you might imagine, full of bite. We spooned it over the meat where it clung, more a sauce than a gravy and none the worse for that.

I was in charge of sides but decided to do something a little different to a standard complement of roasted roots, and so made, for the first (but not the last) time, a dish of Lyonnaise potatoes and some kale, braised with pancetta, liberally seasoned with black pepper and nutmeg, and finished with just a lick of cream. My main complaint with regards this latter dish is that there was enough of it - the kale cooked down a little more than I was expecting. 

Sunday cooking is lovely - slow, considered...the house becoming steadily more fragrant with cooking smells as the afternoon wends its way into the evening. Sunday cooking is chopping vegetables while perched on a stool at the kitchen island, with a cup of tea to hand and the radio burbling in the background. A very pleasing memory to take into the working week.

Recent eats: an interminable January

I think January might have lasted forever. And even though we are, let's be honest, over a third of the way through February, February has just proved itself to be something of a January 2.0. Cold, wet, miserable and utterly ennui-inducing. D is only finally now shaking off a cough he's had since before Christmas, I've been feeling rundown and lurgy-ish and none of this has got 2025 off to a particularly dazzling start.

I decided to dust off the blog to do a recent eats post and went searching through my phone for pictures to share - needless to say, found very little. Little by way of food pictures, that is - if you want a picture of the cat asleep on the back of the sofa then I have several hundred iterations. We really haven't left the house very much, one exception being a lunchtime trip to White Cloth Hall, a relatively new Leeds venture which features a number of street food(ish) type vendors. We shared a Jamie Thiccston sandwich from Morty's Focacceria which was an absolute beast of a thing, but delicious for all of that. I would have liked slightly more burrata but, then, I think most things would benefit from more burrata. In general, the ratio of bread to filling was pretty good, there was plenty of salty, slippery mortadella and it wasn't so ridiculously huge you couldn't fit it in your mouth in one go to get the full benefit of the layers.

We've done some home cooking, of course,  and have enjoyed several dishes from Meera Sodha's latest book, Dinner which I commend to your attention, especially if you wish to up your vegetarian and vegan cooking game. Having said that, looking back over the archive meal plan, I think one of my top food moments from January was carnivorous; tucking into haggis, neeps and tatties on Burns night, smothered in a fabulous whisky sauce. Classics are classics for a reason. Oh, and I baked some blondies for my Dad's birthday which turned out rather nicely. 

But all in all not an awful lot to share from these first few weeks of the year. We plod on.

Happy meals - Gordon Ramsay’s pork with peppers

 

There are few things my husband enjoys more than a monster pork chop. And these pork chops, from Swaledale Butchers, were indeed monsters. The layer of fat was truly obscene; these were the Marlon Brando at-the-end-of-his-life of pigs. But the meat itself was incredibly tasty and succulent.

One of our favourite ways to eat pork chops is a Gordon Ramsay recipe, which he published in his Complete Cookery Course. It is also available online - here. It's incredibly simple - peppers and red onion cooked low and slow, olive oil, a splash of vinegar, a pinch of sugar. The sweet and sour veg cut through the meat without overpowering or overwhelming the porcine star of the show. As a carb monster, it is rare that I eat a dish which solely consists of meat and veg but it is really all you need here. Although if someone were to offer me some crusty bread for mopping, I'd never turn it down.

Recipe corner: slow cooked sausage sauce (ideal for penne)

I hope that I'm not the only person out there that has an absolutely ridiculous amount of recipe bookmarks. I mean, more dishes than I could ever make in a lifetime if you count them up across all the different platforms. And still, they continue to accumulate.

There are some, though, that just lodge themselves in your head. And the fact that I recently cooked a recipe from a blog post that was originally written in 2010 just goes to show that...er, it may take 14 odd years but you might get there eventually. And, when you do, it will be splendifiourous! For this was a truly fantastic dish that I'm glad I finally roused myself to make, and will appear on our food plan again.

I believe that this is originally a River Cafe recipe, via Essex Eating, to ensure that the full credit is here in the post. It is rich and meaty and creamy and the absolute perfect pasta sauce to carry you through the autumn months. 

