Learning to cook

DD is in her third year of secondary school, and has two hours of "Food Technology", (commonly known as cooking), every fortnight. In that time she has learnt how to produce two main meals; curry and pizza! Words fail me...

 

I am fully aware that teaching my children to cook is up to me, and they do help out in the kitchen. However, feeling slightly nervous that she will spend her early adulthood subsisting on ready meals, we have decided that during school holidays that she will cook one main meal a week from scratch. I found an out of print cook book for young people in a charity shop, and off she went. In February we had a pasta dish, and this week she decided to make chicken nuggets. 

I don't know about DD; but I learnt a valuable lesson - always read the recipe carefully before agreeing your child can cook it! This particular version required DD to deep-fry the nuggets. I have never deep-fried anything, and I wasn't very keen to leave my 13 year old in charge of a pan of hot fat! We decided to use a small saucepan, and fry in batches.

The results were very tasty, if not exactly the healthy meal I was hoping my daughter would be learning to cook! They would give McDs a run for their money. I will post the recipe if anyone is interested.

Carrot and coriander fritters

For about a year we have been enjoying a weekly vegetarian meal, spurred on by various bloggers who sent me recipes and wrote encouraging comments. Recently, DH and I have decided to increase it to twice a week, partly because it is cheaper but mostly to reduce processed meat. (Oh sausages, I will miss you!) 

My veg box always contains a good supply of carrots, so this evening I had a go at carrot and coriander fritters from "Frugal Feeding". The recipe is available here. It uses gram flour and sunflower oil to bind the grated veg together. I had never used gram flour before, and after traipsing around the baking and gluten free sections of the supermarket, I finally tracked it down in the Asian section. It is basically ground up chickpeas, and I was a bit dubious about using it as it is very strong tasting. However, having bought a bag of the stuff I felt duty bound to try it. The mixture was very gloopy, and I was worried that it would fall apart in the frying pan. I also cheated and used ground coriander instead of grinding up coriander seeds.

It would be fair to say that I was amazed at the results. The fritters held together beautifully. I served them with pitta bread, mango chutney and the forlorn remnants of last week's rocket. They were delicious! Both children demanded a speedy second attempt. It's just as well really, as I have a whole bag of gram flour to use up!

Cheesy broccoli pasta

I am still enjoying my weekly delivery of veggies. My supplier has a new family box cleverly called the "star-spudded" box. This is great because it is heavier on carrots and potatoes and lighter on fennel and aubergines. In other words, kids are more likely to eat the contents. Don't get me wrong, I am all for children being exposed to new vegetables, and I am sure many of you have offspring who will happily tuck into kohl rabi or Jerusalem artichokes. All of my efforts with DD have spectacularly failed and anything beyond carrots, peas and onions is definitely suspect.

However, broccoli does feature regularly in my box. DD will not eat it; for her it ranks slightly below Brussels sprouts in her league of most-hated veg. She does, however, love macaroni cheese so I had a go at a cheesy broccoli pasta bake, (recipe here).

It was very easy to make and very tasty to eat. DH is lactose intolerant and we always use lactose-free milk. He loved it and didn't suffer unduly. DD picked out all the broccoli. Oh well!

Diddly squash

One of the things that I love about my veg box is enjoying the seasonal veg. Autumn is particularly interesting and a few weeks ago my veg box contained these little fellows:

The coin is a British 10p which is only a few centimetres across. These were seriously diddly squash. There was no way I was going to peel them! For a while they sat on my shelf looking decorative but eventually I decided to roast them whole and stuff them with bolognese.

I followed the instructions from my very helpful veg box people. I decapitated them and scooped out the innards with a melon-baller. Not as gruesome as it sounds! Then I brushed the inside with some olive oil and shoved them in a hot oven. These only took 15 minutes to cook. Then I filled them with some bolognese I'd had on the go in the slow cooker all day, topped with grated cheese and voila!

Courgette and mozarella pasta bake

I haven't posted much about my veg box for the last few weeks because we have been mainly ordering the salad box. During the recent heatwave we could only really face salad! Now that the British summer has returned to whatever passes for normal these days, we are back to "proper" veg.

Courgettes, (known as zucchini in most countries), have been featuring heavily recently. Usually I have to hide or disguise them in some way - DD is not a fan. However, as she is away at camp at the moment, I decided to let them take centre stage with a Hugh F-W recipe available here.

It is a simple pasta bake. Don't be deceived; it takes a fair while to make as you have to gently soften the courgettes for half an hour. It needs a good amount of seasoning otherwise it is a little bland but would probably be really tasty with some added sun-dried tomatoes, bacon or chorizo. I have never bought sun-dried tomatoes; I must find a method of making them which works in the British unpredictable climate.

One of the main selling points of this recipe is that it uses about one courgette per person; very handy in a glut!

Life continues with the veg box!

I think that I am settling into a rhythm with the veg box. Early on Monday morning I mull over the different options on the veg box website. How much will I have left over by the delivery on Friday? Do I want a bigger box? Perhaps some fruit? Can I cope with yet more spring greens? I am not at my brightest and best on Monday mornings, so it usually takes a little while for me to make a sensible decision!

Once I have decided on the box, I plan meals to use the different types of vegetables and write a supermarket shopping list. I am loving that the emphasis of my shopping has changed; now I plan my meals around which vegetables are in season, rather than buying vegetables to suit my meals. 

If anyone in the UK is considering a box scheme, googling "veg box" followed by your county should throw up a few options. A word of caution though, always check where the company is based. Some of the bigger players that deliver in your area will operate through franchisees. They may actually be based hundreds of miles away. Having tried a local scheme and a much bigger supplier, I would go for local every time.

This week my box included chard, so I decided to have a go at a "chard, tomato and ricotta bake" from the BBC Good Food website. It appears to be a bit of a foodie recipe, but DD took one look at it and said "It's omelette!". I was actually a lot happier with this than you might think, as omelette is my bete noire. I have never yet produced an edible one, although DH, who doesn't do a lot of cooking, produces one weekly.

I was relatively pleased with it. It was a bit fiddly but I would do it again. Although this time I would call it omelette!

Veg box round up

I have enjoyed the challenge of incorporating different types of veg into our diet. The most interesting was kale. My children and any type of cabbage-style vegetable do not mix. However, I had a go at this pasta sauce which is for kale or it's cousin, cavalo nero. The recipe doesn't give any quantities at all, so I winged it. I used a small pot of single cream and a handful of parmesan-style value hard cheese. I rather think that the fat in the recipe might negate the health benefits of the kale. (The website for the recipe isn't the veg box scheme that I am using.)

It turned out to be a very vivid green, almost luminous! You can definitely sense the chlorophyll. I added some crispy bacon but I still thought it tasted a bit bland. Then I realised that I'd left out the chilli. Doh! But I had four clean plates at the end, so it must have been OK. Or my children are humouring me...

The children actually ate asparagus as well. We had it dipped in poached eggs, which strangely worked quite well. The season is more or less over now, so they are spared asparagus for another year.

We used up all the salad in various guises, and ate spinach in fish pie. We have eaten one courgette loaf, and one is in the freezer. All I have left are some carrots and onions. The carrots will go in veggie chilli tomorrow. I'm not worried about the onions because I had half a bag in the fridge before the veg box arrived, and now I only have three left.

I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the veg aisle of the supermarket finding prices for veg. I did a comparison with both organic and non-organic produce. 

Organic first! Even though I go to a big local supermarket in a large town, they didn't have all the different varieties of organic veg, so I couldn't do a valid comparison. However, my gut feeling after looking at the prices is that it would have been slightly more expensive to get them from the supermarket.

The non-organic veg worked out to be £8.94, and my box came to £12.25. I used the cheapest veg I could find for my test. This is more or less what I expected, I never thought this would be a cost-saving exercise!  For me it is a lesson in seasonal living, learning to cook in a different way and educating my children.

Veggie shepherdess pie

Last month I had a play with soya mince and produced an almost veggie cottage pie. I wasn't very pleased with the results but Shara suggested using lentils and then Bryallen very helpfully gave me this link for a recipe using lentils. Apparently this is called "shepherdess" pie as opposed to the traditional lamb mince based shepherd's pie or the bovine cottage pie. I'm not entirely sure what the link between shepherdesses and lentils is. I have been entertaining visions of flocks of lentil plants wandering around fields...

