Sweet Potato Cottage Pie

Alright. Every time I say "it wasn't my fault" or a recipe contains, red meat, butter or cheese, you, the imaginary reader should have a drink. Drink a long with Rachael.

I had intended to make a vegetarian shepherd's pie with green lentils and sweet potato mash from using a combination of this recipe, and this one. I really liked the look of the first ones, but it uses canned lentils and canned tomatoes. The second recipe had everything fresh, but it didn't look quite as good, and I wasn't into the sweetcorn. I wrote out both ingredients lists and headed home from work a little early to the supermarket. I went to the particular supermarket which is good at pulses and grains and fresh produce and  got everything I needed really cheap, except the lentils, they had a whole aisle of lentils and mung beans and black beans and soy beans, but none of the green lentils that I needed. They also didn't have the vegetable stock. It was as if the universe had decided that lentils were a bad idea. It was not my fault (you should drink).

I wandered around a bit confused, I still have the crappy phone with no internet so I couldn't browse alternative recipes on the fly. I did notice, in my wanderings that they had low sodium beef stick for only $1, and there was a manager's special on minced (ground) beef. I got a whole ground cow for $2.50. It was as if the Universe was calling to me. It was saying "Rachael, you should cook with beef". The Universe is very persuasive. Lentils were out and beef was back on the menu (drink).

I came home and peeled and chopped my sweet potatoes and got them boiling. I browned some meat, and added 2 chopped onions and 2 large sliced carrots. I let this all fry together until the onions and carrots were starting to get soft. I then added a little bit of white flour and stirred it until it became pretty thick, and added the beef broth until sauce was a good consistency (really, it was still pretty runny, but I was scared to add more flour at this stage as in case in went lumpy). I then added four chopped plum tomatoes and some tomato puree. The recipe asked for thyme, but I didn't have any, so I used oregano. I also added a little Worcestershire sauce and lots black pepper. I let it all bubble together until it all looked like happiness, and then poured it into a casserole dish and added my sweet potatoes, which I mashed with butter (drink).  I covered the whole thing in grated Red Leicester cheese (drink).

It looked like this:

Sweet Potato Cottage Pie

I really liked it, but I'm going to admit, it was a little bland. I guess I should have used garlic, but we'd run out at home so I didn't have any. Also, I thought there were a lot of ingredients already so I should leave it out for once. I didn't add any salt, so that might have been the problem. I almost never add salt to my cooking, a throw back from when my boy was a baby and salt was out of the question. There other potential issue is that there was so much beef that these ingredients made enough for two whole pies. I've got the leftovers in the fridge for another day. This means that, when adding the oregano and the Worcestershire sauce, I possibly was not using enough for the amount of beef that I had. It was still really good, and I would definitely make it again, but it lacked a little something.

Thanksgiving leftovers: Ham & Potato Soup

After the thanksgiving feast of joy, we're still getting through the leftovers. It's just like Christmas, when you just pick at whatever's left out. Meals all just merge into one another. You're never really hungry, you never really have a meal, you just graze for at least 24hours after the main event.

As a result, our diet was really based around ham sandwiches with mayonnaise and chips.  I got the good mayonnaise, that's half olive oil, so I could kid myself that I was making healthy choices, but really this was a facade. We got through a loaf of bread in one afternoon. I appreciate that ham sandwiches do not constitute a balanced diet, but I was raised to not waste food, and Babe's mum is laying there in my kitchen. I needed a better plan.

I decided to boil the ham bone in our surplus chicken stock to make the most legit soup of my life. Boiling a bone, I felt like it was London during the blitz and I needed to 'make do and mend' (but I think that was about clothes, maybe 'dig for victory'. I don't remember the exact war time slogan that represents it, but I felt I bit like I was channeling my Nan).

Blitz spirit

Into this carcass broth, I added three diced potatoes, two chopped sticks of celery, all the leftover meat, a lot of cracked black pepper and a little bit of oregano. In a separate pan, I fried some onions in butter, I added flour, and then milk until the consistency was thick but creamy. If I learned anything from thanksgiving, it's that sour cream makes all food taste better, and I still had half a tub in the fridge, so I put two spoonfuls of it into the white sauce. This was then added to the broth and 'voila', delicious soup.

Ham & Potato Soup

This was a really nice way to use up the leftovers without so much bread and mayonnaise, and although the soup contained butter and potatoes, it didn't contain much of either and I've made gallons of soup! All in all, I'd say this was a reasonably healthy meal, perhaps not as good as a ham salad, but it's November, and soup is good!

Turkey Day!

Thanksgiving is a not a time for healthy meals. It's a time when all the rules go out the window and butter goes on everything. Our house was no different. We had an amazing thanksgiving feast with some really great friends and then got absolutely shit-faced. My husband barfed in the sink. It was awesome.

