Toad in the Hole

I totally followed the recipe and it didn't work well... :(
I think I need more baking dishes. Ones that aren't glass.
This is why I don't like recipes.... too bad baking requires them.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pork-recipes/toad-in-the-hole

The yorkshire-puddingness of it wasn't cooked all the way through but the outside was burnt. Plus there was mystery additional liquid - pork juice? Bleurgh. Luckily, it tasted fine.

Thai Green Curry

This is a tasty favourite of mine because its so rich and different tasting.

I mostly followed the recipe you can find here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/nigelslatersthaigree_80244

Here are the changes:
Remember the chicken pot pie? Remember how I baked the chicken breasts and wings and just used the meat? Well, I was lazy, so I put the baking tray with the skin, bones and wings in it back into the oven and forgot about it.

BUT THEN I USED IT THE NEXT DAY. HAHAHAHahahaha....

I just used them to make chicken stock. I put it all in a small pot with some left over leek bits, trimmed carrot ends and an onion and let it boil away until I needed it.



What else... OH, instead of using chicken breasts I just cooked the other half of the chicken. You know, the non-breast part. I just shoved it in my round glass baking dish with some salt and pepper and baked it until it look done. Then I took it out, cooled it off a bit, and pulled the meat from the bones.

this looks disgusting but man is it tasty.

I used coconut oil because it is so flavourful and Waitrose Thai green curry paste because it looked good.



I really just had to work at getting the flavours right, adding more sugar, fish sauce, soy suace and curry paste to the coconut milk and stock until the flavour was right.

I am not a millionaire - the chicken cost less than £6 and served six (in two separate meals) and all those gorgeous baby veg were REDUCED. genius.

Then I added the chicken, some frozen peas, and my delightful REDUCED veggies. What a joy.



I served it all over rice and served it to my happy friends and family. :)



OH! I FORGOT: look at this wonderful product! Frozen freshly-chopped cilantro in a resealable freezer bag. Booyah! Its so great.

The Long Pot Roast

I made a pot roast, but I didn't take any photos, 'cause I was mostly asleep the whole time.
We were supposed to have the pot roast on Thursday, but it didn't roast through enough, so we didn't have it until Friday night. At least the flavour was improved.

Ages ago I bought a silverside roast that was reduced from £17 to £10. I cut it into three pieces and froze two of them up. If you place frozen meat, unwrapped, on a calphalon pan it'll defrost in no time. So I placed my meat, wrapped, on a calphalon pan and left for a bunch of hours. By the time I came home the roast was, well, slightly defrosted on one side. Here begins the saga.
Anyways, it took about one million years for the beef to defrost, even after I took it out of the wrapping, because I must have been refreezing it with my constant eye contact.

But on to the recipe. It's mostly from Cook's Illustrated, Pot Roast with Root Vegetables.

Sear the beef on a high heat in a pan until its brown on all sides. It says do this in a Dutch oven, which I do not have. So I did the browning and the sauce making in a frying pan and the roasting in a glass baking dish. Once the beef is browned, take it out and place it in the baking dish. Chop up a small onion, a rib of celery and part of a carrot (eat the other part). Fry these in the same frying pan over a medium heat for about 6 minutes. Add a teaspoon of sugar and a minced clove of garlic. Fry for about 30 seconds, then add some stock. I used half a stock cube and about 250ml of water. Deglaze the pan and boil the kettle. Pour the veg and stock mix over the beef, and pour boiling water into the dish until it reaches halfway up the beef. Cover it with foil and put it in a 160C oven for about 3.5 hours.

Wellllllll, I put the roast in at about 8pm, so I screwed up there. Anyways, I kept turning the roast every half hour or so, but it never got done. After about two hours I cut up some root vegetables and scattered them around the roast, nestled in the liquid. So when we went to bed at around 11.30pm I just turned off the oven and LEFT THE ROAST THERE. OVERNIGHT. WITHOUT HEAT OR COOLING. AND I'M STILL ALIVE.

I must be a superhero. Get me.

Anyways, the next morning I took the roast out of the juices and put it on a plate. I covered both the roast and the veg and liquid and left to try on wedding dresses. LEFT THE FOOD ON THE WORKSURFACE.

When I got back at around 5pm I started making more of a stew than a pot roast. A pest had invaded my kitchen and eaten half of the roast. But that was okay, because the ratio of meat, sauce and veg turned out just fine.

I skimmed some of the fat off the top of the liquid and poured both the liquid and veg into a sauce pot. I sliced up the meat and then tore it into pieces and shoved than in the pot as well. Then I added some red wine and salt and let the whole thing bubble away until I ate it and it was DELICIOUS.

The end.

Man Eggs

This was not made by me, but by my man, King of Eggs.


With the addition of ketchup, or tomato sauce, or red sauce or WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT, it went down in about 20 seconds.

Nice work, baby.

Steak and Potato Pie

Remember that other steak? He needed cooking. So, I made a bit of a pie.

First, chop potatoes into a few pieces, put them in a pot, cover them with cold water, add some salt and put them on a hot burner. Aka, boil some potatoes. Maybe I go a bit overboard with the instructions.

Chop up a couple of onions and some celery. Put some butter and some lardons in a frying pan and start frying up the onions. Take the steak, cut off the fat, and chop the meat into small pieces. Put the chopped steak in the pan, along with the piece of fat from the steak. Cook the steak for a while, and then remove the steak-fat. Similar as to the chicken pot pie, add a couple of spoonfuls of flour and cook it for a minute or two.

Then add stock (all I had was chicken) until a sauce forms. To that add some Worcestershire sauce, some red wine, the celery, some cherry tomatoes (I squashed them with my hands as I put them in) and a spoonful of cream.

