Smoked coley chowder

Had some smoked coley in the freezer and fancied this for tea. It was really excellent and I got to use some more of the nice leeks from my garden. Nearing the end of that supply. As usual, when they are all gone I will keep stumbling over leek recipes and will not be able to bring myself to buy any following the spring time glut.

Ingredients:
20g of butter
300g of smoked coley (which is just another name for pollock apparently)- I got this in the fridge compartment at Aldi.
3 large potatoes, peel and dice them to about 1cm
1 pint of whole milk
1 pint of vegetable stock
2 leeks, chopped small - give them a rinse too. They tend to bring the garden with them
1 Onion, chopped small
3 rashers of smoked streaky bacon, chopped up small

Method:
Melt the butter slowly in a thick bottom large pot. Add the leeks, rashers and onion and give it all a good stir. Put the lid on and cook on a low heat for about 5 minutes. Then add the potatoes and stock and season with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 15 minutes until the potatoes are done.
While that is cooking you need to cook the fish. Put the milk in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Be careful not to burn or over boil it as this will spoil the taste. Add the fish and let it simmer gently for about 5 minutes. Check that the fish is done - it should break into flakes easily. Then turn off the heat under the milk and remove the fish to a plate with a fish slice or slatted spoon. Break the fish into flakes and add these to the potato and vegetable mixture. Leave any skin and bones out. Pour the milk into the soup through a sieve (this catches any bones or bits of skin that might have fallen off and also stops the nasty curdled bit that you used to get on your breakfast cereal ending up in your soup). Also sieve in any of the bits from the fish plate so that you don't miss out on any of the flavour.
Simmer the whole lot for about 5 minutes.
Ladle it into large bowls. I put some coriander on top of ours because it was in the fridge, but parsley would be ideal.
I served it with buttermilk scones and butter.

Nicoise Salad

This recipe is based on the Nicoise Salad recipe from Delia's How to Cook Book Two and the one from Ballymaloe Cookery Course.

The 3 how to cook books from Delia are great, but they look the same and trying to remember which one a recipe is from is a pain. I end up looking through up to 3 indexes, depending on how lucky I get. It would have made sense to include an overall index at the back of volume 3, but not so I'm afraid. Sounds like a contender for Eat Your Books.

If you are looking for value for money in a cookbook then the Ballymaloe one is hard to beat. It probably has more recipes than any other book that I have.

Anyway, this combined recipe is delicious. Have made if a few times now. The list of ingredients is long, but don't let that put you off. They are mostly store cupboard items.

This is enough for a good lunch for 2. Serve it with some crusty bread - the picture shows a white roll that I made the same day.

Ingredients:
A few small new or salad potatoes, cooked, no need to peel
A handful of asparagus.
2 Shallots, or 4 spring onions
A good tin of tuna
2 hard boiled eggs
8 Anchovy fillets
A handful of black olives
A tablespoon of capers

For the dressing:
½ tsp of salt
A clove of garlic chopped finely
A teaspoon of Dijon mustard
1 tbsp of white wine vinegar
6 tbsp of olive oil

To make the dressing just put all of the ingredients into a screw top jar - an old jam jar is fine - and shake hard until the whole lot combines into a nice creamy dressing.

Cook the asparagus until tender and then chop it into bite sized pieces. Cut the eggs into quarters and the cooked potatoes into slices. Break the tuna up into bite sized chunks.
Now just arrange all of the ingredients in 2 bowls and pour the dressing over the whole lot. It looks nice if you arrange the tips of the asparagus on top of the whole lot, but as you can see from the photo, I didn't think of this until I was eating it! The potatoes don't have to be completely cold and will absorb a bit more of the dressing if they are warm.

Notes about ingredients
I got the asparagus in Aldi for € 1.79. Very nice stuff, and normally very expensive - so this was great.
The tuna I used was a jar of Albacore from Aldi again. They don't seem to stock this all the time and it is a lot better than the tinned stuff.
Get black olives with the stones still in and remove them yourself. It's a bit fiddly, but worth the effort. The best ones I have found are 'Greek style'. These are not immersed in brine, but are salted and a bit wrinkly.

Beef stew with red wine and herbs

I got some nice steak pieces in the local butchers and had a fridge full of vegetables, so I wanted to make up something tasty. This is adapted from Jamie's Dinners by Jamie Oliver.

