Sort of Baked Ziti

I was a fan of the Sopranos and they always seemed to be eating stuff called Ziti. I looked it up and there are as many recipes as there are Italians it would appear, so here is my take on it.

Ingredients

Meat

• 600g Minced beef
• 2 Smoked bacon rashers chopped

Sauce

• 1 Onion chopped
• 1 Red pepper chopped small
• 3 Carrots chopped small
• 3 Sticks of celery chopped small
• 3 Cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
• 2 Tins of plum tomatoes
• 2 Tbsp of tomato puree
• Splash of balsamic vinegar
• 1 Tbsp cooking oil (olive is good, but not extra virgin)

Everything else

• 200g Cheddar cheese, or enough to cover the dish generously
• Pasta - I used penne, but anything smallish will do
• Parmesan to serve

Method

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.
Fry the beef and bacon until fully coloured. Remove from the pot to make the rest of the sauce.

Make a standard tomato sauce. Usually called Marinara. Mine is like this one, but without added sugar. Cook all of the sauce ingredients except the vinegar, tomatoes and tomato purée on a medium heat until the onion is softened - about 20 minutes. Then add the tomatoes and vinegar and stir. Continue to cook until the carrots are soft.

Cook the pasta in plenty boiling water.
Mix the sauce, meat and pasta and pour into a buttered baking dish.
Cover with lots of cheddar cheese and bake in a 200 degree C oven for about 10 minutes. Until the cheese on top is beginning to brown and is nice and chewey.

I serve this with a rocket salad with toasted pine nuts.

A Christmas plate

Turkey and ham for four days in a row :-) That's what we do in Ireland; buy the biggest ham and turkey for dinner on Christmas day and continue eating until it's all gone. Delicious, but breaks you down eventually. It being Christmas there were plenty of deli type things in the fridge to make up a tasty supper plate. A good portion of smoked salmon with lemon juice is the main event here. A little pile of capers to sharpen it up. A selection of cheeses - normally we just have sharp cheddar in the fridge, but between gifts and pre-christmas treat shopping we had a good few to choose from. Some nice unpasteruised brie, a small piece of blue cheese and a little heap of crumbly Wensleydale with cranberries. A few gerkins for bite and a selection of crackers finished the whole lot off. We had a glass of Spanish red with this. A perfect break from the big dinners of the last few days.

Potatoes for Christmas, saving rocket seeds, slug hunting and sunflower seeds

Potatoes
Going to try to grow some spuds in a container this year for winter. Have always used the excuse that I don't have enough space for potatoes, but I will give a container a go and see how I get on.
Have placed 3 healthy medium sized tubers from a shop bought bag of Wilson's garden potatoes into a cardboard egg box on the windowsill in the kitchen. When they sprout I will plant them in about 15 centimeters of compost and add a layer of compost as the foliage grows.

Rocket seeds
The rocket has gone to seed. Very quick as always, but I left it there to let the pods ripen a bit. Took them all off the stalks today and tidied that bit of the vegetable patch up. This is the seeds after I picked them.

Rocket seeds in their pods

I have put them on newspaper to dry out for a few days before I put them into a jar for storage.

That's rocket to the left and something else leafy on the right

 I have also planted a few of the rocket seeds in a pot for the windowsill. I read that they can be planted in September and should do ok. I am skeptical, but am going to give it a try anyway.
The rocket came in a packet of mixed leaves and I took pods from some of the other leaves and am saving those too. Not sure what they will come up with, but it will probably be fine to eat next summer.

The first few rocket seeds are under there

Slug hunting

We had a relatively slug free summer this year. It is very wet out today and I took a jam jar full of slugs out of the garden. Important to keep them under control and get them out before they get a chance to reproduce. I don't like using slug pellets, so I will use some of the waste beer when I am bottling next week to make some traps. 

Sunflower seeds

I only got one decent sunflower this year. Picked it today and have left it on the bench in the shed to dry. We have plenty of sunflower seeds saved from a few years ago and they germinated very well this year (the problems came with neglect following germination), so I think we will eat this years ones after roasting them. 

