Tag Archives: energy

Guacamole and playing with new toys

Gosh? Is this thing still here? I suppose I’d better post something to it then. :-)

I’ve been lacking the energy to play recently, but some new kitchen toys and a renewed attempt at acquiring the energy may result in more posts in the near future.

Yesterday I had a problem. Two problems in fact.

1) My kitchen was resplendent with several exciting new sharp implements (Remember: A well armed kitchen is a polite kitchen) which were not being used. Not least among these was a food processor with more attachments than your average Swiss army.
2) For reasons which are beyond the scope of this article, I had an awful lot of avocado which were getting very ripe.

Obvious conclusion: Guacamole!

Now, I was far from my cookbooks (ok, I was 5 minutes walk from my cookbooks, but I was in Sainsburys and they weren’t), and I’ve never made guacamole before in my life. What to do, what to do… Enterprising young chef that I am, I hit upon a cunning plan.

Ok, it wasn’t very cunning. I picked up a tub of Sainsburys own brand guacamole and looked at the label.

But it could have been a cunning plan.

Tomatoes, coriander, lemon, chilli, sour cream, a little bit of avocado, etc. No great surprises. I set off to raid the store for ingredients.

First hitch, coriander. They had plenty of coriander. However, it looked really sad. And I mean *really* sad. This isn’t “Kicked puppy” sadness so much as “I’ve just read the entirety of war and peace in one sitting and have now lost all will to live” sadness. It was that sad. So, substitution time. I picked up a pack of flat leaf parsley instead.

Next substitution: They were out of sour cream. This time War and Peace was inflicted upon me. Visions of guacamole receded into the distance, laughing as they ran.

Oh well. Creme fraiche is almost like sour cream, right?

A quick detour via the checkout and time to run gleefully home to attack my new purchases with spinning blades (of doom).

What I used:

3 largeish and very ripe avocados
4 smallish and rather pathetic looking not very ripe tomatoes
1/2 a medium sized red onion.
1 lime
1 lemon
3 small cloves of garlic
A medium sized bunch of flat leaf parsley.
half a tsp of powdered chilli
2 tsp salt
2 tsp brown sugar
250ml Creme Fraiche.

What I did:

It’s not really rocket science. :-) The short answer is “Blended everything until it was thoroughly gooped”. You can skip the rest of this section now.

Squeezed the lemon and lime (using my cool and shiny juicer attachment on the food processor).

Switched over to the spinning blades of doom and added the onion, garlic, salt, sugar and chilli. Span until ingredients were thoroughly doomed.

Added the tomatoes and doomed them too, then the avocado, then the parsley. (I didn’t want the parsley too fine, which is why I added it after there was a healthy quantity of goop to act as buffer).

Finally added the creme fraiche and ran the food processor until it was all mixed.

Conclusion:

Here’s a quote from immediately after making this:

< David > That is a) An awful lot of guacamole and b) An awful lot of really damn good guacamole. :)

I don’t really have much further to add to that, except that maybe it would be worth cooking the onion first next time – the recipe doesn’t taste too oniony, but it has quite a strong aftertaste of it. Some cumin might not go amiss either.

Sweet and Spicy Peppers with Bulgur Wheat

So, I’ve been incredibly lax about posting recently (where by recently I mean ‘for the last six months or more’). I’m going to try and fix that, but to be honest I’m going to fail. Still, here’s a post.

Part of the reason for the lack of post is I haven’t been cooking very well recently. Lack of energy. Tonight I really felt the need for a good meal, but I wanted something simple owing to aforementioned lack of energy. Here’s what I came up with.

What I used

Olive oil (unspecified quantity – enough to cover the bottom of the pan)
3 sweet peppers (2 yellow, 1 red)
1 red onion
3 cloves of garlic
6 smallish tomatoes
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp powdered red chilli
1 cup durum wheat
1.5 cups water

What I did

Err. Not much really. :-)

First, the durum. This is trivial. Put 1 cup durum wheat and 1.5 cups water in a rice cooker. Press the ‘on’ button. Leave to cook.

