Results tagged “freeze ahead” from Mostly Eating

There’s a recipe that keeps popping up and I’ve been trying to ignore it, because surely something that simple isn’t going to make a decent dinner?  It’s called pisto, a kind ratatouille that is a regular feature in Spanish home kitchens. Having given in and tried it, I’m now completely sold on the idea.  It’s not the pisto alone that has entranced me, but the traditional serving suggestion; the familiarity of rice with a homely, tangy tomato sauce and topped with a perfect runny egg. Pisto is a new stock item on our list of easy weeknight suppers but don’t let me limit your ideas.  For starters I’m sure this would make a perfect weekend brunch.

As a meal this is environmentally sustainable, nutritionally well balanced and stress free to make. What’s not to like?

It’s so darn easy
This is not an instant dinner (a misleading term if ever there was, as we discussed last week) but it is a forgiving sort of a meal to make, with very little active input required and little that can go wrong. Ximena Maier of Lobstersquad explains the attraction of making pisto “What I like about it is that it has a very relaxed rhythm. You only have to follow the order of ingredients, and throw them in the pan as soon as they´re chopped. There´s no anxiously waiting for something to be just right, no stressful wild chopping while something may burn. Things will happen while they must, and a minute up and down isn´t a big deal.”   In fact if you have a rice cooker then cooking dinner becomes a very leisurely affair indeed. 

The eggs are gently cooked in little dents made in the pisto with the back of a spoon.  This results in all of the gooey loveliness of a poached egg but with none of the scariness of egg poaching for the uninitiated (though there are many reasons why it is worth learning how to poach an egg if you haven’t already).

Nutritional balance
Pisto with brown rice and an egg is the very model of a well balanced meal.  Vegetables predominate the dish and are there in a range of colours which intimates that you are about to eat a good variety of vitamins and antioxidants. Eggs provide low fat protein and are cooked without the addition of any extra fat. The carbohydrate source is wholegrain. The total amount of fat used in the recipe is small and monounsaturated in nature.  And there is synergy between the ingredients too with the brown rice, egg and vegetables combing to give a reasonable hit of iron and the added benefit of vitamin C from the peppers which enables your body to better absorb these vegetarian iron sources.

Flexibility and Flexitarianism
I’m bound to offend some (Spanish) people with my messing about with the basic pisto recipe (then it’s not pisto, right?) but another very pleasing quality about using this as the inspiration for a meal is that you can adjust it a little according to what’s in the fridge.  If you want to make your pisto more seasonal and local you can; as it is mid Winter here I compromised with canned tomatoes in place of the traditional raw but used imported organic peppers.  An official common variation in Spain is to use eggplant (aubergine) instead of courgette but a carrot works just fine too.  And if you’ve got half a bag of spinach or another greeny leafy veg in the fridge then why not chuck some of that in too (I also keep frozen spinach which you can just chuck straight in from the freezer).

Brown rice is my accompaniment of choice but try experimenting with other wholegrains like buckwheat groats or quinoa. 

This is definitely a no meat required dish adding to its sustainable credentials but the flexitarian among you might enjoy a bit of chorizo sausage for an occasional variation. 

I adore Meeta’s definition of comfort food - “food that hugs you from the inside”. Sums up this kind of food just right doesn’t it?

Dal is very special class of comfort food; it feels like a comfort food (all soft and squishy), it tastes like a comfort food (soothing but moreish) and you can dip your choice of bread into it or shovel with a spoon, bowl to chin. All good stuff. But unlike other comfort foods, dal need not have a touch of cheese, butter, chocolate or cream to their name. In fact they are positively brimming with nutritional benefits, especially when you combine them with a vegetable as in this butternut squash and red lentil variation.

The cinnamon, turmeric and cumin lend a very gentle touch here, imparting aroma to the lentils and squash rather than spice. A tarka is simply a garnish, in this case slow cooked red onion, fiery chilli and garlic. Tarka are generally made using ghee, a saturated fat heavy clarified butter, replaced here by olive oil.

All of those enthusiastic things I said about beans being “agriculturally sustainable and nutritionally multi-tasking” hold true for lentils and I plan to get to know them even better this year. Red lentils are a forgiving place to start if cooking with lentils is new to you, disintegrating into the requisite creamy puree whatever you do to them.

Soup is the perfect food for this time of year; suitably healthy if you ate a few too many mince pies but comforting enough to pacify those of you stuck with snow blizzards or malingering colds. This recipe is for my new favourite, a soup made with roast parsnips, chestnuts and finished off with fresh orange juice and a dollop of zesty, spiced yogurt.

