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.

Asparagus with fettuccine and smoked bacon

Holy Shit this was delicious. I was stuck for something to make for dinner. I've been totally out of inspiration recently. I've gone through the BBC Food recipes too many times and can't find anything good there. If you just google for 'recipes' you get a load of crap that involves opening a can of mushroom soup and a can of green beans and bleugh.

One way that I try to get some inspiration is to look for foods that are in season and then look for a new recipe to make with those. As it's spring, asparagus is in season, and asparagus is delicious. I've only ever steamed it and served on the side of something else. I decided that there must be something else to do with asparagus. Asparagus may be one of those foods that is both healthy and delicious, I just didn't know how to make it into a meal, rather than serving it beside chicken.

Being a boring and predictable human I looked on the usual websites: smitten kitchen and BBC food. There wasn't much to do with asparagus apart from to serve it wrapped in ham. I unchecked the "healthy" option to see what else goes with it, to see if I could find some good Google search terms to use helped me wade through the all the "semi-homemade" bullshit. That's when I came across this recipe and I couldn't help myself. "Balls to healthy", thought I. I made it anyway.

IT WAS SO FREAKING DELICIOUS! but that's because it contained a whole block of Parmesan, a whole packet of bacon and all the fat that came with the bacon. This was a meal that was built around a good idea, but became a bad idea pretty fast. Oh and it's supposed to serve six people, but it served four of us and we licked the plates clean. Usually, there is guilt and remorse surrounding such a decadent meal, but not this time.

The picture is blurry because I was so excited to eat it that I couldn't wait. I also forgot to add the parlsey in my haste. No regrets.

FREAKING. DELICIOUS.

Roasted cauliflower and Sausage and Spinach Balsamic Farfalle

I made roasted cauliflower with caramelized onion and parmesan.  I put a chopped onion and a cauliflower in a baking tray with olive oil, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper and baked for 35minutes. When it was cooked, I sprinkled with Parmesan.

I boiled water for pasta.  When the pasta went on, I cut up two chicken sausages and put them in a hot skillet. When they were cooked,  I added two cloves of garlic and a whole punnet of mushrooms (sliced). In about 5 mins, I added a packet of baby spinach and a punnet of salad tomatoes (halved). I seasoned the pan with salt and pepper.  I let them cook until the spinach was wilted. Then I poured over balsamic vinegar. When the pasta was cooked, I added this to the pan for a minute or two. I served with fresh cold mozzarella.

Husband loved the balsamic idea. Would totes make again.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Beetroot

My husband wanted to have a pizza in front of the TV tonight, so I made two things that he doesn't like. Brussels Sprouts and Beets.

I've never roasted either of these things. I found this recipe for roasted beets that also used the beet greens. it it suggested roasting the beets in olive oil for 45 - 60 minutes. The beet greens are not roasted but are sauteed with onion, olive oil and garlic. There were not many beet greens on my beets, so the beet greens part wasn't much to talk about, but the beets themselves were good. Once the beets were cooked enough that I could comfortably put a knife through them, they were peeled, sliced, and seasoned and drizzled with red wine vinegar. They weren't amazingly delicious, but they were pretty good.

I bought a bag of Brussels sprouts on impulse. It said on the back of the bag to roast them for 40 mins, so I put them in the baking tray with the beets. When they were good and crispy on the outer leaves, I took them out of the oven. I added bits of bacon and Parmesan. These were really good. I would certainly make these again. I got my husband to try one and he said "It's not the worst thing in the world", which isn't a glowing endorsement, but I'll take it.

Baked Pasta with Kale and Butternut Squash

I wrote a really long post but my phone battery died. The re-do is going to be short and to the point.

I made this meal. People liked it.  I used sour cream and a scoop of Philadelphia cream cheese in place of the creme fraiche. I used Parmesan instead of Gruyere. The website "cooking light' might be a misnomer because I don't reckon this was a light meal, it included, bacon, cheese, fried onions, flour and a lot of pasta. It was, however, pretty darned tasty. (Edit: Cooking light thinks that this meal serves 8. In our house it served four! oops!).

When I'm busy, I like baked pasta dishes because I can stick them in the oven while I have spare time between getting home from work and going to get my son from whichever club/activity he's doing that day. Then, when the boy comes home, all the hard work is done and we have a hearty, home-cooked meal waiting for us.

Here are the pictures.

Chicken Fried Rice and Sweet Chili Vegetables

I made this meal because I wanted to use up some left over white rice from the chili I made on the weekend. I know that white rice is not especially healthy at the best of times, and is made even less healthy when fried, but I really don't like throwing away good food. I found an excellent recipe for fried rice, I followed it pretty exactly, but used more vegetables. I included one onion, two carrots, two cups of peas, five spring onions, and half a bag of beansprouts, and chicken for protein.

I served the rice with some stir fried vegetables that I made in a sweet chili sauce. I decided to make this sauce on the fly. In the supermarket I saw some sweet chili sauce and read the ingredients on the side. They were all things that I have in my house already: red chilis, rice vinegar, sugar, water, garlic, ginger, cornflour. I decided to skip the store-made sauce and make my own. When I got home, I googled this recipe and was pretty amazed and the quantity of sugar that this meal requested. A whole cup of sugar! I couldn't possibly serve that much sugar on the vegetables that I was serving with fried rice!  I cut the sugar by about half, and the meal tasted fine! Jesus wept people, chill out on the sugar! I poured he sauce over 3 sliced courgettes (two green, one yellow), one red pepper, a punnet of mushrooms, 5 spring onions, sugar snap peas and the left over beansprouts. It might have contained our five a day, but it also contained an absurd amount of sugar.