Wednesday Night Pizza

One of the things I dread most is a dinner rota. It's Tuesday, it must be spaghetti. Thursday night is curry. And Sunday? Sunday is the dreaded roast dinner, with the same meat and vegetables as we cooked badly last week.

Individually, there's nothing wrong with any of these for dinner. The banality comes from the inevitably of the same seven dishes wheeled out each week, rather than the food. Back in catered halls, I was initially impressed with the variety and quality of the menus. It was only after a few months when vegetable bake rolled round yet again that I began to dismay.

We didn't have a full rota when I was child, but there were some days that had dinner assigned. Saturday would be fajitas (My father eats everything with a knife and fork, even fajitas. He would go out on Saturday nights so we would take the opportunity to eat with our hands.) The horror of the Sunday roast, followed by a light dinner of taramasalata and pitta bread.*

I looked forward to Wednesday though. Wednesday was pizza night. My dad always cooked on pizza night, using a slab of stone to get extra heat in the oven, and gently pushing the dough to fill the pizza trays. I'd help make the tomato sauce, or mix the dough. I'd be first to volunteer for cutting up the kabanos, sneaking the end slices in to my mouth when I thought no one was looking.

Pizza with peppers, kabanos, olives, mushroom & an egg.

This recipe is far from authentic. It features the aforementioned kabanos (usually we'd buy it from the Polski Sklep, but in this part of Scotland I have to make do with ambient kabanos. Nice.) and a tinned tomato sauce. I'm sure most Italians would probably laugh in disgust. It's invented by a man who hadn't tasted pizza until his late twenties, and garnished with whatever leftovers can be scavenged from the salad drawer.

Ambient Kabanos. Next week - trance wiejska

*looking back, I realise this is quite a weird thing to have for dinner once a week for around 10 years.

Wednesday Night Pizza
Serves 2

Dough
175g plain flour
pinch of sugar and salt
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dried yeast

1) Place all the ingredients in a bowl, and add a splash of warm water.
2) Mix until a smooth dough is formed - you may need to add more water.
3) Knead for around 5 minutes until soft and supple. Place in a oiled bowl, then cover with a damp cloth. Leave to rise for at least 30 mins.

Tomato Sauce
1 small onion
1 clove of garlic
1 tsp anchovy paste
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 can of chopped tomatoes
Sprinkle of dried oregano
Salt and pepper

1) Chop the onion and garlic as finely as you can. Gently fry them for 5 minutes, until soft but not coloured.
2) Add in the anchovy paste and tomato puree. Cook for 1 minute.
3) Pour in the chopped tomatoes, oregano and season.
4) Bring the pan to a gently simmer, and stir occasionally.
5) The sauce is ready once it's very thick and the chunks of tomato are almost totally broken down. Dragging a spoon through the pan should leave a clean line. This usually takes around 20 mins.

Thick tomato sauce

Toppings
I like kabanos, peppers, anchovies, capers, fresh egg, olives, mushrooms and mozzarella. Not necessarily all at once.

Assembly
1) Preheat the oven to the highest setting.
2) Gently stretch the pizza dough over an oiled baking sheet*. You'll need to prod and poke it in to place. Make it slightly bigger as it will shrink a little as you put the toppings on.
3) Spread a thin layer of sauce on the dough, and add your toppings.
4) Blast in the hot oven for 8-10 minutes.
*If you are really clever, you can stretch the dough on to a floured plate, and slide it directly on to a scorching hot baking sheet. This makes for a crispy crust, but runs the risk of your pizza disintegrating in to a heap.

Chestnut And Ricotta Pancakes

This post marks the first birthday of this blog! It's been a bit of an up and down year for me, and I guess this is reflected in the blog a bit. There was the bit in early 2009 where I barely posted at all, as I struggled to recover from a respiratory infection and rushed to complete my final year project. I did quite well on the posting in summer, where there were plenty of friends and flatmates around to eat what I made. Now I only have one flatmate, who doesn't like cake, and it's too dark to take proper photos. Perhaps that is why I haven't posted as frequently as I would have liked recently.

Anyway.