Full bodied is the most fitting description I can conjure for this soup. My other half (the triathlete) raved about it for its deep, near meaty flavour and for myself, well I can’t resist a roast parsnip and the nutmeg, orange zest and yogurt topping adds that bit of freshness that I can’t help looking around for now that autumnal roasts and stews are starting to seem “so last year”.

Chestnuts are a funny old thing aren’t they? Delicious, but very different from your average nut and I couldn’t help but be intrigued about their composition. Chestnuts don’t have the typical nut benefits of high protein and heart healthy monounsaturated fat, but they do have plenty of fibre, and with hardly any fat (good or bad) they have massively less calories than your conventional nut. Pretty good for you, but strangely much closer in make-up to a parsnip than an almond.

For the last few weekends I have been a triathlon widow, which has been OK with me because I have had plenty of time to potter about in the kitchen and ponder on what to do with the bounty from our fruit trees.

The usual suspects when it comes to preserving fruit to use through the winter are jams and chutneys. Most years I make plum chutney and I have nothing against a bit of jam but somehow it always seems such a shame to take a super healthy food and to mix it with its weight in sugar. If you want to make your fruit last without adding large quantities of sugar then one answer is to turn it into softly stewed compote and freeze.

Unlike in jam making where the sugar has a central role in preservation, when you freeze fruit the amount of sugar is dictated only by palate, so unless you have a very sweet tooth you can go a lot lower with the sugar than most recipes suggest. I've been mulling this over since Heidi's Plum and Rosewater compote in July (20% sugar to fruit) and more recently Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's article on British plums (25% sugar to fruit) and decided to try my luck at 10% sugar to fruit. This worked out perfectly for my taste buds and is a respectable level of sugar for healthy people to eat as an occasional food (nutrition guidelines suggest that any foods with over 15g of added sugar per 100g be regarded as high in sugar, with 5g or less per 100g considered low).

Despite losing a little bit of certain vitamins compared with eating raw, cooked fruit is a very nutritious food to eat, 'counting' towards that five a day while being up there with a ready meal in the convenience stakes. For those of us who like to know these things, a portion of cooked or stewed fruit is three tablespoons. I have a bunch of reusable containers from Lakeland and have frozen my compote in roughly three portion batches so that I can take out one tub a week through the Winter. Our freezer isn't big enough to store a batch for every week of the Winter but I have stuffed quite a lot in there, largely aided by accidentally leaving the freezer door open a couple of weeks before (I wouldn't advise this as a strategy, it was quite messy and expensive). There is something very satisfying about having a freezerful of healthy food squirreled away, though as always I’m sure there are pros and cons in the sustainability argument. Freezing fruit will use more energy than traditional preserving methods but for me compote fulfils a completely different space in the diet from jam and I love it that I won't need to rely so much on imported fruit during the Winter.

I have made two compotes, one from plum and one from apple, but you will probably have your own ideas depending on what fruit you have a glut of or can buy cheaply. I'm pleased with the contrast between these two - one week I will have a gentle, aromatic plum compote perfumed with vanilla and the next week a fresher, chunkier apple compote spiked with a clean rosewater flavour.

In Oxford you know that autumn is approaching when it is time for St Giles Fair. The two main roads that merge on the North side of the city centre are closed and an old-fashioned funfair springs up overnight, causing traffic chaos for three whole days. Colleges, offices, shops, pubs and museums all suddenly find their main entrance opening out onto the back of a fun house or zero gravity ride and on good years a big wheel offers sneaky peeks into college quadrangles and secret gardens. St Giles Fair also brings with it three unmistakable smells: diesel, candyfloss, and the irresistible waft of frying onions from the fair’s numerous burger vans.

Fresh from the fair and armed with my local, seasonal but mainly just very cute aubergine (see picture), I knew I wanted to pair it with some of those sweet, slow-cooked onions and a really rich (and dare I say) autumnal tomato sauce. The final recipe is a little more time consuming than most of my cooking but griddling the courgette and aubergine and slow cooking the onions is what makes this dish. Lightly brushing the aubergine (eggplant) and courgette (zucchini) with olive oil and griddling until they have golden criss-cross markings on them brings out their flavour in much the same way as slow cooking does for the onions, without letting the aubergine act as too much of a giant olive oil sponge. Speaking of the aubergine, these italian heirloom types have a sweet and creamy flesh with no hint of bitterness to need salting away.

I totted it up quickly on my notepad and a serving of this recipe easily provides three fruit and veg portions. I’ve teamed the vegetables up with quinoa because it has a pleasant nutty flavour and is a healthy choice in carbohydrate terms but I don’t really believe in any of that individual ‘superfood’ business; if you don’t fancy quinoa just substitute it for another wholegrain like brown rice, bulgur or barley. For the curious there is some detailed information on the GI News site from Sydney University about the interaction between wholegrain goodness and glycaemic index.

