Kievs, devilment, soup and salads ... meal planning in reverse!

I thought, because I haven't posted much in the way of anything just lately, that I'd give a quick rundown on what has come out of my kitchen recently.  With both successes and failures - sometimes both at once, depending on everyone's preferences - it makes an interesting mix!

So let's start with one which everyone liked at least one part of - my devilled sausages.  I served these little lovelies (see recipe here) with some home made coleslaw (white cabbage, carrot & onion all sliced finely, mixed with some raisins, Greek yoghurt & mayonnaise), beetroot and a really tasty rice salad.  The rice salad was made with a simple mix of cooked cooled white basmati rice, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, sweetcorn, chopped rocket and small cubes of cheddar cheese.  Once a lovely dressing had been added, along with seasoning to taste (I used a Suzanne's fat free dressing of blackberry, cardamom & chilli), the whole thing came together beautifully.  You can guarantee that even with a rice salad disliking teenager at the table, the sausages and coleslaw will go - and some rice salad went along with it, so I call that a success.

Travelling back on the school run one morning, hubby and I both were overcome with a mushroom lust.  Fortunately Sainsbury's is en route, so a quick stop for supplies meant we could have mushrooms on toast for brunch upon our return.  Yum.

Cooked until softened in a little butter, then seasoned with salt and pepper and given a quick splosh with a little mushroom ketchup, these little lovelies were gorgeous on some sourdough bread we had left over.  Toasted and buttered, it was simple and delicious.

Many moons ago, we made the mistake of introducing our son to chicken Kiev.  Not home made chicken Kiev, but the supermarkets' own version of chicken Kiev - one which is made of munched up and stuck back together again chicken, made into a dome with a tiny teaspoonful of garlic butter inside the cavernous waste that is each Kiev's centre.  He loved them then and every so often he requests them again.

Now for all that I have described them with an element of disdain, it is fond disdain as I really quite enjoy a Kiev myself.  It takes me back to when I had the horses and would come in at 9pm starving hungry.  I'd throw a couple of Kiev's in the oven and a packet of savoury rice into the microwave and 20-30 minutes later, sit down to a hot dinner.   I thoroughly enjoyed the Kiev dinner that hubby rustled together, as pictured above.  I know - I should be ashamed of myself and somewhere under the "Mmmmnnn...", I am.  Honest.

Surely everyone likes a jacket potato, don't they?  Even my hubby likes a twice baked Jacket Potato (more on those, in another post!).  In this instance, however, I was suddenly overcome with the desire for mackerel and as I had some salad left over, it made sense to combine the lot for lunch.  The mackerel came out of one of these little tins of mackerel fillets, but I'm fairly sure it still qualifies as being good for you!  In fact, if you totted up the inflammatory -v- non-inflammatory points, just putting the mackerel on the plate cancelled out any non-inflammatory points the remainder might have had!  A scrummy lunch.

So, how do you like the look of my thick chicken and vegetable soup?  It was intended to be chicken and dumpling soup, however like Topsy it kind of grew in the making and it seemed to us that dumplings would be overkill.

I basically emptied the vegetable drawer of the fridge onto the tray upon which I carry ingredients about the kitchen - and only put back things like cucumber and beetroot.  Following a quick rummage in the freezer, which gleaned the sweetcorn and peas, I was good to go.

The chicken was pan fried to a light golden colour, then shredded and finished its cooking in the soup stock.  Done this way, you gain flavour from the caramelisation on the chicken, but retain the softness that is inherent with chicken breast.

I included such lovely winter warmers as pearl barley and red lentils for thickeners and of course used the lovely Essential Cuisine Chicken Stock as the stock base.  Making the soup was a simple matter of chopping the vegetables to a suitably small size and putting them into the pot in the right order, depending on how long each took to cook!  I started off with the classic onion and garlic, followed by the celery, carrot and potato, then the stock, barley and lentils - finishing up with the softer vegetables and herbs.  With some crusty sourdough bread, the soup made a lovely hearty meal and it truly is the kind of soup that you can throw just about anything at.