The cooking time is quite long, but other than a bit of peeling and chopping it is very easy to prepare. It can be made the day before and gets better over night. It also freezes well.

Ingredients:
600g of Steak pieces, give them a rinse
2 tbsp of vegetable oil
A small bottle of red wine (I got a 250ml one in Aldi for less than €2)
The following veg peeled and roughly chopped:

• An onion
• 2 large potatoes
• A handful of carrots
• A couple of parsnips
• A small turnip

A few sprigs of rosemary - pull off the leaves and chop them finely

Some fresh sage leaves - chopped finely too
A tablespoon of flour

A small tin of tomato puree
A few cloves of garlic, minced
300ml of stock - veg or beef. I used Marigold vegetable powder

Preheat the oven to gas mark 2.
Heat the oil in a flame proof casserole. One of the cast iron ones is good for this, but anything that you can put on top of the hob and then transfer to the oven.
Add the meat and give it a stir around until it is browned on the outside. Then add the rest of the ingredients to the casserole. Stir them around in the stock and wine mixture to get everything nicely distributed. Bring it to the boil on the hob and then transfer to the oven. Cook for between 3 and 4 hours depending on the type of meat you used. Mine was perfect after 3. Don't stir it around too much when you take it out or you will just end up making it mushy. The spuds in particular will go to bits. It is done when the meat is done. Take a piece out and eat it to see.

The rosemary I used was shop bought, but you could use anything good from your garden in preference (thyme, marjoram, oregano etc.). I would not go for more than 2 herbs in this though as you will just end up not being able to taste any of them.

I had the sage in the garden. This is a very hardy plant. There are edible leaves on it almost all year 'round.

The 2 of us had a large lunch of this with white rolls and there is plenty left for a dinner along with some green vegetables.

Tuna Teriyaki with stir fried vegetables and noodles

I got some frozen Tuna Steaks from Aldi the other day and was looking for something to do with them. If you overcook tuna steaks they are tough and dry, so rare or at worst medium is the way to go. I made a teriyaki salmon last week and had some of the sauce left in the fridge, so this seemed like a winner. I was also in the Oriental Emporium on Abbey Street last week, so the fridge had plenty of nice Chinese greens that needed to be used.


This serves 2 people.
You will need a wok for stir frying the vegetables, a pot to cook the noodles and a pan to cook the tuna. (Ideally a griddle pan to give them the nice lines and not over cook them.)

Ingredients
2 Frozen Tuna Steaks from Aldi (others brands are obviously fine, but not canned)
4-6 heads of Pak Choy
½ a head of Chinese cabbage(Also called Napa Cabbage)
1 Carrot finely chopped
A couple of green chillies chopped small
About 100 ml of teriyaki sauce. You can use bought, but this is better.
Enough noodles for 2 people. About 100-150 g per person should be fine.

Defrost the tuna steaks. I did this out of the fridge for about 10 hours. Make sure they are fully defrosted before you start as the centre will likely be cold as they don't get cooked very much. The microwave will not help here as it will slightly cook the steaks and make them tough. Wash the steaks and dry them with some kitchen paper. Rub a little oil on them. Sunflower is fine or a non-extra virgin olive kind. Extra Virgin will burn when you cook at high temp. Season them with salt and pepper on both sides.

Chop the vegetables up roughly. The Pak Choy and the Chinese Cabbage will wilt a lot, so don't need too much chopping to make them manageable. 
Fill a pot for the noddles with boiling water. Bring this back to the boil.
Heat the teriyaki sauce up. I did this in the microwave and it came out fine.
Heat the wok up very hot until it is almost smoking. Then add the oil to it and throw the chopped chillies in there. Stir fry this for a few seconds to flavour the oil. Then add all of your chopped up vegetables. Try to keep these moving as much as you can.
Put the tuna steaks on the hot pan.
Plunge the noodles into the boiling water.
Don't panic! Each of these things takes about 2½ minutes, so everything should finish at the same time.
Flip the tuna after a minute. Make sure the noodles do not boil over. Keep stirring the vegetables.
As soon as you are happy with the vegetables turn them off. Drain the noodles and divide them up between 2 large bowls. Divide the vegetables up and arrange them on top. Next slice the tuna into strips. This makes it easier to eat with chopsticks and looks nicer too. Pour the teriyaki sauce over the whole lot.
The instructions are quite long, but this is a very easy recipe. Well worth getting the ingredients together for.

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