Hogan's Deli and Coffee Shop, Celbridge

This is a lovely little place for lunch on Celbridge Main Street. I am not a big fan of sitting in a pub in the middle of the day eating lunch and I don't eat much fast food. When you take those two options out of the picture you don't have a huge amount of choice in Celbridge. Hogan's is very nice though. A bright place with a nice selection of quiches, salads and other lunch time meals. They do sandwiches and panini too. The coffee is good and the service is very friendly and efficient. A welcome addition to Celbridge.

Garden peas from Wexford

I was mad into growing peas when I was a kid. Something about the perfect little peas inside the pods that you would watch growing day by day. The number of peas I used to get would fit into 2 cupped hands (child's ones), so not a great yielder. I reckon they take too much work and produce too little yield in the garden to bother with them now. My father in law on the other hand has heaps of space and can turn his hand to any crop that he fancies. Good Wexford soil helps a bit, but he is just good at gardening full stop. He grew these beauties this year and gave us a big bag.

From Drop Box

The Flavour Thesaurus was a great help again and pointed in the direction of Pea and Mint soup. I know pea and mint are supposed to go together, but I had never tried it. The mint in the garden needed picking. I can never figure out what to do with it, but this was fantastic. Will be making it again. We have another batch of the Wexford peas left, but then I reckon I will try this one with frozen peas.

Pea and mint soup

Finely chop a carrot, stick of celery, a few cloves of garlic and an onion. Heat a glug of good olive oil up in a heavy based pot. Sweat the veg for about 10 or 15 minutes. Now add the peas. I used about 3 mug fulls of the garden peas. Add 3 teaspoons of Marigold vegetable stock powder. Cover the veg with boiling water and simmer the whole lot for about 30 minutes. Finally add a good bit of mint which you have finely chopped and puree the lot with a stick blender. 

I served this for lunch with some buttered home made brown bread. The photo is not great (no matter how many pixels your phone has it will still take naff photos), but the soup was gorgeous.

Beetroot and Apple with Horseradish dressing

I got a new book called The Flavour Thesaurus. It gives combinations of foods that go well together. This recipe is based on one of her recommendations on beetroot. The garden is full of it at the moment and we were looking for something to do with the glut. Don't like pickled beetroot particularly, so this was the first thing we tried:

Ingredients:
1 medium sized beetroot
Half of a nice tart apply - leave the skin on
Horseradish sauce (jar stuff is fine)
Natural yogurt


Method:
Wash the muck off the beetroot and twist the leaves and stems off. Steam it for as long as it takes to cook. This depends on size. For tiny beets its about 15 to 20 minutes, for the hefty one I used it was about 35 minutes. Use a skewer to check if it is done. Then hold the cooked beetroot under a running cold tap and rub the skin off. Use a knife to cut out any bits that garden nasties might have taken a chunk from.
Now chop the beet into small cubes. Leave this aside. Cut half an apple (I used a Jazz apple from Aldi) into similar sized chunks.
The dressing is made of 2 teaspoons each of the Horseradish and the yogurt. Mix these well in a bowl big enough to take the chopped beet and apple. Add some salt and pepper. Throw the chopped veg and fruit in and mix it all up. Dish this out on to 2 plates.

I served this with home made brown bread and a tin of mackerel from Aldi. Delicious. The quantities above serve 2 people for lunch.

A packet of Rashers and Irish Food Quality Certification

I was in Tesco last week and needed to pick up some bacon. I was planning on making some split pea and bacon soup - a Delia Smith recipe that my wife and I love. I have made this before with a chunk of smoked bacon chopped up small and it was delicious. I thought a packet of rashers would do in a pinch.

There was a huge selection of rashers in the chilled cabinet. They all however seemed to be essentially the same. There are a number of flavours, but who wants flavours in their rashers? Food companies perhaps. This avoids having to produce tasty bacon. There were no free range ones, no organic. Just streaky or back and the bunch of flavours. I bought a packet of Denny back rashers.

When I opened the packet I could see how thin they were. As I separated them they tore. I had to scrape them apart with my fingers. They were covered in some sort of sticky goo. Probably the added flavours. The first few I cooked under the grill smelled of fish oil (presumably what the pigs had been fed). As they cooked a white foam oozed out of them. They were flavourless except for the strong 'smoke' that had been added. I fried the last few and they were just as bad.

