Cooking Up A Storm

As the weather makes spending time in the garden a lot less fun, I turn to my other happy place, the kitchen. 

There's something about Autumn that has me stocking my shelves and filling my freezer  - maybe it's the animal urge to stockpile against the dark and hungry winter. I'm basically a squirrel with a vast store of nuts. Or perhaps a very fat bear planning to hibernate, but a bear with access to a freezer.

Yesterday was one of those intensive cooking days. Unfortunately, I stood for longer than my knees can tolerate so today I'm stuck on the sofa writing about food rather than making it. Still, Mark's here so I've a reasonable chance of a cuppa being brought to me, and I still have some of the Lindor chocolates I bought myself as a reward for going to my various medical screening appointments three weeks ago.

I made some fishcakes first of all - I poached salmon fillets, microwaved two baked potatoes and scooped the flesh out, finely chopped some fresh dill and a spoonful of capers, mixed it all with an egg yolk and shaped it all into patties. The whisked egg white is also in the fridge, to dip the patties in before coating them in panko breadcrumbs and frying them for dinner tonight. Depending how cold I'm feeling they will either go with a nice crispy salad or I'll do french beans from the freezer (thank you, veg garden!) with some of the spiced tomato sauce Mark made yesterday for patatas bravas.

Next up was roasting things for the next three meals - on one tray, slices of aubergine for melanzane parmigiana, and on the other slices and chunks of a butternut squash. If I have to have the oven on for around 40 minutes, I want to make sure I'm using it fully. Electricity is too expensive to waste on a partially empty oven.

For the melanzane parmigiana, I do a modified version of this recipe.  Having some black beans added to the standard parmigiana means it's more filling and more nutritious. My Very Excellent Mate Alison will roll her eyes, because of course I use Bold Beans, and yes, they are ubiquitous. I don't care, I still think they are the best food product to hit the shelves in forever, and I'm delighted to see they are so successful. "I knew them before they were famous" and all that. (That's entirely down to my Very Excellent Mate Kirsty, who shared her freebies from a Bold Bean insider and made me a bean evangelist before shops were stocking them.)

The butternut chunks went into a new-to-me vegetarian lasagne recipe. There was half a jar of butter beans in the fridge, so that went into the butternut and sage layers. I took mascarpone out of the bechamel layer and instead added ricotta to the spinach layer. So it's squash and beans, spinach and ricotta, pasta, bechamel with parmesan (or pecorino, I forget which I had in the fridge). 

The slices of butternut squash will go into this lovely squash, leek and bean gratin from the Riverford Organics website. I made it a couple of weeks ago and it was a big hit with Mark, Zach and I. And yes, I know, there's more Bold Beans in it. 

Another recipe I really rate is Matar Paneer by Manali. I've used a number of her recipes over the last 6 or 7 years and they are excellent. It is honestly the nicest Matar Paneer I've had other than from a restaurant, and better than quite a few of those! I prefer my paneer fried, and I use tinned tomatoes rather than fresh because the fresh tomatoes are tasteless except in summer. I tend to make a double batch because it freezes just fine. I freeze curry in individual portions so I can have a veggie curry while Mark and/or Zach has a chicken one and we can have the same side dishes.

Speaking of side dishes, I went overboard and spent nearly 6 hours making the House Daal from the Dishoom cookbook earlier this month. That's an awful lot of simmering and stirring. A damned fine daal, though. We are lucky enough to live in a very multicultural city, so getting urad daal (black lentils) isn't the challenge it can be in some areas.

And black lentils reminds me of another (mostly) successful recipe I tried this year  - Black Chickpeas with Baharat from Ottolenghi's website.  It's very similar in structure to his Confit Tandoori Chickpeas, which has been an absolute favourite of mine for ages, but with a more Middle Eastern/North African style of flavours. Basically, bung the chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, a gargantuan amount of olive oil and the appropriate spices into a lidded casserole and stick it in the oven for 75 minutes on low. I've done it as a solo meal for me (with chicken alongside for Mark) and as part of a mezze celebration when my much missed Very Excellent Mate Emma came back to Leeds from Edinburgh briefly, alongside other middle eastern dishes, and it worked very well both ways.

 I said a partial success, because I've served to to Penny, Emma, Rajni, Gillian and Zach who all thought it was delicious - and several of them made it themselves. But Mark didn't like it because of the amount of cloves in the the seven-spice mix that makes up baharat.  Also, I grated the orange zest rather than adding strips of it, because a number of comments mentioned the strip of peel being rather bitter. And yes, it's a Bold Bean tie-in, and I'm starting to see Alison's point. (Still don't care, I love them). 

Incidentally,  the recipe works very well with regular chickpeas. The black ones have a nice nutty taste but  regular ones are also just fine. I vacillate between using jarred chickpeas (easy but expensive), cooking dried ones in the pressure cooker (very cheap and good but time consuming) and just bunging a tin in (mostly cheap but not as good.) If I can be faffed doing it, simmering a tin of chickpeas  - or any other bean - on the hob with a pinch of bicarb for 10 minutes really improves them. But some days, who cares? It's all good anyway.

Oh dear. While I've been typing Mark's fallen asleep in the chair, so I'm on my own to get a hot drink after all. Drat.

Souper Trooper

We're well into the 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' (thank you, A-Level English Lit curriculum for lodging Keats in my brain forever) and I can no longer pretend it's still summer. On the whole I am not a fan of  autumn and winter because the garden is dormant, it gets dark too soon and it's soggy much of the time.

