Grilled fresh mackerel with lime salsa and toasted almonds

This makes a nice lunch or light evening meal. No carbs in evidence either unless you are on very low levels and can't eat tomatoes.

Ingredients

2 fillets of fresh mackerel
Juice of 2 limes
2 large tomatoes, roughly chopped
Chopped fresh parsley
2 tbsp Sliced almonds
Salt and pepper

Method

Preheat the grill to its highest setting - 250C in my case. Line a baking tray with foil. Place the washed and dried fillets skin side up on the foil. Season with salt and pepper and place under the grill.
Mix the lime juice and tomatoes in a small serving bowl.
Toast the almond slices in a dry frying pan on a high heat until they start to turn golden.

To serve place a fillet on each plate, sprinkle the almonds over the fish and make a pile of the salsa on the side.

Everyday stir fried vegetables in wraps

This is simple and can be made with a variety of vegetables. Here is a version I made yesterday:

Serves 2.5

Ingredients

3 carrots, sliced thinly
1 red onion, chopped
2cm piece of ginger, peeled and chopped finely
Chunk of broccoli stem and a few of the florets (about half the head is fine)
Half a head of cabbage shredded - you can include most of the stem as long as its not too woody
About 8 mushrooms chopped roughly
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Rapeseed oil and sesame oil
4 flour tortillas
Natural yogurt and sweet chilli sauce.

Heat the about a tablespoon of the oil in a wok. Next add the chopped vegetables one type at a time allowing them to heat up before you add the next batch. This prevents the whole lot getting steamed as the temperature of the wok gets reduced too much when you overload it. Toss the vegetables to prevent them sticking. Tossing them is also less likely to break them up than using a wooden spoon to stir.
Keep the heat high and toss the vegetables every few seconds for about 10 minutes or until all of the vegetables are cooked.
Turn the heat off. Add some soy sauce and mix the whole lot up.
Serve with flour tortillas - 2 per person is plenty.
Place a tortilla on your plate, spread a line of natural yogurt across the diameter. Do the same with the sweet chilli sauce. Wrap the whole lot up and enjoy.

Bread salad and Hake

I got a big loaf of nice white bread a couple of days ago and we ended up with too much. It's still nice for toasting, but this salad is a far better use. I served it with some steamed hake. Nice summery food for the first good weather we have had in ages.

Hake cooked in foil

Ingredients:

Enough hake fillet to feed yourselves - make sure its properly defrosted
Juice of a lemon
Salt and pepper.

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Wash and pin bone the hake. Give it a good drying with kitchen paper. Put a large sheet of foil on a baking tray. Place the hake on top of this. Juice the lemon on top and remove any pips. Discard the lemon skin. Close over the foil to seal the package up. Bake in the oven for about 12 minutes. Check the fish is cooked correctly before you serve. While the fish is cooking you can make the salad.

Bread salad

Ingredients:

White bread (stale)
About 10 good olives - stoned and cut up
A handful of chopped basil with stalks removed
6 ripe tomatoes - chopped with the calyxes removed
olive oil and red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper
About a tablespoon of capers, drained

Cut the crusts off a big chunk of stale white bread. I used a block about 10cm on a side, but use what you think you need to feed yourselves and up or down the rest of the ingredients in proportion. That said, this is not an exact recipe. Just through in rough amounts and you will be fine.
Put all of the ingredients in a large salad bowl. Make up a dressing of 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 8 tablespoons of olive oil. Pour this over the mixture and squish it all up with your hands.
Bring to the table.

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

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.

Smokey bacon spaghetti bolognese

I have cooked a lot of spaghetti bolognese over the years and I was pretty much making this one up as I went along, but it worked out great. I put plenty of smoked bacon in there at the start and that was the main flavour along with the beef. After the recent snow and ice the thyme was looking a bit forlorn in the back garden, but I put a big bunch of that in as well.

