Where growing, making & good living come together

Souper

Posted by on Thursday 4 October 2012 in cooking | 3 comments

In an effort to get back into the habit of blogging regularly, I’m taking part in Blogtoberfest 2012 – at least one post a day on at least one of my blogs (full list of the posts).

I had to do something with all that great smelling stock, so today has been a batch soup making day.

We’ve got chicken, carrot and ginger at the front, all pureed up and ready to go, and still a bubbling away George’s Marvelous Medicine type tomato/pepper/beany soup at the back.

The former is one of my favourite winter warmer soups because of the heat of the ginger but also because the carrot keeps the soup at lava temperatures for ages (useful on particularly cold days!). I know it’s not quite winter yet and today was actually a really nice autumn day here, but the start of soup season is mentally if not physically upon us here, and what the hey, it’s just yummy ;)

The latter is a particularly special concoction because while I was picking some of the key beany ingredients I couldn’t find the can open so had to use whatever beans can in a ring-pull can… It’s packed with cumin and chilli too though, so I’m sure it’ll be fine!

Have you been soup-ing recently?

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The best smelling chicken stock I’ve ever made*

Posted by on Wednesday 3 October 2012 in cooking | 5 comments

* Well, you know, one of them. I don’t remember them all exactly but this one smells gooooooooood.

Hi again. It’s been a while since I blogged – too long – I hope you’re all well.

I’m taking part in Blogtoberfest 2012 to try to get back into the habit of blogging regularly – the idea is to blog every day, at least once a day. I’m spreading my efforts across this site, How Can I Recycle This? and my somewhat geeky only-of-interest-to-my-mum personal blog to make it easier on myself (but I’m keeping a list of all my Blogtoberfest posts to make sure I do one a day!).

ANYWAY. The chicken stock. The last chicken stock I made in my new-ish big slow cooker was a bit lacklustre so I’ve been saving the carcasses from our Swillington Farm chickens in the freezer to make a mega-stock – and this is it.

After roasting the carcasses alongside our dinner last night, they went in the slow cooker and the smell of it cooking made me drool. This morning, I separated it out and it smelled even better. It’s a bit fatty at this stage but I’ll skim it before I use it. As well as making stock, I also made some fluffy friends – Lily-dog got the chunks of carrot from the stock and she & the cats also got bits of chicken too tough for our soup :)

The bestest bit is that Swillington Farm birds are so huge that not all my carcasses would fit the pot in one go so I’ve got a second load on now – more yummy aromas! (The last bird we got from Swillington was over 3kg/6lbs 6 – each breast alone weighed 400g/14oz! Massive!)

The first lot was spiced with coriander seeds, black peppercorns, a garlic clove and some chunks of galangal. This one is second one is black peppercorns, szechuan peppercorns and galangal. I’m not exactly sure what either batch will be used for but, since it’s us, it’s likely to be something spicy/gingery/peppery so these should work either way.

What spices/flavours do you use in your chicken (or other) stock?

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Ten minute chicken & sweetcorn noodle soup recipe

Posted by on Tuesday 13 September 2011 in cooking, Featured, recipes | 1 comment

I wrote this back in August but it didn’t post for some reason. Now that soup season has properly started, we’re less interested in light soups – we want warming stodge! – but it’s still yummy :)

I usually make hearty, wintery soups but since it is technically summer at the moment, we’ve wanted lighter broths for our lunches. This chicken & sweetcorn noodle soup fits the bill nicely – not a giant overwhelming flavour bomb on our tastebuds but fresh & light, filling us up without the need for bread.

I make this whenever we’ve got some spare chicken stock – it’s a useful, quick lunch for us. If I’m thinking ahead, I put some vaguely suitable flavours in the stock – for example, extra black peppercorns, coriander seeds and galangal.


Quick chicken & sweetcorn noodle soup recipe

Serves 4 as a lunch

Ingredients
1.5ltrs of fresh chicken stock
150-200g-ish of chicken (either the already cooked bits stripped from the chicken carcass or a chicken breast)
A green pepper, finely diced
About 250-300g-ish of sweetcorn kernels
Pinch of chilli flakes/half a fresh chilli, very finely sliced

1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp rice vinegar (or white wine vinegar)
1/2 tbsp of Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp of honey

A nest of egg noodles (or pack of ramen noodles)
1 tbsp of cornflour, mixed into runny paste with a little water
1-2 eggs, whisked together in a bowl
Black pepper (to taste – but a fair bit)
Salt (to taste)

Optional extras to serve
Rounds of fresh chilli
Rounds of spring onion
Coriander leaves

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Homemade takeout

Posted by on Monday 22 August 2011 in cooking, Featured | 3 comments

Steel Kitten has blogged about learning how to make her own kebab meat for homemade donner kebabs and it’s made me think about how we’ve slowly been replacing takeout dinners.