 However, there are some positives about the cold and dark even a solar-powered soul like myself can appreciate. One is that it's time to get the beautiful Welsh woollen blanket on the bed once again. The other is that it's soup season. 

It's a very good blanket 

I love soup. I really, really love it. Not just 'quite like' but actually think about and look forward to it. It's a wonderful, comforting thing. It can be healthy or indulgent, quick or take ages, smooth to soothe a sore throat or hearty and veering towards stew. I don't care, I love all of them.

One of my favourites has been sustaining me since I was breastfeeding my second baby (who is now 24) and never had time to get a proper meal. I actually fed him with a tea towel over his head while I ate this soup because there was nothing more likely to wake him for a feed than the presence of a warm dinner for me. The soup is nourishing because of the lovely Puy lentils, and helps cut through a bunged up nose or general winter blues with the kick of sour lemon juice and heat of chilli flakes. 

Hot and Sour Soup with Lentils 

1 diced onion
1tbs olive oil
200g mushrooms
300g Puy lentils
1.5l vegetable stock
3 crushed garlic cloves
lemon juice
chilli flakes

I fry the onions in the oil until they're lightly golden, then add the mushrooms and cook for another 5-7 minutes. I add the garlic for the last minute then pour the lentils and stock in, cover and simmer for about 30-40 minutes until the lentils are fully cooked but still hold their shape. Then it's adding enough lemon juice and chilli to fit your palate - in my case about 4 tablespoons of lemon juice and a heaped teaspoon of flakes, but I like things on the punchy side.

Other days it's nice to have something creamy and comforting. Leek and Potato is obviously a winner. Cream Of Tomato soup reminds me of snowy lunchtimes in Canada when I was a kid, dunking my grilled cheese into the soup bowl at the kitchen table in our house on Ann Street.  However, most often I make soup with a single type of vegetable, roasted until sweet.

A change to these old favourites I've adopted recently is to add white beans to all my smooth soups. When they are pureed it just adds a bit of velvety smooth texture while boosting the protein, iron, minerals and fibre of the soup. Beans are ridiculously good for you and cheap, so it seems a no-brainer.

Roast 'Something' Soup

An oven tray of roughly chopped vegetable (eg butternut squash, carrots, parsnips or cauliflower)
2 tbs olive oil
vegetable stock
1 tin or jar of chickpeas or butter beans or cannellini beans
spices and salt and pepper
cream (optional)

I toss the squash slices (or carrots etc) in the oil and tip them into an oven tray which goes into a medium hot oven until the vegetable is tender. How long depends on big or small you've cut your veg, but typically it's in there for 30-50 minutes. Then I tip it in the blender with the beans and add stock slowly until it's a soup and not a puree. With squash and pumpkin soup I like to add cumin; carrot likes coriander; parsnips benefit from a dash of horseradish.  This is the time to check the seasoning and add a dash of lemon juice to brighten the flavour of the soup. Then it gets portioned up with anything not getting immediately eaten being labelled (obviously) and put in the freezer.

I took a tub of this type of soups - butternut squash with chickpeas - to have lunch with a friend the other day, and we were agreeing how brilliant this sort of food is when you just don't have the energy to stand in the kitchen. Sometimes, whether through illness, the general peri menopausal hellscape or just a case of I cannot be arsed, a container of soup in the fridge is like a hug from your past self to your current knackered self. "There, there. Don't worry, I've got you covered."

Broccoli soup is a special one - it needs almost nothing doing to it at all. Gordon Ramsay demonstrated it on telly once and it was a revelation! Literally a 5 minute soup. Just steamed broccoli put in a blender with stock and seasoning. It's a vibrant green, and is absolutely delicious with a slice of goats cheese sitting on top, gently melting. If you've ever got a slightly sad looking broccoli in the veg drawer, I can highly recommend using it up this way. 

I've written in the past about the absolute queen of soup, Pasta E Fagioli  which is especially pleasing made with home grown borlotti beans. In fact, some of last year's borlottis are in this week's sausage casserole, reminding me that the veg patch is a gift that keeps giving even when the garden is asleep.

My favourite ready made soup is the Smoked Haddock and Salmon Chowder made by Cully and Sully. It usually costs between £2.20-£3 and is a hearty meal all of its own. It's not quite up there with the marvellous Fiskesuppe we had in Norway, but it's the best soup I've had from a supermarket. 

To be honest, for me there are very few vegetable soups worth buying in the supermarket since manufacturers started adding coconut solids to soups (rather than butter) to make them vegan. It's not nearly as nice. I stick to fish soups now  if I'm buying ready made. My freezer is packed with reused Cully and Sully tubs; I buy it most weeks through winter.

The best restaurant for marvellous soup, in my opinion, is The Jolly Fisherman in Craster. They have a magnificent Crab Soup that they serve with a generous helping of homemade bread, and the House Chowder is also superb. 

I am alone in my Soup Devotion in this house. Mark enjoys the odd bowl, but he'd usually opt for a sandwich instead. (Mark and I have VERY different ideas about what qualifies as acceptable bread. I am very much Not A Fan of the damned Chorleywood process that ruined bread quality in the UK, whereas he doesn't mind) Zach never quite forgave soup for being the only thing he could eat for weeks when he first got braces, and Miss B thinks soup is boring. 

One thing we can all agree on is that Andy Warhol preserved for posterity the most truly repellent flavour of Campbell's Soups in his second Soup Cans collection of  paintings. It's currently on display at the rather wonderful Cartwright Hall in Shipley, on the edge of Bradford. What on earth were Campbell thinking?

Hot Dog Bean Soup? No ta.