Impromptu Coleslaw

Posted on August 4, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

I was clearing out the fridge on Saturday, trying to make room for the produce we’d bought at Borough Market. Freya was a little poorly so I decided to make something with the ingredients lying around in the fridge.

This coleslaw (naked of mayonnaise) was simply:

half a shredded red cabbage
a couple of grated carrots
a handful of sliced radishes
a sliced large red onion
a julienned apple
a diced half a cucumber
two finely sliced green chillis

I dressed it with some rapeseed oil mixed with honey and white wine vinegar.

It was pretty nice for something made up on the spot. In the end we had it in a wrap with some grilled paneer as a late evening snack whilst we started the mammoth task of watching 60+ episodes of Australian Masterchef Season 5 (you should watch this – it’s very inspiring).

The rest we had for dinner the next day as an accompaniment to the lovely dinner we shared with Freya’s family. It was still nice and crisp and tasted just as good the next day.

Borough Market

Posted on August 4, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

This weekend we decided to go to Borough Market. Freya had never been before and we’ve been putting it off for weeks – but this weekend we got in the car nice and early arrived at the market by 8:30am.

Borough Market it literally just at the end of London Bridge on the South side of the river. Parking was a bit of a problem but we eventually found a space at £10 for two hours. This was a bit of a shame because Borough Market has its own car park – just near ‘The Rake’ (a great pub) – and it costs maybe £2 an hour. We’ll remember this for next time.

Being a market I assumed it would be in full flow by 8:30am – but I was very much mistaken. Borough Market doesn’t really get going until 10am – there were a lot of people still setting up when we arrived. Not that this was a problem. You get to see a lot more when it isn’t rammed with tourists.

Borough Market is so colourful and is full of fresh vegetables, fruit, cheeses, bread and cured meats. We aren’t eating meat at the moment so we stuck to the cheese fruit and veg!

We had a really nice Halloumi Burger for breakfast from one of the stands in the uncovered part of the market. Very tasty and actually the only hot food we could get that early in the morning! Most hot food places weren’t ready until nearer 10am.

We ended up buying some lettuce, figs, basil and peaches from ‘Turnips’ – which is a very large and impressive greengrocers in the covered part of the market. In hindsight we should have shopped around a bit more as there were better figs on other stands.

We also went into Neal’s Yard – which is opposite The Market Porter (another great pub) and tried lots of cheese. We bought some too – £20’s worth in fact!

We also found an amazing Foccacia Bread from which was covered in Olives and Rosemary. It looked and smelled amazing.

By 11am we had already left the market – just as it was filling up with people and getting a bit crowded.

I can thoroughly recommend a morning at this market – it’s great fun – and there’s so much to choose from.

Sweet Potato Pancakes with Pea Pesto, Goats Cheese and Roasted Peppers

Posted on August 1, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

Papaya, Halloumi and Watercress Salad

Posted on August 1, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

One of the many lifestyle changes we’ve adopted since moving to the boat is not doing our online shopping with Ocado. Now there’s nothing wrong with online shopping at all – in fact I am a very strong advocate of shopping with Ocado – you can’t beat the quality or the service they offer. That said – boats are smaller than houses and you don’t tend to see many boats with fridge freezers, or a larder. Baisically there’s nowhere to put a week’s worth of shopping!.

Our new approach is to decide daily what we are going to eat, and then go to the local shops and buy our ingredients. We have a fridge – and we can store maybe 2 days worth of fresh ingredients – but there’s no freezer. And it’s been very hot so you can’t just leave stuff out to rot.

In Brentford (where our boat is) there are many local shops – we like Al Shaam – they are a Cypriot shop (I think) and have so many different types of Halloumi, Goats Cheese, fresh Papaya, fresh everything. We really like the guys that run it and they are super helpful – and always have big bunches of the fresh herbs we want. They don’t have everything – so occasionally we have to venture elsewhere – but not very often.

