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.

Recipe corner: Creamed spinach

As mentioned on Monday, I have recently added this to my rotating repertoire of side dishes for a roast (roast potatoes are the only fixed point, everything else is up for grabs. Controversial?) This is SUCH a simple dish but a fabulous accompaniment. Because the flavours are mellow (the Parmesan is really a seasoning, so it’s not particularly cheesy - just fabulously savoury) it would go with most things. And it is so soft and comforting, I can quite imagine just eating a bowl of mashed potato with this spooned on top with an extra cheeky shower of Parmesan. 

Ingredients

15g butter

15g plain flour

150ml milk

Scant teaspoon of English mustard

10g Parmesan cheese, finely grated

Shallot, finely chopped

Bag of baby leaf spinach (c. 120g)

Knob of butter, splash of rapeseed oil

Nutmeg

Serves 2, as a side

Melt a knob of butter and a splash (just a teaspoon or so) of oil over a very low heat. When the butter is just melted, throw in the shallot. Add a pinch of salt to help it sweat and then cook it, slowly, until soft and translucent. This dish is about softness, so be sure to cook until all hint of crunch is removed.

Add the spinach leaves, still keeping the heat low, and then cover. Cook, covered, for five minutes or so, stirring occasionally and wonder as the spinach wilts to practically nothing. Remove the lid and continue to cook until any visible liquid has disappeared. At this point season - you won’t need too much salt, but add a good grind of black pepper and a generous grating of nutmeg. I went for about a quarter of a small nut as I wanted a real whack of nutmeg flavour, but go slowly if you’re not sure - it’s heady stuff. Remove the spinach mixture from the pan and set aside.

Turn the heat up slightly (so now medium low) and then we’re making a standard roux. You know the drill: melt the butter then stir in the flour to create a pale, golden paste. Pour the milk in, a third or so at a time, stirring briskly on each addition to ensure a smooth sauce. Once all the milk has been added, lightly season (remember you already have well seasoned spinach), stir through the mustard and bubble the sauce, gently, for a couple of minutes. Taste, to ensure all the flour taste has been cooked out. Remove from the heat and melt through the Parmesan. Finally, add the spinach back to the sauce and combine well.

Bake in a hot (180 fan) oven for 25-30 minutes, until golden and bubbling. I would suggest covering it for the first half and then removing the lid / foil for the remainder, but I have a beast of an oven. If you’re having it as part of a roast dinner (for example) it a good one to prepare in advance and just whack in to bake alongside potatoes et al.

Easter Sunday lunch - 2019

For the second year in a row, D and I decided to push the boat out a bit for Easter Sunday lunch.  Although we did not eat it at lunchtime.  And we are neither of us practicing Christians (although I still maintain that my Catholicism is lapsed rather than totally extinct.)

Last year, we had duck.  This year, we again blew raspberries in the face of tradition (which demands that one serves lamb on Easter Sunday) and had pork.  Roast belly pork.  Twice cooked.

But first, not so much as a starter as an amuse.  An idea that we blatantly nicked borrowed from the specials board of The Reliance last week.  Little Jersey Royals, parboiled and then tossed in oil and roasted, split and topped with sour cream and caviar (not the real stuff, I hasten to add).  Reader, this is such a simple idea but it is SO effective and would make a marvellous canape, especially during Jersey Royal season.

Onto the pork, and my husband takes roasting belly pork very seriously.  This behemoth of a joint was slow cooked, pressed and then finished under the grill per the method that I've described here.

I, meanwhile, was in charge of side dishes, and I made lightly pickled rhubarb and stem ginger - not quite a chutney - based on Diana Henry's recipe here.  It was absolutely delicious with the rich meat.  She served it with a pork loin that was flavoured with caraway and juniper - I knew that wouldn't fly with the Pig Master, so decided to introduce caraway, at least, into the meal by sauteeing little cubes of potato with caraway seeds until crispy and golden.  Finally, we needed something green and so I made a delicious tangle of kale, blanched and then cooked together with onion, bacon and cream and flavoured with bags of black pepper and nutmeg.  To bring everything together, the splendid pork gravy.  And yes, we did serve the gravy in a miniature gravy boat.  The first rule of Masterchef Presenation is that the sauce should always be on the side.

