This is a recipe for chicken thighs that I’ve been carrying in my head for at least 10 years. Hours of searching (online and off) have failed to discover original source – I suspect it was from one of those shiny recipe cards that always find their way into my supermarket trolley.  Juicy chicken thighs filled with halloumi cheese and scented with sage, all served in a rich tomato sauce. It sounds decadent, but in fact the amount of cheese is small and hidden within are three servings of vegetable.  It’s worth hunting out reduced-fat halloumi cheese if you can to cut down on the saturated fat – it’s taste and texture are pretty good, especially for using in recipes.  And this Warm fennel, orange and halloumi salad from the Waitrose website is just the job to use up the remainder (it’s delicious and easy).

Newer readers to Mostly Eating might be surprised to see a meat-based recipe popping up here.  There aren’t many meat recipes here simply because we don’t eat much of the stuff, though we’re not actually vegetarian. We’ll have meat about once a week, so maybe one meal out of twenty, and it’s a meal I’m happy to spend money on and take time over.  Nutritionally the evidence just keeps on stacking up for plant-based diets, with the latest finding being that people who eat less meat may lose more weight than meat eaters with the same calorie intake.  And everyone has their own personal ethics around meat.  I wouldn’t dream of pressing mine on to anyone reading this or indeed the people I meet through work who I give nutrition advice to. My take on meat eating is that I’m happy to occasionally eat and savour meat that has been raised to a high animal welfare standard, but the idea of eating animals at most meals just doesn’t sit comfortably.

We have this with a small portion of rice (brown or basmati) and a
handful of steamed green beans which notches the veggies up to four portions.  Take a look at recipe notes for lighter and vegetarian options.

We’ve just returned from a few days in Provence where they have near constant sunshine in which to bask and also to grow sunflowers, lavender, olives by the field load. The Great British Summer in contrast is a fickle thing. Slightly disappointing, but not entirely surprising then, to come home to find the only species flourishing in the vegetable bed were a small posse of damp-loving funghi.

This one-pot bake is a perfectly suited to the trials and tribulations of a classic British summer.  The flavours are sunny and Mediterranean (lemon, oregano, tomato, olive oil) but the finished dish is also suitably warm and cozy for an evening inside watching the rain.  It is a “one-pot” supper in the nutritional sense too, combining summer vegetables (fennel, cherry tomatoes, onions), high protein, high fibre dried beans, monounsaturated olive oil and a wholegrain breadcrumb topping. One serving provides at least 3 of your five serves of fruit and vegetable per day with minimal effort.

Veggie sausages are typically lower in fat and more environmentally sustainable to produce than the meaty sort.  For a dish like this where the sausages are a bit player rather than the true star of the show, I tend to use veggie sausages (for the aforementioned reasons).  The recipe as it stands produces a dry style of dish with a crispy top; if you fancy something a little more cassoulet in style then just add a slosh of stock or white wine to the pan before topping with the breadcrumb.

Related musings and recipes on Mostly Eating
Heart Healthy Macaroni Cheese (with a very similar breadcrumb topping)
The perfect convenience food? Why a humble tin of beans is good for you and the planet
Fennel and Tomato Lasagne
Aubergine, courgette and tomato stew with quinoa and feta
What to eat now – a Mediterranean or Nordic style diet?

Last Sunday was all about using up the ends of a roast chicken from a couple of weeks before, plus sundry other odds and ends from the fridge.  I was so pleased with the end result I thought I’d share it here:  a homely chicken casserole with seasonal veggies, spelt and light dumplings made with rosemary and lemon.

Like most people, we’re feeling the credit crunch a little bit around this way.  I’m loathe to cut our food buying in any dramatic way (not surprisingly, eating well is a fairly big priority in our house) so it is a softly, softly approach at the moment.  For me part of the deal of being an occasional omnivore means buying higher welfare standard meat and going back from this to cheaper alternatives just isn’t an option.  A small organic chicken is surprisingly economical, not to mention tastier than the ubiquitous pale chicken breast fillet.  This way the whole of the chicken gets used up, plus there’s something quietly satisfying in a domesticated way about stretching a chicken out to three or four meals.