Last night there were chestnuts and ricotta in the fridge. I was planning to make something savoury, but they weren't inspiring me. Jess on Twitter suggested blending it with honey to make a spread. This sounded vaguely more promising.

Chestnut and Ricotta Pancakes

The first lesson I learned was that my 4 year old, £15-from-Argos-Blender is a bit crap. It utterly failed at blending, and instead created some watery chestnut honey paste surrounded by whole chestnuts and lumps of ricotta. It does rule at banana and peanut butter smoothies though.

The second lesson was that chestnuts are massively enhanced by honey. I still don't get ricotta though, I don't like the blandness nor the texture.

I made some pancakes for lunch today, and decided that chestnut ricotta honey mish mash would be the perfect filling.

Chestnut + Honey + Ricotta = Tasty

To make the pancakes, I whisked 120g plain flour with an egg and 100ml milk. Once this was a smooth paste, I added another 200ml milk and a small spoonful of sugar. It would have been a good idea to add some vanilla essence as well, but I couldn't be bothered to get it out of the cupboard. Oh well.

After I'd fried off a couple of successful pancakes (why does the first one always fail?), I filled them with the ricotta and chestnut mix, and dusted with icing sugar.

Pork Hock and Haricot Stew

The borscht I made a few weeks ago needed a bit of pork hock in it. I wasn't going to bother, but it was surprisingly cheap for such a massive hunk of meat. After putting a little of it in the soup, the rest went in the freezer for another time.

Every so often I have to have a freezer purge to get eat up some of the stuff in there, as well as saving some cash. So this week I defrosted the pork hock, and set about finding a recipe to use it in. I came across this Pork Hock and Butterbean Stew on Dinner Diary, and decided to give it a go.

I replaced the butterbeans for haricots, as I had some in the cupboard, and the whole point of freezer left over day is to not spend money! I also used white wine instead of sherry. The rest of the dish was very easy to make, and although it took a few hours, most of that was spent watching "Eggheads" while the stew bubbled away. The hardest part was getting the meat off the bone as it was too hot to get a proper grip on it.

The stew was delicious, and the paprika did give it a Spanish feel. A bit of chorizo in there would have been excellent, but it was still tasty. I served it with some brown rice and some crusty bread for mopping up the juices.

Pork Hock and Haricot Stew

There was enough of this for some of it to go back in the freezer as a left over portion, and if I hadn't used some in the borscht it would have made two portions to freeze. I was really impressed with the pork hock, which was incredibly tender by the end of the cooking. There were some sinews and fatty bits left, but I managed to get most of these out when shredding the meat. Definitely a store cupboard triumph!

PS - I did the guest round up at Nora The Kitchen 'Splorer this week, check it out!

Scotch Eggs

A while back, my dad spent quite a while telling me that the perfect boiled egg was all about heating the white to a certain temperature, and that if you kept it at that temperature, it would never over-cook. As I've been reading more about the science of cookery, I've found that my dad was correct - an egg cooked at 65C will have a set white and a creamy yolk.

I've also been intrigued by the rise of the scotch egg from Greg's abomination to acceptable gastro-pub fare. They always seem to have a runny yolk, so maybe it was time to apply science to snacking.

Here comes the science bit!

Egg Number 1
Initially I thought the easiest way to keep an egg at 65C without using a fancy-pants waterbath (I don't even have enough worktop space to justify a stand mixer, let alone an water circulator) was in the oven. Although the oven was labeled 60C, it didn't seem particularly hot in there. I could comfortably put my hand in the oven and move the racks around without it burning. The oven thermometer starts at 100C, and the needle was hovering just under this, so I left an egg in there for about 45 minutes.

After the egg had cooled down a bit, I cracked it open. It wasn't firm enough to peel and so in that respect was an epic fail. However, I scooped the egg out of the shell and ate it, and it was amazingly delicious. The yolk was runny and rich, and the white was cooked but still creamy and soft. The only way it could have been better was if there had been some buttered soldiers to dip in it.

Egg Number 2
Next up I decided to try a water bath. Using a sugar thermometer, I heated a saucepan of water to 65C. I was surprised to find that by putting my hob on the lowest setting, that I could maintain this temperature very easily. I occasionally added a little cold water if the temperature started rising, but I only had to do this about twice in the hour or so that I cooked the egg for.