Ingredients

4 decent pork sausages

tbsp olive oil

Red onion, finely chopped

3 garlic cloves, crushed or grated

1/2 tsp chilli flakes

1/2 tsp fennel seeds

Bay leaf

150ml red wine

400g tin tomatoes

Pinch of sugar

1/4 nutmeg

60g Parmesan, finely grated (plus the rind if you have it)

75ml double cream

Serves 2-3 with 75g pasta pp (depending on level of greed)

Over a medium heat, warm the oil and then crumble in the sausage meat, removed from its skins. Cook gently, until more fat starts to render from the sausages.

Now add the onion, garlic and dried spices and, keeping the heat relatively low, cook for 30 mins or so until the onion is golden and soft.

Add the wine, whack the heat up a notch or two, and cook briskly until all the liquid has evaporated. Then add the tomatoes, seasoning with a pinch of sugar to take off the acidity, and add the Parmesan rind as well if you happen to have it. Turn down the heat and simmer for 45 minutes.

Season with the nutmeg, plus salt and pepper as required (you won't need much of either), and then stir through the grated cheese and the cream.

Serve with pasta (although I actually also think this would be lovely with a cloud of mash).

Happy Meals - the tastiest sausage

 

The second HM post and this one also contains a homemade sausage. But I make no apologies because sausages are wonderful things and homemade sausages are particularly wonderful (although Ginger Pig’s offerings come a close second).

D’s Merguez sausages are extra-particularly wonderful. Lamb, rather than pork, and heavily spiced with a hint of chilli heat. We ate them with red pepper hummus (also homemade, using my basic template as a starting point and then throwing in roasted red peppers, paprika, chilli, oregano and extra garlic), flatbreads, stuffed vine leaves and herby falafels (not homemade - the shame!)

Excellent stuff.

Happy Meals - a Thai inspired Saturday supper

Welcome to a new, probably infrequent, possibly one episode only series of quick posts talking about meals have cooked at home that we particularly enjoyed.

A little background to this one: D is currently a little obsessed with the London based Thai restaurant Kiln. He went there twice in two days when he was last down. They don’t have a recipe book but they do have a few recipes available on the Great British Chefs website and, yesterday evening we cooked two of them. 

Behold, with my usual appalling food photography skills on display (in fairness, I was hungry) - two Sai oua which is a type of Northern Thai sausage served with a mushroom salad with bitter herbs. On the side, Thai sticky rice, lightly fried then dressed with a sauce consisting of a tablespoon each of Sriracha chilli sauce, honey, fish sauce and sesame oil and finished with some shredded omelette (which had been seasoned with more fish sauce and white pepper). The whole dish was garnished with Thai basil and birds eye chillies. 

Better than any Thai takeaway I have EVER had, I enjoyed every mouthful. And if the food in Kiln is even half as good then D is really on to something and I need to get my arse there as soon as possible. 

Recipe corner: labneh with roasted tenderstem broccoli

Of COURSE it was the case that on one of the hottest days of the year I should have planned an evening meal that required a lot of time spent cooking. Just as on a similarly warm day a few weeks ago, I went to a pastry making class (at Betty’s Cookery School and it was tremendous fun, albeit attempting flaky pastry in 20 degree plus heat is rather messy). My sense of timing has always been admirable. 

Anyway, last Saturday night we had sort-of mezze. I say sort of because the dishes and flavours were taken from a range of cuisines and thrown together in what I would like to think was a fusion (rather than confusion) of gastronomic experiences. But I fully concede I might be deluded on that point; never let it be said I achieve authenticity in my cooking. 

We had D’s amazing Merguez sausages, roasted and served with a simple houmous and a few whole chickpeas for texture. We had Ottolenghi’s iman bayaldi, a stewed aubergine dish that I’ve been meaning to make for ages. We had za’tar flatbreads. And we had roasted broccoli on labneh. 