Anyway enough of my life! – this recipe is incredibly easy. Apart from frying off the halloumi it’s all just preparation. I found it made every such a lot but maybe everything just looks so much bigger on a boat!

The recipe is the first one I’ve taken from The Art of Eating Well by Hemsley Hemsley. I chose it because it was very quick to prepare and I knew the shop up the road had all the ingredients. If this is anything to go by I’ll be making a lot more dishes from this book.

All you do with this is wash some watercress and lay it on a big plate or bowl, top it with halved cherry tomatoes and sliced red onion, sliced avocado and slivers of papaya.
Then you toast some pine nuts (I also added some pumpkin seeds) and then fry the halloumi until it is golden.

Add both the halloumi and the pine nuts to the salad, and dress with a some olive oil, runny hunny and apple cider vinegar.

This is really easy. I think I made it in 20 minutes tops. It’s incredibly tasty and because there is so much you can go back for seconds (and thirds in my case).

One thing this dish does highlight is the need for really good ingredients. If I’m honest my avocados were a little bland and the watercress wasn’t the best I’d seen – that said it was still very good indeed.

The Art of Eating Well – Hemsley Hemsley

Posted on July 31, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

Wow I haven’t cooked properly for a long time – and I certainly haven’t blogged for even longer.

It’s been way to hot to eat of late – and we’ve been snacking on very little more than wraps containing salad and either grilled halloumi, feta or paneer.

It’s also been really tricky to cook on the boat as the kitchen area hasn’t really been functional. But now it is so it’s full steam ahead (well no steam – it’s too hot!)

I stumbled upon this book by accident – one of my team also has the surname Hemsley and by chance I pasted his name into Amazon by accident and up came this book. It reminded me of the Honestly Healthy books (which I’ve reviewed here before) so I bought it on impulse. After all most of my cooks are now in store – so I need something to cook from! (that’s my excuse anyway).

This book follows a similar ethic to Honestly Healthy – cut down on gluten, reduce acid forming foods etc – but it uses a lot less of those specialised ingredients that almost all the Honestly Healthy recipes demand. Also there are some meat dishes in this book – which are absent from HH.

I’ve not scoured the book from front to back yet but three dishes that already have caught my eye are:

Papaya, Halloumi and Watercress Salad
Summer Lime Coleslaw
Pea, Peach and Goats Cheese Salad

All look very simple to make and I know I can get the ingredients now as they are all in season.

So watch this space for the recipes I make from this book – it looks like it’s going to be a good one!

The Incredible Spice Men

Posted on July 10, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

Where have you been I hear you ask! Sorry I’ve been gone some time – but unlike Captain Oates I have returned.

Moving onto a boat, moving house, and just trying to settle back to some semblance of normality takes time! It feels like I haven’t cooked properly for 2 weeks. Surviving purely on take out and nibbles couldn’t last forever – and now I have a kitchen – a kitchen on a boat – and can get back into the swing of cooking every day.

I’ve decided to make dishes from Cyrus Todiwala and Tony Singh’s The Incredible Spice Men. I first saw Tony Singh on the Great British Menu and I found him very entertaining. Very enthusiastic, very passionate, very funny – I must go to his restaurant one day!

We watched the TV show that supported the book – and found the guys pretty entertaining and I figured some moderately spicy food might be nice for a change. It has to be moderately spicy as Freya really can’t do spicy. It has to be mild all the way! The chutney for the Chilli Cheese Toast for example contains 10 dried red hot chillis! I had to eat all of that!

We place an Ocado order and had it delivered to the Marina where our boat is moored – and it arrived – on time – no issues. The driver even offered to help us take it to the boat. We spared him the pain of climbing down a 3 metre ladder!

Lots of the recipes in this book are pretty simple – and are just subtle revisions of traditional British food. Two of the dishes I’ve chosen are essentially Baked Beans with stuff added.

My boat kitchen – with proper galley layout – and an iMac on the side to show me my recipes is pretty makeshift for now. We have no running water – the oven is balanced on top of an untiled work surface – and everything else is all over the place – definitely not in the right place. So I’m not making anything complicated for now!