Here’s what I had left in my fridge:

• Chicken stock – the really good stuff, the sort that sets to a quivering jelly in the fridge.  The stock was made from the carcass of a roast chicken that I didn’t have time to turn into stock straight away but slung into the freezer until the next weekend.
• Half a tub of crème fraiche – whenever I buy crème fraiche for a recipe there is always some leftover; every recipe uses half a pot or less!
• A chunk of sourdough – of course the breadcrumbs don’t have to be made from sourdough but the bottom line is that good bread makes good breadcrumbs.  Slightly dry, stale bread is even better than fresh, but fresh will work fine too.
• Seasonal vegetables – I’ve used carrot and leek, the seasonal vegetables that I had odds and ends of in the fridge.  Celery, squash, onion, fennel and turnip would also work well here.
• Rosemary and bay – not technically in the fridge, but unlike more delicate species, rosemary and bay are the only herbs to consistently survive both my horticultural efforts and the British climate

Casserole with dumplings is a universal comfort food and it turns out that most cultures have their own dumpling recipe, of which the traditional English dumpling is a particularly splendidly stodgy exemplar made from flour and suet (a hard, saturated animal fat).  My “leftover” dumplings are suet free, concocted of breadcrumbs and parmesan and held together with egg and leftover crème fraiche.  While the egg and crème fraiche are not fat free they at least provide valuable calcium, iron and protein, unlike suet which is essentially an unadulterated fat.  Making your own stock is really easy if you haven’t tried it and allows you to control how much salt ends up in there, not to mention the fact that it just tastes better.  Freshly homemade stock will settle with a layer of fat across its top which you can easily skim off after leaving it to settle in the fridge.

Posts I like in praise of using up a whole chicken
The House Guest Who Came to Visit and Stayed to Cook a guest post on Mark Bittman’s NY Times blog
3 meals from one bird, from the chicken out campaign – recipes by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall
Three of a kind: October: roast chicken, chicken frittata, chicken soup – slightly infuriating multi-page layout, but some nice suggestions from Arthur Potts Dawson
Jamie Oliver’s easy chicken stock – an easy introduction to making chicken stock from a carcass

Cottage Pie is a perennial British favourite, one of that breed of dishes you find in all cultures whose sole purpose in life it is to use up yummy leftovers.  A proper cottage pie is a hearty dish of savoury beef cooked with carrots and onions and topped with a rib-sticking layer of mashed potato.  Its sibling recipe, shepherd’s pie, is much the same but made with lamb, each dish being bourne out of the happy necessity to use up leftover meat from the Sunday roast.

A good cottage pie is a splendid thing, and no great nutritional disaster if you choose lean mince and don’t smother the top with cheddar cheese or bathe the mash in heaps of butter.  But it is also the epitome of winter cooking – time to move on.  March is time for a welcome spring take on cottage pie using chicken alongside lighthearted flavourings of lemon zest, tarragon and crème fraiche.

The original inspiration for this recipe is buried deep within a gargantuan pile of food magazines in our living room so this is one of those top of the head efforts.  It turned out pleasingly well I thought, a delicately flavoured Sunday lunch kind of a pie rather than a big, hearty supper dish.

Of course to name this recipe properly I really need the correct term for the person or persons whose job it is to look after chickens.  If any of you can help out I’d be much obliged (fingers crossed that it will be something suitably whimsical – poultry farmer pie just isn’t cutting it!).

Flicking back through the archives, this is the first meat recipe on Mostly Eating since mid-October. More than ever meat is a bit of a treat in our house, something to savour, not an everyday staple food. Flexible recipes that can be made vegetarian or meaty depending on mood and available ingredients seems to be the way forward more and more, for us anyway.

Variations on the theme

• the milder flavours here would work well with a soya based or quorn mince
• for a second veggie variation, use a mix of white beans and green lentils in place of the chicken (with extra seasoning and crème fraiche)
• lamb mince is good in this, but not beef (I have a feeling that the ‘mother’ of this recipe was lamb based)
• for a lighter topping use mashed parsnips, or a half and half mix of potatoes and parsnip
• lemon thyme has the same fragrant cheery spring vibe as tarragon

I couldn’t get hold of high welfare standard chicken mince so bought organic chicken thigh and minced it in a food processor (chicken breast would be a bit bland here).  The pie is lovely with a few simple lightly cooked seasonal vegetables on the side  (ours were carrots with lemon thyme and purple sprouting broccoli).

