Ringing the dinner bell

Mmm, dinner. I love dinner. I especially like new dinners - a change from eating the same handful of familiar meals. I particularly especially like new dinners that my kids eat without complaining.
(OK, that didn't quite happen. But nearly)

I got the very marvellous Ms Jack Monroe's cook book for my birthday a few weeks ago. There are some things she and I will not ever agree on - tinned fruit in dinner! No! - but she cooks many simple things: tasty, affordable things that I could knock up in not much time. Reading her book reminded me that I can like making food for my family after all.

I dread cooking meals for my kids. My eldest was an extremely picky eater from infancy. Which particular meal he would approve for a year at time would change - homemade cauliflower cheese with diced boiled egg, spaghetti, fish fingers and potato smiles, veggie burgers and margarita pizza have all taken their turn as Sole Acceptable Meal over the years - but the pattern was exhausting. No fruit, no veg, no rice, nor meat, nor pulses nor even chips. I went wrong somewhere and never quite got back on track. (Yes, you can judge me. Go ahead. It won't be anything worse than I've thought myself. Even CAMHS said we'd tried everything they would suggest and let's just hope he grows out of it.)

My youngest is playing monkey see, monkey do with the eldest and my middle child - formerly an enthusiastic eater of anything - has decided to object to some of the few foods the other two will actually eat. There are nearly no meals they all like. Home made macaroni cheese is the only reliable one.

And that's why I hate cooking for them. At best, at least one of them will push the food around glumly and not eat. At worst two of them will moan and strop, making enjoying a meal together hard going. To save my sanity by reducing the emotional investment I have in the success of a dinner, I never spend more than 25 minutes of prep on a meal for them. Otherwise I am a ball of seething resentment when no one eats it, which is fair to no one. They didn't ask me to spend 90 minutes on a fancy dinner they won't eat.

So, knowing I was really experimenting for my own enjoyment, I had a browse through Jack Monroe's book. I made the red kidney bean burgers for Mark and I for lunch one day - delicious! Then I looked at the carrot and coriander felafel recipe and had an idea.

Mark, Z and I love felafel. Miss B loves hummus. She and Z also love assembling their food. Luke likes wraps, although only if they contain melted cheese. A "build your own wrap" meal could work.

I shredded some lettuce, sliced cucumbers and cherry tomatoes, peeled ribbons of carrots. I knocked up a quick bowl of hummus, made the felafel's according to Jack's recipe and set everything on the table.  But what to offer Luke? I had a ball of cheap mozzarella in the fridge, so I tore that into fat chunks, dipped them in flour, beaten egg and flour again (because I meant to use matzo meal and realised we hadn't got any - oops) and dropped them in the pan of oil with the felafel. There was a plate of warm pitta and wraps in the centre of the table and a small plate for each person to assemble their own dinner.

It was a big success. Announcing she didn't like vegetables, Miss B promptly ate most of the cucumber and a fair few carrot ribbons before stuffing herself with a mound of hummus. Luke liked the daft mozzarella melts in his wrap - ok, not a healthy food, but at least we were all eating together  - and Zach made a gargantuan wrap filled with loads of everything. For him, the felafel were the stars of the meal. He had an extra portion later that evening when he came home from Scouts. Mark and I loved it too.

So a big Thank You to Jack Monroe for inspiring me to try something new for the kids, and a huge thumbs up for her book. Get a copy if you can.

Oh, and if you buy hummus rather than make it, I recommend having a go at home made. Much cheaper and easy to adapt to your taste.

Hummus:
1 tin chickpeas
1 clove garlic
1 tablespoon (ish) of tahini. Peanut butter will do at a pinch
lemon juice
olive oil
salt and pepper

Drain the chickpea water into a cup. Tip the chickpeas, garlic and tahini in a blender. Add enough lemon juice, chickpea water and olive oil to the blender to allow it to be just wet enough to whizz the chickpeas up. My guess is 2 parts chick pea water, 2 parts oil oil to 1 part lemon juice. Add the liquid sparingly and taste as you go so you can tell if it is too thick, too tangy (add more olive oil) or too bland (add lemon juice). Put in a generous pinch of salt and a grind of pepper to taste.

That's it.

Seriously, that's hummus. Tip a few things in a blender, whizz them up, taste it, whizz again until smooth and Bob's your oyster. See why I never bother buying it?

PS - You can add all sorts of things - fresh coriander, ground cumin, roasted peppers - but I still like it best as it is.

Turning Japanese

I'm still in the lucky position of having great piles of veg ready for eating. The summer sprouting broccoli is up, green and yellow courgettes are everywhere, the red onions and the carrots are all reaching decent sizes

A few of the courgettes had graduated to significantly less appealing marrows. It seems size isn't everything. However, the hens regard marrows as a high treat, so they made short work of the whoppers. The smaller and more tender fruits are much more my thing.