Lastly - for this instalment, anyway - we have the sad case of the Merguez sausage.  Oh dear, what a tale of uncertainties, changes of mind and mistaken identities.  You see, hubby had a risotto in mind.  It involved lamb and possibly preserved lemon.  At this stage, it was just "in mind", you know - evolving.  I suggested to him that Merguez sausage might be good as the lamb component.  I knew that Asda do 4 or 5 Merguez sausages within the right price range and also knew that they were, to a large part, lamb.  However, what I didn't realise then was that Asda's Merguez sausages were, to a large part, beef.  ~rolls eyes~  I suppose they have to keep the price down somehow and there are cuts of beef that are a lot more economical to use than lamb.  However, being this charitable is with the benefit of hindsight.  That wasn't what I was saying once they were in my fridge and I'd read the ingredients list.

Being such a large part beef, made them useless for hubby's risotto.  So there they were, sitting in the fridge with no job to do.  Not only that, but because we'd never had them before and the ingredients list was unexpected, we had no idea how they tasted to be able to include them in a recipe somewhere.  There was only one thing to be done - cook them and eat them for lunch with a salad.

As it turned out, they were entirely wrong for the risotto hubby had evolving in his head - but would be great for another kind of risotto some other day.  They leach a gorgeous spicily flavoured, coloured oil once heated up - in the same way that chorizo does - and have a hint of lambiness in their flavour, but to be honest, I'd have been hard pressed to have told you what meat they tasted of.  They are certainly spicy - but not in a chilli sort of way.  More of a paprika and cumin sort of way that would make them ideal for all sorts of dishes.  So now we know - and I'm sure one day they'll appear in a more creative concept than beside some salad!

So just to whet your appetite, for my next instalment of meal planning in reverse, we've got some BBQ, more mackerel, that risotto and an awesome roast pork dinner amongst other things.  Can't wait!

Meal planning for eventualities of the sniffling kind

It seemed highly likely that as son & heir currently has a bit of an upper respiratory infection (I hesitate to label it a cold and cough - but that's basically what's going on), the rest of us are liable to go down with it.

Hubby is already showing signs of wilting and I've felt generally a bit low, so I thought it wise to make this week's meal plan one that concentrates on the simple and the easy.  It's not a good thing to have to knuckle down to cooking a dish that requires several tricky processes, when you'd really rather just go back to bed.  All that results in, is our reaching for the nearest takeaway menu - and considering home cooked is so much better for us, it's a bit self-defeating.

However, I didn't intend for this week to be quite as dominated by bacon as it has turned out to be!

Both hubby and I seem to be going through a serious bacon fancy and the large part of our ideas for this week turned out to be centred around the lovely stuff.  I suppose there's no real harm in it, as I can't see us going off bacon any time soon!

Here's what's on the list for this week :

Tues : shop-bought frozen Pizza

Weds : vegetable curry and rice

Thurs : Carbonara and garlic bread

Fri : Bacon & sausage pilaff

Sat : Bacon & onion pie with baked beans and peas

Sun : Roast of some denomination (probably a bacon joint!)

Mon : Chicken Kiev and savoury rice.

Shop bought frozen pizza is our usual "get out of jail free" card.  Son & heir loves it, hubby approves and I get fed, so it'll do.  Hubby is our pizza chef, so I don't even have to venture into the kitchen in order to get fed.  Can't argue with that!

Something like this - except with more veggies!

Wednesday's vegetable curry began life as Cornish Pasties.  I know!  Talented shapeshifting going on there!  No, I'm afraid I forgot to take the meat out of the freezer, which negated the Cornish Pasties as I was going to make them early on in the day.  You see, son & heir is back involved in his Rock Choir practice which means a late pickup from school, so it would have fitted perfectly.

I realised that I had rather a lot of leftover vegetables in the fridge and initially considered some kind of soup for dinner.  That was, until I pondered on currying the soup - whereupon I thought I may as well just go for a vegetable curry and be done with it.  I know that son & heir isn't hugely struck on vegetable curry as a concept (no meat, you see), so I figure if I boil a couple of eggs, I can include a hard boiled egg in son & heir's.  That should cheer him up, as he loves his eggs.

Photo c/o BBC Good Food

Thursday's Carbonara is the first of a rush on bacon dishes and I'm really looking forward to this.  Rather than use spaghetti, I thought (to ring the changes) I'd try some of the Mafalda Corta pasta instead.  Its ruffles should grab the sauce beautifully and it is just so easy to make, plus it has the benefit of being one of those enigmatic processes that shouldn't work, but does - and beautifully.

The Bacon & Sausage Pilaff is actually an adaptation of a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe which you can find here.  I'm going to take it a little bit further and add a few more ingredients to the mix (mushrooms & peas, for instance) along with the bacon, sausage and black pudding.  I'll also turn the sausages into little sausage meatballs, as I think they'll suit the Pilaff structure more elegantly than rough-cut sausages.

Photo c/o Jeff's Great British Eats

Saturday's Bacon & Onion Pie is a James Martin recipe which you can find here and which I expect I'll follow pretty much to the letter.  It's a recipe which involves bacon, fried onions, mashed potato and cheese - what could go wrong?  He recommends serving it with baked beans or peas - well both works for me!  I might even throw in a tin of carrots, just for fun.  Oh, for those who don't realise what I'm going on about here, my hubby is a man who considers both peas and carrots should never appear on the same plate as baked beans.  I consider them to be perfect bedfellows - so bring it on!

Hubby has promised us a roast for Sunday, although what we're going to be roasting is a matter of conjecture at the moment.  It will all depend on what Spring Fields Butchers has that looks nice, I suspect!  We haven't had a true roast dinner for quite some time, so I'm really looking forward to this one.

Another property from a similar road in Oxshott - I'd have lived behind the tree on the right.  lol

Monday's Chicken Kiev is a) a step back in time for me and b) something of a misnomer.  To begin with, when I lived in Oxshott in Surrey, I had a small granny annexe by the side of a huge Victorian country house.  My little flat consisted of two rooms, a bathroom and share of the utility room where there was a sink.  My two rooms I divided into living & bed, plus cooking & storage.

Cooking was something of a challenge, as the sink was away down the corridor and I had a two-ring Belling oven and a microwave.  I wasn't in to cook a great deal anyway, as I would leave to walk the dogs at 6.30 a.m., then go to the stables to feed, turn out into the field and muck out my horse & donkey, returning home to shower and change for work at 9.30am.  Then I'd leave work at around 6pm, collect the dogs and go to the stables to bring in the horse & donkey, feed them and settle them down for bed - maybe even cramming in a ride, in the summer months.  Lastly, I'd walk the dogs (in the pitch black, through the woods!), getting home at around 9pm-10pm when cooking was the last thing on my mind.  The slow cooker came into its own during the winter months!

Me, with my No.1 Highland Pony, Kellie of Whitefield

However, one of my favourite meals was a Chicken Kiev with savoury rice.  The Kiev would go into the oven while the savoury rice (or "slavering mice" as it came to be known) would be twirling in the microwave.  They'd both co-incide in time to sit down and eat before I fell asleep.  Perfect.  Eating was all about fuel, in those days.

Slavering Mice - mmmmn! lol

Now the misnomer comes in, because the Kiev isn't a Kiev at all.  It's a Chicken Cordon Bleu after-a-fashion.  For all that it's sold as a "kiev", it is in fact, chicken (although that's arguable - probably more "chicken bits, stuck together with carbohydrate glue") filled with cream cheese and ham, cooked in breadcrumbs.

Either way, it will be a super-simple meal of disgustingly processed food that is full of everything that's bad for us.  Yes, I know I could make the same thing from chicken breasts and it would be much nicer, more trustworthy and better for us.  However, it won't be done with the minimum of effort.  Well, you have to kick over the traces from time to time, haven't you?

Hopefully, a normal, healthy menu plan will return next week.  *wink*

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So come on, what's for dinner this week?

OMG Cat is surprised too!

Goodness, I can't quite believe it's Saturday and I'm only just getting around to telling you about what's on the menu for this week!

So, I'd better just get on with it quickly, hadn't I?

Stir fry chicken

Crunchy fish (in breadcrumbs) with vegetable rice

Fish & chips

Devilled sausages & Ottolenghi's Green Couscous

High Tea : tuna sandwiches, ham & peas pudding rolls, coleslaw,

scones & cream

Beef & baby corn curry with rice

Chicken Kiev, Jersey new potatoes, carrots & broccoli.