Recipes this week include:

Chilli Cheese Toast with Spicy Chutney (almost Welsh Rarebit)
Duck Egg with Cumin and Asparagus
Todiwala and Singh’s Banging British Breakfast
Kati Kebab and Parsley Pesto
Korma Pudding
Green Mango and Chilli Salad
Mushy Peas and Tamarind
Spiced Red Cabbage
Peanut and Mint Slaw
Coriander Coalishslaw
Ferdinando’s Roasted Potatoes

To name but a few!

I’ve already made half of these so I’ll get back into the blogging cycle once I find a good place for Internet reception! You don’t get all the usual toys with a boat. I’ve even had to downsize to a 32 inch TV! There’s a very good pub up the road called ‘The Magpie and Crown’. It has Delirium Red on tap – one of my favourites even if it is about £6 a pint! They also have Fruli on tap – which Freya loves!

This is a good book – not a great book. The recipes are very simple – I reckon anyone could make any of them. It’s certainly a good book to get me back into cooking in a makeshift kitchen with no running water!

The next book will be more exciting – promise!

Celeriac Soup with Goats Cheese Cream and a Walnut and Green Pepper Salsa

Posted on June 19, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

Soup? In the summer? Are you mad?

Well no – but whilst looking through the fridge for left over ingredients from last week’s book, I saw that I had some leeks and a whole celeriac.

Denis Cotter has a recipe for Celeriac Soup in his book ‘For the Love of Food’ and it is pretty simple. I had all the ingredients – so why not ! All I lacked was the white wine – which I again ‘borrowed’ from Freya’s mum.

This soup also has a goat’s cheese cream and a green pepper and walnut salsa. Without it I’d have said this would have been bland. But these two additions really make the dish special.

For the soup, you fry some leeks and some garlic until soft, add a whole celeriac (diced) and a potato (also diced), and start the boil with 100ml of white wine.

Once that’s absorbed, add some vegetable stock and cook until the vegetables are tender. Took 30 minutes for me.

Blitz the soup in your favourite blitzer. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg and serve. Easy!

The best bit though is the toppings:

For the cream, mash some goats cheese with some double cream. Simple

For the salsa, chop a green pepper really small, do the same with walnuts, and add in some olive oil and parsley. Just as simple.

We loved this. We ate it whilst watching ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, feeling we had earned a deserved rest after packing up all our stuff for the boat.

We ate the leftovers the next day cold – and to be honest it was just as nice cold. Soup’s don’t have to be hot you know.

Tonight we unofficially move onto the boat. Officially that will be at the weekend!

Spiced Halloumi on a Warm Puy Lentil, Spinach and Beetroot Salad

Posted on June 18, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

Catchy title huh!

I love this recipe from Denis Cotter’s ‘For the Love of Food’. I’ve made it before. And it is consistently good – mainly because it is so simple. There’s very little ‘doing’ in this recipe – most of the time is spent roasting the beetroot!

I feel a little bit like Old Mother Hubbard this week. All my cupboards are bare. Everything is packed ready for the move onto the boat – and basic ingredients like flour are nowhere to be seen! Pretty frustrating – but fortunately I had all the ingredients for this dish in the fridge (except 100ml of red wine which I pinched from Freya’s mum!) I say pinched – I did pay for the wine with a serving of the dinner – so it was a fair trade.

The hardest part of this recipe is peeling a beetroot and slicing it into wedges. You just can’t keep your hands clean unless you wear some latex gloves.

Anyway – to make this you peel and wedge a beetroot – toss in some balsamic vinegar and a little olive oil and roast (I did mine in my only remaining oven – the Halogen oven) until they begin to caramelise. It took about 30 mins.

While you’re waiting, cook some lentils in red wine and stock (with some garlic and thyme) until they are cooked and the liquid is absorbed.

While you’re waiting for this, crush some red chilli with some cumin seeds and lime zest/juice; slice some Halloumi, and chop a spring onion or two.