I cracked it open, and initially was quite pleased - the white was set enough to be able to peel the egg, but still wobbly enough to suggest that the yolk would be runny. However, as I continued peeling, it became obvious that the egg was far too fragile to put in to a scotch egg. As I took off the last pieces of shell, the egg collapsed completely.

By some fluke of science, I'd created an inverted egg. The yolk was completely set, and was like a little orange pebble in a pile of white gooey jelly. I ate this egg too. It wasn't as tasty as the first one, but the yolk, while set, was still moist. I'd be quite interested in using this method again to create set yolks that could be used as a garnish or as a component in a dish.

What had happened was that the yolk proteins had set at 65C, as had some of the white proteins. However, one of the proteins in the yolk doesn't set until 80C, so this egg obviously had a higher ratio of this high temperature protein and thus the white was still quite runny.

Egg Number 3
By this point, the leftover sausages that I was planning to use for the scotch eggs were dangerously close to their use-by date. So I wimped out and put two eggs in a cold pan of water, brought them to the boil, and simmered for 8 minutes. They were pretty standard hardboiled eggs.

In future, I think I'd go for a two stage process to find the perfect peelable boiled egg. First a lovely bath at 63-64C, to firm up the white, but keep the yolk runny. Then a quick dip (1-2 minutes) in a 90C bath to firm out the outer layer of the white, so it's possible to peel it without it falling apart. Then maybe a quick shock in iced water to ensure they don't over cook. Hmmm, several different baths and a peel, sounds like a day at a spa hotel.

Baked Scotch Egg

The actual scotch eggs were fairly simple to make - mash up a load of sausage meat (about 2 sausages per egg) and wrap this around the boiled egg. Then roll the egg in some seasoned flour, some beaten egg, and then breadcrumbs. I seasoned the breadcrumbs with a little cayenne pepper to give them a bit of a kick. As you can see from the photos, my wrapping wasn't entirely even, but that wasn't too much of a problem.

Uneven but tasty

As with most Scottish items, a proper Scotch Egg is deep fried. I didn't really want to do this, so I baked them at 200C for 30 minutes, and finished them off in the frying pan to get the breadcrumbs crispy. I think the sausage meat insulates the egg quite well, as when I finally got to scoff the eggs they yolk was still quite moist and not overcooked. They were also delicious later on when they'd been chilled for a while. Even though I'd baked them, you could feel the cholesterol destroying your arteries as you chewed. Perhaps this is not the recipe to repeat until I perfect it...

Palmiers

Although it was fun making the vol-au-vents for the Daring Bakers, using circular cutters meant I had loads of puff pastry scraps. Unlike shortcrust pastry, these can't just be scrunched up and re-rolled. The scraps have to be stacked to preserve the layers, but even then they probably won't be able to achieve the same rise as the original pastry could.

So, having a massive pile of scraps that weren't going to rise properly, it seemed sensible to follow Joy's advice and make palmiers!

I couldn't decide whether to go sweet or savoury. I went with both.

The sweet were dusted with vanilla sugar and mixed spice. The sugar caramelised and made them crunchy and chewy and delicious. The speckles of vanilla and spices mingled to give an appropriately autumnal flavour.

Sweetly Spicy Palmiers

The savoury ones were layered with an extra mature cheddar and cayenne pepper. The cheese is far too strong to eat on it's own, and even T, who loves a good cheddar found it too harsh. However, when baked up, the cheese flavour mellowed out and became more pleasant. The cayenne gave it a bit of a kick and stopped it feeling too fatty.

Cheesy Palmiers

Although I preferred the taste of the sweet palmiers, the cheesy ones would be perfect for a pre-dinner snack, and are a great way to use up any puff-pastry scraps you might have lying about!

Mexican Style Spinach and Chicken Wraps

Although I've moved out of my student flat, I don't get the keys to my new flat for another week. My worldly possessions (including my beloved Le Creuset casserole dish and all my baking equipment) are currently languishing in a self storage unit on the outskirts of Edinburgh. In an attempt to actually get our deposit back, I spent 3 days cleaning the flat. A lack of equipment, energy, time and a kitchen meant I hadn't eaten properly for several days.