This recipe uses green lentils. For some strange reason these are called "lentilles vertes" in my supermarket. Well, I suppose it's not too far to France from here! I made a few substitutions, (dried mixed herbs instead of thyme, tomato ketchup instead of puree), but the results were very tasty.

I have now got quite a few vegetarian recipes to draw from. It has been great fun investigating different ways of cooking. Very surprisingly I have fallen in love with lentils. They are so versatile, cheap and healthy! They are fast becoming a staple part of our diet, and that can only be a good thing.

Quick and easy veggie chilli

I am still expanding my repertoire of vegetarian recipes, so I was very pleased to stumble across this one on "The Frugal Graduate". I am very impressed with Bryallen's blog, which is a great mix of recipes, tips on saving money and thought-provoking articles.

The beauty of this recipe is that it uses up leftover vegetables, it is very easy to make and it is cheap. It is a useful recipe to have up your sleeve if your menu plan goes awry and you need something to knock up quickly.

The children particularly enjoyed this one; they both asked for seconds! 

Almost veggie cottage pie

For this week's vegetarian meal I decided to experiment with soya mince.  Cottage pie is a family favourite, so I wanted to see if I could manage a meat-free version. I found the soya mince in the frozen aisle of the supermarket, along with Quorn mince. Unfortunately Quorn doesn't like DD, so that isn't an option for us.

I expect there are as many ways of producing cottage pie as there are people who cook it, but I chop and soften whatever veg is starting to look dodgy, brown off the mince, throw in the veg with a little flour, a tin of chopped tomatoes, a stock cube, a tin of kidney beans and enough water so it doesn't stick. I then leave it to simmer for at least half an hour before topping it with cheesy mash and cooking in the oven for twenty minutes or so. 

Rather bizarrely, all you need to do to cook soya mince is to fry it from frozen for eight minutes in a little oil. Apart from using vegetable stock powder rather than my usual beef Oxo cube, I didn't do anything different to normal. All was going well until I decided that the "meat" was a little bland. Inspiration struck! Add Worcestershire sauce! (For those who are baffled, Worcestershire sauce is a strongly flavoured British sauce used to flavour meat, or scrambled eggs if you are me.) Unfortunately, it wasn't until the deed had been done that I checked the label and found anchovies listed. Who knew? Well, not me obviously.

The pie was well received by my family; DH thought it was meat until I enlightened him. However, I am not sure what I think about eating soya. I know there is some debate about the environmental impact of soya bean farming. I am not competent to judge whether it is worse than the impact of farming methane-producing beef cattle. The original point of eating more vegetarian food was to avoid processed meat, and there does appear to be a lot of processing going into soya mince. I am also trying to teach my children to appreciate vegetables and pulses and try different foods. So, on balance, I don't think I will be using soya mince again.

Root vegetable pie

I realise that this blog has become very food-centred lately. Maybe it's because cooking is such a large part of my life. I try to cook from scratch for four hungry people every day so it's just as well that I like it! I'm not so fond of the washing up.

I am particularly enjoying discovering different vegetarian recipes. Having played with pulses for the last few weeks I decided on a root vegetable pie this week. 

The recipe is available on the Riverford Organic Farms website. It is a good example of why you should read a recipe before starting it, as the pie needs to rest before you put it in the oven and then it cooks for an hour! Tea was a little late that day. I was a little wary of how it would go down, but it was surprisingly tasty. Apparently all it needs is gravy. Sigh. Despite the vegetable content it is not a very healthy meal due to all the puff pastry, but it is pretty cheap, especially if you are very good and make your own pastry. I didn't. One day I will, but today is not that day.

Lentil burgers

I've been keeping up with my aim of cooking one vegetarian meal a week; in fact this week I extended to two! For the last two weeks I have made lentil burgers from a recipe by Frugal in Derbyshire, kindly pointed out to me by Shara at Mama's Mission II. The beauty of these is that you can add your own flavours, so last week we had spicy cumin and coriander and this week we had paprika and parsley (alliteration unintentional!). 

It is quite a simple recipe. Last week I thought that the mixture was very wet, and ended up squeezing the patties to get rid of the excess. It wasn't until long after they had been eaten that I realised that I hadn't added the oats! Doh! This week's batch were much more successful. I served them with (shop-bought) rolls and home made potato wedges.