You’ve probably made a recipe like this yourself – add a bit of olive oil to the pan, fry the garlic, add another drizzle of olive oil and sizzle the meat, add a handful of veggies and a dash of cream or creme-fraiche to finish it off and voila, you have an instant sauce for pasta. Maybe with just a touch more olive oil to loosen it up at the end. This is the recipe I intended to make, but when I reached for the olive oil I was alarmed by the speed with which the bottle seems to be emptying. I’m sure it was full three weeks ago and now there is only about a third left. Sometimes I’m just too engrossed in its wonderful heart healthy monounsaturated fat profile, busy living the Mediterranean diet, that I forget that all of those drizzles are slowly and effortlessly stockpiling calories. So here’s my tip for the day for anybody else who thinks they might have gone a bit too mediterranean – get a tablespoon from your drawer, fill it with olive oil and then empty the oil into the pan that you use the most. It’s quite a good amount, yes? There, you never have to measure olive oil again – you now know what a tablespoon of olive oil looks like and also what 120 kcal of olive oil looks like, give or take a little.

So to the pasta. The whole dish contains just one teaspoon of olive oil per person, with the extra moisture provided by a big glug of vegetable stock. The stock is a great twist – pop the lid on and the broad beans and chicken effectively steam instead of fry. Vegetable stock gives the final sauce a rich savoury flavour and with the mustard it only needs a little touch of creme-fraiche to finish it off (hats off to my supermarket who now sells creme-fraiche that is both half-fat AND organic). Adding a big handful of mint at the end is a vital stage to make the whole meal lively and fresh (it is still supposed to be summer after all).

It nearly didn’t end well. Thoughtfully watching the pan while the chicken and vegetables steamed, the broad beans transformed from vibrant shade of green to a pale sage, wrinkling a little. Hang on, isn’t there something about broad beans skins being really tough?

Nigel Slater and his kitchen diaries came to the rescue (not for the first time); Nigel says ”…remove the skin from any beans bigger than your thumbnail. Tiny beans will have a thin skin that is perfectly edible”. Phew. I just gave the whole thing a glance over at the end and squeezed any slightly larger beans out of their skins. This wasn’t a chore as there were only about two; if all of your beans are on the large side then you might want to parboil them and pop them out of their skins before you start.

This recipe is my contribution to presto pasta nights, hosted as always by Ruth at Once Upon a Feast

Sam has challenged all of us English to stick up for our much-maligned national cuisine, which is a fine idea but leaves us all with a bit of quandary; do we showcase one of our traditional dishes or do we attempt to show “how much we have come on”?
One of the things I think we Brits/English do really well is this local eating and reducing food miles business. One of the advantages of living on such a small island is that when we try to eat local it really can mean local. Not for us a 100-mile radius like those Bay Area people I keep hearing about – no disrespect intended if any of you are reading :-) Nope, over here local is often very local indeed (100 miles is after all, a quarter of the length of England). From where I live at the edge of a reasonably large city (Oxford) I can get artisan cheeses, an impressive choice of organic veg, melt-in-the-mouth sustainably farmed lamb all within the 18 miles from my house.

An area of British produce that has seen a big surge in popularity in recent years with both health-conscious and ethically-concerned shoppers is venison. The main species of deer farmed for venison in England is the red deer, indigenous to Britain, which I think fits nicely with the theme of the event. I far prefer the idea of eating an animal that has been reared out and about in something close to its natural habitat (hence my thing about lamb recipes) and the increase in sales suggest that there are a lot of other peope who feel the same way. Deer for the most part are still reared on expansive parkland in England, though I understand that the same is not true of all countries.

Red meat has a bad reputation nutritionally-speaking. Some, but not all of these concerns are related to the saturated fat content of the meat, so if you do eat red meat occasionally then naturally low-in-fat venison is an excellent choice. It is much lower in fat (including saturated fat) than other red meats, while retaining the typical beneficial attributes such as high quality protein and easily-absorbed iron. The venison in my casserole contains 165 kcal in it per 100g, and 2.5g of fat, whereas my next choice, lean (trimmed) braising steak that would have contained 225 kcal and 9.7g of fat.

On to the second big ingredient in this casserole. Making damson or sloe gin is just about as English as you can get (in a very rural way). You can read more about this tradition at the wonderfully named sloe.biz, but it essentially involves soaking fruit in gin and sugar for a few months, creating a beautifully pink and very potent tipple. Timing means that the gin is usually ready to try just in time for Christmas, Hurrah!

I’m too lazy to collect sloes, which involves spotting the hedgerow flowers in the spring and remembering their exact position ready to go back and pick the berries in the Autumn. As well as remembering where you saw them, you have to be a master of timing – too soon and they won’t be ripe (after the first frost is best) but too late and you’ll lose out (there can be fierce competition for a good crop of sloes!). But I’m saved from all this competitiveness by the lovely damson tree in my own back garden which I can keep an eye on from my kitchen window.

