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.

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 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.

Garden kickoff, last of the leeks and cheddar scones

First vegetable patch work
I finally got out into the garden today. Dug the vegetable patches and spread the years worth of kitchen compost. It was composted very nicely. I tipped the whole lot out and removed the good stuff. Threw the uncomposted recent stuff back into the now almost empty bin. Next up I have to rake the ground to a fine tilth and get the first of the seeds planted indoors.

The last of the leeks needed to be lifted before I could get working on the patch. There were quite a lot of them. Topped and tailed them all and made this soup with 700 grammes of them. The rest are in the fridge at the moment.

Leek and Potato soup
Ingredients:

700g of leeks - cut up finely and washed
2 onions - chopped finely
900g of potatoes - peeled and shopped small
100g of butter - I got some nice country butter in Tesco
Salt and pepper
1.5 litres of chicken stock - I just used decent cubes, real is of course better

Method:

Melt the butter in a large thick bottomed pot. Add all the vegetables and stir to coat them with the butter. Season with plenty of salt and pepper. Leave the mixture on a medium heat for about 15 minutes until the vegetables have all softened. Check it does not burn every few minutes and give it a good stir. I found that the potatoes stuck a bit, but did not burn.
Then add the hot stock and give the whole lot a stir. Cook this for about 40 minutes on a very low heat. Liquidize and stir the milk in. This recipe makes a lot, but it freezes well.

Cheese and herb scones
These have a lovely chewy texture and are yellow in colour from the buttermilk. Like all scones they are very quick and easy to make, so not worth making in bulk for freezing. Just make them up fresh when you need them. Having nice herbs in the garden makes this possible. You won't spend a fortune buying fresh herbs that go off in the bottom of your fridge.


Ingredients:

220g of plain flour
Half a teaspoon of baking soda, sieved
Handful of sage chopped finely - I had this in the garden, but dried is ok
200ml of buttermilk
25g of cheddar cheese grated

Method:

Mix the flour, baking soda and sage in a bowl. Add the buttermilk a little at a time until you have a dough that you can handle. Should be a bit sticky, but not total gunge. Turn it out onto a floured work surface and shape it into a flat disc about a centimeter thick. Cut it up into triangles, or use a cutter. Use a brush to coat the top surface of each scone in some more butter milk. Dip the scone tops into the grated cheese. Place them on a sheet of grease proof paper on a baking sheet.
Bake at gas mark 8 for about 20 minutes. Hollow when tapped.

These went great with the leek soup and some more of the country butter on them.

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.

Egg in the hole

When I was a kid we used to get this a lot. It was cooked in lard then and worth the calories to be honest, but here is a healthier version. It uses about a teaspoon of vegetable oil for 2 people, so not that bad at all.

Ingredients

2 slices of wholemeal bread - frozen is fine 

2 eggs

1 tsp of vegetable oil

Salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a non stick pan. You don't want it in flames, but if it is too cool the oil just absorbs into the bread straight away and it all gets a bit soggy.
While that is heating up, cut a square out of each slice of bread. The egg is going in there, but the hole just needs to be a bit bigger than the yolk. The white of the egg will spread out over the surface of the bread very nicely.
Put the bread in the pan and let it cook in the oil for about a minute. Pushing it flat if its sticking up. The crack the egg into the hole and season with salt and pepper. Cook like this for about 2 minutes. Then flip it over. Best to use something like a spatula or a fish slice to do this in case the egg leaves the bread while you are flipping it.
Cook for another couple of minutes until the white of the egg is cooked. Served with chutney and some extra toast, this makes a very nice lunch.