I have made the mistake of buying Denny products before. Probably because of the amount they spend on advertising. It strikes me as sad that in a country that is supposedly so reliant on agriculture food producers are intent on making bottom of the barrel muck like these rashers. This is of course an Irish Quality Assurance Scheme product. Here is a link to the producer rules for this scheme.

I live in a major suburb. We subsidise this industry to a vast extent and they don't seem to produce anything worth eating. How are Bord Bia supposed to sell this junk in foreign markets? I can imagine the Germans or the French laughing at us. Food in Ireland is frequently viewed as a producers right to sell and the consumer can take what they are given.

I think the Quality Assurance Scheme is a base level which all farms should achieve. This should not be an opt in and should be removed from packaging as a marketing tool.

Secondly a new scheme needs to be introduced aimed at the quality of the end product. Professional grading panels could be used to determine what products are of the highest quality. A set of grading levels - 1, 2, 3 etc. could be used to show which products were the best. What type of feed had been used could be indicated on the package along with the lack of additives and housing conditions for animals. These products could command a premium price. This move away from commodity production should improve margins for everyone in the supply chain. The consumer will also benefit from real choices in the quality of what they buy.

I would certainly pay a lot more for bacon that taste like bacon. I won't buy Denny products again though.

Sticky carrot side dish

This is a Jamie Oliver recipe. Decided to do this instead of just steam the carrots.

Peel and chop the carrots and stand them in a pot snugly. Put a big knob of butter on top of them. Season and stuff some bay leaves in between them.
Fill it half way up the side of the carrots with stock or water.

Bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer with the lid on. Wait until the carrots are cooked and then remove the lid and reduce the stock until you are just left with the butter sticky at the bottom of the pot. Now you have to wait until the bottom of the carrots caramelises.

A minute too long and they will burn. These look burnt, but they were very tasty.
If I was doing this again I would use less stock and try to keep a bit of bite in the carrots.
That is chicken breast coated with cream cheese and pesto and wrapped in bacon along with some asparagus and masked potatoes.

The aftermath of this looked a lot worse than it was. Soaked the pot over night and the burnt bits just came off.

White yeast bread

Had some friends coming over for lunch on Sunday, so made a beef stew with red wine.
Made this loaf of bread to go along with it. I just followed the instructions on the packet of flour and it came out perfect. So much for yest bread being complicated. I egg washed the top and put some sesame seeds on there too to make it look the part. Improved the flavour too.

French Bread

French bread

Not that French when you make it in Celbridge, but nice all the same. Getting yeast bread right takes quite a bit of practice, but I will try to point out some of the pitfalls.
The main differences between this and a basic white yeast bread are that this has 3 risings and steam is used in the oven to give the characteristic crust of French bread.

Ingredients:

250g Strong white flour

200ml tepid water (use half boiling and half tap and the temperature will be fine)

7g Sachet of dried yeast

Quarter tsp of salt

Method:

Add the yeast to the water and give it a stir. Add this to half of the flour and salt in a large bowl. Give it a good stir. It should be the consistency of very thick pancake batter at this stage. Cover it in cling film and let it stand for about 3 hours at room temperature.

It will have increased in size by about a factor of 3 and started to collapse in on itself. Ready for the second stage. Don't be afraid to leave this for longer than the 3 hours. Yeast bread involves plenty of patience and rushing it will give you a brick loaf. That said, try not to lose heart if you get bad results. Figure out what happened (ask a question here) and try again. It is worth getting this right. Then again your first attempt might be boulangerie stuff.

Next add the rest of the flour. Mix it in and use your hand to roll it into a ball. You may have to add some more flour to make sure that it is workable. Lightly flour a work surface and knead the bread for about 15 minutes. If the mixture gets a little too sticky dust it with some flour, but try not to overdo it. Wetter dough is better. The 15 minute knead is hard work, but very enjoyable. Make sure your hands are clean and sleeves rolled up before you start. I much prefer to do this by hand rather than use a mixer.

Now put the ball of dough back into the bowl you took it from. Cover it with some lightly oiled cling film and put it in a warm place. I use the hot press, but a warm kitchen is fine. Leave it for about 3 hours. You can see why it is so difficult to have this stuff for breakfast and why bakers get up in the middle of the night.

