Food diary 1
Monday: haloumi, beetroot and purple sprouting broccoli, with new potatoes mixed in. Not bad at all.
Tuesday: Lamb steak, tomatoes, baby aubergines, lentils, and nice flavour mix borrowed from this lamb tagine recipe; with couscous, plus threw in some leftover beetroot from yesterday’s dinner. Pink couscous, pretty! Cooking time: preparing, stirring, etc, about half an hour; a little over an hour from start to finish. Yummy.
Wednesday: Potato, chorizo and spinach soup. Simple recipe largely relying on the chorizo for flavour (additional flavouring: onion, butter, mustard seeds and a little stock concentrate); total cooking time no more than 40 minutes, including 10-15 minutes peeling, chopping, etc. Very good comfort food. (Could probably do a veggie version with a bit of extra flavouring - maybe some cheese.)
Thursday: Baked sweet potato and portobello mushroom, with tomato sauce (one I made earlier, out of the freezer) with aduki beans (also from the freezer - a fantastic idea). Total cooking time varies depending on the size of the sweet potato, but usually about an hour total, of which I spend maybe 5 minutes actually doing stuff. (Put potato in oven, smothered in olive oil; half an hour or so later put mushroom in oven, ditto; tomato sauce and beans go in microwave. It’s barely cooking at all.) Always nice, if not exactly mindblowing.
Friday: Spicy pork and tomato stew (adapted this recipe - great flavours, definitely worth doing the full-scale version in the future), with rice. Added some fennel, and used up the tinned tomatoes from Tuesday evening. Preparation took about 25 minutes, total cooking about 50 minutes. Damn good.
There’s some taleggio cheese in the fridge that needs to be used up soon. Hmmm…
Saturday: Risotto with wet (fresh) garlic and taleggio. Risotto is one of my favourite comfort foods (the weather has turned miserable and cold over the last week…), although nothing compares to mashed potato in that department. My favourite risotto in recent months has been sweet potato (taking over from fennel), but this works pretty well. NB, however: when I’ve used wet garlic in risotto previously, I’ve roasted it. This time I tried simply using it raw, as in this recipe (because I feel bad about putting the oven on just to roast a head of garlic, for crissakes…), but I don’t think it was as nice. Roasting the garlic first makes it sweeter and milder and although you then need a bit more of it, I think it gives a better flavour. Could have used parmesan rather than taleggio, but the latter gave it a creamier texture. (Rather like savoury rice pudding.)
Sunday: Farmers’ Market Day!! Which always leads to a dilemma: which of the bulging packs of dead animal to eat tonight?! I went for something I’ve only ever seen at this farmers market: venison liver. It’s gorgeous, and cheap. You don’t need to do much to it, but I have a bad habit of overcooking liver if I fry it, so this is what I do: brown each side for a couple of minute in the frying pan with a little oil, then take it out; put in some red wine or marsala or some such and reduce slightly, add a little liquid and flavouring (I usually go for something sweet like redcurrant jelly + something savoury like stock concentrate or soy sauce); then I put the liver back in the liquid to gently poach for a few more minutes, till it’s just a little pink in the middle (you don’t need much liquid - the liver is never completely submerged). Then I take it out for the last time and bung a spoonful or two of cream or creme fraiche into the sauce to make it creamy and unhealthy. Served with potatoes and purple sprouting broccoli (’tis the p.s.b. season - rejoice!), but rice, salad, etc, might work instead.
There is now a crazy amount of top-quality meat in the freezer, neatly divided into portions for use over the coming weeks. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without my freezer.