Anyway, after all the waiting (this year I have left mine to steep for an especially long time, way past Christmas), you are left with not only the drink itself but also a big batch of booze-sodden fruit. My Yorkshire roots pretty much prohibit me from throwing the fruit away, hence the birth of this casserole. This is all very well, I hear you thinking, but what about all those of you who don’t happen to have a batch of boozy damsons to hand right this minute? I’ve got two ideas for you. First, if you want to get into the spirit of things (literally), you could try making some plum gin rather than the damson or sloe variety (google and you’ll find a few people have tried this and it seems to work). Second choice, much easier, is to substitute the damsons for something fruity and sweet straight from the larder; a few stoned plums or cherries, or dried prunes soaked in cranberry juice overnight.

Anyway, back to my initial musing on what sort of dish to make. This venison casserole is I hope somewhere in between traditional and modern, with a nod to very English traditions and produce, but still a long way from our old reputation for high-fat, low-flavour stodge. We had our casserole with straightforward mashed potato and veg, sticking with the theme, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it would be even better with sweet potato mash. Follow the meal with a snifter of your own damson gin or a fine shop-bought specimen of sloe gin which I’m sure would go down equally well.

If you’ve read the post just before this one about sustainable lamb farming, you’ll know that I sometimes buy the lamb farmed by the Northmoor Trust at our local farmers market in Oxford (see their picturesque location above). The first time I bought their lamb I bought a pack with 2 rolled breasts of lamb in it; it was both a bargain and an item of complete foodie curiosity. It looked a bit like an over-sized, fat-streaked, rolled pinwheel of bacon, cut to a 2 cm thickness rather than the usual few millimetres. I left the market very happy that I would be able to put it to good use with a bit of help from Google and a few cookbooks, and while I’m not really into pigs ears and those sorts of things, it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling to be using a cut that might otherwise have been overlooked.

So, on to the day of the cooking of the lamb. What did Google have to say for itself? Not much really is the answer. I thought Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would be the man to search for, him being a champion of cheap and lesser known cuts of meat. I did find his recipe for breast of lamb Ste Ménéhould, apparently a recipe from The River Cottage Meat Book, but it sounded very complicated (cooking on one day, resting overnight under jam jars and then coating in breadcrumbs and cooking again the next day). The other sites were a real mixed bag and bought up more questions than they answered. Did it matter that I have breast of lamb rather than breast of mutton? Could I use a recipe for bone-in lamb when mine has been deboned? Most importantly, what do you do when you want to cook and eat on the same day? The only recurring theme seemed to be that stuffing was the way to go if you had a piece of boned breast meat.

And the cookbooks? I have a lot of cookbooks, so I was quite upset with the lot of them that only one that came up with a suggestion for using lamb breast. That gold star goes to Tamasin Day Lewis’ from her Good Tempered Food. She has a recipe for Grillade of Breast of Lamb, more of a dinner party dish with anchovies and red wine vinegar, but again it was one of those recipes that you have to make across several days.

Anyway, it was all so confusing that I decided to make something up and keep my fingers crossed that it would all work out for the best. There were a lot of sites that mentioned that this was a fairly fatty cut of meat so a stuffing with spring-inspired flavours like fruit, citrus and rosemary sounded like it might work. Slow cooking also seemed to be the order of the day and so a steady roasting with a little white wine to keep the meat moist also sounded worth a try.

The end result turned out pretty well so I’ve posted it here ready for the next person who blithely buys a breast of lamb then realises that they have no idea what to do with it! The meat is full flavoured and kept moist by the wine while the lemon peel and dried fruit in the stuffing lighten what might otherwise be a little rich and heavy. This is a fatty cut of meat though so it does require a bit of attention as you eat it to cut the biggest bits of fat away (or to pick the pieces up and chew all of the nuggets of meat out from around the fat). A lot of the fat is on the inside of the roll so it doesn’t all go attractively brown and chewy which saved me from just eating the lot. Mind you, it’s horses for courses on this bit; my other half had a pretty much empty plate at the end of it all. Perhaps not the healthiest thing to have for Sunday lunch every week then.