Heat a good glug of olive oil in a thick based pot. Cut the rinds off each of the 3 rashers of back bacon in a single piece. Throw these rinds into the pot and let them start frying while you chop the rest of the bacon into small pieces. Add the rest of the bacon along with 2 chopped onions. Let the whole lot fry for about 10 minutes. Then add a finely chopped carrot and 2 sticks of celery.
Next add a kilogram of good quality beef mince. This needs to be good stuff. Use cheap mince and the dish will have a greasy flavour. Break the mince up with a wooden spoon and brown it through. Next add plenty of thyme on the twigs. Give it a rinse first, but don't bother chopping it. You will just fish that out of the sauce before serving.
Add 2 tins of plum tomatoes and stir to break them up a bit. About 2 tablespoons of tomato puree goes in next. Give the whole lot a good stir and simmer on a low heat for about 40 minutes. Check that the carrots and celery are cooked through. Fish out the bacon rinds and the thyme. The sauce is now ready, but you can leave it on a low heat while you cook the pasta. I did not add any extra salt to this and just seasoned with some black pepper. when the sauce was ready I took out a couple of portions for baby dinners and then added about a small glass of red wine.

Cook your spaghetti in plenty of salted water. I used wholewheat as I think it tastes better.

Finally grate plenty of parmesan cheese on top of the sauce in the serving dishes.

Pea and parsnip soup with aniseed

This recipe is inspired by the excellent book by Niki Segnit The Flavour Thesaurus. I have added some aniseed to her pea and parsnip soup. The flavours all worked well together and it was dead easy to prepare.
To get the aniseed give one clove of star anise a good whack in a mortar and pestle. Then peel out the individual aniseeds, throw the husk out and crush the aniseeds.

Take 2 large parsnips and peel and chop them into large dice. Fry a chopped onion in a good glug of olive oil. (Don't use extra virgin for this as its likely to burn a bit). Add the parsnip to the fried onions and give it a good stir. Cover with about a litre of vegetable stock. I used Marigold Swiss Bouillon in boiling water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 10 minutes or until the parsnip is soft. Then add 300g of frozen peas and the crushed aniseeds from one star anise. I am going to use a bit more of this next time, but the flavour of aniseed can be a bit overpowering, so go easy on it first time. Season with some pepper. You probably won't need any salt if the stock is salty enough, so try a spoonful first. Bring it back to the boil and simmer for about 5 minutes. Liquidise and serve.

Ideal mid week and I still have plenty of parsnips from the garden. I never do well with peas unfortunately, so frozen it has to be. Vegetarian, filling and very tasty. We had this for a light dinner for 2 people, but it would be a great lunch in smaller portions.

Herbed pork chops with leek and mustard sauce

This recipe is based on one I got from the website epicurious. It turned out really well and I'll be making it again.

First coat the chops  - I used 2 small ones each - in a couple of teaspoons of rosemary and thyme, which you have chopped small. Take 3 rashers of bacon, derind and chop them into strips. Fry them in a pan until cooked and then set them aside. Next fry the pork chops until they are almost done. 

Then remove them and set aside on a plate. Fry 2 cleaned and chopped leeks in the fat that remains in the pan along with about 3 cloves of garlic. When that is cooked, add a half a litre of vegetable stock and give the pan a good stir to release any carmelised bits from the bottom. Now return the bacon to the pan and add a tablespoon of chopped fresh sage. Put the chops back in and cover the whole lot until the chops are cooked - about 5 minutes for me, but check your chops by cutting into the thickest one. Then remove the chops to a warmed plate and turn the heat up to reduce the sauce. When it has thickened sufficiently turn the heat off. Add 1 teaspoon of natural yogurt and 1 teaspoon of dijon mustard. Give it a good mix and spoon it over the cooked chops. 

I served this with steamed new potatoes, brocolli and carrots. 

Biscuit topped apple crumble

We got a bag of apples off an uncle last week so I decided to make a crumble. I had a packet of hazelnuts in the fridge, with some rough instructions on how to make a rhubarb crumble, so I adapted them.

150g of oat biscuits (I used a mix of hobnobs and digestives)
50g of whole hazel nuts
700g of cooking apples
2 tbsp of sugar
A couple of tbsp of water

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees c.

First toast the hazel nuts under a hot grill. This only takes a few minutes. Keep an eye on them as they burn easily. When they are done, allow them to cool and chop them roughly.
Next chop up the biscuits and give them a good bashing. No point in getting too fussy about this, nice and rough is just fine.
Peel and slice the apples and put them in a pan with the water and sugar. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 5 minutes. Pour the lot into a casserole or deep pie dish. Mix the biscuits and nuts together and spread them over the apple mixture. Put it in the oven for about 15 minutes. Serve with some vanilla ice cream.

