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.

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.