Bread salad and Hake

I got a big loaf of nice white bread a couple of days ago and we ended up with too much. It's still nice for toasting, but this salad is a far better use. I served it with some steamed hake. Nice summery food for the first good weather we have had in ages.

Hake cooked in foil

Ingredients:

Enough hake fillet to feed yourselves - make sure its properly defrosted
Juice of a lemon
Salt and pepper.

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Wash and pin bone the hake. Give it a good drying with kitchen paper. Put a large sheet of foil on a baking tray. Place the hake on top of this. Juice the lemon on top and remove any pips. Discard the lemon skin. Close over the foil to seal the package up. Bake in the oven for about 12 minutes. Check the fish is cooked correctly before you serve. While the fish is cooking you can make the salad.

Bread salad

Ingredients:

White bread (stale)
About 10 good olives - stoned and cut up
A handful of chopped basil with stalks removed
6 ripe tomatoes - chopped with the calyxes removed
olive oil and red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper
About a tablespoon of capers, drained

Cut the crusts off a big chunk of stale white bread. I used a block about 10cm on a side, but use what you think you need to feed yourselves and up or down the rest of the ingredients in proportion. That said, this is not an exact recipe. Just through in rough amounts and you will be fine.
Put all of the ingredients in a large salad bowl. Make up a dressing of 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 8 tablespoons of olive oil. Pour this over the mixture and squish it all up with your hands.
Bring to the table.

New Lidl opens in Celbridge

Lidl opened in Celbridge today. They sent a leaflet around with pictures of their fresh baked bread. Looks great. A few different kinds of sourdough on the menu. Will give this a try as soon as I can. Going to give the par baked clag in Tesco across the road a run for its money I'd say.

Green lentil casserole

Very tasty and filling mid week dinner. This serves 2. No need to soak the lentils.

Onions - 1 chopped finely
Carrots - 2 chopped chunky
Green lentils - 100g
Celery - couple of sticks
Sweet Potato - about half of one
Stock to cover
Splash of soy

Add the ingredients to the pot bring to the boil and simmer for about 30 minutes or until the carrots are cooked.

Stir fried beef

Bit of leftover steak from yesterday's dinner. Aldi finest range, striploin. Gorgeous stuff. So tender you could eat it with a spoon.
Just had a little bit left - about half a steak. So sliced it thin.
Fried some ginger in a wok with hot veg oil. Added plenty of garlic and an onion, finely chopped. Then a carrot chopped small. Made a bit of a bags of this at first and had to fish the carotts out to chop them smaller. Hate rock hard carrots in a stir fry. Must quarter them lengthways first next time.
Threw the steak in on top of the whole lot and gave it all a good stir frying.
Put the noodles into a saucepan and tipped a kettle of boiling water on top. They were a bit mushy when I got to them. Noodles seem to be a bit delicate when it comes to cooking. Must plunge them into boiling water next time and time them. Can experiment with the cooking time then to make sure I get them right.
Added a sachet of sauce from Aldi too. Sweet and spicy this one was called. And it was vinegary crap. Kinda messed up a good start by chucking this in. It did not relieve much of the effort either. Will make my own stir fry sauce next time.
All in all not a great meal, but it did the job and was not too much work after a day at the office.
Might try something like this next time:

http://www.ivu.org/recipes/chinese/easy-peasy.html

Stir fried vegetables with Teriaki sauce and noodles

Needed to make dinner in a hurry, so here is what I did. Take 50g of ordinary sugar and put it in a pot. Add 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and give it a stir. Put it on a medium heat and stir occasionally until all of the sugar dissolves. Then turn on the heat and add a glug of sake. Put the lid on the pot and leave it until you are ready to serve. 

Chop a variety of vegetables into bite sized pieces. Tougher vegetables like carrots will need to be sliced smaller. Use whatever you prefer, but I used half a cabbage, an onion, a carrot, a mug of frozen peas, a red pepper and some mushrooms. 

Heat some sesame oil and olive oil in a wok. Add the vegetables one at a time cooking for a minute or 2 between each addition. Add from requires most cooking (carrots for example) up to requires least cooking - say cabbage. Toss them while they cook on a high heat. 

While that is cooking put on a pot of boiling water. Don't add salt, noodles are already very salty. Drop the noodles into the water and simmer for 3 minutes. 

Drain the noodles. Divide the vegetables between 2 bowls. Top with the noodles and spoon the sauce over. 

Chard Saag

This is a type of curried spinach from India. I don't grow spinach, so I used chard instead. We were very pleased with the result.
First I softened an onion and a few cloves of chopped garlic in some oil in a thick based, large pot. Once this was softened I added a bird eye chilli. Also chopped and with the seeds in for heat. Then I added a large quantity of washed an destalked chard that I had cut into strips. I used about 600g for my wife an I and this worked out as enough for the 2 of us for dinner. 600g is a huge amount of chard though - it will take a few minutes to wash and chop this up.
Next I added a tablespoon of curry powder and mixed the whole lot up. As the spinach wilts it releases water/juices which collect in the bottom of the pan. These need to be evaporated/reduced before you can serve this up. Finally I added a tin of tomatoes with their juice. I broke the tomatoes up with a wooden spoon.
I let the whole lot simmer for about 20 minutes with the lid off and it was ready to serve.
I served this with cous cous - which sounds weird and was :) The more traditional fried potatoes would have been better. But is was a mid week afterall.

Monk fish fillets wrapped in parma ham and sundried tomato pesto with potatoes dauphinoise

This was very easy to make. But first I had to deal with the ethical problem of eating a fish that is ripped from the sea bed in one of the most destructive ways possible. I reckon ethical problems don't get much simpler than this one. You should not eat monkfish. There I said it.
I reckon a lot of food politics is propaganda put about by people who would just like things to be different in a way that would benefit them. Less competition (because I always lose), eat less meat (because I am a vegetarian and its no change for me) - you get the idea.
Food miles is apparently pretty much bullshit. The energy in a piece of food (any piece of food) is consumed along its growth, processing and transport. Of this the transport makes up less than 10%. The key to doing something for the environment with our food choices is to not waste food and to eat less red meat. You don't have to eat so much less that you start to get smug (see the vegan in Scott Pilgrim for example), but even a modest reduction (discover one vegetarian recipe that you like as a main meal and eat it every couple of weeks) will make a better impact on the earth than eschewing all of those healthy New Zealand Kiwis that you want to eat with a tea spoon. Oh yeah, remember that you have the kiwis in the fruit bowl and eat them before they go off. Naughty consumer.