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.

Aubergine and Chickpea curry

This is bubbling away on the hob as I type. http://www.eighth-day.co.uk/recipes/tcpaucur.htm
It is cooked in a fairly traditional Indian way, meaning that it uses a ton of oil. I always avoid 'overdoing it' - it is only Monday afterall :) and this is sometimes a bad idea. The technique here is to fry the seeds - mustard and cumin - in hot oil. This causes them to pop and negates the need to crush them. However when you do this with less than a full layer of oil across the bottom of the pot they can easily burn. My eyes were stinging when I made this, but I think that was just the chilis cooking. Just did a test taste and it tastes very nice. Spicy, but nice. I used 2 bird eye chillis in mine and a bit more cayenne than the recipe called for. The 'bit more' problem comes from not using a spoon to measure the spices, but instead tipping them into my had and trying to get it roughly right. Making a curry afterall should not be a science experiment.
It's for tomorrow, so I will add a few tablespoons of yogurt to it before we eat it tomorrow - try to cool it down a little. Serve it with some white basmati rice.

Pancakes

We had pancakes for breakfast this morning. Normal thin ones, not buttermilk, or those cakey ones you get in America. I suppose crepes is really what we had, but in Ireland, these are just pancakes.
Get a blender and put 100g of plain flour in there. Crack an egg in. Add a half pint of milk and zuzz the lot up for a few seconds. That is all it takes.
Put a pan on medium for a few minutes to heat it up. Then jack the heat up nice and high. Try not to completely torch your pan though. You know what your own pan can take. Non stick surfaces are not very happy being incinerated repeatedly.
Put a very small knob of butter on the pan and let it melt. Wipe it off with a wadded up piece of kitchen paper. Careful not to burn yourself here. I did this morning :(
Now pour enough of the mix on to the pan to cover about half of the surface area. Tilt the pan around to thin the pancake out. Then let it cook for a few minutes. Small bubbles should be visible on the surface. When they have all burst, you can flip it over. Give it another minute or 2 and put it on a warmed plate. Keep this plate in the oven at about 80 degrees until you have all the pancakes cooked. Then sit down and eat. Golden syrup is great on these, or nutella, or butter lemon and sugar.

Chips in Hogan's deli

We had some lunch in Hogan's deli in Celbridge a few days ago. The baby was asleep in the pram, so we took the opportunity to eat something in a restaurant. The society of non-knackered adults so to speak. The quiche was lovely as always, but we got a side order of chips this time. Best chips I have ever eaten :-) They are open now in the evenings for dinner, so we are going to organise a baby sitter soon. Don't know what is on the menu yet, but I will be getting those chips along with it ;-)

Smoked Mackerel Pilaf

Had this for dinner last night. I comes from The Feel-Good Cookbook by Ainsley Harriott. It is a simple recipe that is packed with taste. I highly recommend this if you need a good collection of comfort food recipes.