I'm currently camping at T's until we can move in to the new flat together, so I decided I should attempt to get something vaguely healthy inside me and recover from the last few days so that the next move won't be so stressful. I'd been planning on some kind of avocado and chicken salad, but the avocado was a bit brown and over-ripe. Instead I mashed it up with some chilli, lemon juice and garlic to make a sort-of guacamole.

Spinach and Chicken Wraps

I poached half a chicken breast, and then wilted a couple of handfuls of spinach in a dry pan. The shredded chicken was put in a wrap, alongside the spinach, guacamole and a drizzle of yoghurt. I would have liked some fresh tomatoes in there too, but there were none in the fridge.

The guacamole and chicken were delicious, and the varying greens when I cut the wraps open made me think I should call this something like "tortilla fresca", but my knowledge of Mexican cuisine is only marginally better than Jamie Oliver's, so I thought better of it.

Letting the side down was the spinach. It was a bit healthy tasting for my liking. The taste of iron was overwhelming, and masked the flavours of the guacamole and chicken too much. Perhaps using baby spinach with a milder taste would have been a better plan.

Anyway, this was a tasty little lunch time treat, and has 2 of my five-a-day. Hopefully all those vitamins and minerals will have me raring to go for another round of hardcore box moving next week...

Raspberry Crumble, with a Hint of Strawberry

Last week, I went down to Durham for a night to visit my flatmate H, who has graduated, moved out of the flat, and is about to start a very exciting new project updating a guidebook (I want her job!). On the train down, I got a text from T. The strawberries we'd picked a few days ago were becoming over-ripe and squishy, with a couple already mouldy and in the bin. We decided to mush up any that looked on their last legs and freeze them.

When I returned from H's, I made the gooseberry snow, and froze the last couple of handfuls of remaining gooseberries. Now I just had a punnet of raspberries to deal with. I'd already used some for a very boozy cranachan (recipe to come later once I remember how much raspberry vodka I put in it...) but there were still quite a fair amount in the punnet.

So... it had to be some kind of recipe that was mostly fruit, as I didn't fancy a pile of cream and carbohydrates with just a couple of berries on top. It also had to be quick and simple, as 1 Vs 100 was on Xbox Live. I know this is the lamest thing ever, but I really, really, REALLY love trivia quizzes.

Raspberry crumble won. It is simple, quick, easy to clear up, great hot, good cold and gives fruit the starring role. Plus it always reminds of being a kid as crumble was about the only pudding my mum could be bothered to cook!

Raspberry Crumble

I completely guessed the recipe, as I forgot to bring my scales over to T's flat.

1/4 packet of butter (about 75g?)
A good sprinkle of flour
A good sprinkle of oats
A small sprinkle of sugar
Pinch of salt
Pinch of ginger

The mixture seemed crumbly enough, and looked like there was enough to cover the dish I'd dumped all the raspberries in to. Just as I was about to add the topping, I remembered the frozen strawberries. There wasn't that much so I defrosted the mush in a saucepan with a dash of water and threw that in with the raspberries too.

Leftovers!

After 30 minutes in a gas mark 5 oven, the juice from the berries was staining the edges of the crumble, which had turned golden and crispy. We ate it with a small dollop of ice cream that was lurking in the back of the freezer. The fruit underneath was sweet, with a slight sourness, and had turned jammy and thick. The flavour of the strawberries wasn't obvious, but it tempered the intensity of the raspberries and made the whole affair even more yummy.

I finished off the last portion today while watching Eggheads. Sometimes I love being unemployed.

Summer Courgette Spaghetti

Given that only a few weeks ago I was ranting about how I don't like pasta, today's post might seem a little strange. However, I'm moving flat soon (yay!) so need to eat as much as I can from the cupboards. That includes 2 portions of spaghetti bought in some moment of pasta-based madness. I'd also spent the afternoon at the gym, so something vaguely healthy seemed fitting. I had half a courgette left over in the fridge too, so this courgette and tomato sauce from last month's Good Food magazine seemed ideal.