Having devoured that, we were quite pleased that we had kept the starter light because still to come was dessert and this was another very rich dish, for all that I kept the portion sizes small.  Chocolate ganache, salted caramel sauce and candied salted peanuts.  I already had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do but used this recipe as a rough guideline.  It tasted like a very posh Snickers which is a Good Thing.

It wasn't till after we had finished that we realised that not only had the starter been a blatant rip off tribute to The Reliance, but the other two dishes were also based on things that we have eaten there in the recent past.  Which tells you that a) we love The Reliance and if you are ever in Leeds, you should go and b) eating out is an important source of culinary inspiration and therefore is entirely justified in all circumstances. 

Happy Easter one and all!

MPM: 19th November 2018

Gah! I can’t believe that I have got to the end of another week and STILL have two Venice posts to finish not to mention various other half done drafts sitting in my blogger feed to sort out. Hands up - life seems a little bit of a struggle at the moment. Work is challenging - good, but challenging and very full on - and I get home in the evening and weekends and am so drained that I don’t want to do anything much but lie around, stroke the cat and binge on Netflix. I wish that I was one of those people who thrive on wholesome hobbies and think my goal for next year must be to try and make my life outside of work a little bit fuller. It’s probably one of those things, like exercise, that feels overwhelming to start with, but when you get into the routine you reap the positive rewards.

Anyhoo, at the very least I can manage a meal planning post. I’m looking forward to the eats this week:

Monday: shepherds’ pie. Bumped from last week, as I write this (on Sunday evening) the mince is bubbling away in the slow cooker so all I need to do tomorrow is sort out the mash for the top and the veg for the side.

Tuesday: ham, eggs and Piperade from this lovely recipe.

Wednesday: D is out for lunch, so we’re going to keep things fairly light for tea and just have a nice pot of soup. However, I’ve been having a bit of a yen for soda bread recently, so I may knock up some to go on the side.

Thursday: a fennel gratin with an orange zest and pine nut crust, served with a fennel seed pilaf. Thank you, Nigel Slater.

Friday: a beef rendang . We’ll be making use of the slow cooker again so all we have to do on Friday evening is cook some rice to go on the side.

Saturday: D has requested a Szechuan red braised pork belly which sounds delicious.

Sunday: roast chicken with various trimmings.

Have a wonderful week everyone, and happy eating! Oooh, and Peridot, enjoy Fantastic Beasts and be sure to let me know what you think!

MPM: 12th March 2018

Happy Monday campers!  Actually, I'm writing this on Friday afternoon so the weekend is still to come.  I hope that it was a good one.  We have plans for a trip into town for brunch and books, the very nicest sort of day.  Although, really, I need to stop buying books.  I've got a tottering TBR (to be read) pile that I really should tackle before adding still more to it.  But I just can't resist - nothing makes me giddier than the prospect of a browse around a bookshop.  Except, possibly, a browse around a lipstick counter.

We digress.  For today, it is Monday, and that means meal planning (although, actually, we did that on Thursday so the meal plan was contrived on Thursday, written on Friday and only published on Monday.  Mind blowing.)

This week, we fast Monday and Thursday - and after a couple of poor weeks we are determined to get two good days under our belts.  On Friday, we are going for dinner at that behemoth of the Harrogate food scene, Norse.  Looking forward to that one.  Elsewhere:

Tuesday: a four cheese risotto.  Yep, that's right - risotto made with FOUR different cheeses.  The recipe is from The Silver Spoon.  I am looking forward to sinking into a cheesy coma afterwards.

Wednesday:  D has selected bangers and mash - there's very much a comfort food theme emerging here, isn't there?