Mark and I had totally failed to do the supermarket shopping this week. We've been popping to the smaller shop at the end of the road for milk and bread and I've been using up the contents of the cupboard and freezer to cobble together meals. The garden has been a great help with this. However, I was getting a bit bored and wanted something new to eat.

I'd read about making vegetable tempura a lot but I've never tried it.  For a start I know nothing about Japanese food aside from having noodles at Wagamama. And for another thing, it looks a bit scary. It's the deep frying. I don't deep fry anything. At all. I like fish and chips from the chippy but that's the full extent of my deep fried dabbling. Partly, all that oil seems pretty wasteful, partly I'm scared it will spatter terribly and burn me, and partly the episode in the first series of Spooks that Mark told me about - I hadn't even watched it - horrified me and I think of it every time I hear the sizzle of fat.

However, that is wussy and daft. It's not wasteful if the veg going in it is free, as long as I am careful and also don't get water near the oil there's no reason it would spit and burn me, and ... well, I couldn't think of anything to banish the Spooks thing but I pushed on regardless.

I picked carrots, broccoli, courgettes and grabbed an onion that had been drying. I washed them all thoroughly to get rid of any insects; I know eating bugs is bandied about in the Guardian as a good form of protein in an overpopulated world but I'm not going for it just now, ta.
I sliced the small courgettes and carrot into narrow lengths, the larger courgette and the onion into disks and left the broccoli florets as they were.

Excuse the rubbish photography - frying dinner and taking quick photos with my phone at the same time mean one or the other will be badly executed. I chose good frying and poor pics as the wise balance.

Anyway, I read a number of tempura recipes that are scattered across my cook books. They all called for sparkling water or, in one case, beer. I don't know about you, my lovely webby mates, but if I am cobbling together a dinner because i haven't done the shopping, sparkling water is not something I will have to hand.  In fact, other than when making a drink with my elderflower cordial that calls for some soda water, my 'water' options are only ever of the tap or tonic varieties, and the latter is only since I discovered how nice a gin and tonic is.

So clearly sparkling water was out of the question.  Then again, tempura is a traditional Japanese dish and I doubt they had sparkling water back in the 1500s. The thing seems to be to keep the batter as light as possible, and both fizzy water and cold water are supposed to help this. But other things help a batter remain light, and they didn't involve a trip to the shops. I went for a 50/50 split of corn flour (cornstarch) and plain flour to achieve that. (I am the sort of person who has corn flour in her cupboards) I added an egg yolk, which 3 of my 4 recipes advised, and ice cold water.  In retrospect popping a couple of ice cubes in the batter would have helped keep it cold for longer as I fried the veg in shifts.  Oh, and I seasoned the batter with salt.
I mixed enough to get it to come together and added enough cold water that the batter would coat my finger when I dipped it in, but only thinly. I dipped and fried the veg a few at a time, for about a minute.
 When I lifted the cooked vegetables out of the cooking oil I placed them on a tray lined with paper towels to absorb any excess oil.  I actually popped the first few in a lined bowl but that made them go a bit soggy as the heat from each piece sort of steamed the batter of its neighbours. 

I had intended to make a dipping sauce based on soy sauce. Unfortunately, as I rooted about for the sauce I noticed its expiry date was 3 years ago. In the end I just sprinkled a little salt over the top and we tucked straight in. They were just LOVELY. My 11yo, who is usually game for anything, looked at them in disgust. But once he tried a piece it was hard to stop him from scoffing the lot. 

Next time I will make a sauce first - something with a vinegar and chilli kick, I think.  I'd keep the batter cold by either adding ice cubes or having it in my metal mixing bowl sitting inside a bigger bowl lined with ice. I would make the batter slightly thicker, but only slightly. I sloshed a tad more water in than I meant to when I was thinning it down the first time. And I would definitely try it with some prawns or strips of fish as well as the lovely veg if I had any in the kitchen.

Here's my current version of a tempura recipe:

125g corn flour

125g plain flour

pinch of salt

1 large egg yolk 

Very cold water (sparkling if you are feeling all fancy)

Sift the corn flour and plain flour together. add the salt and egg yolk. Stir in just enough water to make a thin batter - I found somewhere around the 1/2 cup/ 125ml level was pretty close. It doesn't matter if the batter is a little lumpy. It makes nice crispy bits on the food that way.

Dip small pieces of vegetables in the batter. Deep fry in hot vegetable oil for a minute or so. Eat while they are still hot.

Do you know what? Even the Spooks thing won't stop me from making this again
J xx