When everything is ready, add the beetroot and the spring onion to the the lentils – and allow to start cooling.

Then fry your Halloumi until it is golden and rub some of your chilli rub into it. Then serve the lentils on a bed of spinach and add the halloumi on top.

This is incredibly easy – and tastes amazing. It’s one of my top five dishes. Consistently good. You can’t get it wrong and it is a very well balanced meal.

Braised Broad Beans with Lemon and Dill

Posted on June 16, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

Some dishes just aren’t work the effort. And in hindsight I was very foolish with this dish.

I’ve been looking forward to cooking with Fresh Broad Beans for months. I was naive to assume that you could buy them podded. I was even more naive to assume that podding was quick. Top of the naivety pile was that podding wasn’t the end of it – you have to peel them as well.

It took Freya and myself almost 2 hours to pod and peel two bags of Broad Beans. 1.5 kilograms of broad beans ended up as less than 350g of podded and peeled broad beans. In that time we watched Kill Bill Volume 2. It took that long.

Suffice to say that by the end of it all there was very little enthusiasm to eat. It was just too late – and I felt I knew each broad bean too personally to then cook and eat them!

Anyway back to the recipe: don’t bother – go hungry and save yourself two hours. You’ll lose weight too and your fingers won’t be sore!

But seriously: once you’ve podded the peas, add them to some softened garlic, red onion, sugar and sea salt. Add some stock and cook for 20 minutes – until all the liquid is absorbed. Stir in some dill and lemon juice and serve.

This recipe looks so quick and simple when you are flicking through a cookbook – but getting stung with pea podding and peeling (how many times have I whinged about this now?) means it’ll take you a good couple of hours (and that’s if you have a willing partner who will suffer with you while you pod).

I’ll try this recipe again with frozen and defrosted broad beans. It will probably be fine. But this isn’t a recipe that sets my world on fire. It just didn’t have the excitement and the flavour I was expecting.

Sorry Maria, this is one recipe from ‘The Modern Vegetarian’ that I just didn’t enjoy making.

Rosemary Popcorn

Posted on June 16, 2014 by tenuoustoaster

Is popcorn cooking? probably not. Although you can burn it and it might not pop if you do it wrong!

This recipe came from Maria Ella’s – The Modern Vegetarian. It’s not really a recipe when you say ‘pop some corn’ – much like another cookbook I have where they tell you how to make a shandy by pouring lemonade onto a beer.

We have bucket loads of popcorn kernels. When you visit a health food shop and see ‘Buy one get one half price’ you really do believe that ‘yeh I will eat that much popcorn’. Trust me you won’t!

A 1 kilogram bag of popcorn will feed a small country for about 20 years. So be prepared to have your spare bag of popcorn move house with you – much like the unused ‘fenugreek seeds’ and all the other Bart spices that you thought were a good idea at the time!

True story: when Freya moved in with me in Gamlingay, we sorted through my kitchen supplies and she found a Schwartz tub of Hot Chilli Powder that was older than she was! I bought it from Costco when I moved out of home in the 80s – thinking giant tubs of spices were great value for money – and it has taken up space in my kitchen cupboards for over 20 years!

Anyway – back to the popcorn! All you have to do here is melt some butter, or oil in a pan with some chopped up small rosemary. It’s probably a good idea to have a lid on your pan or you’ll be making a bit of a mess. It’s also a good idea to have a heavy based pan or it’s going to blacken and burn. I have cast iron Le Creuset pans – which are more than heavy enough !

Get the pan hot – add a layer of popcorn kernels (which really isn’t a lot at all) and put the lid on. It’ll pop in less than a minute. Once the popping abates turn off the heat – and let the remaining kernels pop. Take then out of the pan – put them in a bag with some sea salt and shake it. Job done!

Whatever you do – don’t be impatient. Take that lid off too early and those kernels are gonna be all over your floor.

I made three pans worth – about the size of a large freezer bag – and we couldn’t eat it all. I ended up feeding the left overs to the ducks!