There were three recipes that I want to write about here so I can remember them in future. The first two were made by me and the last one was made by Sarah, of risotto fame.

Fusion Stuffing!
I have not made American stuffing before, I don't really know what it is. I asked lots of Americans and it appears that there's a lot of variety, but cornbread is a running theme. One friend advised me that "stuffing is really meant to be something no one enjoys. It's usually dry and tastes a bit of chicken stock. It almost always contains celery", but others passionately defended stuffing and advocated using sausage. It seems that stuffing is just another hot topic that polarizes Americans. In the UK there is really only one kind of stuffing, it's sage and onion, and you can make it with or without sausage meat. There are other kinds but they're quite fringe and no one really likes them.  I decided to make a pretty traditional British sage and onion stuffing with sausagemeat, (based in this recipe) but to use cornbread instead of white breadcrumbs to make it a little more american. I also didn't add the egg, as I prefer stuffing to be crunchy than stodgy, but I did pour a little chicken stock into the mix to prevent it from drying out. To finish it off, I made a lattice of bacon over the top, so it looked a little like and american apple pie, but with bacon! :) I would definitely make this again! Delicious! :)

Fusion Stuffing

Green Bean Casserole
It's so hard to make anything that's a thanksgiving classic without it being so unhealthy that its literally trying to kill you. On my first ever thanksgiving in the US, I was invited to a potluck with work. Emails went around the office in which people said what they were making, most people were making meat and potatoes and cheese-based dishes, so I decided to make something green. I did a quick google search of traditional thanksgiving vegetable dishes and "Green Bean Casserole" came up, so, without reading any further, I volunteered to make that. What I didn't realize, was that I'd kind of made a cultural faux pas. Americans feel no need to have something green on the plate. The second thing that I was ignorant of, was that Green Bean Casserole is not green at all! It's covered in cheese! and most recipes online involved canned soup and canned beans! What the fuck is that? It actually took me a long time of searching to find a recipe that didn't involve canned soup. Eventually, I found this one but it needs a lot of adjusting to make it great. I've been dallying with it ever since, and this time, I think I finally nailed it.

I boiled the green beans for about 8 minutes so they were cooked through, then took them off the boil and plunged them in ice water so they stop coking and keep their texture. Then I fried butter in a pan, and caramelized a finely chopped shallot. Then, I added the mushrooms, and when they were looking good, I added the flour. This is where I go off track, at this point, I added a chicken broth, no specific amount, just enough to give it a good texture so the sauce, then I whisked in a generous helping of sour cream. I then added the green beans to the pan so that everything was combined thoroughly. I then topped it with cheese and a layer of butter-fried-cornflakes and a little more cheese. It looked and tasted great, really creamy and delicious and is pretty easy to make.

Green Bean Casserole

Filthy Cauliflower
This dish was made by Sarah. I'm calling it Filthy Cauliflower because this is an extremely sexy dish, and just so decadent that it feels naughty. It was a roasted cauliflower and aged white cheddar gratin, with added goats cheese, Parmesan, crimini mushrooms, shitaki mushrooms, caramelized onions and bacon. Sarah loosely followed this recipe. Everyone loved it, it was the clear winner. I'm going to have to give it a try at Christmas. Just look at it, it's outrageous.

Filthy Cauliflower

Our thanksgiving feast was perfect, I wouldn't change a thing. I am very thankful for my family and friends and the food in my belly! I'm a very lucky lady! I'll start worrying about our health again tomorrow, promise.

Turkey Day Feast

My husband's Thanksgiving Dinner

Sarah Insipired Shrimp Risotto

Today's meal is much indebted to Sarah. She made a shrimp risotto and brought her leftovers to work. It looked and smelled delicious and I knew that I needed to try it. I have never made any kind of risotto before so I waited until I had plenty of time for cooking and I read several recipes to get me geared up. Although I knew this meal was going to be delicious, white rice, butter and wine are not healthy ingredients. I consulted Sarah, and she had some great advice ...

1. Don't use so much butter, it's not necessary,
2. Add more vegetables, such as mushrooms and zucchini - some vegetables are delicious.
3. Add a scoop of sour cream and Parmesan, it's better than butter and will make the risotto really creamy.

Well... she was right!

Shrimp Risotto

My husband is a nice guy and he always says my cooking is great, but sometimes he makes a serious face and says "THIS IS FREAKING DELICIOUS!!" and he has second helpings, and he makes sure there's enough for him to take some to work for lunch the next day. This was one of the latter days, and it makes me feel so very good when he reacts this way.

It still wasn't exactly healthy. It was nutritious, there were mushrooms, onions, zucchini, and shrimp not to mention the fresh parsley and garlic, but honestly, the main focus of this meal is white rice. Shrimp are amazing pink balls of protein, unfortunately, they also contain a lot of cholesterol. This is a great edition to my culinary vocabulary, and I'll definitely make it again, but it's just not as healthy as I'd like it to be!