Reducing the tomatoes

The recipe was super quick to pull together, and the only adaptation I made was quartering all the ingredients, as I was making this for one *sob*. Apart from using spaghetti instead of linguine, but I think that difference is negligible.

Courgette and Tomato Spaghetti.

The result was a pretty tasty dinner, although as is always the case, I put in a few too many chilli flakes and the dish was perhaps a little spicier than would have been ideal. I really liked the contrast between the soft courgette and the crispy, salty bacon bits, and I even coped with eating a whole 75g of pasta!

Although I probably wouldn't go out and buy ingredients specifically to make this, it was great as a way of using up that spare bit of courgette lingering in the salad drawer. Now to find something to make that final 75g of spaghetti bearable!

PS - Both the photos in this post look so much tastier when clicked for the bigger versions!

Pork and Beans

We've already established that I like South American style food, and I like trying new recipes. So the two came together when I found a recipe for spiced pork loin with black eyed beans at T's flat.

I bought a massive hunk of pork from the butcher, who was actually nice to me for once. Probably because I ended up spending the best part of £20 on it, but it was good to be spoken to as a proper person rather than getting sarcastic comments. (I should really go to the other butcher, but it's so much further to walk to.) I also stocked up on tinned black eyed beans and paprika from Lupe Pintos, which is an Aladdin's cave of random food from around the world. I also got a couple of their chorizo rosario, which is uncooked so it isn't as tough as the precooked chorizo you find in the supermarkets. I got everything else from the green grocer, although I completely forgot to get the fresh tomatoes, instead just getting tinned ones.

Spiced pork loin with chorizo, bean and tomato stew

The recipe itself was pretty easy to pull together, and although the butcher scored the skin for me, I didn't ask him to french trim the bones as there was still as lot of meat in that area that I didn't want to waste. The crackling came up well, the paprika gave it a mild spiciness, and the fat underneath was creamy rather than chewy. I ate a bit too much of it and felt ill afterwards. I found the tomato sauce a little too watery, although this meant that I could mop up the leftovers with a slice of bread instead! I used larger chillies, so the stew wasn't too hot even when the chillies were sliced in to it at the end. Plus I absolutely love stewed chorizo. I had to restrain myself from picking out all the chorizo while dishing up and eating it all myself. The pork wasn't as melt in the mouth as I'd hoped, but the steam from the stew meant it was still moist and tender.

T enjoyed it too, I am trying to get him more in to pulses as a) they are tasty, b) they are good for you and c) they are a cheap way to bulk out a meal. I haven't yet managed to get a vegetarian chilli down him, but surely it is only a matter of time?

The picture in the Jamie Oliver book/website looked much prettier than mine, and either he used meat from a withered pig or that baking tray is enormous. T's roasting tin is tiny, as it was about the only one we could find that fitted in to his shoebox sized oven. I can't wait until I have my own flat and can buy a decent oven that can fit in more than one thing at a time.

There were some left overs, which I divided into chops. The one in the fridge reheated well the next day (let's face it, stew is always better the next day), but the one in the freezer is an unknown quantity... I would definitely make it again, but reduce the amount of liquid in the stew, and add in way more chillis. It was a bit messy for a posh dinner, but would be great for a more informal meal.

Talking of which, I might have my first ever dinner party next week. I am trying to decided whether to just invite my friends or to get each of my flatmates to bring a randomer. Decisions decisions.

Leftover Egg Whites and Vanilla Marshmallows

I get through a lot of eggs. I've used maybe 18 or so in the last week on various baking projects. I almost always end up with egg whites leftover though. I guess because I tend towards richer, creamier things, like creme patisserie, custards or mousses.

Before I started baking so frequently, I would have made pavlova with them. Actually, I would have more likely have put them in the fridge meaning to make meringue, forgotten about them for a week, and then thrown them away as I worried they had gone bad.

While the main staples for baking are cheap, it's the good stuff like ground nuts and chocolate that make it expensive. Given that I can easily spend £20 on ingredients if left unchecked, I am really trying to not waste things in an effort to make money go further. This includes those pesky egg whites.

