Archives for September 2013

Blue cheese dauphinoise

September 26, 2013

Now I never claim to be an expert. And I never claim to triple test things unless I have. Today I didn’t.

This blog is all about what we had for dinner and what you see is what you get.

I have waxed lyrical about canned dauphinoise potatoes from French supermarkets.

Today I was making my own with the nifty blade in my Magimix (ten years old now and apart from the crack in the funnel that appeared after 4 years it’s still going strong).

Six medium potatoes sliced in seconds.

They’re called “Lady Balfour” from Sainsbury’s organic range – which seems an appropriate name since Downton Abbey has returned to the telly.

Remember the mushroom soup the other day, a mixed cream and vegetable Kallo stock pot. Well I thought this would be a good base too for dauphinoise potatoes.

1 x 284 ml pot of Elmlea double light and 600ml of water with Kallo stock pot.

I arranged the sliced potatoes in one of my Grandma’s fabulous red ceramic dishes that always makes me feel like something out of Nigella Christmas.

Pour the liquid over the top and stud crumbled blue cheese around the gaps.

Bake for 50 minutes at gas mark six.

It’s cooked and it’s fabulous. Only one niggle is there’s more liquid than I’d like.

So do you know how I got around that?

I saved it for soup. What goes around eh.

With thanks to Sainsbury’s for Lady Balfour potato samples and Clawson Dairy Ltd for sample of Caxston soft blue cheese. The Kallo stock pots were a sample too from ages ago, they’re similar to the Knorr ones but have more bits. Plus they’re organic.

Creamy mushroom and pepper soup #NoCroutonsRequired

September 24, 2013

It’s definitely that time of year again, after a summer of salads, soup is firmly back on the menu. My six year old even asked for some for his supper.

Normally I consider soup a weekend lunch type of thing, I quite often make soups on Saturdays.

We are coming to the end of the Boursin mountain. Having seen how well this stuff melts into a sauce I figured it would behave itself in a soup.

My father frequently fed me soup for lunch on Saturdays so it must be ingrained in me. (He used to have me make said soup from powdered sachets though. Bleugh. Forgive me – this was before I’d had any cookery lessons at school or discovered what a blender was).

As an aside, I will let you know that my stick blender vanished in early July. I have hunted high and low throughout house and cellar and the stick blender is nowhere to be seen.

So it was jolly convenient when Buy It Direct got in touch and offered for me to road test a gadget from their site. This smurf coloured Morphy Accents hand blender, as you can see in the picture above has both a whisk attachment and mini chopper chamber in addition to the standard blending attachment.

I like that the blender is metal, the touch button is very sensitive (my previous Braun required strength to keep the button pressed). The handle is much weightier than my old model and I’m still getting used to it.

The Morphy Accents hand blender did a great job of blending my mushroom soup but I will have to report back separately how it’s done whisking eggs or chopping anything as I’m yet to use it for these features.

Ted was completing a food diary for homework when I served this. He wrote simply “soup and bread”. I tried to get him to expand this to “home made creamy mushroom soup and black olive ciabatta” but he wasn’t having any of it!

Creamy Mushroom and Pepper Soup
Serves 3-4 (assuming bread alongside)

Ingredients:

200g mushrooms, sliced (chestnut ones feel especially autumnal!)
1 tbsp butter
284ml tub of cream (I used reduced fat double by Elmlea but single or low fat single would be fine too)
1 vegetable stock cube or stock pot paste
700ml boiling water
3 mini packs of black pepper Boursin (around 2 tbsp)
seasoning to taste
You could use an alternative soft white cheese and add pepper separately. Also, if you prefer a lower fat soup feel free to decrease the ratio of cream to water.

Directions:

1. Fry the mushroom in the butter until soft.
2. Dissolve the vegetable stock cube or pot in 700ml boiling water in a jug. Pour over the mushrooms together with the cream and Boursin/soft white cheese and stir.
3. Once combined, take off the heat and blend until smooth. Serve immediately.