Okay, so now I"m going off-track, possibly because wine was consumed, and if you're only reading this because of food then you should stop reading. Things in my life are very perfect right now, and I can't help but be made anxious by that fact. My son is happy and healthy and performing very well in school, my husband's career is taking off and he's become something of a local celebrity, and all is well with my work, I'm still reasonably young (30), and reasonably thin, and I'm married to the man of my dreams. While we were sharing this meal, we all acknowledged how lucky we all are to have such good fortune. We also listened to music and this song came on... Johnny Cash 'Daddy Sang Bass' and we all sang along. My husband goes "Daddy sang bass" in his really deep voice, I go "Mamma sang tenor"  in my high pitched voice, and my son was supposed to sing "and little Lewis would join right in there", except he couldn't ever seem to fit the words into his part. It was a bit of a shambles, but we all had a good laugh anyway. So then Johnny Cash sings "And the circle, shall not be broken, by-and-by lord by-and-by" about the closeness of his family, despite the poverty and the troubles that his family endured, and I couldn't help but get sentimental about my family. It's easy to be happy together when everything's going great, but I hope that my family will be just as strong if things weren't going so well. I hope that sharing family meals together, and singing dumb songs while we eat, will help to keep us close. <3

Bok Choy ~ Cok Bhoy

I haven't written anything here for a while because I am lazy and unreliable, and also because I haven't made any meals that were exciting enough to motivate me to write.

I have been making healthy food (well, sometimes). I made a nice chicken soup when my husband was ill, and I've made it a few times since. It's ever so quick and easy. The recipe that I followed was a little bland so it helps to add a bullion cube, but that also means a lot of salt and flavorings  Chicken soup is bit like making a chicken dinner, but in a way that's possible to achieve in 30 mins and doesn't require the use of every pot, pan and surface in the kitchen!

The other thing I've been making is fish pie from this recipe. I love using fresh parsley, because I feel so legit. I'm like an actual cook. It's not really healthy because I do layer it with cheese and potatoes, but it's fish, and i serve it with green beans and carrots, so it's not all bad. The only issue with this recipie is that I don't know where to find fish stock, but I get around it by using more fish than the recipe asks for and using frozen fish - so much extra fishy water comes out of frozen fish that it's kind of like a stock, right? I'm sure it would be much better with the real stuff but I don't know where to get it.

Fish Pie

I love parsley sauce on ham, and as the only real ingredients are milk and parsley, it's a healthy alternative to gravy which is mostly meat fat and salt. My husband, however, thinks it's too bland and so I experimented with adding shallots as was recommended by some website. It was not good, the shallots over powered it and all I could taste were onions. I ate it, but I prefer the regular stuff. Here it is, I'm really only showing this picture to prove that even when eating bad food I stick healthy stuff on the side, check out my romaine lettuce and tomato cous cous. I am trying!

Ham with Parsley Sauce and healthy sides

None of those recipes, however much I like them, are exciting enough to warrant writing about, but today's recipe was exciting. Today, I made a stir fry, including the sauce, and I used bok choy, which is something I hadn't even heard of when I woke up this morning.

My husband wanted a stir fry for dinner, and rather than simply bunging chicken, peppers and mushrooms in a pan and adding soy sauce, I went a bit further and read a few recipes. As is often the way with me, the route I settled on was an illegitimate love child of several of these. I had largely intended to make a watercress stir-fry recipe, but the supermarket near my house doesn't have watercress but it does have lots of different kinds of Chinese greens - hence the bok choy. I also decided to at a few red chilis and more vegetables.

First, I made the sauce by combining 3 parts of hoisin sauce, with 2 parts soy and 2 parts rice vinegar and a splash of sesame oil. I then added 3 cloves of crushed garlic into it and a thumbs-worth of fresh ginger, pealed and grated (what unit should ginger be measured in?). That's all I had to do to have a homemade sauce - how easy! :)

I fried strips of chicken in a hot wok and added a few sliced mushrooms, a red and a yellow pepper, and a fair few cashews because I really like cashews. After a few minutes, I added my homemade sauce and finally the bok choy and some sugar snap peas. I was very keen not to relive the kale fiasco and researched which parts of the vegetable you're supposed to use, and it's essentially all of it, so bok choi is a fool proof addition to my diet. I didn't cook the greens for too long so that they'd still be crisp. Sadly, I forgot all about the red chilies and so hurriedly chopped and added them at the last minute. While all this was going on, I boiled some water in another pan so I could boil some vermicelli rice noodles.