Saturday: a recipe from "Simple" by the wonderful Diana Henry. Devilled mackerel with cucumber and watercress yoghurt.

Sunday:  roast pork.  Tomorrow, we embark upon a vegetarian week so I have promised D a good chunk of meat to see him off and he has challenged me to make better crackling than my mother, who cooked roast pork for us a couple of weeks ago.  It's not something I cook very often, but I will do my best.

MPM: 19th June 2017

So it got hot. I, in common with much of the rest of the UK, have spent the last few days of the heatwave complaining about it bitterly. When the rain returns halfway through the week, we shall complain bitterly about that too. Such is the British way.

I really like the meal plan this week and am looking forward to all the dishes on rotation - with the possible exception of the inevitable Fast Day soup on Tuesday and Thursday. If it cools down enough to restore my appetite, I shall look forward to them even more.

Monday: roast sea bream with fennel, potatoes, olives and capers. A lovely sounding one pot dish that won't require too much effort and has an appropriately Mediterranean feel.

Wednesday: pasta in a sweet tomato sauce with roasted red peppers and sausage

Friday: a friend of ours brought us back some black pudding from a recent holiday and D suggested using it as part of a proper fry up. A weekend fry up supper was a real treat when I was a child so this should be great. Bacon, eggs, mushrooms and toast will all be in attendance.

Saturday: garlic prawn linguine. The original recipe looks pretty simple - just prawns, garlic, butter, lemon and parsley. I'm wondering about adding some spiralised courgettes and roasted cherry tomatoes for a bit of additional interest (and nutritional value!)

Sunday: Parmesan roasted chicken thighs with cauliflower and thyme - aka variations on a theme of Sunday roast.

Have a good week all!

Meditations on a Sunday roast

Is there anything that we Brits love more than a Sunday roast?  Well, probably many things (is the most popular dish in the UK still chicken tikka masala?) but a Sunday roast is surely up there.  The country may be in total disarray, the economy in free fall but this is one proud British tradition that will surely never die.


The big question is, what is your joint of choice?  D and I have pondered the point for years.  There are so many aspects to take into consideration.  The side dishes - you can't have sage and onion stuffing with lamb now, can you?  The leftovers - we're big fans of the leftover lamb biryani but, equally, cold roast chicken or beef make superior sandwiches (especially if you happen to have some blue cheese knocking around to season the latter).  It's a tough call, but I think my heart belongs to the roast chicken. 

Thus it was, when D saw a mention in the Good Food magazine of a roast chicken to end all roast chickens, we couldn't help but purchase it.  The Thoughful Producer* seems to be a relatively new endeavour which is all about producing the very best quality, free range chickens.  I suspect that these birds get massages.  At £15.99 they are not cheap (you can order direct from their website but we got ours through Ocado to avoid paying the delivery charge) but we thought the resulting product was very good indeed, and without getting preachy, I do think that consumers have a responsibility to buy and eat the very best meat that they can afford.   It's worth bearing in mind as well that this was a BIG CHICKEN - we derived lunch for four people, a round of sandwiches and six portions of curry from ours - that's eleven meals at £1.45 per portion.  (Please note that this is not a sponsored post - we just really liked the chicken and wanted to share the love.)


Back to the Sunday roast, and, to match such a beast we had to bring our A game to the sides.  D produced some fantastic hasselback potatoes, which were a bloody faff to cut but a delight to eat.  He tucked thin slivers of garlic and flecks of rosemary into the slits in the potato and drizzled with oil; the result was somewhere between a roastie and a jacket potato, crispy of skin and firm of flesh. 

Peas were sautéed with pancetta and shallots and seasoned with the merest hint of dried chilli which only served to enhance their sweetness.  And we roasted hunks of cauliflower until they were beginning to char and then poured over a sweet-sour dressing which included honey, sultanas and pine nuts.  Puffy, golden Yorkshire puddings and a rich gravy, enhanced by the bird's own giblets added the finishing touches.