The other vegetarian meal this week was a Greek salad with halloumi cheese from this Sophie Grigson book which I borrowed from the library:

Image from mykitchentable.co.uk

There are some lovely recipes in here. Some of them are printed on the "My Kitchen Table" website, although unfortunately not the whole book! I suspect the library may want it back at some point so I may have to find my own copy. The Greek salad tasted great. It used quails' eggs, which are not cheap and incredibly fiddly. I bought them this time as I wasn't shelling out for any meat, but next time I will just use hens' eggs. DD, my vegetable-avoider, had sensibly gone out to a friend's for tea when I made this, but I will definitely be doing it again so it will be interesting to see her reaction.

Carrot and Coriander Falafels

Having started my quest to introduce vegetarian food into our diet, last week I attempted falafels. I have never eaten these before, and I don't even know how to say it! But feeling smug after my successful lentil curry I decided to have a go. I used a recipe from "A Girl Called Jack" which I have only just discovered. It is a brilliant blog which is a fascinating mixture of social action and recipes. Until recently Jack only had £10 a week to feed herself and her son, so her blog is full of seriously frugal recipes. These falafels work out at around 23p per portion.

The recipe was easy to follow, although my arms had a good workout with all the mashing of chickpeas. Next time I might just get out the food processor! The mixture didn't quite come together - in retrospect I should have added an egg to bind it. However, the falafels were very tasty and we had clear plates all round.

I am loving experimenting with vegetarian ingredients, and trying out lots of new flavours. I am sure it has to be doing us some good!

Lentil and Potato Dhal

A few weeks ago I wrote a post asking for help with ideas for vegetarian meals. I have really appreciated all the replies, and will be trying out the ideas. I love the support in Blogland! Lily from Gingham and Daisies very kindly sent me some recipes using lentils. I have cooked with lentils before, but I have never made them taste good! I was a little unsure how the kids would take to them, but I was determined to have a go. One of Lily's recipes was for Lentil and Potato Dhal. It was a spiced up version of a Delia Smith recipe, available here.

Lily's version included chilli flakes and fresh chillies as well as the Madras curry powder. We split along gender lines in our house; DD and I like our food spicy while DH and DS are a little more cautious. In the end I went for a more gentle curry, and served it with some rice (and trepidation).

I was really surprised at the family's reaction. Everyone loved it and cleared their plates! DH didn't even realise he was eating lentils. I am feeling a lot more confident about cooking pulses now, and I may be trying lentil moussaka this week. I am definitely going to be including vegetarian food in the meal plan at least once a week. Thank you Lily for the inspiration!

Vegetarian food - help!

Slightly alarmed by the report that eating too much processed meat has been linked to early death, DH has decided that we are going to eat more vegetarian food. He announced this as we tucked into sausage casserole! We have this about once a week, and we probably use a packet of bacon a week between us, so all in all I don't think we overdo the processed meat. However, I can see the health benefits of eating more veggies and I am willing to have a go at a weekly vegetarian dish. After all, I was vegetarian myself for three years when I was a student.

There are a few issues; DH is lactose intolerant so we can't have too much cheese. Bang go macaroni and cauliflower cheese! He also dislikes too much tomato, no one apart from me will eat courgettes, and I struggle to get DD to eat more than peas and sweetcorn on the vegetable front. Help! Does anyone have any good ideas?!

A first outing with the crock pot

I have finally taken my new slow cooker for it's maiden voyage. Usually when I make stew I just throw in the dodgy looking vegetables from the salad crypt, but for my first venture I thought that I should follow a recipe. As Morgan and Angela said, there are lots of websites out there. I found that the Netmums website had lots of useful recipes. I've never looked at the Netmums site; my children were slightly older when it became popular and I associated it with potty training and weaning! I appear to have underestimated it.

I chose a simple beef stew recipe. It felt a bit strange to be chopping onions and browning meat at 7.30am, and the kids found the smell a little strange while they were munching cereal, but we went with it. The smell soon changed into one of delicious cooking. I kept peeking in to check progress, and as soon as the children got home from school they wanted to know when tea would be ready.

8am

5.30pm

The final results did not disappoint, the stew was lovely. I am not normally a gravy person, and I added slightly less stock than recommended to the pot. As a result the gravy was beautifully thick. I am looking forward now to experimenting with it, and seeing what I can produce. I am particularly intrigued by the idea of cooking a whole chicken in it!