Vanilla Marshmallows

Although I like meringue, its not something you can eat that much of. My go to recipe for egg whites lately has been financiers, but this weekend it was wearing thin. Part of my reasoning behind the Red Velvet cake was that the icing used egg whites, but that still left me with 2 egg whites festering in the fridge. Googling "2 egg whites" lead me to marshmallows, and this particular recipe by Hugh FW. I also fancied the foodbeam recipe, but that used more than 2 egg whites and I didn't like the idea of messing with quantities on something as precarious as confectionery.

Instead, I mixed the two recipes together. I replaced Hugh's beet juice for colour with Fanny's vanilla seeds for flavour.

The only tricky moment was boiling the sugar syrup. I was using my parent's old sugar thermometer that I stole borrowed from my dad's house. It is only in Fahrenheit, so I had not a clue how hot the sugar actually was, just that it had to get to 250F before I could pour in the gelatine and vanilla mix. It was boiling pretty vigorously, got to 220F, and stopped. I actually thought the thermometer was broken, as the temperature seemed to hover at 220F for about 5 minutes. Turning the heat up didn't seem to do much either, and I was worried that the sugar would burn, explode or do something else equally unpleasant.

Eventually it got moving again and I mixed the gelatine and syrup before adding to the beaten egg whites in small dribbles. The resulting mixture had a similar texture and look to meringue mix, but was runny instead of stiff. I wasn't sure how long to whip it for, and I think I could have given it a bit longer to make the marshmallows even lighter.

After a rather anxious two hours wondering if it had set, and trying seriously hard to resist the urge to poke it every 5 minutes, I turned out the square of marshmallow. It was sticky, but firm, and came away from the tin surprisingly easily. I then set about cutting the block into bite sized cubes. I used a palette knife, although I think a sharper knife might have made the job a bit easier and my cuts a bit neater. Once dusted with sugar and cornflour, I packed them into Tupperware, but not before trying a couple myself.

Unlike shop bought marshmallows, these didn't seem overwhelmingly chemical. The vanilla flavour was perhaps a tad too subtle, but it was there nonetheless. They had the slight crust from the icing sugar coating, but were billowy inside. My flatmate E declared that it was "probably the best marshmallow I've ever had", but he is not a renowned marshmallow connoisseur so this is not quite as sweeping as first seems.

More Fluffiness

Given that I'd never even heard of homemade marshmallows until 6 months or so ago, I was surprised at how easy they were to make. I would suggest that this would be a good kids recipe, as the results are impressive for very little work, but the large amounts of boiling sugar are perhaps not so suitable!

I'm even looking forward to my next batch of leftover egg white...

Dissertation woes

The dissertation is looming, and I haven’t had much time this week. I’ve even resorted to taking a packed lunch to uni so I don’t have to lose an hour of study time walking home for lunch!

I’ve still found the time to make a few things, mainly to cheer me up between the seemingly endless bouts of reading government strategy papers.
- Tea bread, mainly to use up loads of dried fruit that had been in the cupboard too long. I think next time I might soak the fruit in Lapsang Souchon to give it a different spin.
- Roasted vegetable and feta tart. I still don’t like feta cheese though.
- Lemon Buttermilk pie. My flatmates were having a chilli evening, and we wanted an authentically tex-mex dessert. Google told us buttermilk pie. It was a bit like an English egg custard tart, but lemony instead of flavoured with nutmeg.
- Canadian pancakes. We had vast quantities of buttermilk left over from the chilli night, and buttermilk is not an ingredient that crops up much in British food.
- Lentil, bacon and roasted winter vegetable stew. Took this in to uni in a thermos flask and looked like a total nerd.
- Raspberry and vanilla muffins. This was to use up some raspberries I had in the fridge, as well as the seemingly endless amount of buttermilk. They were a tad dry so I topped them with some sweetened cream cheese.
- Chicken, lemon and tarragon soup. One of the success stories for the NCG book of soup.
We still have some buttermilk left, so I might make some scones, or marinate some chicken drumsticks with herbs.