I haven’t tested this theory but I like to think that much of the flavour was a result of using well treated lamb reared in a very natural environment. Breast of lamb is a very cheap cut so this is a great opportunity to buy organic if you don’t normally, or to find out about a local farmer who rears his sheep in a sustainable way that is animal and environmentally mindful. For anybody who likes to know these things, I did have a look into the nutritional composition of this cut in comparison with others. The meat from roasted breast of lamb contains 18.5g of fat per 100g, or 29.9g if you eat both the fat and the lean. In comparison roast leg of lamb contains about 9.4g of fat per 100g of meat or 14.2g for both the fat and the lean.

This one is for when you really fancy something with a thai curry vibe but without the calories and fat of coconut milk which is very high in both of these things but particularly saturated fat (shame!). The recipe is an adaptation of a mango chicken recipe I saw the wonderful Mary Berry making on TV a while back, a dish which was flavoured with peppadew peppers (a store cupboard favourite) and chinese five spice. Here I’ve gone for more thai flavours; fish sauce, red curry paste and lime juice. Chicken makes an excellent low fat starting point and the recipe also includes low fat yogurt and nutritious, fresh mango and pepper. Both the pepper and the mango are excellent sources of Vitamin C and beta-carotene but are most definitely not indigenous to the UK in February and will have been imported from somewhere far away and sunny. Food miles is a complex issue but my take on it is that reducing the overall mileage of your shopping basket is almost certainly a better plan than trying to become fully local then giving up in frustration. It would be great to only buy local, seasonal produce but for the moment in the winter months I’m happy with buying the odd imported ingredient, particularly when it is something very nutritious (or fairtrade chocolate). You can find out about stockists of fairtrade certified mangoes and chocolate on the Fairtrade Foundation Website.

We ate our chicken with boiled rice and edamame because I was keen to try out the new frozen edamame which have recently become available in the shops here. I had forgotten from my many visits to Wagamama that edamame have much more of a nutty taste than their fresh green exterior seems to hint at; I think if it was making this again I would go for something with a cleaner, springier taste (sugar snap peas perhaps, or even frozen peas for convenience). The sauce is surprisingly rich tasting given how low fat it is so something crunchy and fresh on the side would go pleasantly well.

I imagine that this sauce would go well with salmon, though I must admit that I haven’t tried this out myself yet. If you want to give it a go I would suggest that you cook it slightly differently to stop the fish falling apart into flakes. How about making the sauce as outlined below but including the honey/palm sugar, then pouring the sauce over the raw cubed fish and heating the two together under the grill in a heatproof dish until the fish is cooked?

I am more than happy to spend a bit extra to eat organic but there’s no getting away from the fact that organic meat costs more. I’m not going to buy non-organic meat so this leaves me with two strategies to play with, both of which I use. The first is to eat less meat, which many of us are choosing to do for health reasons. The second is to go for cheaper cuts, hence my purchase last weekend of a pack of lovely organic lamb mince. My usual recipe choice for this is Nigella Lawson’s “Greekish Lamb Pasta” from her Forever Summer book, a Mediterranean take on spag bol which I serve with crumbled feta and chopped fresh mint over the top (delish but decidedly not a low cal option) . This time I felt in need of something different and a bit lighter (it is January after all). The resulting dinner was lamb, sultana and mint polpettine served on a big flat tortilla that had been spread with houmous and then rocket and pinenuts added at the end for a bit of crunch.

Polpettine are those satisfyingly savoury tiny little meatballs with lovely crunchy but chewy golden crusty bits on the outside. I have only just realised that they are also significantly easy to cook than their larger cousins; being small they cook through so quickly and obviously that you never have the dilemma of sacrificing one to be cut in half to test for ‘doneness’. Once assembled you could I suppose fold the whole thing up wrap stylee but it appeals to my greedy side to have something more akin to a large but floppy pizza that fills the entire plate.

The whole meal takes about 15 minutes from start to finish and as I’m not very keen on washing up I like that you can get by with just one mixing bowl and a small frying pan. I can also attest to its simplicity – it turned out fine despite the cook consuming half a bottle of red wine beforehand. We used houmous with olives but plain would be fine. I have used dried mint here as that is what I happened to have but use fresh if you have it, or if not I’m sure dried oregano would be fine. It seemed a bit unnecessary to air-freight in a such a small part of the meal but then I spoilt my lofty ethical ideals buy unthinkingly buying rocket imported from Kenya.

Depending upon what meat is available this is also very tasty with thinly strips of slightly rare steak instead of the meatballs. If you were to go down this route I would skip the pinenuts and go for thin slices of red onion (keep the lemon juice). Rest the steak for a couple of minutes before you assemble everything and drizzle the meat juices over.