Penne with Chilli, Aubergine and Feta

This is an adaptation of a recipe by Nigella Lawson.

I cannot predict which meals my family will love. I only made this so I could use up leftover things in the house. I had half a block of Feta cheese and some courgettes laying around so put this meal together. Apparently, my family loved this meal, so I suppose I should add it to my recipe blog.

• I sliced two green courgettes and diced an aubergine, drizzled them with olive oil and seasoned with salt and black pepper. I roasted them for around 15 mins until they started to go golden brown.
• I boiled water for penne in a big pan. 
• In my lovely red ceramic casserole dish / cooking pot, I fried some sliced chicken in olive oil with hot chilli powder. Then I set these aside. 
• In the same red pot, I put another glug of olive oil and fried an onion, with another sprinkle of chilli powder, until the onions got soft. Then I added a teaspoon of sugar, two cloves of garlic and I cooked these with the onion for a minute or two. I poured over enough red wine vinegar to moisten the mixture. The pan was hot so the vinegar boiled quickly. Then I added a tin of chopped tomatoes and water to the same volume as the can of tomatoes. I put the lid on, and let it all simmer together for about 15 minutes.
• When the pasta was ready I drained it but kept a little water aside. 
• I then added the roasted vegetables and the chicken to the pot with the pasta sauce and I crumbled in about 150g of feta cheese. I put the lid back on the pan for 2-4 minutes. 
• Then I added the pasta and the little pasta water that I had preserved to the sauce. 
• I served it in warm bowls with fresh basil leaves, black pepper and grated parmesan. 

My son ate two bowls of the pasta and mopped up the sauce with bread and butter. It's kind of amazing how much a teenage boy can eat and not gain weight! My husband and son really enjoyed it.

Chorizo Pork Belly and Chickpea Casserole, with roasted Jerusalem Artichokes

I haven't written in this blog for a long time, but I had to blog this one because husband and son thought it was so great. 

I had a new red casserole pot and everything that goes into seems to come out so delicious. This one was Chorizo, Belly Pork and Chickpea Casserole . I mostly followed the recipe with a few exceptions. I didn't have enough pork belly so I made it up with lardons and with a little extra choriza. I also added some fresh cherry tomatoes (seasoned with salt) and some sun dried tomatoes because I had some in. I didn't have golden caster sugar so just used normal caster sugar. I didn't have sherry vinegar, so I used red wine vinegar as suggested by the recipe. The result was very delicious. 

I served it with some roasted Jerusalem artichokes and Brussels sprouts. I made these by putting a good splash of olive oil, about 6 crushed garlic cloves, and thyme in a bowl. I tossed the Jerusalem artichokes and sprouts in the bowl and then roasted them at the same time as the casserole (though only for about 50mins). 

I didn't take a picture, but it was pretty darned good. 

Penne and Sausage Pasta Bake

Nights are drawing in so it's the time of year when hearty evening meals are especially satisfying. I made a sausage and Penne pasta bake from  this recipe, I'd never made a white sauce before but found it very easy to do and tasty. The white sauce really made it stand out from the other pasta bakes that I make, but obviously, it means a lot of calories. The sausage meat wasn't my favourite. I used "mild Italian brats" but I think it might work better with British sausages. It's certainly a good hearty dinner that's reasonably cheap. It also made plenty of leftovers for the next day.

Parsley Sauce

I have tried to make parsley sauce several times and have always cocked it up. I make it too bland and milky. With my beloved Nan passing away this week, I decided to try again.  Nanny always used to make ham and parsley sauce and it reminds me of her. This time, it actually worked it was very creamy and buttery and delicious. Rather than being pleased with my success, it made me sad. I don't suppose I would have been less sad if I would have cocked it up and imagined by nanny's disappointment, but nonetheless it made I had to choke back a few tears at the dinner table, trying not to make it awkward for everyone else. 

I used this recipe,  which has three parts.  You need to make a roux out of butter and flour, make some sort of stock from milk, onion slices, carrot slices and parsley stalks. Then combine the two with the parsley and season.  I messed up and used too much of the roux, it was so thick that I needed to add a lot more milk to make it normal again. It was lovely but so buttery! I honestly (not joking) had palpitations after dinner.  I served it with shredded cabbage with (butter and) mushrooms, carrot (not pictured because I forgot about them) and mashed potatoes.

My son loved it, as did I. I think my housemate was being polite, but he said it was good. My husband opted to eat a sandwich instead. He doesn't like parsley sauce. 

Shrimp Risotto with Parsley and Asparagus

This was a bit chaotic. Usuallly, on Fridays my husband and I forfeit dinner for booze. We just get olives and cheese and nibbles and a good amount of alcohol and hang out and drink. Today, however, I neglected to eat lunch, and as I was getting ready to head out from work, I got really hungry. I decided I needed a shrimp risotto, which is a weird thing to need, but there we have it. I found this recipe, and printed it and drove home as fast as I could (safely). Really excited about dinner and booze.