I also enrolled on a sugar-paste modelling class, partly with the idea of making some kind of topper for D’s wedding cake. At the moment we are learning to make carnations and lilies. I need to practice with icing too, although she hasn’t worked out what flavours she wants yet so I can’t choose which type of icing would go best.

I’ve only got 25 days of my dissertation left and I cannot wait!

Crispy Tofu with Shiitake and Edamame

I had one last piece of tofu left last night, and some edemame beans in the freezer. A quick google revealed this dish: crisp fried tofu with shiitake and edemame sauce.

I don't know how healthy it is to deep fry tofu, but I went for it anyway.

I really liked this meal, particularly the sauce. My main problems with it were the usual tofu textural issues. The mushrooms and edemame were both quite soft, and the tofu, even though some of the smaller bits were crispy, was now chewy instead of squidgy. I think I should have sliced it smaller or cooked it longer to get a bit more crunch in there.

I also didn't have any sherry, so I used some white wine and some vinegar, and I had birdseye chillies, so I only used a small amount.

I usually have some tofu lying around, and there's still loads of edemame in the freezer, so I'm sure this one will be cropping up again, next time I will try and get a photo!

The £7.42 Chicken Challenge: Part III

We've had two dinners this week with the left over chicken from the roast dinner, including some very tasty home-made fajitas. They were probably not very authentic, but they tasted good and there was enough left over for my lunch the next day too.

Next up was some pasta sauce with vegetables. As I am feeling a bit unhealthy after Christmas, I decided this would be a good way to use up some of the chicken and have a fairly well-balanced meal.

Roasted Vegetable Pasta Sauce
Serves 2

1 small aubergine
1 medium courgette
1 green pepper
3 cloves of garlic
1 onion
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
Sprigs of rosemary
Some cooked chicken
olive oil
salt and pepper

First chop up the aubergine, the courgette and the pepper into largish chunks, and put them in a roasting tin. Sprinkle over some salt, pepper, rosemary and the garlic cloves (still in their skins) and drizzle with a little olive oil. Roast at 200C for about 40 minutes. They should be starting to turn black around the edges, but soft on the inside.

Cut the onion up into small pieces, and fry it in a small amount of olive oil. Add in the roasted vegetables, except the garlic. The garlic should be soft enough to squeeze out of the skins into the pan as well. Add the canned tomatoes straight away, and stir it up! I also added some more rosemary, some tomato puree and some pepper at this point.
(You could use real tomatoes in this step, but as the ones in the shops at the moment are pretty rough, tinned was a better option.)

Once that is bubbling away, cut up the chicken in to small pieces. Add it in at the last minute, as you don't want to cook it, just reheat it. The amount of chicken you use is up to you, as I was trying to make this cheap and healthy I didn't use much, but if you put in lots you could probably stretch this to 3 or 4 portions instead of two.

I served this with tagliatelle, but I think it would work best with a chunkier shape like giant conchiglioni, as that would catch the larger vegetables.

Tagliatelle with roasted vegetables and tomato sauce.

The £7.42 Chicken Challenge: Part II

I used the saved carcass from the chicken the other day to make stock. I boiled the carcass and skin with an onion, some celery, loads of garlic, some cloves and a bay leaf. I meant to leave it for 2 hours, but ended up leaving it for four!

I got quite a thick, aromatic, concentrated stock, and managed to get exactly 2 litres out of it. I think I'll probably water it down to 4 litres when I use it, unless I use it in a curry, in which case the spicy element will probably work quite well.

I should make stock more often, once you've chopped things up and put them in the pot, you don't have to do anything to it, apart from skimming off any scum or fat that comes to the surface. I think I spent about 20 minutes working on the stock, and the rest of the time doing other stuff while it bubbled away.

A quick look at online supermarkets reveals that you'd pay about £4 for 2l of fresh stock so worth the effort I think!

The £7.42 Chicken Challenge: Part I

I think one of the worst things about the food culture in Britain is cheap meat. Traditionally, meat has been a treat. It is meant to be more expensive than other ingredients.