I’ll be honest – we still do eat quite a bit of takeaway/delivery food – but it is less than it used to be. When we lived in Leeds, we were in a prime spot for takeout – we were in the overlapping bit of four different takeout areas so had a huge variety of places to choose from. It was mostly junk food takeout (but done well) but there were a few more better quality places (eg Box Pizza – who when they first started out did fancy burgers too) and restaurants that delivered too. Lots of tasty temptation.

Since moving, we’ve become disillusioned with the takeaway options around here but still have takeout cravings/the urge for lazy comfort food at dinnertime so have started making more of our own takeout favourites at home:

Curries

We are curry fiends. In West Yorkshire, it’s almost rude not to be – there are so many excellent restaurants around. We still eat curries out of the house about once a fortnight but we also make them a lot. A few years ago, we went on a cookery course taught by one of the head chefs of a local restaurant chain and it vastly increased John’s cooking confidence so he’s the one that tends to cook them at home. He blogged a few of our favourite recipes from that course (lamb achar; lemon rice; chicken jalfrezi) but he’s tweaked them over the years so next time he makes them, I’ll document the new versions (especially the keema & chickpea version of the achar – that’s my favourite :) ).

We used to have daal a lot when we were veggie – with rice as a main dish rather than just the side dish it’s relegated to a lot over here. I used this recipe for tarka daal, and this for a yellow split pea one.

Obviously just about the best thing about curry is that it’s one of those foods that tastes better the next day and it freezes really well too. We always cook curries in large quantities (one of the few things we batch cook) so we can have a homemade ready meal/homemade takeout when we’re feeling lazy — healthier and far cheaper than ordering in. Daal doesn’t freeze as well (or rather, whole pulses don’t defrost well in my experience) but wetter soup-y style ones don’t suffer as badly as they’re already mostly/entirely broken down.

Cost per portion: (some sort of meat curry)
take-out/delivery – about £5-6 a dish, plus extra for rice/chapatis from some places
homemade – (made with organic & local meat) about £2, including rice
Time to make: 1hour+ – but can be batch made and frozen (then takes about 10 mins)

Cost per portion: (some sort of veggie daal)
take-out/delivery – about £4-5, plus extra for rice/chapatis from some places
homemade – no more than £1, including rice
Time to make: about half an hour

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This week’s meal plan

Posted by on Monday 25 July 2011 in weekly meal plans | 2 comments

I’ve not done meal plans for the last few weeks – it started when I wasn’t going to be here/cooking for a week during my drama-packed week earlier in the month, then I was off and on poorly for a week so not eating much, then it was my birthday week (so lots of eating out or at least not me cooking!) and then it was now. However, in between all that, we’ve reached quite a few dinner times without an idea of what we’re going to eat (and all our Swillington Farm meat frozen solid) so I think it’s time we returned to planning!

Sunday brunch – sausage & eggs
Sunday dinner – beef & mushroom casserole with butter dumplings*, and veg

Monday lunchpate on toast** sliced beef & mustard in a bun
Monday dinner – (John away) sticky sticky spare ribs

Tuesday lunch – sausage & eggs
Tuesday dinner – leftover beef & mushroom casserole with dumplings & veg

Wednesday lunch – ham sandwiches
Wednesday dinner – chorizo & courgette frittata

Thursday lunch – samosas and salad
Thursday dinner – (John out) pasta with John’s special pasta sauce (from the freezer)

Friday lunch – pork pies from Wilson’s in Armley***
Friday dinner – celebratory**** meal out – probably bargainacious curry.

Saturday brunch – bacon & eggs
Saturday dinner – chicken legs, with new potatoes from the garden & salad

* ie, dumplings made with butter not suet.
** damn you mouldy bread! I only bought the pate because I knew I had you to use up. Then you went mouldy. *shakes fist*
*** well, John will have a yummy pork pie – Wilson’s do very nice pork pies. I will have a cornish pasty and wish I could have a pork pie without it giving me indigestion. Damn you pork pies. *shakes fist*
**** we’re, hopefully, completing the sale of our old house, I think that deserves a £6 a head curry ;)

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