So, this latter dish was inspired by two things; a perusal of the original Moro cookbook, and a starter I ate at the late, lamented Reliance sometime last year. (For those not au fait with the Leeds pub scene, The Reliance was a fantastic gastropub and Leeds institution, and the menu was magic for interesting vegetable based dishes).

Even if you don’t try this particular combination, I’d urge you to give labneh a go - so easy and SO delicious. It found it to be similar in taste and texture to Boursin cheese; my next batch I am going to combine with cracked black pepper and smear all over a baguette. 

Ingredients

For the labneh (first stage):

300g full fat Greek yoghurt

Generous pinch of salt

(Second stage):

Small clove of garlic

Spring onion, finely chopped

Salt and plenty of black pepper

For the garnish:

100g trimmed tenderstem broccoli spears

Tbsp olive oil (plus extra for garnish)

Tbsp flaked almonds

1-2 tbsp pickled jalapeño chillis, roughly chopped (optional)

Serves 2 as part of a mezze spread or side dish

Making labneh is incredibly easy but you will need a large bowl, a muslin cloth, a wooden spoon and room in the fridge.

Line the bowl with the cloth and spoon in your yoghurt. Add salt and stir through. Then, gather up the sides of the cloth and tie round the handle of the wooden spoon (other kitchen implements will work too), which you have laid across the top of the bowl, so that you end up with a little money bag of yoghurt, suspended over the bowl. The bag should not touch the bottom of the bowl. 

I feel like I have repeated the word bowl too often in that paragraph.

Leave overnight in the fridge. Mine was suspended for about 22 hours in total and I thought the consistency was perfect but the longer it stays in there, the firmer it will be.

When you come to make the dish, preheat the oven to 180 degrees and toss the broccoli in olive oil and seasoning. Once the oven has come to temperature, you will roast for around 20 mins.

Drain any liquid from the bottom of the labneh bowl and remove the cheese from the muslin cloth. Beat lightly to loosen and then you can add any flavouring you wish. I kept this relatively simple by stirring through a little garlic, a spring onion and lots of seasoning. Spread the labneh on a serving plate.

Lightly toast the almonds in a dry frying pan over a low heat.

When the broccoli is roasted and the ends beginning to look a little charred, remove from the oven and place on the labneh. Drizzle over a little olive oil and sprinkle on the almonds and jalapeño chillies (if using).

Note: if you’re not a fan of crunchy broccoli, you may wish to blanche the spears in advance of roasting.

Weekend eats (and kitchen talk) - April 2023

As I mentioned in my last but one post, we recently had some major construction work done on the back of our house, which included completely reinventing our formerly tiny kitchen. Previously, we had a fairly large (for a bog-standard 1930s semi) dining room which had a LOT of dead space, partly due to a very small and rather pointless back extension. At the same time, the kitchen was a small galley, with limited storage and limited surface space. It certainly wasn't comfortable for two people to cook in at the same time. The oven was ancient, and one of the five gas hobs hadn't worked in a decade (let's gently gloss over the reason why neither of us ever thought to get it repaired or, indeed, why the oven itself with many year's worth of baked on grime never found itself at the receiving end of a deep clean.) The surfaces themselves were appalling, the decor that peculiar shade of pale, sickly yellowish beige that seemed to be so popular back in the seventies. In short, a bit of a nightmare, especially for people who enjoy cooking and want the kitchen to be at the centre of the home.

Circumstances at last allowed for us to rip it all out and start again. It has been a long, painful and ludicrously expensive process but we are now there, bar a little bit of final painting, and to say that I am delighted is an understatement.

From this...

To this:

Isn't it lovely?

I'll admit, though, I've found it a tiny bit difficult to get into the swing of cooking in the new space. It doesn't really feel completely mine yet and I'm a bit nervous about making a mess. So D has done most of the heavy lifting, cookery speaking, so far. This weekend was the first time I really started to relax and enjoy it a little bit more. I made floury buns and coleslaw to accompany some excellent hotdog sausages on Saturday evening, and on Sunday we had a joyous Welsh rarebit for breakfast and bacon chops with mustard mash, smoky creamed spinach and roasted asparagus for supper and it was all very, very nice indeed.