Month: February 2012

Meal plan: 5 February 2012

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It’s been a rather good week for food in our house. Plenty of pies, bakes, soups and stews to keep us warm. Plus there was the added bonus of some rather tasty meals at my sister-in-law’s at the weekend whom we visited to help celebrate her 50th birthday.

Highs

The award for my food highlight of the week has to go to braised pig cheeks.

Braised pig cheeks with celeriac mash

Most people I’ve mentioned this dish to have given the same rather squeamish response but it is truly an amazing meal. You’ve got to try it. And it’s so cheap too. I got six pig cheeks from my butcher for just £4 and that’s enough to feed four people.

You slow cook the cheeks in red wine and vegetables until they are sumptuously tender and practically melt in your mouth. Pure heaven on a plate. I’ll post the recipe on the blog very soon. I promise.

Another food highlight, a regular in our house during the winter months, was the sausage and cabbage bake. Savoy cabbage is particularly good this time of year and so I entered my bake into the In Season Challenge over at Bake It, Make It, where you’ll find more recipes using this marvellous vegetable.

Lows

It’s been a tricky task coming up with what I’d call a low this week. So I’m plumping for what was more of a disappointment. Not in the dish itself but in my daughters’ reaction to it. I baked Lorraine Pascale’s pumpkin and rosemary muffins. My husband and I thought they were delicious but the kids weren’t convinced.

So here’s what we ate last week:

Monday 30 January
Lunch: pasta salad
Dinner: sausage and cabbage bake

Tuesday 31 January
Lunch: carrot, coriander and ginger soup
Dinner: cottage pie

Wednesday 1 February
Lunch: pumpkin and rosemary muffins 
Dinner: braised pig cheeks with celeriac mash

Thursday 2 February
Lunch: butternut squash soup, ham salad rolls
Dinner (kids): spaghetti bolognese F (adults): beef stew and parsley dumplings F

Friday 3 February
Lunch: rice salad
Dinner: baked potatoes, garlic mushrooms and salad

Saturday 4 February
Lunch: stir fried spring greens and noodles
Dinner: AWAY

Sunday 5 February
Lunch: AWAY
Dinner: butternut squash soup and bread rolls

F = from freezer

Three ways with butternut squash

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Lorraine Pascale muffins
Riverford risotto
My soup

A rather large butternut squash arrived in our veg box last week. So as well as making my usual soup, I thought I’d try out a couple of new recipes on the family.

The first of these was a Lorraine Pascale recipe I’d seen her do recently on TV – pumpkin and rosemary muffins.

Pumpkin and rosemary muffins from a Lorraine Pascale recipe

It’s a great recipe, ever so easy, and would definitely recommend you try it. My husband and I enjoyed the muffins one lunchtime. We had them warm, with a little butter and some mature Cheddar cheese on the side.

Unfortunately our daughters were  not so impressed to find them in their lunch boxes at school and nursery. I think perhaps the rosemary was too overwhelming a flavour for them. Oh well, you can’t win them all, but you’ve got to try!

So I put the remainder in the freezer and I look forward to enjoying them at some point, sans enfants.

I won’t write out the recipe for pumpkin and rosemary muffins here but instead direct you to the BBC Food website.

The muffins used about a quarter of the butternut squash. I took another quarter for a squash risotto as inspired by the lovely people at Riverford Organic, who deliver our weekly veg box.

Riverford’s squash risotto

Now this was a success with the whole family, almost. The kids really enjoyed it, wolfing it down in seconds. It’s easy to eat, so very good for toddlers and babies getting to grip with new textures. My husband did quite like it I think, despite a few comments about the lack of meat. Which is normal from him.

This is another simple recipe. I only used half the quantities given in the Riverford recipe and I still had enough to feed two adults and two children, with a couple of portions left over for the freezer.

With the remaining half of the squash I cooked up a big pan of soup. Butternut squash makes for a very satisfying soup and children in particular love it, probably because they’re rather partial to those sweet flavours.

Roasted butternut squash with rosemary

I usually boil the butternut squash with the potato but this time it had already been roasted, as I’d needed cooked squash for the other recipes. I think I prefer it this way. It gives the soup a slightly more smokey flavour which is delicious.

Butternut squash soup

2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 small butternut squash, peeled, deseeded and diced
1 potato, peeled and diced (if you like a thicker soup, add another potato)
1 litre vegetable stock, hot
Salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a large pan and add the onion. Gently fry until golden.

Add the squash and potato and cook for a minute or two before pouring in the hot stock.

Bring to a gentle simmer, then cover and cook for 15 minutes.

Liquidise the soup until smooth using a handheld blender or in a jug liquidiser. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

It’s lovely to have homemade soup ready to warm up when you’re forced to grab lunch at your desk

As butternut squash is in season right now and in plentiful supply, I’ve entered this post into the Simple and in Season blog event for February over at Fabulicious Food.

I love the idea behind this blog event – highlighting the best of what’s in season now and sharing recipes using those wonderful ingredients.

Some gorgeous looking recipes have already been posted, and I look forward to seeing many more over the coming month.