I thinly sliced the onion and sweet peppers and fried them with the olive oil, garlic, sugar and salt. I started the onions a few minutes before the peppers. I coarsely chopped the tomatoes and, once the peppers were looking reasonably cooked, added them and the chilli to the mixture. I left this to cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomato reduced to a thick sauce and the peppers tasted cooked.

Conclusion

Nice, simple, effective. I’m a big fan of durum wheat at the moment – it’s like cous cous, only much harder to go wrong with. It’s nice for dishes that I would normally have with rice.

The peppers were very good. I think they needed frying for longer before adding the tomatoes (peppers don’t cook very well in liquid), but other than that I can’t think anything I would have done differently. Maybe slightly more chilli and less salt.

Latkes

I was bored.

I don’t just mean the sort of boredom that arises from not being very interested in what you are doing, I mean the sort of soul crushing mind numbing boredom that rises up from the deep, saps you of all your energy and causes you to reach the point where anything you might do to prevent the boredom just seems like too much work.

As you can imagine, this sort of boredom is a problem. I get it a lot, and being currently unemployed (which will change soon, hurrah! I just need to decide which offer to accept.) while all my friends are gainfully employed in jobs or PhDs, I’m particularly prone to it at the moment. There are plenty of things I could be doing, but if I get into a slump then they all seem like too much effort.

This time however, a solution arose. Lunchtime.

My stomach grumbled. “David”, it said “I hunger. You should feed me.”

“I don’t know. That sounds like a lot of work.

“Yeah, it is. But if you don’t feed me then I’ll be forced to escape from your body and go on a rampage. Millions will die to sate my hunger, and it will be all your fault.”

“Hmm. Well, that would be bad, yes. But I’m still not sure…”

My brain chimed in. “Yes. You should cook something. I’m bored out of your mind here. Cook something new and write it up for ‘Playing with your food’. That way you’ll have an hour or two of entertainment, and your three readers will get something to amuse them as well.”

“Alright, alright. You’ve convinced me.”

When your body parts conspire against you there’s really nothing to do but to go along with their wishes.

Unfortunately I was still uninspired. This needed to be remedied if I were to effectively produce a new meal. So, Robin, to the blogmobile!

My method of finding new cooking blogs to peruse was very simple. I wandered over to Food, in the main… and clicked on every link on the right hand side of the page.

Eventually I settled on this. I’ve heard about latkes before and I keep thinking “Hmm, I should try to make those.” but never get around to it. Well, the time for procrastination was over. Latkes it is.

Purely by chance, somewhere in between deciding on this and cooking it I thought I’d check my weight (I haven’t in months) and noted that I’d somehow managed to drop down to about my desired ideal weight with no conscious effort on my part. Right after christmas and new years.

How much oil was in that recipe again?

Anyway, time for some cooking.

What I used

About 7 small to medium potatoes, peeled
Three small white onions
1/2 tbsp of salt
Two eggs
1/2 a cup of flour
1/2 a cup of sunflower oil
1/2 tsp baking soda

What I did

As you will probably have noticed if you’ve followed the above link, there’s not really an awful lot of resemblance between my ingredients and Debbie’s ingredients. They’re the same sort of things, but the quantities are only tangentially related. This is in part due to my usual tendency to adapt, in part because I peel potatoes on autopilot and peeled far more potatoes than I actually needed before I knew it, and mostly because the recipe was all the way upstairs and it would be so much work to go up and check it.

I used the grateresque attachment for the food processor and got a large pile of shredded potato. As directed I put it into a metal colander and squeezed as much of the juice out as I could, but it was still quite damp. It was at this point I decided to employ low cunning to complete the task and sprinkled the salt over it, mixed it up thoroughly and went to do the onions. These I decided that rather than shredding I would do with the normal processor blades, turning them into more of an onion puree.

