Kedgeree

As often happens when I’m shopping for specific ingredients for something I plan to cook, I end up with something completely different in the basket and vague ideas of what to do with it flitting through my mind. This particularly happens when I’m hungry.. I know, I know never shop on an empty stomach blah blah... but this was the state of affairs last Saturday when I happened to be  shopping...

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Hot & Sour Broth with Prawns

So here we have the last of the meals made from one simple chicken! This is a healthy, clean-tasting soup using the carcass and bones of the aforementioned chicken for the stock which is of course the base for the broth itself. You can play around with this to suit your taste, omitting the prawns for something plainer, or even substituting for some shredded chicken if you like.You could actually...

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Chicken Pie with Mushrooms, Sweetcorn and Herbs

There’s not a huge amount to say about this. It’s a chicken pie, made from leftovers from the preceding roast chicken.  It is very good, excellent comfort food. I think though that next time I will use the Jamie Oliver trick of putting little balls of sausage meat on top of the sausage mixture before topping wiith the pastry - then it really will be...

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Roast Chicken & Gorgeous Stuffing with Creamed Corn

Another “old” recipe then this. And another taken from Economy Gastronomy. The main concept of the book of course is to buy the best ingredients that you can afford but then make these ingredients work harder for you and in particular choose a “bedrock” key ingredient the leftovers of which can easily be made into at least one other meal. Here...

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Goan Fish Curry

  So, here’s the thing, I had an urge for a lobster based curry the other night: I think my previous venison blog post where I had mentioned Lidl’s lobster had stuck in my head and it was all I could think of. That of course was to be my undoing: naturally Lidl had none of the more exciting stock in. No Barbary duck breasts, no venison or guinea fowl, and certainly no damn lobster. But having...

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Foil Baked Halibut Steaks with Samphire, Sliced Potatoes and Olive Paste

I had an appointment with my chiropractor last Friday which meant that I was going to be close to the infamous SJ Hatt’s fishmonger on Essex Road. With that in mind I decided that I would get some red mullet in order to try out a Jose Pizarro recipe that I’ve wanted to do now for absolutely ages... BUT bloody disaster! No red mullet to be had. Chatting with the very friendly fishmonger, it turns...

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Pork Shoulder Steaks with an Apple, Parsley & Red Chilli Butter

Back to the old recipe folder again and here some pork steaks topped with an apple butter. Again, I really can’t remember where the idea for this came from and doing a google search doesn’t throw anything familiar up so I will have to presume that inspiration just struck one day! I do know that at the time I was still receiving fortnightly veg boxes...

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Celery & Chestnut Soup and Roasted Flat Peaches with Vanilla Crème Fraîche

I mentioned in the earlier prawn linguine post that I'd planned last weekend to cook up some celery soup followed by the venison last posted. Obviously my small plumbing disaster intervened (we opted for an Indian in the end as I was too stressed out to cook) but the celery soup came out earlier in the week and some tired old peaches languishing in...

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Pan-fried Balsamic Marinated Venison Steaks with Sweet Sour Peppers

I bought some venison steaks from Lidl a while ago which have been sitting in the freezer for a while and with the bf staying (and having just installed a new shower pump for me!) I thought this a perfect time to crack them out and try and do something special with them. Lidl gets a bit of a bad rap really I think - people tend to just think of it as budget and therefore poor quality. But...

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Creamy Prawn, Mushroom & Tomato Linguine

A minor plumbing fiasco last night meant that my planned cooking (celery soup to be followed by venison steaks) went flying out of the window at great speed. Hopefully I'll get to do that in the next day or so but in the meantime here's another from the archives. I’ve noticed that a few of the recipes I’ve added recently have smoked garlic in them. I’d bought a bulb at Borough Market if I remember...

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Ginger Pork & Noodle Stir-fry

Finally something that I have cooked recently (although I will still be reverting to old recipes to get through the backlog over the next few weeks)! As I mentioned, I’d recently dusted off my copy of Economy Gastronomy and picked out a few more recipes that I fancied trying - this being one of them. Here, a cheap fatty cut of pork, belly, is twice cooked to create a fairly simple, very tasty...

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