When you look at how meat is produced, it's obvious why meat is expensive. To grow some vegetables, fruits, grains or pulses, I can sow some seeds, and then just leave them until harvest time. Rain will water them and birds and insects will help fertilize the plants and eat pests. A totally natural approach probably isn't the most reliable, so I might invest a bit of time and money in putting down compost or soil nutrients, or weeding the field. I might also water the fields, or use pesticides to maintain my crop. By ultimately, I can pretty much leave the plants to their own devices and they will produce food for me.

If I want to get some chicken, beef, pork or lamb, then it is much more complicated. I have find a shelter for the animals at night, and protect them from predators. They might need a lot of land to roam on, with special plants growing on it, or special areas like dirt baths or muddy patches. I have to ensure the animals are fed everyday, and look after their health. I also have to make sure they breed, so I'll have some animals to farm next year. Animals take up a lot of time and effort, and eat the plant crops that I could be eating. Therefore, the yield of meat from animals will be more expensive than plant based food.

In the supermarket the other day, I had a choice of three chickens. One was organic, free range and expensive. For a 1.8kg bird, the price was over £11. There was a value chicken, that at for 1.8kg, only cost £3.40. There was also a free range chicken, that was corn fed, for £7.42. I went for the free range one. I would have paid around £7 just for 2 free range breasts, so paying an extra 42p for the legs, wings and carcass was a good deal.

While I am not totally convinced by the benefits of organic produce, I am convinced by free range. I don't think animals have rights per se, and I would never become vegetarian for ethical reasons. However, I do think animals should be looked after, and not made to suffer just because we are top of the food chain. A quick look around small holder websites reveals that you can't really even feed a chicken for £3.40, let alone look after it properly. Commercial farmers will buy in bulk and have lower costs, but still, it does not bode well. If an animal is going to die so I can eat it, I want it to have had a decent life, with good quality food, outside access, and enough time to mature properly and not killed as soon as they are heavy enough to go to the supermarket.

I know to some extent that you can't be sure about what you are eating unless you have farmed it yourself, and I would prefer to buy all my meat from the farmer's market, where you can talk to the people that raised the animals about the conditions in which they were kept. One of the few good things going for Britain in terms of mass market food is that we do have stricter farming regulations than most of Europe, so a cheap British pork chop is better than a cheap European one, but I still think most forms of intensive farming should be banned, and people should be forced to accept that meat is not cheap.

So now I have my mid-price happy chicken, I need to make sure I get the most out of it. First off, a roast dinner!


We ate most of a breast and a leg with the roast dinner, and shredded the rest of the meat for use later in the week. I also saved most of the fat, skin and all the bones to make stock with.

Scouse and latkes

Last night I made scouse for dinner. T is from Liverpool so this is his local dish. Liverpool used to be a major shipping port, and scouse is a product of all this immigration and multiculturalism. It's similar to Irish stew, although there are also suggestions that it originates from the Baltic states.

We'd had some roast lamb the other week, and I'd used most of the leftovers in a shepherd's pie. There was still some left in the freezer though, so we phoned T's aunt (whose recipe is apparently world famous!) and she told us how to make scouse.

As our lamb was already cooked, we stewed a couple of potatoes, three leeks and three carrots with some chicken stock (just enough to cover the veg) and seasoning for an hour. T's aunt told us a secret ingredient, but we couldn't find it in the shops so we used curry powder instead to warm it up a bit. We added the lamb, put the lid back on the pan and stewed it for another 30 minutes. It was a nice end to a chilly day in Edinburgh, and I mopped up all the all the juice with buttered bread.

Tonight T had the left over scouse, and I went back to mine for some left over pheasant stew that I had frozen a while back. There wasn't much left, so I made some latkes to go with it. I had seen an interesting looking recipe on Sassy Radish. My last attempt at potato cakes was disastrous, and they fell apart, so it was time to give it another go. I did the icy water element, and was really surprised by the amount of starch in the bottom of the bowl. As I used smaller potatoes than the recipe recommended, I wan't sure how much egg to put in, but the consistency seemed good and they worked out fine.

The latkes were crispy on the outside, and cooked through, so softer in the middle but it was still possible to feel the individual strips of potato. I dipped some in the stew and ate the rest with some creme fraiche. I made two portions, and ate them both...