Following that rising the surface of the dough should be smooth and soft. If you press your finger lightly into it the depression should remain after you remove your finger. In the bottom right of this picture you can see the mark of my finger.

Next you need to shape the loaf. This dough will work in pretty much any shape - plaits, mini rolls or baguette shapes. Here are some rolls that I made a few weeks ago using a recipe very similar to this:

You can also use a lightly oiled loaf tin.

If you are doing baguette shapes you will need a clean tea towel and a large baking tray. Fold the towel into 3 pleats on the baking tray. The pleats will act as trenches for your bread to do its final rise in. Without the pleats to constrain the dough it will just all spread out flat. Not very baguette shaped.

Cover the pleats in plenty of flour. Break the ball of dough into 3 roughly equal parts. Roll each one out into a sausage shape. Lift up one end of one of the sausages and fold it into the centre. Press it down hard so that is sticks. Now do this with the other end - pressing it on top of the first finger mark. Lift this folded sausage into one of the pleats in the tea towel. Repeat this for the remaining 2 dough sausages. Finally cover the whole lot in another clean tea towel and leave for its final rising.
Bake for 25 minutes in the centre of a hot oven - about gas mark 8. Steam is used to give the crust to real French baguettes. To simulate this in my humble domestic cooker I put a pot of boiling water on the bottom of the oven. The crusts turned out looking very nice.

French onion soup

French onion soup

This serves 2 people and makes a very nice lunch. There is quite a lot of work in preparing it - lots of stirring, but it is worth the effort once in a while.

Ingredients:
25g of Butter
400g of onions, thinly sliced
600ml of beef stock, a good cube is fine
Some French style bread
25g of emmental cheese, grated

Method:
Melt the butter over a medium heat in a thick based pot. Add the onions and cook with the lid off for about an hour. You will need to stir it a lot during this time to prevent it sticking. Next add the stock and stir well. You want to get any crispy carmelised bits off the base of the pot and into the soup. Bring it to the boil and cook it for about 5 minutes more.
Slice the French bread at an angle and toast it on both sides under the grill. Then pile the cheese up on top of the toast. Melt the cheese under the grill. Pour the soup into warmed bowls and place the croutons on the top.

Brown beef stock

Beef stock
I have wanted to make beef stock from scratch for a while. Unbounded ambition, that's me.

Ingredients:
As much chopped up beef marrow bone as you can get (I used 500g. The rest of my measurements are for that amount. Adjust your recipe if you get more).
One onion roughly chopped
3 carrots sliced length ways - I didn't bother to peel them, just washed
A tsp of peppercorns
A couple of whole cloves if you like
1.5 litres of boiling water
3 cloves of garlic with the skins left on
Whatever herbs you like - I used Sage because I had some in the garden.

Sourcing:

The marrow bones are from Fitzpatrick's butchers in the Tesco shopping centre in Celbridge. Tried most of the other butchers in Celbridge - including Tesco's and this was the first one to produce the goods. I could hear him hack sawing away in the back. He gave me about 500g of marrow bone and did not charge. I bought some shoulder of lamb to make a stew some day so I did not feel too guilty about making him do all that hacking. That's the marrow bones in the picture. Along with my wrecked roasting tray.
Sage was from my garden. The hardiness of this plant never ceases to amaze me. It has plenty of leaves on it now and the weather has been freezing.
The veg are from Aldi.
Peppercorns from Marks and Spencer - no particular reason. I was just there and so were they.

Method:
Roast the bones in a strong roasting tray for about half an hour at gas mark 8. This should brown them a bit. Then add all of the vegetables, but not the garlic, cloves, peppercorns or herbs to the tray and give it another 45 minutes.
Then scrape the whole lot into a large pot and add the boiling water and the rest of the ingredients. Turn the heat on under that one.
Then add a small amount of water - about a cup - to the roasting tray and deglaze it on top of the cooker. Use a wooden spoon to make sure you scrape all the nice crisped up bits into the liquid. Make sure you use an oven glove to hold the roasting dish when you are deglazing. Empty this liquid into the stock pot too. Bring it to the boil. Reduce to the lowest possible heat and allow to simmer for 5 hours. Let the stock cool and then put it in the fridge. The fat will set on the surface. Use a large spoon to skim this off. The stock is ready to use. I am going to make French onion soup with it. I'll post that when I have it finished. Here's a picture of what it looked like bubbling away.