If you’ve got a recipe using seasonal ingredients, you should check it out!

Carrot, coriander and ginger soup

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Soups are wonderful. They’re so simple to make and great for a quick lunch with crusty bread, and at tea time I often give my girls a bowl of soup and a sandwich.

Carrot and coriander soup is one of our family favourites. Now and again I add ginger to give it a little extra zing, perfect to warm the bones on a chilly day.

I like to cook up a big pot of soup on a Sunday to warm up for lunches through the week.

Ingredients

1 tbsp sunflower or vegetable oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 piece of ginger about as long as your thumb, peeled and finely chopped
8 carrots, peeled and sliced
1 potato, peeled and diced
1 litre vegetable stock, hot
1 large bunch fresh coriander, roughly chopped
Salt

Heat the oil in a large pan and add the onion. Gently fry until golden, then add the ginger and cook for two minutes.

Add the carrots and potato and cook for a minute or two before pouring in the hot stock.

Bring to a gentle simmer, then cover and cook for 15 minutes. Stir in the coriander (reserving a little for garnish) and cook gently for another minute.

Liquidise the soup until smooth using a handheld blender or in a jug liquidiser. Taste and add a little salt if needed.

Serve with a little chopped coriander on top.

Sausage and cabbage bake

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The poor old cabbage. It’s got itself a bit of a bad name, hasn’t it? Probably all those memories of terrible school dinners, when it was boiled for hours and hours before being inflicted on us poor suffering children.

It’s completely undeserved of course. Savoy cabbage in particular is a wonderful vegetable and is at its best during the cold winter months. It is quite different from the white or green cabbage and, in my opinion, is far tastier.

The beauty of savoy cabbage is that it doesn’t need dressing up in fancy recipes to make it interesting. For an easy side dish, steam some chopped savoy for a few minutes and then serve with a knob of butter, salt and pepper.

Or how about this simple sausage and cabbage bake? It might not sound at first like a culinary delight and, no it’s not the prettiest dish, but trust me. Once you’ve tried it, you’ll make it again and again.

It’s based on a recipe by Tamasin Day-Lewis, who in turn got the recipe from Jane Grigson. They serve theirs with mashed potato but I’ve added sliced potato to my version to create a fantastic one-pot supper, perfect at the end of a hectic day of work and school.

Please buy the best quality sausages you can afford for this dish, ones with a good high meat content. Cheap sausages just aren’t worth bothering with.

Sausage and cabbage bake

Butter
1 large savoy cabbage, cored and shredded
8 potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced
8 fat pork sausages
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas 4.

Lightly butter a large overproof dish – one that has a lid.

Bring a large panful of salted water to the boil and cook the cabbage and potatoes quickly for five minutes until just tender. Drain and run under cold water to stop any further cooking.

Slit the sausage skins lengthways with a sharp knife and squeeze out the sausage meat. My youngest daughter likes to help me with this job.

Place a layer of cabbage and potatoes at the bottom of the ovenproof dish and season with salt and pepper. Cover this with a layer of sausagemeat. Repeat to use all the meat and vegetables, ending with a layer of cabbage and potato.

Fleck the top with butter. Cover with greaseproof paper and then the lid.

Bake for 40-45 minutes, until the vegetables are tender and the top is browned and crispy.

A real winter warmer if ever there was one!

I am entering my sausage and cabbage bake into the In Season Challenge, set by Carol over at Make It, Bake It. Her challenge this month is to come up with a recipe featuring savoy cabbage, so of course this seemed to me the perfect dish.

If you’ve got a favourite savoy cabbage recipe, you should enter the challenge too. But there isn’t long – the deadline is 5 February 2012.

Beetroot and potato dauphinoise

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I came across this delicious dish at one of our local pubs this Christmas, the excellent Holcombe Inn, and decided then I would have to recreate it at home.

It’s a lovely way to use beetroot, which is in plentiful supply at the moment, and is very good served with roast meats. My children really like beetroot, perhaps because it’s quite sweet.

Slice the beetroot and potatoes as thinly as you can. It’s best to use a mandolin if you have one.

This is a perfect dish for the Aga as it needs to be cooked slowly in a low oven.

Beetroot and potato dauphinoise

Serves 2

3 large potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced
2 large beetroot, peeled and thinly sliced
Salt and pepper
Handful fresh thyme, picked
4 cloves garlic, crushed
150 ml double cream, perhaps a little more
Butter

Preheat the oven to 160°C/Gas Mark 2.

Put the sliced potato and beetroot in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Add the thyme, garlic and cream and combine so that the vegetables are well covered.

Place in a small gratin dish and roughly arrange the potato and beetroot so the slices lie flat. I like to have a layer of potato and then a layer of beetroot and so on. Pack down well.

The cream should almost come to the top of the vegetables. If not, add a little more.

Fleck the top of the vegetables with a little butter and cover with foil.

Bake for around 1½ hours, until the potato and beetroot are tender. Increase the oven temperature to 220°C/Gas Mark 7, remove the foil and return the dish to the oven for another 10-15 minutes until the top has crisped up.