As an idle observation, if you run the grater attachment to the food processor and just drop a potato on top of it then it bounces about in an amusing manner. I can’t help but imagine the little potato pleading for its life as it avoids the spinning blades.

But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, I’d decided to mix the Latkes in the kenwood. Why? Because I’m lazy, that’s why. And it’s the same amount of washing up, so why not? I transferred the onion to the kenwood bowl and returned my attention to the potato. The salt had done its work quite admirably and I was able to squeeze a lot more liquid out of it. Having done so I transferred it to the kenwood as well.

I then added the eggs, flour and baking soda and mixed it all up. It produced a batter with a texture fairly similar to my normal pancake mix, which was encouraging.

I then poured the oil into a nonstick pan and heated it. At this point I looked at the pan, slightly disbelieving. Buddha on a pogo stick that’s a lot of oil… I know I have recipes which use almost that much oil, but that’s in a large curry. The sole purpose of this oil is for frying things in. This somehow makes it more alarming.

Anyway, I used a heaped spoonfull of batter for each latke. The pan fit about four of them, and there was enough batter to make eight. I fried them for five minutes on each side until they were a darkish brown.

Towards the point where I wanted to flip the first batch I noticed that the best spatula was currently in a pile of washing up leftover from my brother cooking bacon and egg earlier (the irony amused me briefly). I quickly washed it up and moved to flip the latkes.

Point of reference? Putting a wet spatula into very hot oil isn’t a great idea. Ouch.

Anyway, latkes duly flipped, they cooked for another five minutes and then I transferred them to a plate and put the next batch on.

Conclusion

I was already pretty sure these would be good. They smelled wonderful.

Good lord. They tasted even better. These are really really good.

I’d made far more than I was going to be able to eat, so I rushed upstairs to get the Boy. (‘The Boy’ is my affectionate name for my brother).

“Boy”, says I, “Would you like to try something indescribably delicious?”

The Boy is skeptical. I cook strange and unnatural things, with vegetables and hardly any dead animal to speak of. However upon my description of what a latke is (“It’s basically a pancake made out of shredded potato and onion”) he is convinced to give it a go.

The Boy agrees. They’re really very good. He’s rather full from having had the aforementioned bacon and egg, so he only has one, but I make up for this by having three (and another one halfway through writing this post). The rest will keep to be reheated in the oven later.

So, a definite success. They do generate a lot of washing up, and they do stink up the house, but they taste amazing.

The only thing I would do differently in future is make sure that they really were a quite dark brown. Some of them were slightly undercooked and, while still nice, they were a bit to soft inside and lacked the crispness of the really well cooked ones.

Badass garlic lentils

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably got an impression of a variety of exotic spices and subtle flavours. You no doubt see me as some sort of culinary master, spending hours slaving away in the kitchen to find the perfect recipe. Most likely you’ve even thought “Wow, that David is godlike in his mastery! I must bear his children!”

Alas, I am here to tell you that this simply isn’t true. Behold my deep, dark secret: Some times I simply can’t be bothered. I don’t have the energy, the ingredients, or the time to put something fancy together, so it’s time to just throw everything in a pot and see what happens. Occasionally, this works.

A frequent theme of this sort of cooking is lentils. It is very easy to produce something edible with lentils – you take a bunch of lentils, you stick ’em in a pot of water, you add stuff for flavouring. Cook until, well, cooked.

The following is an example of this. I won’t even pretend I was measuring things…

What I used:

Garlic, lots (say about 5 cloves)
Coarse sea salt
Green lentils. I guess about 300g, but I’m only going on packet size here.
Stock cube
Marmite
Very lazy chillies (these appear to be chopped semi-dried chillies preserved in white wine vinegar. They appear to be about two months past their use by date, so I’m doing my best to use them up)
Olive oil
Bay leaves, handful (4? 5?)
Thyme
About a third of a bottle of sainsbury’s tomato passata

What I did:

Pretty much what it says on the packet. Take lentils, stick them in water. Add a stock cube.

At this point I now hunt around the kitchen for other things to add. You don’t think I planned this do you?