With thanks to Boursin for sample cream cheese. Say hi to them on Twitter @boursincheese
With thanks also to Buy It Direct for the Morphy Accents blender. Say hi to them on Twitter @buyitdirect

This soup is being sent to this month’s mushroom themed No Croutons Required jointly organised by Tinned Tomatoes (and this month hosted by) Lisa’s Kitchen.

Pasta bake saved my life last Thursday

September 19, 2013

It’s been a while since I bought jars of sauce.

I used to use them quite a bit when I worked full time but since becoming a more confident cook I’ve been less reliant on them.

Possibly no longer having the incentive to save glass jars stopped me buying them. The cellar shelves were rammed with eight jars each of a myriad of styles and sizes. I used to select bottled sauces on the desirability of the shape/size versus familiarity with how easily the labels washed away and how reliably the safety buttons would suck back down sealing the new contents. With the cellar shelf complete, little jam or chutney making in process and a desire to reduce the inconvenience of recycling glass, fewer jars were bought in our household.

My most frequently bought sauces in jars used to be Sainsbury’s stir in sauces of mushroom and pesto (short squat jars with vertical ridges), Buitoni (because it was the closest shape to some Italian ones given to me when my Italian housemate returned to her homeland) and Bisto cook in sauce (tall jars with straight sides that had lids with excellent safety buttons).

I would generally have bought Ragu for its lasagne sauces; tomato and bechamel. Oddly one thing I’d not done with stuff in jars was pasta bake since I’d previously been under the illusion it was necessary to pre-cook the pasta and bunging sauce on boiled pasta was quicker.

So when Ragu asked me to road test their new range of pasta bake sauces, I knew they’d be a big hit for dinner with Ted and said yes.

They’re a one dish dish if you get what I mean. No saucepan and no boiling.

Last Thursday I was feeling decidedly under the weather and was looking for a low effort supper and the Ragu pasta bake came to the rescue.

Even in my fragile state I managed to weigh 200g of pasta, tip over the sauce and some water and bung in the oven.

After about half an hour you give it a stir and add some cheese. Since I’d not been up to grocery shopping our cupboards were somewhat depleted and I had to forage for what as left to use instead of normal ordinary grated cheese.

I added some chunks of tomato and chive Boursin and a little grated parmesan. And I chucked in some leftover peas and beans from the fridge.

I was able to pop it back in the oven and go back to moping on the sofa.

This pasta bake was tomato & herb however other flavours in the range include tomato & bacon, tuna, cheese & bacon. For vegetarians there is also tomato, garlic and chilli.

At £1.99 I find them a tad expensive however if I saw them on BOGOF I might stock up on them.

I was attracted to being able to make a pasta dish that didn’t require babysitting a saucepan which might boil over. If you were serving this dish to four people you’d need something else along side as this was only enough for 2 adults and 1 child by itself. I’d normally cook 50g pasta per person if there was an accompaniment or plenty of ingredients padding it out.

With thanks to Ragu for samples of pasta bake sauce which no doubt will reappear here in the next couple of weeks. Say hi to them on Twitter @raguUK.

With thanks also to Boursin for the now diminishing soft cheese mountain. Say hi to them on Twitter @boursincheese.

Old school style cheese and potato pie and why the world just went a bit rubbish after 1990

September 17, 2013

How I loved school dinners. Before they were privatised that is.

Old style school dinners, before they started serving food on prison style plastic moulded trays.

I believe kids are more likely to eat proper meals when they’re served on proper plates.

It disgusted me when in around 1990, Walsall’s local education authority contracted out the provision of school dinners to a private company.

Overnight they replaced plates with plastic trays and beakers with disposable cups in order to save on washing up.

How I loved school home economics lessons. Before they started referring to them “food technology” that is.

Old style recipes, basic techniques upon which to build a lifetime’s ability to cook from scratch.

I believe kids are more likely to eat proper meals when they’ve been encouraged to cook by themselves.