A courgette and tomato soup for lunch

The garden is bursting with vegetables at the moment so it seemed like a good idea to make a light soup for lunch. There are about 5 courgettes in the fridge and a small bunch of tomatoes in the fruit bowl which need to be eaten so that more can be taken in off the plants. The first of the leeks are also ready to eat. I didn't get many leeks to germinate this year (new seed next year I reckon), but those I did plant out came up well.

I decided to make a light soup using as much of this stuff as I could.

First sweat these vegetables (finely chopped) in a good glug of olive oil.

1 onion
3 carrots
3 celery sticks
1 leek

This takes about 15 minutes. Then add a litre of light vegetable stock - I used marigold powder, but anything else including chicken stock would work fine.
Then skin 4 or 5 tomatoes and chop them into quarters and cut 2 small courgettes into thick matchsticks.

Throw these into the pot and season with pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for about 10 minutes.
Serve with plenty of chopped fresh parsley and some bread and cheese. It makes a lovely lunch. We used the currant bread that I made a couple of days ago, toasted and spread with real butter and topped with slices of cheddar. 

Currant bread

Made some currant bread today. Only took a few minutes to put together. I used the electric mixer to make it a bit easier.

Preheat your oven to 200 C.

Throw the following in a bowl:

500g plain white flour
good pinch of salt
120g of sultanas or currants
2 teaspoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of baking soda
300 ml of buttermilk
1 egg


Give the whole lot a good mix. Dust your hands with some flour and shape the dough into a ball in the bowl. Put a layer of non stick cooking paper on a baking sheet. Grease this with some butter or margarine. Turn the dough out on to this and shape it into a rough round. Cut a deep cross into the top of the loaf. Bake for 45 minutes. Tap it on the base to make sure its done.

Vegetarian curry with tamarind

I went through a phase of making Laksa a while ago and had some tamarind paste left in the press.  Tamarind is used to sour curries and I thought it would make a good addition to a curry just made with mild curry powder. The tamarind is soaked in a small quantity of boiling water first and then pushed through a metal sieve. You don't eat the seeds. I also added some garam masala which I have had lying around for ages. I really just want to get rid of this. It is rarely called for in the recipes that I use and I don't like throwing anything out. I picked a good handful of small chard leaves from the garden too. I wanted to get a nice tart tomatoey flavour, so I added a few chopped sun dried tomatoes to the mix too. The rest of the ingredients are largely what I had to hand.

2 Onions
2 Carrots
2 Celery sticks
3 cloves of garlic (from my father in laws garden)
The stalk of a broccoli head that we used up during the week
1 Chili with the seeds removed
A handful of sultanas
1 tablespoon of sunflower oil
2 tablespoons of mild curry powder
1 teaspoon of garam masala
A chunk of tamarind (about 20g)
1 tin of whole tomatoes + the tin filled with cold water
3 sun dried tomatoes chopped very small
1 teaspoon of vegetable stock powder
A handful of small chard leaves

Chop all of the vegetables into bite sized pieces - except the onions and garlic, chop these finely.
Fry the onion and garlic in the oil for a few minutes. Add the curry paste and garam masala and fry for another minute or 2 to release the flavours. Then add all of the other ingredients except the chard and give it a good stir. Cook for about 30 to 40 minutes until the vegetables are all tender. Throw the chard in for the last few minutes.

I served this with some boiled white basmati rice. It had a lovely rich flavour.

Borlotti bean minestrone

The finished product

We have had a tin of borlotti beans in the press for the last while. They were inherited when some friends moved house and cleared out their kitchen. We weren't really sure what to do with them, so I took a look on the web to see if I could get any ideas. A lot of the recipes that I found used them with tomatoes, garlic and olive oil, so I decided to make a minestrone.

First put a good glug of olive oil in a cast iron pot on a medium heat. I used some nice Greek stuff that I got in Aldi. Next you need to soften some finely chopped vegetables over a medium heat to make the soup base. I used a couple of carrots, onions and celery sticks, but I reckon you could vary that easily enough. About 20 minutes should be plenty to soften these.  