The thing with Sunday dinners is that you have to resist doing too many dishes to preserve your own sanity.  But I would have loved to add more here - a sage and onion stuffing, a root vegetable mash, crispy roasted kale, batons of sweet, sticky parsnips, sausagemeat.  The list goes on ad infinitum.  Luckily, Sunday rolls around every week so there is always another roast dinner on the horizon to which we can look forward.  If you have any tips for new dishes or recipes then I would love to hear them!

ETA: Yotam Ottolenghi has some lovely ideas for chicken side dishes that are a bit more exotic and summery than good old roast spuds - see here.

Meat free musings

Well, we went a whole week without eating any meat or fish at all.  And, for the most part, what a delicious experience it was!  While I am not now having some sort of Damascene conversion and eschewing animal flesh forever (I ate a smoked salmon sandwich yesterday and it was lovely) I certainly am now more aware than ever that it is perfectly possible to eat delicious food that happens to be vegetarian (as opposed to vegetarian food that happens to be delicious).

One thing I noticed was that the range of veggie friendly food on the go is a bit lacking.  I work away from the office on a Monday and tend to pick up a sandwich in good old M&S.  In this instance, unless you were a fan of cheese or egg, there wasn't much there, especially in comparison to the plethora of chicken based options.  Fortunately, I love cheese and egg, but it felt a wee bit uninspiring.

The only meal where I positively missed the meat was my vegetarian Sunday roast.  I made a carrot and cashew nut roast from this recipe which was delicious (I had some cold for lunch today with salad and homemade coleslaw - lovely) but, for all the onion gravy and roast potatoes and buttery braised cabbage, it just wasn't quite the same.  I would rather have had chicken with perhaps a slice of nut roast fulfilling the role of the stuffing.

Which leads me on to my next point - that just because you're eating vegetarian food, your calorie consumption is not necessarily going to go down.  The nut roast is a case in point - the recipe serves 4-6 with a quarter portion coming in at something like 15 pro points (which would be somewhere in the region of 600 calories).  That's higher than for a decent sized portion of lamb, the fattiest of the Sunday meats, and significantly higher than a good helping of the leaner chicken, turkey or pork.  I also found myself eating more cheese than I might do in the normal course of things - probably because I really like cheese and, when it came to meal planning, it kept springing to mind as a natural protein source.

I think only one of the meals that we had was entirely vegan - Nigella Lawson's tomato and pea curry with coconut rice.  I really enjoyed this, although am slightly ashamed to say that D and I both commented on how nice the tomato curry would be as an accompaniment to some  spiced lamb cutlets.  Sigh.

All in all though, a success, and a salutary reminder of how it is not only possible but actually pretty easy to go meat free if you need to.  D will be serving up his meat free week at the end of February and it will be interesting to see how we compare - he tends to be a more adventurous cook than I, so probably less cheese and more spice.  I'm sure that there is a Spice Girls joke to be had there somewhere...

Foodie at home: the best of 2015

Being a terribly sad spreadsheet obsessive, I keep a record during the year of our evening meals. Not all of them, just the ones that we would be happy to repeat.  I also note how many times that particular dish is cooked so that I can measure the popularity.  I've been doing this on and off since midway through 2012.  I probably need to get out more.

Anyway, it does mean that come the end of the year I am well equipped to reflect upon what we have been cooking (and eating).  Which is lucky for the purposes of this post.

As ever, our most consumed dish is the ubiquitous pan fried salmon fillet with pasta pesto.  which we have had seven times this year.  I don't know what it is about this particular combination of flavours that we love so much but it is a household staple.  The pesto is out of a jar, making this incredibly quick and simple to throw together.  Often, we stir ribbons of courgette and a handful of peas through the pasta for added green.  I don't think that I will ever get tired of eating this.

