Quick tomato soup with chorizo and beans (recipe)

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 31 May 2011 in cooking, Featured, recipes | 3 comments

A common tip for people trying to eat less meat for frugal, health or environmental reasons is to use meat as a flavour not as an ingredient to add volume/bulk to the meal. I love chorizo for this purpose – the smallest pieces provide plenty of flavour. This soup doesn’t taste like a slice of neat chorizo, but the sausage adds a lot of depth to what is otherwise a pretty basic tomato soup.

Like our spicy tomato and lentil soup, this is a quicky and aside from the chorizo, is made from standard store-cupboard ingredients – so is a great last minute lunch soup. It’s not quite as frugal as the lentil one (because of the chorizo) but it’s still pretty cheap for something so easy and tasty :)

This week’s meal plan:

Posted by louisa on Monday 30 May 2011 in weekly meal plans | 0 comments

Another bank holiday in the UK – between Easter, bank holidays and our holidays, I think we’ve only had two five-day-working-weeks in the last two months :)

Sunday brunch – sausage, eggs & potato cakes
Sunday dinner – curry with the team

Monday brunch – pancakes, weeeee
Monday dinner – John’s previously frozen super special pasta sauce, with pasta & salad

Tuesday lunch – curried egg mayo with bread
Tuesday dinner – spicy pinto bean, pepper & chorizo stew

Wednesday lunch – some sort of veggie soup with bread & cheese
Wednesday dinner – pork chops with garlicky-tomato fried green beans

Thursday lunch – leftover veggie soup with bread & cheese
Thursday dinner – spicy smoked mackerel kedgeree

Friday lunch – samosas with salad/pickled veg
Friday dinner – burgers, with salad and bean salad

Have you planned your meals for this week? Are you having anything nice?

This week’s meal plan

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 May 2011 in weekly meal plans | 0 comments

A late start on this one since we were away – I did write a meal plan for our camping trip but since we cut it short and rain-stopped-bbq-play another evening, it seems a bit pointless to post it. It was very useful to have though to know what we should with us.

Tuesday lunch – bread & ham
Tuesday dinner – chicken risotto with salad

Wednesday lunch – pate on toast (for me); ham sandwich (John)
Wednesday dinner – pasta with tuna, sweetcorn, olives & chillis

Thursday lunch – curried egg mayo with bread/toast
Thursday dinner – (John out) leftover risotto (hopefully!) or jacket potato, with salad

Friday lunch – samosas with salad
Friday dinner – warm chorizo & poached egg salad, with new potatoes

Ramsoms & Ricotta Ravioli Recipe (aka cheesy, spicy wild garlic ravioli)

Posted by louisa on Monday 16 May 2011 in cooking, Featured, recipes, wild food | 4 comments

Usually when I post recipes, they’re either long-time firm favourites or new things that I’ve made a least a few times to try different flavour tweaks. However these suckers took a good while to make and I can’t see myself finding the time to make them again before the wild garlic (Ramsoms) season is well and truly over, so I’m going to publish the recipe now after making them start-to-finish just once. They were yummy as they were :)

There is so much wild garlic in the woods behind our house that it seems rude not to use it as often as possible throughout the spring. We add it raw into salad, have it in mash/potato cakes for a colcannon-ish dish, use it as a pizza topping but mostly, have it on pasta — usually wilted with a little lightly fried chorizo and some olives. Yummo.

It goes so well with pasta, as a tasty spinach substitute, that I wanted to try making pasta with it – and this is the result: wild garlic ravioli. WG loses a lot of its fieriness when you cook it and the flavour here is quite subtle – which is why I served it with a sprinkling wild garlic seed pods too. Plus, they also look ace :)

Our weekly meal plan – one meal that takes ages to make and lots of quick ones

Posted by louisa on Monday 16 May 2011 in weekly meal plans | 0 comments

Another coming and going week – or rather I’m out Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday evenings then we’re busy at the weekend too. Lots of quick meals…

Sunday brunch – sausages & homemade bread
Sunday dinner – the exciting (veggie) experimental ravioli I was too tired to cook on Friday night, with salad

Monday lunch – curried egg mayo sandwiches
Monday dinner – pasta with chorizo & olives, with salad for me; leftover ravioli with chorizo, for John

Tuesday lunch – some sort of tomato-ey veggie soup with bread (possibly tomato and lentil soup)
Tuesday dinner – dinner out with my friend Katherine?

Wednesday lunch – more soup with bread and cheese
Wednesday dinner – jacket potatoes (with tuna & salad or cheese & beans)

Thursday lunch – bread’n’cheese’n’stuff
Thursday dinner – smoked mackerel kedgeree

Friday brunch – scrambled eggs & toast
Friday dinner – burgers

Real Bread week: our favourite bread recipes

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 10 May 2011 in cooking, eating, Featured | 15 comments

Apparently it’s Real Bread Maker week this week. I’m not sure why it’s not just Real Bread week, why it has to be all about breadmakers but either way, mmm bread.

When I left my last-but-one job I was given a juicer as a leaving present. As I hate juice, I swapped it for a bread maker. We probably made bread in it about a dozen times — admittedly a dozen more times than we would have used the juicer — but not enough to warrant it taking up a whole lot of space in our then-tiny kitchen. We just weren’t impressed with the bread from it – we tried a number of different recipes but none were impressive enough to be worth the effort. A few years ago, we gave the gadget to John’s sister and worked out how to make much better bread without it.

Aside from meal-centric breads like chapattis, naans and pizza dough, we tend to make three types of bread: yeast-based slow rise no knead bread, sourdough and soda bread.

Sourdough

The sourdough is by far the most labour intensive because in addition to the regular bread making stuff, we have to keep our starter alive all the time even though we don’t bake it that often. When we do make it, we use the Handmade Bakery’s “Yorkshire Leaven” and their pain de campagne recipes – the former uses a sourdough “production starter” which is left overnight before the bulk of the flour added, whereas the latter is fully mixed & kneaded then left overnight. The two different options mean we can pick the recipe which suits our schedule better – whether we have more time right then or will have more time the following day. Both result in a really tasty, substantial loaf – not like fluffy barely-there white bread from the supermarket but a real part of a meal.

Slow rise no knead bread

In comparison to the sourdough, slow rise no knead bread is less flavourful – that’s not to say it’s not tasty in its own right, just it’s not so zingy. The texture is similar though – substantial with large air bubbles; you know you’re eating it, that’s for sure. It needs leaving overnight like the sourdough too but the actual involved-making time is minimal – time does the hard work so you don’t have to ;) It takes less than five minutes to mix the dough then it’s left for 12 hours or so, shaped (which takes no more than a minute), left to prove for a couple of hours then baked. And it uses only store cupboard ingredients – no pesky, needy starters. I’m willing to trade the sourdough zing for the easiness of this recipe most of the time. [Our slow rise no knead bread recipe]

Super quick soda bread

Both the sourdough and slow rise breads are great but do require a lengthy wait and need to be somewhere warm for the duration (which isn’t always possible in our house). Soda bread is our favourite “need bread now” bread as it’s ready within the hour. It doesn’t need any kneading or a warm rising/resting environment either – just mix the ingredients together and bung it in the oven. I wouldn’t go as far to say it’s an acquired taste but it certainly does have an unusual flavour – not really a bread for sandwiches but great for with a hearty winter soup or with jam for a sweet treat. [Our soda bread recipe]

So those are our three favourite real breads – what are yours? Do you bake bread regularly? Do you use a bread maker?