Then throw in the tin of rinsed borlotti beans, a tin of whole plum tomatoes and a litre of vegetable stock. Season with salt, pepper and plenty of fresh rosemary. I blanched and froze some chard from the garden earlier this week and so I added this to the pot. Cabbage is more common, but any boilable green leafy vegetable would be fine. Let this all simmer for about 20 minutes.

That's it done except for the pasta. This is best left until you are ready to eat. If you add the pasta too early and leave it to sit it will keep sucking up liquid and you will end up with a soggy mess. I used wholewheat spaghetti which I broke into chunks 3 or 4 inches long and threw them but pretty much any pasta will work. About one normal main meal portion of pasta is fine for these quantities. Just keep the pot bubbling until the pasta is cooked and you are ready to go. 

This fed both of us well for our main meal. It would be a very nice lunch or starter in a smaller portion. This is very healthy stuff. The only things to watch are that you don't over do it with the oil and that your stock is not too salty. 

Mackerel, beetroot and horseradish sauce

Jamie Oliver has a recipe for trout with a horseradish sauce. This is very similar, but with mackerel instead of the trout.

The beetroot in the garden is perfect at the moment. A couple of inches across each. We had 2 of these globes each for dinner. Washed them and twisted the leaves off. Then we steamed them for about 30 minutes, checking them with a skewer to see when they were perfect. They are easy to peel by hand under a slowly running cold tap. Just push the skins off with your thumbs and leave the beets aside on a plate until you have the other stuff on the plates. They will retain their heat for about 5 minutes in a warm kitchen as long as you don't slice them before serving.

The mackerel was from a fishmongers in Howth. They had cleaned it already and it was still cheap as chips. When mackerel is fresh there is nothing to touch it. When I got back from the shop I froze this in batches of 2. It defrosted fine at room temperature and then we roasted it for 15 minutes at 180 degreed c with a bit of salt and pepper on top. The skin crisped up nicely.

The sauce was made from equal quantities of natural yogurt and horseradish sauce in a jar. About a tablespoon of lemon juice and a good grind of salt and pepper. Mixed this up well in a bowl and stuck a spoon in it for serving ourselves at the table (or couch in this case).

We steamed some of the father in law's potatoes to go with this. Very tasty and healthy too.

A Spanish pork and beans stew

We had this in Spain a couple of years ago. It is often served as a tapas portion with some white crusty bread and goes very well with strong red wine.

Fabada

Ingredients

400g dried butter beans. Most types of white beans will work fine here.
600g piece of bacon
2 bay leaves
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 Rashers of back bacon chopped up - include the rind if it is thin enough to fry and be edible.
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
1 teaspoon paprika. I used La Chinata. (This is one of the most over the top websites for a spice that you will ever see. Take a look)
200g chorizo sausage
2 tins of tomatoes


Method


Soak the beans over night. Cook them according to the packet instructions. Usually about 40 minutes simmering is plenty. Drain them and put them aside. 
Cook the piece of bacon in about 2 litres of water with the bay leaves. This usually takes about 50 minutes. It will depend on weight. 20 minutes per 500g plus 20 minutes. 
Trim the fat off and chop the bacon into bite sized pieces.
Fry the rashers and cut them into strips. 
Cut the chorizo into matchsticks and fry it for a few minutes. Discard the oil that oozes out when you cook this. 
Fry the onion and garlic in the oil and add the chopped cooked meats. Add the tomatoes and bay leaves and simmer for about an hour.

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.

Lamb jalfrezi

Got a jar of jalfrezi paste in the Asian market a while ago. Here is the lamb curry that I made with it:

Ingredients:
500g of shoulder of lamb pieces
1 tbsp of vegetable oil
2 tbsp Pataks jalfrezi paste
1 onion chopped up
Tin of tomatoes
1 green chilli
2 small dried chillies
Half the tomato tin of water

Method:
Heat the tablespoon of veg oil in a thick bottomed sauce pan. Add the onion and fry for a few minutes to brown it. Keep stirring it and make sure it does not burn. Add the curry paste and fry for another minute. This gets the flavours out. Add the meat and stir it around to brown it for a few minutes. The add the rest of the ingredients. Bring to the boil and then turn down low and put the lid on. It takes about an hour to cook. It's done when the meat is tender.
I served this with some cous cous and a big blob of lime pickle.

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.

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.