There now, that's a fairly eclectic mixture!  We were originally going to have Ottolenghi's Kosheri & spicy minced lamb on Thursday, but after a particularly harassing day at work I was bushed and couldn't lift a finger - so we got fish & chips.

After bamboozling our son into accepting a stir fry, I decided to just go for it and put a stir fry on the list.  This one wasn't just a stir fry (as in just veggies), it included noodles and the chicken was prepared separately to the stir fry mix, so as to make it easier to eat for the poor wee soul.

I suppose you could call it Garlic, Chilli & Honey Chicken with Oyster Sauce stir fry - which just about describes it!  Anyway, it was extremely more-ish (which was just as well, because son left quite a bit of his) and is definitely going to appear on the menu list again some day soon.  (Poor son & heir).  I'll be blogging the recipe soon, too - as it's definitely one I'd want to pass on.

Wednesday's dish was all about satisfying hubby's craving for "crunchy fish", which is the frozen fillet of fish that comes in either batter or breadcrumbs.  Every so often he gets a mad craving for it, but this time instead of with chips, he suggested a home-made savoury rice.  Now in the past, home-made savoury rice has been a licence to throw lots of veggies in the bin.  However, this time I made it a personal quest to "up my game" (as they say on Masterchef) and produce something that was as tasty as it was satisfying.

I began by cooking some quartered carrot slices in enough fish stock (from a cube - or two, in fact, as the quantity was well over the 400ml that one stock delivers) to cook the Basmati rice.  After 2-3 minutes, I added the rice.  While that was going on, I cooked a sliced onion in some olive oil until it was golden, then added a little coarse sea salt to it and left it to one side until the rice was done.  In the meantime, I'd added a handful of frozen sweetcorn to the rice pot, then a few minutes later, a handful of frozen peas (all these veggies had to cook within the 9 minutes as stated by the rice packet, so hence the staggered arrival times in the pot).  Next in was a tin of Borlotti beans (for additional protein and fibre) and some chopped celery.

Once the rice was cooked, I tipped three chopped spring onions into the bottom of the colander and drained the rice over the top of them, thus heating them up a little and semi-cooking them.  Then the whole lot went back into the pan, accompanied by a knob of butter and the cooked sliced onion.  I gave the whole lot a mix with a fork (for some reason, mixing with a spoon just turns the rice gloopy - but a fork doesn't.  ~shrug~) and served wit the crunchy fish.  The whole effect was really lovely - in fact, I could have carried on eating the rice and forgotten about the fish.  Regrettably, I didn't catch a photograph of the rice (such was my lack of confidence in it).  The true test of it's validity as a dish however, was that hubby nabbed the leftovers the next day and stir-fried them for his lunch.  Now THAT doesn't happen often!

Thursday was a bit of a washout, owing to the harassing day at work.  It wasn't that people were harassing me, it's just that I had a deadline to make, but other people's deadlines kept getting in the way!  Everybody seemed to need my input, that day.

Just HOW Ottolenghi does that look?

Still, as it turned out, I'm glad that I bumped the Devilled Sausages and Ottolenghi's Green Couscous along until Friday, as I am quite sure the couscous wouldn't have turned out as awesomely fabulous as it did, if I'd have been tired and not too bothered about what I was cooking.

As I've said already, I'll definitely blog the couscous recipe, as it was something of a revelation.

Make it ciabatta instead of a bap, and you've got it!

Tonight, Saturday, is a lovely meal in lots of ways.  We're having High Tea.  This is one of son & heir's favourite types of meals, in that it involves lots of carbohydrate and very little vegetable matter.  *chuckle*  It's fun to have, every so often.  So we'll be having Tuna & mayonnaise sandwiches (maybe with sweetcorn, if I can wangle it), plus Ciabatta Rolls containing ham & pease pudding (a hark back to Hubby's youth in Newcastle), plus coleslaw, cherry tomatoes, cucumber and pickles.  For dessert, we're having fruit scones with cherry compote and clotted cream.  ~sharp intake of breath~  I know!  I haven't even cooked so much as the scones or the compote.  ~hangs head in shame~  But it's a once-in-a-blue-moon occasion.  We'll be making up for it in the days to come.  Gruel for the next three days.  Maybe a lettuce leaf or two, if we're extra good.