As you can see, this was a bit of a catch-all for things I had in my fridge. If you have other vegetables, add them. Beer instead of red wine would be fine. Chorizo instead of lardons sounds great. Feel free to make it your own.

By this point the potatoes should be done. Drain them, mash them, and then add milk and some beaten eggs. Mix it all together til its really smooth.

Pour the filling into your dish. When putting the potatoes on top of the filling, plop wee bits of mashed potato all around the top of the dish. Then start smoothing it out with a fork. Make nice fork-y bits that will brown nicely.

Shove it in the oven until the potatoes get browned on the tips.



Yum!

Simple Salad

Solving your salad woes.

Do find salad kind of lame sometimes? Me, too. But I know its good for me, and it never really tastes BAD, so I usually make it. This night, though, I only had lettuce and mushrooms. For being the main ingredient in a salad, lettuce is surprisingly bad at mixing with salad's back-up star, the dressing. It often turns out that unless you use a tasty and fatty (and delicious and bad at the same time) creamy dressing, your dressing falls listlessly to the bottom of the bowl and your lettuce tastes unsurprisingly like lettuce. Add to that some raw mushrooms, tasty slightly chalky and papery and raw. Meh.

So - what I did instead was this: I chopped my lettuce nice and small. Then I rinsed it in my salad bowl to get rid of any grit. I left it on the chopping board to drain a bit and chopped up my mushrooms. Into a bowl I whisked together some (that is an exact measurement) oil, red wine vinegar, honey, tons of pepper and salt. Then I plopped the mushrooms in the bowl with the dressing and let them marinate. The shrooms soak up the dressing and soften at the same time, solving two problems at once.



That's about it. Mix them together and you get a really lovely salad!

Chicken Pot Pie

I just love chicken pot pie. Chicken pot pie, you are so delicious.

Firstly - I set the oven for 200C. Instead of buying chicken breasts, I bought a whole chicken and cut away the breasts and wings from the rest of the body, skin, bones and all. I put a little butter under the skin and rubbed salt and pepper on the skin. I laid the half-chicken on a few rings of onion to keep the chicken from sticking to the roasting tray and shoved it into the oven until cooks (or mostly cooked).



Chop up two small onions, a couple sticks of celery and a two carrots. Melt some butter in a frying pan (preferably, use a NON non-stick pan). As the chicken cooks away in the oven, it'll start spitting out some fat. Take the roasting tray out of the oven and drain the chicken fat into the frying pan - using the chicken fat instead of just butter, vegetable oil or olive oil adds more interesting flavour.

Place the onions in the frying pan and cook them down a bit. While the onions are cooking down, place two stock cubes and the appropriate amount of water in a pot. Or, if you've got stock, just heat it up a bit - about 2-3 cups. Leave it on the stovetop, ready for use in making the sauce.

Add about two tablespoons of flour to the frying pan and stir constantly for about two minutes, scraping the bottom of the pan so that nothing burns, only browns. Basically, to make a roux, always just add the same amount of flour as butter. Slowly add in ladles of the stock and stir until a nice thick sauce form - taking care to scrape the bottom of the pan.




Once the sauce is formed, add the following: celery, carrot and a few tablespoons of cream. Take the chicken out of the oven and tear the breasts off the bone. Chop the chicken into small pieces (most of it will be cooked through, but don't worry if bits are a still a bit raw - there will be plenty of time for it to cook through later) and add them to the pan. Get some frozen peas out of the freezer and add a bunch of those, too.



Now for the pastry topping: this can be done hours in advance or just any time whilst you're cooking. The basic idea for the pastry is one part flour to one part fat, plus lots of salt and pepper, and maybe some sturdy herbs like thyme or rosemary. Here's what I did for this recipe: I measured out about 200g of flour - half plain and half wholemeal. I got out about 200g of butter and sliced it in to pieces - this helps warm it up a bit faster and makes it easier to mix. You may end up using less butter than that because you end up doing it by feel. So, into the bowl put all the flour, salt and pepper and about three-quarters of the butter. Now, work the flour and the butter together in the bowl with your fingers. Just start squishing it all together until the butter and flour is mixed and starts forming a dough. Once it forms a dough that mostly sticks together, add a bit of cold water (maybe just over a tablespoon) and mix the dough together til it forms a ball. Press that ball into a disc, leave it in the bowl and shove it in the fridge until you're ready for it - just make sure its cold and hard.



When you're ready, take the pastry out of the fridge, use plenty of flour one your work surface and rolling pin (aka wine bottle) and roll the dough out into whatever shape your dish is. Best thing to do is roll it out a bunch, then take your baking dish, turn it upside-down on the dough and press it down a bit so it leaves an imprint. Then use a knife and follow the imprint the cut the shape you need. Use extra bits to fill in the ragged edges. I usually have a bunch leftover and since the crust is obviously the TASTIEST bit, I use it all. I just formed it into another shape and doubled up the crust, ie. regular crust across the whole thing, with a second layer of heart shaped pastry in the centre. You'll see what I mean from the photo.




Okay, so... pour what's in the frying pan into your baking dish. Then place the pastry topping(s) on top - crimp the edges a bit so that the filling can't bubble over the top. Then cut a few slits in the pastry so that steam can escape.

One last step - thought its not necessary: crack one egg in a bowl and stir it up a bit. Glaze the pastry with the egg - this way it gets a nice, golden finish to it. I just use my fingers as I haven't got a brush.

Shove the pie in the oven at 200C-ish and cook it 'til its bubbling and the pastry is a pleasing light brown colour.



Enjoy!