Homemade takeout

Posted by louisa 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

Wild garlic and serrano ham pizza – mmm!

Posted by louisa on Thursday 21 April 2011 in cooking, recipes, wild food | 0 comments

We had wild garlic and serrano ham pizza for dinner last night. Our friend Strowger has repeatedly advocated wild garlic seed pods on pizza after we both pickled some last year but I hadn’t used the leafy stuff on pizza before.

I won’t do a full recipe – since I would have thought just about everyone reading this will have their own preferred dough & sauce recipe – but I will say I collected a large handful of wild garlic (Ramsons) leaves, which weighed about 50g including stalks – although I didn’t actually use any of the stalks on the pizza — they got sliced off and nibbled while I was cooking :)

I sliced the washed leaves into ribbons and wilted them slightly by frying them very lightly (30 seconds or so) in a drop of oil to mellow the flavour slightly, then immediately put them onto my prepared pizza. I paired it with serrano ham since that’s got enough flavour to hold its own against the WG – and added some flowers afterwards for prettification purposes ;)

And the verdict: well, the short version of thoughts is in the title for this post ;) John said it didn’t taste like any pizza he’d ever had before – but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I thought the wilted texture was perfect – very soft without being slippery – and the flavour more developed than the sharpness of raw wild garlic.

Next time, I’m almost tempted to leave off the ham though (it was still there but not the star of the show) and just have some different cheese and perhaps some ricotta or sliced mozzaralla – basically a more intensely flavoured spinach-and-ricotta style pie.