I ran to the supermarket on the way home. They have good fresh shrimp, a fabulous grocery section and I had seen arborio rice there recently. However, today they were out of arugula, lemons and fennel. Flipping irritating. I buy the other things I need and dash to another supermarket a few miles away. They are also out of fennel and arugula only comes in a packet with spinach. Fuck it. I got the lemons, I skipped the fennel, and I used a large bunch of curly parsley and some asparagus in place of the arugula. I was winging it.

When I get home, super keen to get on with dinner, I ask my son to help with the shrimp. I am not patient enough to do the shrimp first, and then start the onions and rice, so he peels the shrimp, while I start the ball rolling on the risotto. About five shrimp in, he has a funny turn and needs to lie down. I cannot stir risotto and peal shrimp and chop onions and garlic all at the same time. chaos ensued. Dinner went a bit like this.

First I made three cups of chicken stock. Second, I sauteed an onion in some olive oil and then added the garlic and the rice. I used a lot more rice than I was supposed to, probably about two cups, maybe more, so I added a whole glass of white wine, and upped the amount of stock. Once the wine was absorbed I added the stock little-by-little as it got absorbed in the rice (I kept adding stock until the very end when the rice was cooked). Then I chopped the parsley very finely and stirred it into the rice. It added a good green tint. Then, I added the juice of two pretty small lemons and the zest from both lemons. As the liquid was slowly sinking into the rice, I fried the shrimp in olive oil in a separate pan and then put them to one side. Then I put a little water in the shrimp pan, and about two teaspoons of butter and I cooked a bunch of asparagus (chopped into 2cm pieces). When this was cooked, I added it (and the buttery water) to the rice. Then I stirred in the shrimp, seasoned and ate.

It was good. Very flavorsome and the lemon gave it a good fresh summery taste. Would eat again.

Spinach, Eggplant and Chickpea Curry

I have an arch nemesis called "The Really Big Bag Of Spinach ".  The Really Big Bag Of Spinach, or TRBBOS is too large. It contains more spinach than my family of four can eat before it goes putrid. It is, however, obnoxiously inexpensive. It costs one dollar less, than a normal quantity of spinach, that would just barely go around four people. I'm not an idiot. I'm not going to spend more money, to get less spinach. But I have a grandmother who taught me that wasting food was a terrible thing. The woman was brought up in the shadow of the second world war. She had a solid "waste not want not" attitude.  She taught me that letting food go to waste was a shitty thing to do. As such, if I have to throw away a potato that has rolled to the back of the cupboard and gone-off, I feel bad. As i throw it into the bin, I get a pang of guilt, that is probably not as large as the feeling that Schindler got at the end of the war. I could have done more. I should have cooked and eaten this potato. I get flashbacks to that scene in the Pianist where he only has one bad gone-off potato to eat, and here I am, throwing out potatoes! ARGH! So every time I want to make spinach, I buy TRBBOS and a timer starts in my mind, I've got about three days to eat this absurd quantity of spinach before it goes bad. I've never succeeded, although I have sometimes come close.

Yesterday, I got TRBBOS for a salad. I put as much spinach as possible into the salad, to the detriment of the salad. This barely put a dent in TRBBOS. Today, I decided to find the meal that used the most spinach possible and make that for dinner. I found this recipe for 'spinach, aubergine and chickpea curry' which called for 1KG of spinach. The end of this story, is that I am more than half-way through the bag, with one day to go before it goes weird. I'm pretty sure that if I make a few VERY SPINACHY omelettes for breakfast tomorrow, I'm home free, but we'll see.

I pretty much just copied the recipe exactly, but I went a little too easy on the cumin and coriander, so need to up the quantities on that the next time. I'm also not very good at chilies, I used serrano peppers, and my housemate thought that they were fine, but perhaps I should use more next time, because it could have done with a little more bite. Overall, though, I really liked this dish and it was healthy as well as interesting. I need to make it again, this time with more spices.

Lemon Chicken

This one barely deserves a blog, and I was so hungry I only took a very blurry picture, but here goes anyway.

I made lemon chicken. I read a bunch of  recipes but I mostly used this one. I browned skinless chicken breasts in a pan with salt and pepper, then removed them from the heat and put then in a baking dish. I made a lemon sauce by using the zest of two lemons and the juice of two lemons, a few splashes of cooking sherry, and added oregano and thyme and nine cloves of garlic, which I had put in the pan with the chicken. I then poured the sauce over the chicken and baked for 30minutes. I served it with  cous cous and baked vegetables.

The chicken was really nice and flavorful. I always like roasted broccolli and mushrooms but I don't always know what protein to serve it with. This is a cheap and convenient thing to do with a chicken breast to have it interesting a juicy, without adding butter.

Apologies for the worst food photography of all time.