So, first thing I do is add garlic. I roasted this before hand (that’s what the olive oil was for) and crush it slightly before adding it in. Whenever I roast garlic I add a fair bit of coarse sea salt to it as well to draw out the juices.

Now, to give it some flavour I added the bay leaves and thyme.

One of my standard tricks for improving the flavour of stocks is to add marmite to them. If you are unlucky enough to not be British (or Australian, which is practically british but with a better tan) then you might not be familiar with marmite, so let me explain this concept.

The classic ad for marmite which I always remember is you see a man walking along with a sandwich. He passes a homeless person and, feeling sorry for him, gives him half of the sandwich. The homeless person in question takes one bite of the sandwich, spits it out and starts yelling at the man.

Yes. This is an advertisement for the product. Their slogan is “You either love it or you hate it.”

Allow me to clarify further. Marmite is an evil foul smelling black goop with the consistency of tar and the salt content of the dead sea. For reasons of cultural insanity the british choose to spread it on bread and willingly consume it.

It’s actually quite nice.

Basically it’s a yeast extract – originally from the leftovers from making beer. It’s extremely salty and has a nice rich flavour to it when sufficiently diluted (or spread realllly thinly over warm toast and margarine). Consequently when added to a stock it really adds a lot of flavour to it.

I add a dollop of it. A few moments later I happen to notice the vegetable stock packet I’ve used, which proudly declares that it is guaranteed to be yeast free. That’s nice. I add another dollop of marmite for good measure.

Finally, rummaging through the fridge I found the aforementioned lazy chillies. Checked the sell by date, confirmed that they were not now radioactive and decided that the lentils could use a bit of a kick to them. I added them to the stock and left it to cook for a bit longer.

About 10 minutes later I came back to the lentils, tasted them and decided they needed a bit more of a kick, so I added another dollop. At this point the lentils were getting cookedish, so I added the tomato (random bit of trivia: Tomato slows down the cooking process for lentils, so you shouldn’t add it too soon. Of course, so does salt. At this point I suspect the marmite and roasted garlic had contributed enough salt to preserve a rhino). I left it to cook for another 10-20 minutes more and then served.

It was still very liquidy, so it was more of a lentil soup than anything. I took a sip.

Then I coughed and spluttered for a bit and drunk a lot of water to recover.

A bit of a kick? Try a mule’s worth. These lentils kicked my ass. I bravely made a few more attempts at eating them, but simply couldn’t do it.

So, I adopted the standard aga owner’s approach to dealing with culinary disasters. Bung it in the simmering oven and forget about it.

I came back to it the next morning. The water had entirely evaporated off, leaving a slightly moist thing that was nothing so much as bits of brown in brown goo. Still, I shouldn’t judge. Some of my best fr… err. what I mean is that I have a very nice pumpkin and brown lentil stew recipe which resembles nothing so much as raw sewage. You can’t always tell if something is going to be awful by looking at it. So, I plucked up my courage and steeled myself for a bite.

Conclusion

Hey. That’s actually pretty good.

For some reason the extra cooking really mellowed the spiciness. I think this is because the spice was all in the broth and the lentils weren’t getting much of the flavour, but as it cooked the flavour soaked into the lentils. Still, this was by no means a subtle dish – the overriding flavour was garlic, with a strong complementary chilli flavour. Oh yes, and salt. Don’t get me wrong, there were other flavours, but when you’re reduced to considering marmite to be a nuance you know that this here recipe is not for food snobs.

I’ve actually made this again since, and simplified certain steps. Rather than roasting the garlic I just fried it (takes less time and saves washing up), cutting out the salt. I also cut out the thyme and bay leaves because, frankly, you couldn’t taste a thing, and cooked it on a much higher heat than the simmering oven so it didn’t take all night to cook.

So, all in all a nice and simple addition to the recipe book. Takes a while to cook, but it takes a while of being ignored to cook. Definitely one for future nights when I can’t be bothered.