Or, perhaps a tad more seriously, on Sunday we'll be having a lovingly-tended, slow cooked beef curry - using Brisket of beef.  In fact, it won't be all that bad for us, as I trim the beef to remove a lot of the fat before cooking and am not intending on including any cream, as I want the full flavour of the brisket to come through.  I'm hoping for a full-bodied beefy curry, only tempered slightly by the inclusion of some baby corn for texture and interest.

So that brings us to Monday, which as it's another working day, I've booked in something that won't cause any arguments over the preparation or eating - Chicken Kiev with new potatoes (Jerseys, in this instance) broccoli and carrots.  Yes, the Kievs have butter in them, but the butter can be trickled over the Jerseys - and the veggies are there to help with our five a day.

Son and heir has decreed that he'll be cooking his chicken dish (wrapped in bacon) for us next Sunday, so that's one day of next week's menus sorted out!  Now all I've got to do is to work out the remaining six dishes before tomorrow - and tell you all about them, before next week is up!

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Sometimes, as much as you want them to, things just don't go right.

By and large, as you look at this blog, you might think to yourself that everything I cook turns out simply marvellously and - even against the odds - everyone likes it and everything's lovely.  Not so.

Parmesan Pittas

Just lately, I've had a little run of dishes that weren't quite right for one reason or another.

Take the Algerian Chakchouka that I served with Parmesan Pittas.  The pittas were lovely (drizzled with olive oil, covered with grated parmesan and baked for 15 mins), but the Chakchouka (really, just paprika, onions, peppers and tomato with an egg cracked into it to poach in the tomato sauce) really wasn't great.  I knew that hubby had a thing about eggs and was particularly leery of part-cooked eggs.  So, I broke his egg in a teensy bit early, which meant it would be almost fully cooked when served.  Hence, I was a bit surprised when he announced "I don't like hard-boiled eggs", and promptly removed his egg and sat it on the side of his plate, untouched.  (It was a Burford Brown, too! ~weep~).  I honestly thought it would be okay.  ~gallic shrug~  Ah well, you win some, you lose some.  Son, however, decided he liked his egg fine - he just didn't like the pepper/tomato mixture it had been cooked in.  *sigh*  Although, I had sympathies with him regarding that score, as I wasn't all that keen on it either.  (I did eat mine, however!).  So that was one of those nights when it would have been better to send out for chips.

The following evening, we had a Cheese, Leek & Ham flan.  Now as you know, my pastry has been the subject of some considerable rudeness from the family, but this time, I followed a different recipe for an all-butter shortcrust pastry.  It rolled out fine and baked to a lovely colour.  I had a bit of an accident with it when I took it out of the oven (darned near dropped the lot, in fact), which resulted in one side of it becoming broken.  Which was a pity, because it was looking quite lovely before that happened.

The recipe came from http://www.closetcooking.com/ and I had no reason to believe it would be anything other than extremely yummy.   In fact, it was extremely yummy - it was just the texture that let it down.

The tart filling comprised pan-fried ham, leek and grated cheese, mixed together with a touch of garlic (inspired idea!), an egg, cream and whole grain mustard - and put in the oven to bake for around 20 minutes.  Well, I'm afraid mine wasn't anywhere near ready at 20 minutes, it was still absolutely liquid in the middle.  Another 15 minutes and it was still soggy in the middle.  Another 10 minutes (that's 40 minutes in all) and it was sort of blobby, whilst accompanied by some sort of whey, or maybe it was leek juice - who knows?  Either way, the flavour was lovely - it was just the horrible blobby texture that we found quite difficult to get along with.  I can only think that somehow the egg/cream mixture had split during cooking - resulting in the blobs and whey.  As to why - I have no idea but would be open to suggestions!

So, to end this tale of woe on a positive note, here's a photograph of a dinner which hubby put together for us.  Yes, they are Chicken Kievs from the freezer, but if you can forgive that fact - doesn't it look edible?  Those little potatoes were just YUM!

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