You know it only just occurred to me that all this quinoa we’ve suddenly started eating has to be coming from somewhere and sure enough when I checked the brand I bought last is imported from Bolivia. Do we grow quinoa in the UK? Yes we do apparently, as a tall dense cover crop for game birds to hide in! I wonder if that is starting to change.

Homemade lasagne is fantastic, but I am a lazy cook so for me this statement generally only applies when somebody else makes it. Make a ragu, make a white sauce, layer it all up without running out of one set of ingredients before the others and then cook it all again - and this is without even mentioning the washing up and the possibility of only being able to get the sort of lasagne sheets that you have to precook (life is definitely too short for that last one!).

“Too much faff” is a poor excuse for a foodie not to make something so I have stuck with two more respectable excuses; first and foremost like many people I don’t eat all that much red meat these days, and secondly (and possibly more surprisingly given the state of our kitchen cupboards!) I have never actually owned a lasagne dish. But I have had a recipe in mind for a while, should I ever own a lasagne dish and as santa (Mum and Dad) was very kind this year I have just had the opportunity to give it a go. The idea for the recipe is something I saw on UKTV food some time ago, with a few things added here and there. Here’s how easy it is: chop and fry some veg, add a tin of tomatoes and a few other bits and bobs, layer up with precooked lasagne sheets and blob some mozzarella about in lieu of a white sauce.

As well as the easiness/low washing up quota of the recipe, I was attracted to it for it's potential as a healthier alternative to a normal beef ragu-style lasagne (by which I'm thinking of this kind of thing from Delia Smith) and so I thought I would contribute it to the Heart of the Matter event on heart-healthy pasta dishes. I'm not suggesting that this would be the way to go if you need a very low-fat diet or are trying to lose weight (if either of these are the case the lasagne food group is just not really the place to be hanging around). But for those of us who are just trying to make the things we eat every day a bit healthier then this recipe has a lot going for it, especially if you can team it with a salad and skip the garlic bread.

A few people I know turn their noses up at Quorn because it “doesn’t taste of anything”. To my mind they are missing the point; it is precisely this quality of Quorn that makes it useful. Yes, the plain imitation chicken fillets are decidedly uninspiring (and a little odd) but ignore those and go for the mince or the pieces; Quorn is at its best in something like a stew or a chili where it can absorb all of the other flavours like a sponge.

This vegetarian chili is not the most elegant dish around but the huge batch I have just made will be most welcome over the next few weeks when I am going to be very busy with limited time to cook and shop. It freezes beautifully and is very highly rated by the more carnivorous half of the household.

The important thing with this one is that you have to make this recipe the day before you want to eat it if you want it to taste good. I think there are two reasons why this is even more important for a quorn chili than a meat version. Firstly, because parts of the dish are relatively bland tasting, you need to allow longer for that magical merging of flavours that happens to make any stew type dish taste more than just the sum of the individual parts. Secondly, some of the lovely aromatic compounds in the spices will dissolve in the water component of the dish and others in the fat. Because this version is so low in fat compared with a meat dish again you need to give it a bit longer for all of the flavours to spread throughout. So, make it while you watch a movie on a rainy Saturday afternoon, wandering into the kitchen to give it a stir occasionally, and then it will be ready and waiting as a quick dinner on Sunday or Monday night. Bag or box the remaining portions and put them in the freezer from which they will emerge even tastier.

Friday was a big day for me, my last day after working in the same place for nearly nine and a half years! As is tradition when somebody arrives or leaves we had a big communal coffee morning, known locally as a Beano.

This isn't the place to describe the perfectly chosen flowers, photos and other gifts I was given, the lovely speech (though Stuart did you really need to bring up the rugby tackling incident?), or the sniffing on my part. But I would like to say a big Thank You again to everybody involved in giving me such a fantastic send off - you know who you are! Anyway, enough of the sentimental stuff now, if you are reading this blog you probably want me to shut up and get to the food part.

My offerings for the occasion were some Chocolate and Chili bites. These went very quickly and a few people asked for the recipe so I’m guessing they were a hit; you can find the original recipe for them on the Chocolate and Zucchini web site. These are very rich (more akin to a brownie rather than a muffin) and very tasty. I'd love to tell you all about how good for you they are with their antioxidant-rich dark chocolate but given their other major ingredients (lots and lots of butter and sugar) it would be terribly unethical of me to encourage their regular consumption on health grounds. What I will say is that these are suitably small so as not to make you feel too guilty, and that a little of what you fancy does you good.