Brown lentil casserole and the first seeds in trays

Brown lentil casserole

Made with loads of vegetables and lentils for protein, this is an excellent main course. It's very tasty and healthy too. The list of ingredients is not hard and fast, this post is more about the general idea of vegetable and lentil based casseroles and how to make them. The list given here is based on what I had in the fridge today. I used the small brown lentils, but the flatter green ones are fine too. This recipe is not ideal for the small orange ones as they tend to dissolve. If you want to use those try this recipe instead. This serves 2 people for dinner.

Ingredients:
3 handfuls of brown lentils
Half a butternut squash(I find that even after halving these keep for ages in the fridge. Same goes for the sweet potato)
A small turnip
3 carrots
Half a sweet potato
3 tsp of marigold vegetable stock powder (you can use regular stock cubes, but you will need to use enough of them for the amount of water that will cover the vegetables. Better to use a measuring jug in this case. Marigold is good stuff with no much in it. Tricky to get though.)
A couple of teaspoons of soy sauce
2 celery sticks
1 Onion
Boiling water to cover
A cup of frozen peas


Sourcing:
The brown lentils are from the health food shop in Liffey Valley shopping centre. You can usually get these in Tesco, when they have them in stock. More often than not our Tesco just has a convenient space on the shelf where they would be if they had any. At least I know to stop looking at that point.
Most of the vegetables were bought in Aldi.
The Marigold stock powder was bought in Sainsbury's in Newry. I normally get it in the health food shop on Liffey Street, but was up north, so picked up a few there instead. Soy sauce is Kikkoman from the Asian Emporium on Abbey street.  They sell it in large bottles there which I then decant into the nicer little serving one. Much cheaper that way.

Method:
Peel and chop all the vegetables into bite sized pieces. Place all of the ingredients except the peas into a large pot. Add the stock powder or cubes and cover with the boiling water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 25 minutes. The add the frozen peas and continue to simmer for another 5 minutes. Check that the lentils are done to your liking.

The first seeds in trays
Raked over the vegetable patches to get them ready for planting. They are looking pretty good if a bit lumpy. I never get them looking like they do on gardeners world. Might try some 'no dig' next year.

Planted courgettes and leeks in mini pots. The seeds are a good bit out of date, so will keep an eye on them to see if they germinate in the next 2 weeks. If not, it's off to the garden centre. Seeds are cheap, so it's not that, but who likes to throw stuff out?

Next things to do are get the rest of the veg into trays (trying to avoid direct seeding into the patch, it does not work out very well for me) and plant the herb trays for the kitchen. I will try to grow rosemary this year, like every year and will probably fail :-( Great crop of tomatoes last year - we still have chutney - so must get some of them sown indoors ready for planting out.

Traffic light system for labeling food

There is a lot of talk about a traffic light system for food labeling so that people who don't understand nutrition can be told that what they thought was healthy is in fact like eating sweets for breakfast. Some food companies and supermarkets have taken the initiative and made up their own traffic lights. Governments tend to like this sort of thing. It takes responsibility from them and reduces the cost of 'regulating' a sector. More importantly perhaps it prevents them having to take on their financial supporters in industry. What politician would want to piss off a big multinational food company for example?
So in the absence of real certified traffic lights whose function is to protect citizens we get watered down corporate ones whose function is to prevent the introduction of the real thing.
Food companies in their search for marketing perfection scour their products to find good stuff that they can promote. This allows them to say that sugary cereals don't have any fat. If you eat them, you will have fat, but that is not the food company's fault. So the reasoning goes. I reckon when we do finally get traffic lights a red light in any of the monitored areas (fat, sugar, salt etc.) should result in a ban on any positive spin marketing claims for the product. Certain products are going to contain bad things, but if we are told this with traffic lights fair enough. A less savvy consumer though may not even turn to the side of the box if is is screaming 'fat free' at them.