This is what it looked like :) I love all the colours! This picture doesn't really do it justice, it looked great. I put the large bowl in the table and we each had individual bowls with noodles in and added the stir fry to the top as we pleased. :)

Bok Choy Stir Fry

Bok Choy Stir Fry served with noodles

It was really nice, but I think it would be better if I had remembered to add the chili sooner. The bok choi was great, and I would definitely use it again, it doesn't have too much flavor, it holds a lot of the flavor of the sauce, and has a good crisp texture to it.

Fruit Salad with Ice Cream

For dessert my son made a fruit salad with kiwi fruit, banana, a golden delicious apple and green grapes. It was very yummy! It felt very clean and fresh and looked lovely! It was served with our favorite vanilla bean ice cream. He did a great job!


Today's meal probably wasn't all that low calorie, but it was so full of nutrients and colour and flavours. Best of all it was delicious. My husband clearly enjoyed it, he actually drank the remaining sauce from the bowl and then had to go and have a nap to sleep it all off, bless his cotton socks. He's had a very busy week <3

mmmmmmmmm winey food

Okay so here it is. My beloved husband starts his new job tomorrow. We're all very excited about his success. I was going to make some sort of homemade bolognaesey situation, and I was determined to use lots of herbs and spices to keep it delicious, but base the meal on real ingredients, largely vegetables, home cooked. nothing processed, no adding anything.

The other thing is, we opened the nice bottle of red wine that I got in Santa Barbara and so this blog is going to be somewhat ill-formed.

I wanted to make some sort of tomato-based sauce with garlic and paprika. I wanted to use minced/ground chicken instead of beef to keep the calories low but the protein high. I could not find a recipe that I wanted to use. I probably googled 15 recipes but didn't want to make any of them because they were all to simple, too complicated, or required too many ingredients that weren't the kinds of food that I want to use.

I ended up bastardising all of them.

That sounds grand. Freddy Kruger, of the much loved Nightmare on Elm Street franchise,  is the bastard child of one nun and a thousand maniacs. My dinner, in contrast, was the bastard child of one me, and about fifteen online pasta sauce recipes. It's a lot nicer than the Freddie Kruger. Instead of creating an undead child-killer who stalks the dreams of children to get revenge on their parents for burning him alive, I created nutritious family meal.

While my husband went to one supermarket to get the ground chicken, I went to the one that does the good vegetables, and bought this mountain of colorful produce.

That's tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, garlic, spinach, celery, spaghetti squash, basil in a tube, Worcestershire sauce, paprika, oregano and 'Italian seasoning'. I cooked in a bit of a blur. I started off with garlic and onion in a bit of olive oil in a large pan, then added chicken and more garlic, and then celery and mushrooms, the tomatoes definitely came last and the herbs and spices were being added throughout. I baked the spaghetti squash and served the dinner with a side of spinach and a glass of fancy wine.

How fucking sophisticated. We even lit a candle.

It was delicious. I could have sauteed the celery and onions for longer before adding anything else to have them be softer, and I could have peeled the tomatoes to make the sauce smoother, but I quite enjoyed the interesting texture and the occasional crunch in the overall result. My family ate it all up and had seconds and thirds. I love them so very much, and seeing them enjoying a plate of vegetables makes me so very proud.

Wine is also good. Wine makes one feel extra sentimental towards ones family, but they are genuinely wonderful. I am incredibly lucky.

This 'Nutrition Facts' thing refers to all the food I included in the whole meal. Divide the numbers by at least three to see what one serving contains.

Sausage Miracle

I invented a recipe and called it "Sausage Miracle".

I woke up late. I got ready for work with about ten mins to spare but that's not enough time to make tea and drink it. If I can't have my morning cup of tea then I don't want to have any breakfast. Toast without tea would be like the John Stewart show without John Stewart - totally pointless.

In the ten minutes that I had to spare, I made Sausage Miracle. It's called sausage miracle because it was so very very very delicious and made in about ten minutes with only the limited ingredients that I had in my house. It happened in a flash! Like a "Road to Damascus" moment, but with sausage. :)

I warmed some olive oil in a pan, threw in two cloves of chopped garlic, and two Walmart mild Italian sausages that was chopped up small so they would cook fast. I put some frozen green beans in the microwave. When the sausage was brown, I added two good sized chopped tomatoes and let the whole thing cook. When the beans were cooked I added them to the garlic/sausage/tomato mixture with a healthy amount of black pepper.

I warmed it up as soon as I got to work because it smelled so good and I'd missed my breakfast. Viola!

This is one of the times where healthy food rivals unhealthy food in terms of taste. This was easily more delicious than a cheese burger. I know, there's a sausage in it, but I ended up splitting this meal with my office-mate so we only had one sausage each, that can't be that bad.

Unfortunately, I didn't share this one with my husband and son, and the whole point of this blog is to make healthier food for them. I'll have to make it for them soon. It was just so delicious.

Nutritional Information: