Stuffed Tomatoes

As I may have mentioned, you know…in passing, just maybe once or twice….I moved last week. In fact, I didn't just move, I moved into my very first real home that I own!!! Its all been a little bit mental and hectic (we completed about an hour before the man and van were arriving to move me out of my last residence) but I felt a little bit like superwoman on moving day. I really am my mother’s daughter because as well as getting everything boxed up/marked/moved, I managed to also prepare a rather delicious dinner for moving night. Very simple, cheap and perfect to prepare in advance just to chuck in the oven on the night. Before it seems like I'm just a big bragger, I didn't feel quite like superwoman over the next week as I don’t think I made one proper meal in my own kitchen during that whole time!

Ingredients

4-8 large tomatoes

1 cup rice

250g lamb mince

Handful of pine nuts

1 onion

Garlic

Pinch cinnamon

Pinch paprika

Salt/pepper

Mint/parsley/basil/thyme/sage (basically whatever fresh herbs you have available)

Cook the rice as you usually would but stop it ¾ way through (the rice will still have a bit of bite) drain and set aside. While the rice is cooking you can make the mince mixture. Cut the tops off the tomatoes (but keep) and scoop out their insides (keep these too).

Chop the onion and garlic and the insides of the tomatoes. Roughly chop the herbs.Cook the onions and garlic on a very low heat with a small amount of olive oil (lamb is a far fattier meat than beef and you will not need any more) until translucent (about 6-10 minutes), then add the lamb mince and turn the heat up. Keeping it moving, brown the lamb mince and add the cinnamon,paprika and pine nuts.

Cook for a few minutes before adding the chopped tomato insides, salt and pepper and some tomato purée  At this point, if it is looking a little dry, add a small amount of water and the ¾ done rice, giving it all a good mix. Turn off the heat and stir through the chopped herbs.

When you are ready, stuff the rice mixture into the tomatoes, spreading any extra around them in the base of the dish (I use my cast iron pot for this, but any heavy based dish suitable for the oven would do, i.e. a ceramic/glass one that fits everything in snugly) and pour a bit of water over.

As I didn't have enough large tomatoes,
I threw some chopped cherry ones around the rice
 at the bottom of the dish.

Bake in the oven for about 40 minutes on high (about 180-200) until the tomatoes have slightly blackened. Serve with a fresh salad and a rich tomato sauce and it’s a dinner for kings! If you are preparing this in advance, do everything until putting it in oven and then you are ready to go whenever you need it. 

Frozen Spinach

As I said, I’m moving out very soon (this week in fact…I must get packing!) and have been using up what’s in the freezer when along came a pack of frozen spinach. Originally bought as a substitute for fresh in Saag Aloo (I promise I’ll post a recipe, but I seem to have lost the photos and thought I’d get this one up first), I just keep finding it more and more useful. Although it does cook down into a rather mushy substance and I would not advise serving it as a side alone, it does wonders to bulk up stir fries, use it in curries or stuff your lamb with it. Oh, and it won’t go off!

Spinach and Mint Stuffing

As well as substituting for fresh spinach in my previous recipe, you could also try this version.

Ingredients

1 small or ½ white onion

1 clove garlic

1 red chilli

A few handfuls of frozen spinach

Small handful of mint leaves

Small handful of parsley leaves

1 slice stale bread

Dice the onions, chilli and garlic. Slowly cook with a glug of olive oil for 6-7 minutes, stirring occasionally to ensure it doesn’t burn. Meanwhile, whiz the bread in a food processor to make breadcrumbs and bake in a high oven for 5 minutes or so until crisp.

Add the frozen spinach to the onion mixture and turn up the heat slightly. Cook until the spinach has defrosted, using a wooden spoon to separate it (mash it up!?) as it cooks.

Once the spinach has all defrosted add the breadcrumbs, stir in and cook for a few more minutes before turning off the heat and adding the mint and parsley (roughly chopped).

Stuff into meat (I did it with lamb, it was delish) or cook in a small and shallow oven dish for 15-20 minutes in the oven. 

Stock Cupboard Stir Fry

She also included these lovely chopsticks!

I recently participated in Foodie Pen Pals for the first time, this is a scheme where each month you get somebody whom you send a parcel of foodie related goodies to, and somebody else sends you a monthly treat. In September, my box came from a lovely lady also called Charlie who sent me a box with a lot of Asian goodies in. Well I don’t know if she realised how amazingly useful this would be!

I’m moving out of my house very soon and so its got to that time where I HAVE to use up what is in the house and am definitely not allowed to just go out and buy loads of other ingredients. Well, luckily enough Charlie had sent me a packet of udon noodles (my favourites, they are like wiggly worms) which meant that all I needed to conjure up were a few veggies and bobs your uncle, you are done! Pretty much any vegetables will do, though I’d try to include some onion for flavour.  I used…1/2 sweet red pepper, ¼ white onion, 4 mushrooms, handful frozen spinach and ½ green chilli.

The key to stir-fries is written in the title, they need to be cooked on high and kept constantly moving. This ensures the veg keep their crunch and is a great speedy meal as it’s ready in less than 10 minutes.

Essential Ingredients

1 tablespoon sesame oil (actually, this isn’t essential but if you don’t have it  it is well worth thinking about getting some in if you enjoy oriental cooking)

1 tablespoon flavourless oil (light olive, vegetable, groundnut)

1 clove garlic

2 tablespoons light soy sauce

1 lime (juice of)

1 tablespoon honey

1 packet soft noodles

Heat the oils in a wok on high and add the chilli and garlic keeping it moving, when it is just starting to colour add the onion and cook for about 2 minutes KEEP IT MOVING.

Add the pepper (or harder vegetables) and frozen spinach and cook for a minute before adding the soy sauce, lime juice and honey. 

Cook for another 2-3 minutes before adding the mushrooms (or softer vegetables) and a minute or so later, the noodles.Check that the liquid and add more soy sauce if needed then cook for 2-3 minutes and serve.  

Teatime Treats

I know, I know…I have been a truly awful blogger this past month. I don’t have any excuse so how about some sweet treats to get your taste buds excited!

With this gorgeous weather we’ve been having recently (finally summer arrives) it seems the perfect time for afternoon tea picnics, and in fact that’s just what I’m doing as a surprise for the boy to celebrate our anniversary (shhhh, don’t tell him!). So here are two recipes to make your high tea even yummier!

Fairy Cakes

These are seriously a doddle and you only have to remember 2, 4, 4 and 4. That is; 2 eggs and 4 ounces each of flour, sugar and butter. Seriously, that’s it! If you want bigger quantities then just increase the mix (3 eggs, 6 ounces, 4 eggs, 8 ounces and so on). This is a classic sponge recipe and can be adapted for various things, adding chocolate drops, cocoa, cut it in half and put jam in the middle…its like recycling, the possibilities are endless! Oh and don’t make the mistake of adding baking powder, it will be give your cakes nipples.

Ingredients

2 eggs

4 oz plain flour

4 oz butter (at room temperature)

4 oz caster sugar

You will need an electric whisk or  some guns (muscles that is)!

  

Place the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl (cutting the butter into small cubes makes this next bit much easier) and whisk together (start at low on electric whisk and increase to high as mixture gets softer and less likely to go all over your kitchen.)  You want to whisk these together until they are pale and creamy, and then keep whisking some more!

I can’t stress how important this step is, this should be what takes the longest time whilst making these as its this step that ensure they have enough air in to rise and be light and fluffy.

Sift half the flour into the bowl, make a well and crack one egg into it. Mix on a low speed until its all incorporated and then repeat with the rest of the flour and last egg. And voila! You have cake mixture.

Put a dollop of mixture into each fairy cake case, put into a preheated oven at about 180 and bake for 13-17 minutes. They are ready when you can lightly press the top and it springs back.

Scones

Whereas I have been making fairy cakes since year dot (my Grammy was an excellent baker and helpfully had a slow oven) scones are a new addition to my repertoire, but I don’t know why it took me so long to try them out!

If you don’t have buttermilk you can use a homemade substitute. One cup of milk with one tablespoon of lemon juice left for 15 minutes will turn and is perfect to use instead.

This recipe comes from my very trusted Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step cook book.

Ingredients

8 oz self-raising flour

3 oz butter

1 ½ oz caster sugar

1 egg

4-10 tbsp buttermilk

Pinch of salt

You will need some kind of round cookie cutter

  

Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Cut the butter up into cubes and add to the bowl, then rub the butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs (somebody once told me the way to do this is to tickle the butter and flour like a baby’s bottom!) Add the sugar and mix in.

Break the egg into a bowl/jug/appropriate sized receptacle and add 2 tablespoons of buttermilk. Make a well in the centre of the flour mix and pour in your egg and buttermilk mixture. Using a normal kitchen knife, mix together until it’s too stiff to use the knife, then it’s time to get your hands dirty! 

If it’s too dry to bring together into a ball, add more buttermilk a tablespoon at a time; the end result should be soft but not sticky.

Flour the work surface and roll out the dough until it’s about an inch thick. Cut out the scones using the cookie cutter and place onto a greased baking tray (or onto floured greasproof paper). You will most likely have to reshape and re-roll the dough in order to cut the scones out efficiently.

Bake at the top of the oven at 220 (200 for fan ovens) for about 10 minutes until golden on top and cool on a wire rack.

I GOT PRESS PASSES!!!

Did I tell you that I got press passes to a food festival? I’m not going to lie, I was immensely excited!  Taste Festival is aimed at showcasing local/regional food producers as well as a demonstration tent with various chefs throughout the weekend. I could rattle on about everything there was, but I don’t think I’d have many readers by the end of this post.

We couldn’t have been more blessed with the weather as the weekend of 18^th was an absolute scorcher, we only lasted a few hours before wilting under the heat so my hat goes off to everybody who was exhibiting and selling at event. I suppose I should get started telling you about them! I’m a bit of a condiment fiend, particularly because they are often the sort of thing that one struggles to replicate as well, and boy were there some good ones here.

No, its not a condiment, but I felt I had to mention Toffee Vodka somewhere!

I don’t know about you, but I LOVE chilli jam and it is on my list of things to make for myself one day, so I was quite delighted to notice at least 3 chilli jams around the place. They were all of a really high standard but I ended up buying mine from The Versatile Sauce Co, and I’m pretty sure that’s just because the people were so lovely. But now I can’t stop eating it! It goes so well with everything and we enjoyed it that night with barbecued sausages from Spot on Produce.

There was one other condiment that day that I feel deserves its own special mention, Rosemary Jelly from Kush Cuisine. A bit like mint jelly with that sweetness but instead of mint, there’s this wonderful taste of rosemary. I imagine its absolute heaven with roast lamb, I was just sad my wallet didn’t stretch quite that far.

I’ll get back to more of the stuff on sale later but first I HAVE to tell you about the barbecue train! Yes, that’s right, a barbecue that looks like a steam train! The pulled pork they were making looked delicious; unfortunately I decided to have slow roasted lamb for lunch that was HORRIBLE! I thought the point of slow roasting is that it’s all soft and delicious, this was just dry and stringy, very disappointing.

Hiding away in the corner of the field was Herbal Haven, who seem to be following us around as we saw them at the Winchester Hat Fair (not to do with hats) very recently. I was drooling over the selection of herbs then, so I couldn’t resist a second time. His range is incredible, more types of mint, basil, thyme, coriander (to name but a few) than you could hope t o remember and he even does a range of medicinal herbs and plants. I came home with Vietnamese coriander that took me straight back to Hanoi and a beautifully sweet apple mint that I can’t wait to try and make tea from.

There’s so much more to tell you but I imagine I am probably boring you so I’ll finish off by telling you about ale-gar. ‘Ale-gar?’ I hear you ask, yes ale-gar! It’s vinegar made from ale instead of wine, and is made from a medieval recipe and was probably the most intriguing thing on sale. It comes with a pretty hefty price tag however, so I decided to go home with some deliciously sweet and syrupy blueberry vinegar from the lovely ladies at The Blueberry Co.

I hang my head in shame

For I am a terrible person not to have blogged for weeks! I know, how will you ever forgive me?

Let’s see if I can make up for it. As some of you will know I spent a week in Italy with Italian Housemate’s friends and family. We stayed in a little farmhouse in Baratti, a tiny village in Tuscany; beautiful scenery, beautiful weather and oh my, the food! The kitchen in Baratti was Massimo’s territory, and I know a territorial chef if I see one.

So instead of cooking, for my Italian week I watched and learned, asking annoying questions to Massimo who cannot speak English and receiving answers in Italian. It is not only the English that react to somebody not understanding by speaking LOUDER AND S L O W E R.

It turns out the Italians do like to stay true to stereotype; I have never eaten so much pasta in my entire life! I think I practically rolled home, but boy it was worth it.  I’m sure you don’t want to hear about each and every meal I had, but I’ll go through a couple of the highlights…

Dried Aubergines with Mint

The Italians have a rather different relationship with vegetables than we do (and food in general), they are seen more as a course in themselves as opposed to something we have to eat or to go with meat, and with dishes like this I can understand it.

Aubergines are a funny kind of vegetable, I’ve always quite liked them, but they seem to be rather hit and miss. Sometimes they can be ever so soggy and when I have one in the fridge I often am just not sure what to do with it. Well, I have a new favourite aubergine dish. Simply dried in the sun for 24 hours (that’s the Italian sun, not the English sun) and fried over with mint (yes, mint!)  they are seriously superb.

The mint was just growing wild near the house!

I have tried to replicate this dish twice since I have been home, with both fantastic and disastrous results. First time I dried them out in the sun (it was a very hot day) for a day and left out in the kitchen overnight with salt on, they worked perfectly. However, with the recent spat of good weather I decided to repeat the experiment and IT WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA! I ended up with mouldy aubergines after only a day. It seems you need a very dry heat for this dish, I’ll come back with a recipe once I have worked out a suitable alternative to good old sunlight.

Fresh Pasta

You know, I don’t think I have ever tried fresh, home made pasta before…I’ve missed out. I couldn’t even hope to give you any quantities here as Massimo just threw the flour down, I do however know he used semolina as well as flour (not in most recipes) and less semolina than flour.

I’ve just had my first go at pasta this week, I was really pleased with the results but it’s such hard work! I thought my arms were fairly used to kneading, but kneading pasta is on another level. It took the combined efforts of Italian Housemate, New Housemate and me to get this going, Massimo made it look easy.

Once kneaded, it sits covered in the fridge for an hour before rolling out. Massimo would roll it out, then sprinkle flour all over the dough and then wrap and roll the dough around the rolling pin.

I’m not entirely certain as to why, but when I was doing it myself I think it helped show up where the dough was unevenly rolled. Once thin enough, pasta was cut into long thick strips and laid on floured foil until ready for cooking.

The pasta was served with pesto, there was nothing new or different about Massimo’s pesto, it was just the quality of the basil. As he was grinding it down in the pestle and mortar (metal affects the taste of the basil) the whole house smelt of it, it was truly wonderful and a perfect complement to the fresh pasta, and that was just the starter!

I think I should probably stop now for risk of boring anybody, though I really haven’t touched on half the dishes. Mussels cooked in seawater, the mysterious ‘palamito’ fish (which translates to trawl line, not exactly a fish!), tomato risotto (with the tomato juice and no stock or wine) not to mention the Carpaccio or even the basic tomato sauces. What I really took away from the food this week was that you really can’t beat good quality, fresh ingredients…or Italian sun!

24 Hour Pulled Pork

This has to have been one of my most successful experiments ever! I’m not very good at slow cooking, not because it’s difficult, but because I am horribly impatient and assume that my kitchen has set fire if I leave it. This week however, I pushed passed my neuroses and actually left the house for five hours whilst the pork was going (annoying my friends every hour or so wondering aloud whether my house is still standing). I can’t quite describe how happy I was when the pork fell apart (well, it would have were it not for the string holding it together) as I lifted it from its roasting tin. I served it in ciabatta buns, apple slaw and barbecued corn on the cob, perfection!

Ingredients

Shoulder of Pork (about 2.5 kilos fed 5 of us with a portion left over)

Dry Rub

2 ½ teaspoons hot paprika

1 teaspoon salt

3 cloves garlic

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

3-5 sprigs of fresh thyme

1 heaped teaspoon cumin

 6-8 cloves

Baste

150ml cider vinegar

150ml white wine vinegar

2 tablespoons brown sugar

2 tablespoons honey

1 apple

1 teaspoon chilli flake

1 cinnamon stick (about 5cm long)

Salt/pepper

10pm the night before

Mix all the dry rub ingredients together other than the cloves (crush the garlic and pick leaves off thyme). Put the pork in a roasting tray and rub all over (most pork comes with its fat already scored, if it isn’t then you will have to do this before rubbing). It will seem like you can’t get any more on but keep going and cover as much as you can with it. Poke the cloves into the fat.  Once you’ve used the entire mixture, cover in cling film and refrigerate overnight.

Peel and core the apple and whizz it up in a food processor or hand blender. 

Add to all the other baste ingredients and leave in the fridge overnight.

11am the next morning (to be ready for 8pm)

Take the pork out the fridge and allow to rest for at least 30 minutes.

Turn the oven to 130 C or 250 f, using an oven thermometer is really useful here, and place a deep ovenproof dish filled with water at the bottom of the oven. 

Baste the pork (slop some of the vinegar mixture over it) and put it in the oven. You want to baste every 45 minutes- hour, however, if you wish to leave the house then add up to half the baste to the bottom of the pan and a little water (use your discretion as to how much depending on how long you are leaving for).

After 8 hours your pork will be ready, it may look very blackened but this is just the baste that has caramelised, don’t be scared! Take the pork out the roasting tray and pull apart(so that’s where the name’s from!) or shred with a couple of forks. It should easily come apart in mouth-watering chunks.

‘De-glaze’ the roasting tray by putting it on the hob on high and adding water, mixing to ensure all the saucy bits(and the bits on the bottom of the tray) are mixed in. Bring to the boil and reduce slightly before adding the pork to serve.