It disgusted me when in around 1990, GCSE Home Economics moved away from the syllabus inherited from O Level learning how to cook proper family meals and became an extension of business studies designing pizza boxes.

If you want to trace back the rot that led to disengagement with home cooking, poorer quality school food and the knock on effects we bemoan today, I reckon the tipping point happened in 1990.

Luckily for me, I had enjoyed six years of excellent secondary school dinners and attained my A grade for GCSE home economics by the time of of this watershed.

Probably these individual cheese and potato pies were a thing of the past with privatised school dinners – too much washing up of individual dishes. Instead they served it tray bake style – the same recipe but far less finesse over the presentation!

I also recall that “potato galette” (effectively cheese and potato pie) was one of the recipes taught in the first year at secondary school – now termed Year Seven.

Everyone took wicker baskets to school cookery lessons containing ingredients for that week’s dish and carried the basket with the finished meal home on the school bus for that night’s supper.

School cookery lessons began at age 11 and were taught for 1 term per year until the end of the third year (now Year Nine). There were three lessons per week split into a single session for writing and a double session for the cooking. For these three years you also had a term per year of art and design technology. When you took your options you could take one GCSE in either art, design technology or home economics. I chose the latter and enjoyed two further years of school cookery lessons.

Even if you didn’t opt to take home economics at GCSE you’d have received as standard at least 30 cookery sessions over the course of 3 years. The first year focussed on using different parts of the oven i.e. dishes using the hob, the grill and then the oven. The early lessons were simply things like beans on toast and boiled eggs. But before long we were learning basic sponge cake recipes and whipping up Victoria sponges, pineapple upside down cakes and swiss roll.

Some of these essential recipes stayed with me for life and for many years I continued to make my own cheese and potato pie.

I’m not sure how cheese and potato pie dropped out of my repertoire but when my Italian housemate Anastasia left me these little brown dishes the memories of school cheese and potato pie flooded back. It’s glorious comfort food and I knew it would be right up Ted’s street and decided to make it for him last week.

He takes great interest in whatever I’m cooking and although he won’t be making it himself yet, I have decided to reinstate cheese and potato pie to our family’s regular menu. You can either make one big one or serve it individually. Depending how old your child is, they may eat one half one day and the rest the next. Ted had half with veggies and the other half with some left over bolognaise sauce the next day.

Did you learn to cook at school?

Old school style cheese and potato pie
Makes 4 individual pies

Ingredients:

500g white potatoes, peeled and chopped into large chunks
150g grated cheddar
25g butter
1 roughly chopped onion
2 tbsp olive oil (today I used Oi1 oil as previously featured in garlic mashed potatoes)
1 egg
1 tomato cut into 4 thick slices.

Note – you can use more butter instead of olive oil if you wish.

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 6 / 200c. Boil the potatoes in a large saucepan of water until cooked.
2. Meanwhile, fry the onion in the butter until lightly golden and soft.
3. Drain the water from the potatoes. Add the cooked onion, grated cheese, olive oil and egg. Mash together throughly.
4. Decant into oven proof dishes and top with a slice of tomato. Bake for 20 minutes until golden brown on top.

Serve with salad, vegetables and/ or left over meat.

With thanks to Godminster for sample cheddar cheese. Say hi to them on Twitter at @godminsterfarm

Also thanks to Sainsbury’s for samples of Taste the Difference mashing potatoes.

This cheese and potato pie is being submitted to this month’s cheddar themed Cheese Please organised by Fromage Homage.

When Ted went cooking with Raymond Blanc

September 13, 2013

It’s probably just as well Ted didn’t give a FULL rundown of what he did in the holidays.

It’s bad enough his first homework was to write a food diary in which the first entry was “sushi from M&S simply food on the motorway”.

Goodness knows what the new teacher would have thought if he’d announced he’d been cooking with Raymond Blanc.

In that long last week before going back to school we were invited to a kids’ cookery class at Brasserie Blanc Covent Garden with Mnsr Blanc himself.

