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.