We try and have a roast dinner at least every other Sunday, and 2015 was the year of the roast lemongrass and turmeric chicken from Diana Henry's stunning "A Bird in Hand".  This recipe is all kinds of tasty.  And, as an accompanying side dish, my coronation rice salad works perfectly.  I'm so proud of that recipe - it definitely surpasses the original supermarket version that inspired it in the first place.

Continuing on a theme of spice, 2015 was the year when D created the masala spiced fish finger sandwich as an anniversary meal which I absolutely loved.  A good sandwich is a thing of beauty and a joy forever and this one was superlative.

Another innovation for 2015 was to institute "Sunday breakfast" as a way to extend our early morning fare beyond bacon sandwiches.  We've had some gorgeous dishes so far, but my favourite is probably the bhurji pau - spicy scrambled eggs.  I owe Babu Street Kitchen a debt of gratitude for opening our eyes to the possibility of spice at breakfast time.

From India to Italy - and one of my ingredients of the year (I banged on about it enough) has to be the 'nduja sausage that I bought from The Ham and Cheese Company.  Oh, but I love this stuff.  I've got lots of ideas for introducing it into different recipes, but to be honest, you probably will never better just spreading it thinly on toast, drizzling with a little olive oil and flashing it under a piping hot grill to melt slightly.

Talking of toast, I think that this year I might finally have conquered my fear of bread making.  Certainly, I have become distinctly more proficient and my confidence continues to grow.  The satisfaction of eating freshly baked bread, warm from the oven, is immense.  I don't have a huge repertoire as of yet but this Hairy Bikers' recipe for a rustic Spanish loaf is definitely a current household favourite.  I might have to write that up over here actually, as recipes on the BBC website have a nasty little habit of disappearing.

And finally, there was very little in the way of Weight Watching this year and nowhere is this more evidenced than by this remarkable dessert that we made at Easter - hot cross bun pudding with salted caramel.  We served it with a stollen flavoured ice cream, but it would be just as good drowned in cream.

Here's to more good cooking and eating in 2016!

Italian inspired stuffed leg of lamb with Spring on the side - Easter Sunday chez Foodie

For all that Easter is the arguably more significant religious festival (to Christians, at least) it is Christmas Dinner that has become the biggest occasion in the home cook's calendar.  This year, D and I wanted to try and redress the balance a little bit.

It had to be lamb.  You can't not cook lamb at Easter.  And,to be honest, if you're going to cook lamb, it is very hard to go wrong with Tom Kerridge's superlative lamb shoulder on boulangere potatoes. If you've never cooked that little beauty, dear Reader, then you need to give it a go.  But I wanted to do something a little bit different this year, and took to t'Internet for some alternative inspiration.

I ended up, thanks to some inspiration from a dear friend, with an approximation of this recipe, courtesy of the Jamie Oliver magazine.

I started with a leg joint that my friendly local butcher boned out and butterflied for me.  It is worth asking a professional to do this if you possibly can, although a husband with access to You Tube and a sharp knife will make a jolly good attempt if you're pushed.  I smeared a couple of heaped teaspoons of green pesto across the meat then added roughly chopped artichoke hearts, still golden and peppery with oil, anchovy fillets, a thick coating of Parmesan breadcrumbs, a carpet of flat leaf parsley and plenty of seasoning before rolling the beast up and securing with string.  There are some powerful, salty ingredients in that stuffing, such that it sounds like it might be slightly too much - but rest assured that in conjunction with the sweet, fatty lamb it works like an absolute dream.

To accompany, I wanted some side dishes that would incorporate the same sort of robust flavours as the meat but might be slightly lighter than the Sunday dinner norm.  I revisited an old friend, a cannellini bean puree flavoured with lemon and roasted garlic which provided a soft, flavourful blanket on which to build the plate up with roasted new potatoes, pan roasted asparagus (still not local alas - I'm waiting for the start of the season with bated breath) and a delicious braised fennel gratin with lemon and Parmesan.  Minted peas would be another excellent addition here if you felt so inclined.