The event was in honour of new kids’ cookery app Henri Le Worm created by Raymond’s son Oli Blanc.

But it wasn’t all playing with iPads and eating croissant. No. Kids each had work stations with proper cooking equipment.

The first job was whisking egg whites for chocolate mousse – without an electric hand mixer.

Well. I haven’t done that for years. Why would you?

So I did feel a bit pathetic when Raymond urged “put some elbow into it Mami”!

Despite our best joint efforts (indeed I could Tell was putting some welly into it as I held his hand on the whisk) we sneakily enlisted one of the sous chefs to finish the task at hand!

Leaving Ted to enjoy decorating his mousse. He was so proud of it he wouldn’t eat it. At first. (He soon came around).

Secondly we created these egg mayonnaise mice which Raymond says he started serving to kids in his restaurant in the 1970s.

They’re foamy mayo over two halves of hard boiled egg decorated with flaked almonds, bits of black olive and a chive.

And they’re very good to eat indeed!

Using the Henri Le Worm app

With cute animated characters voiced by Simon Pegg, the Henri le Worm app features 10 recipes by Raymond Blanc. It’s beautifully animated and features an interactive story called “The lost cookery book”.

I can well imagine Henri Le Worm becoming a popular kids’ TV series and it seems a gap in the market to have an animated kids show with a food theme. Simon Pegg’s narration is wonderfully natural evoking memories of “Bod” and “Willo the Wisp”. It’s all very whimsical and your kids may even pick up a few French phrases along the way.

The animation is excellent quality, the illustrations are a similar style to “Ben and Holly”. 10 recipes isn’t very many for £2.99 but I suspect it’s enough to keep kids busy for their attention span and I get the impression more recipes may follow in future updates.

Will we get an Henri Le Worm tv show? Watch this space!

With thanks to Raymond Blanc and Brasserie Blanc. Henri Le Worm: The Missing Cookbook is now available for the iPad and iPad mini, and will be coming to iPhone soon: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/henri-le-worm/id688853981?mt=8 Price £2.99.

Farro di cocco and mozzarella salad

September 12, 2013

Show me something in the supermarket I’ve not seen or heard of before and I’m a sucker to try it.

Farro di cocco would appear to be an Italian spelt grain that I spotted in Waitrose’s dried nuts/seeds/grains/fruit section.

To be honest this dish turned out somewhat different to anticipated; I wasn’t sure how to gauge how much this stuff would puff up when cooked. Pack instructions were to cook 50g out of a 250g pack although this unhelpfully omitted how many people this would serve.

Actually it doesn’t swell when cooked very much at all. So I found myself padding this salad out with cannellini beans and all kinds.

This was one of those meals where Ted was super interested in helping make the dinner but actually was very picky when it appeared on his plate. I guess many kids you’d know you’d not got a cat in hell’s chance of them eating it but he kept insisting he wanted to eat it.

In practice favourite bits (mozzarella, tomato, olives) were carefully selected and the rest rejected!

Oh well, we tried. Maybe if I have a go again I’ll make more of the farro di cocco and serve it more like rice or cous cous.

Ingredients added to the 50g farro di cocco here were:

1 can of cannellini beans
10 black olives
1 ball of mozzarella chopped into chunks
1 large chopped tomato
1 tbsp flaked almonds
a few leaves of basil

…in a dressing of roast pepper sacla, olive oil and white wine vinegar.

I fear it was a dinner too geeky for my little boy today!!

Have you tried farro di cocco?

Back to school garlic mashed potatoes

September 10, 2013

“We’ve got the dark nights again” as my Grandma used to say.

Despite 30c temperatures late last week probably most of us have had a taste of autumn over the weekend; coats are being donned for school once more.

A nip in the air is as good as excuse as any for some rib sticking comfort food. Armed with fluffy spuds and garlicky Boursin I whipped up the first mashed potatoes I could remember having in ages.