A new crock!

I have been thinking about buying a slow cooker for a while now, enticed by the idea that it uses less power than my main oven but unsure if it is really worth the outlay. However, I spotted this little beauty on offer today in the supermarket. How could I resist? After all, it will save me money in the long run. Honestly.

So now I've just got to learn how to use it! I know that lots of you in this corner of the blogosphere use one, and I am looking forward to getting to grips with it.

Tuna fish cakes

After our main meal yesterday I had some left over mashed potato and sweetcorn. I never get the quantity of mashed potato right. Why is that?!  So, inspired by Shara at Mama's Mission II, I adapted my usual salmon fish cake recipe to use tuna and sweetcorn.

To start off I boiled and mashed some more potato. The quantity doesn't matter too much; I normally make as much as I would for a normal meal. You need enough to bind the fish together and if you have too much you end up with fish flavoured potato cakes! I added one 185g tin of tuna, the leftover sweetcorn and some seasoning to the potato, mixed it together with my hands and shaped into 8 fish cakes.

It doesn't look very appetizing at this stage!

Then comes the fun part! I set up bowls of flour, beaten egg and breadcrumbs in a production line. 

 

Each fish cake gets dunked in each bowl in turn until you end up with something that looks like this:

These are then fried until the breadcrumb coating is crisp on each side:

They can be served with salad but this time of year we have ours with veggies. They make a tasty, simple meal. I used a value brand of tuna, (still caught by pole and line), so it was also ethically sound and cheap. I like it when these two things combine!

Mock Turkey

I have been really enjoying "The Wartime Farm" on the BBC. This is the first of the Farm series that I have seen and I have been very impressed with it. So much so that I spent some of my birthday money on the book!

I had particularly enjoyed the Christmas episode where Ruth knocked up a "Mock Turkey" or "Murkey" for Christmas dinner. It is basically made of stuffing which is  much my family's favourite part of a roast dinner. I had to give it a go! There are lots of recipes for Mock Turkey out there on the web. This one is basically sausagemeat, bread crumbs, herbs and seasoning held together with grated onions and apples. The results are shaped into the shape of a turkey, using parsnips for legs, and then covered with bacon.

As I don't suppose World War Two housewives had food processors I grated the onions and apples by hand. Onions and I don't mix, and by the time I had finished I looked like I had been weeping copiously. Instead of buying sausagemeat, which in my supermarket comes ready seasoned and "herbed", I skinned plain sausages. The psuedo-fowl was baked for an hour and a half in a medium oven.

Of course, it tastes absolutely nothing like turkey. I liked it as I am a sausage fan. DH and DS were similarly keen, preferring it to the real thing, but DD was not so enamoured, labelling it "stodgy". I still have to work out what to do with the leftovers. I am sure the original cooks wouldn't have let any go to waste!

In praise of chorizo!

Back in the summer I looked after my neighbours' cat for a time while they were enjoying Spain. I am not generally considered an intimidating person, but this particular cat turns tail and runs at the sight of me! He obviously associates me with being home alone and I am his least favourite person. I am treated with the disdain that I so obviously deserve. So I was very happy when the travellers returned, and was even more happy when they presented me with Spanish sweets and a chorizo!

I was a bit baffled by the chorizo. I have never cooked with one before as I don't usually hang around the deli section of the supermarket. 

I didn't actually keep it on a cupboard door!

Fortunately I spotted this recipe for spicy chorizo and tomato pasta on a brilliant blog called Frugal Feeding. It is very simple and only uses a few ingredients.

Ingredients

100g spicy chorizo

400g carton of passata

1 tbsp smoked paprika

300g pasta

Method

1. Chop the chorizo into small cubes and start to fry gently in a saucepan.

2. Put the pasta on to boil.

3. After a few minutes add the paprika to the chorizo and chuck in the passata. The sauce will be ready when the pasta is cooked.

As well as being tasty chorizo is also a pretty frugal way of eating meat. Since my first encounter I have bought one from the supermarket. The only one I could find was from the "pay a lot more for fancy packaging" range but it was still only £2.25 for 220g which makes the meat in this meal work out at 25p per person. I have been told you can get them in Lidl but I haven't seen one there yet.