It’s hard to recall now but for a good six weeks this summer I couldn’t bear to light the gas hob never mind the oven.

So mashed potatoes were definitely off the menu and although I’m not glad to see the warm weather go, I do rather like the return of comfort food.

Easy peasy garlic mashed potatoes: mash potatoes with half a pack of Boursin garlic and herbs cheese and a glug of smooth olive oil. My variety today was an extra virgin variety from Crete. A sneaky pinch of salt flakes and a grinding of pepper and you’re good to go.

Are you ready to serve comfort food again?

With thanks to Sainsbury’s for samples of Taste the Difference mashing potatoes. I found they mashed incredibly easily. If a recipe calls for a “floury texture” potato then this is your spud. I warn you though, they soak up lots of butter and some of them were so tiny they were fiddly to peel. The ones in my bag were grown in the UK. Say hi to Sainsbury’s on Twitter @sainsburys

With thanks also to Candiasoil for samples of “Oi1 Peza” Cretian olive oil sold in these attractive tins which also protect the oil’s flavour being damaged by sunlight. Crete lays claim to having cultivated the first olives as far back as 3500BC. Oi1 Peza and Oi1 Viannos Cretian olive oils are due to be sold in Tesco this autumn, priced £6.35 for 500ml. Also ongoing thanks to Boursin for cream cheese.

Boursin beef baguette

September 5, 2013

Bashing the hell out of a lump of meat is always a fun task. Ted came running downstairs to see what all the noise was about.

You can make a couple of flash fry steaks go a long way if you cut them into strips for sandwiches. I stretched two of these steaks into lunch for 3 adults and 1 Ted with two steaks left over for a future supper. That’s the child size portion above if you think I’ve short changed anyone – the grown ups ate twice this amount.

Simply spread chunks of fresh baguette with butter and cream cheese – today I’ve used Boursin with Black Pepper which goes beautifully with beef and fresh rocket.

This is one of my favourite post-supermarket Saturday lunches because it only takes about 10 minutes to prepare but feels special enough to celebrate the weekend!

Do you have a special favourite lunch after buying the groceries?

With thanks to Boursin for samples of cream cheese. Say hi to them on Twitter @boursincheese.

Left over beef bolognaise #nowastefoodchallenge #creditcrunchmunch

September 3, 2013

Using minced beef in pasta sauce is a staple dish for many of us – but there’s no need to limit yourself making minced beef dishes with packs of ready minced beef.

I had two cooked flash fry steaks left over plus one cold lonely beef burger off the barbecue.

Come supper time I chucked the lot into the Magimix and blitz blitz had cooked ground beef ready the throw into the dinner.

It’s fairly pointless blogging a bolognaise sauce – this post is really about using up cold cooked beef so I won’t go into huge detail.

Just soften an onion in olive oil, add some tomatoes and garlic.

If I’m making minced beef in a large enough quantity I tend to keep the first batch for pasta (or a cottage pie if using stock rather than tomato) then spice up the second half in a chilli. Since this was just using up left overs I was a little sad not to have enough to do this!

With a sprinkle of cheese and few torn bits off the long suffering basil plant it was another speedy supper.

How do you use left over beef?

This dish using left over ingredients is also being submitted to:

Credit Crunch Munch organised by Helen and Camilla, this month hosted by Elizabeth

No Waste Food Challenge, organised by Kate, this month hosted also by Elizabeth

Speedy supper: tenderest chicken in pesto and Boursin

September 3, 2013

Dead easy, tenderest juiciest way to cook chicken in under 30 minutes.

Did you ever bake a chicken breast in nothing more than curry paste and yogurt?

The results out of the casserole dish aren’t visually pleasing but I promise you tender tender chicken guaranteed with very little effort indeed.

So I wondered how it would go with a 50/50 mush mush of pesto and cream cheese. I am gradually working my way through various flavours of Sacla sauces and Boursin cream cheese and recently most evening meals seem to have featured either one or the other….