One of my favourite pieces of cooking equipment is my Le Creuset tagine, which was a gift a couple of Christmases ago as a replacement for an earlier tagine which ended up with the lid stuck to the base following an attempt to cook rather more lamb tagine with apricots and honey than it would really hold. I don't use it nearly often enough, but I remembered it this morning when we were thinking about what to have for dinner, and reached for my copy of Claudia Roden's Tamarind and Saffron to look for inspiration.
We decided that the recipe for chicken with pasta looked interesting, and as the deli in the Covered Market yielded the requisite small rice-shaped pasta that was what we had. The chicken is simmered slowly in water with garlic, cardamon, cinnamon and ginger, and then the pasta is cooked in the resulting broth with the cooked chicken added and warmed through just before serving. As I was only cooking for two of us I used chicken supremes instead of the whole chicken suggested in the recipe, but still simmered them for an hour. We were both impressed by the result (despite the cognitive dissonance of eating something that looked like rice but tasted like pasta!); it was a nice soothing meal for the end of a long week, delicately flavoured rather than being overwhelmingly spicy.
As a side dish we had spicy carrot puree, also from the Claudia Roden book; mashed carrots with olive oil, vinegar, harissa and cumin.
Saturday 28 March 2009
Wednesday 25 March 2009
Cabbage Soup Diet: Thai cabbage and onion soup with coconut, lime and coriander
No new recipes for the last couple of weeks, because we've been away, and now we're back inspiration is still in short supply. This evening I was stumped by the assortment of green leafy things in the vegbox (two Savoy cabbages, and spring greens) until I remembered Denis Cotter's Paradiso Seasons. This is easily my favourite vegetarian cookbook; it may well be my favourite cookbook overall. It's certainly the best one to go to when trying to think of interesting and different things to cook from the vegbox; the recipes are grouped by season and main ingredient, and give seasonal Irish ingredients an interesting twist - lots of Eastern and Middle Eastern influence.
Today I spotted a recipe for Thai cabbage and onion soup which seemed like the ideal way to use one of the Savoy cabbages. Like most of the recipes in the book, it was fairly straightforward to cook, and the result was extremely good - simultaneously soothing and reviving. I threw in some rice noodles to bulk it out a bit, and if I was making it again I might add a splash of fish sauce to add some depth to the stock, but generally a very nice dinner, and a pleasant change from the tried-and-tested recipes we've been having recently.
Today I spotted a recipe for Thai cabbage and onion soup which seemed like the ideal way to use one of the Savoy cabbages. Like most of the recipes in the book, it was fairly straightforward to cook, and the result was extremely good - simultaneously soothing and reviving. I threw in some rice noodles to bulk it out a bit, and if I was making it again I might add a splash of fish sauce to add some depth to the stock, but generally a very nice dinner, and a pleasant change from the tried-and-tested recipes we've been having recently.
Monday 9 March 2009
Marinaded tuna and pot-roast pork
I ended up making new things on Saturday and Sunday this week. Saturday's dinner was tuna steaks; we fancied something with an Oriental feel to it, and rather than going for the usual teriyaki tuna I followed a suggestion from my friend A and marinaded the steaks in lime juice, fish sauce, garlic and ginger. Grilled and served with sesame noodles and stir-fried broccoli with oyster sauce, it was lovely. Definitely one we'll have again.
We'd got a piece of pork shoulder to have yesterday, and plans to slow-cook it. After some googling I settled on this recipe from the Waitrose website. We didn't have any rosemary or sage, but the pork went into the oven with garlic, thyme, lemon zest and water at five o'clock and stayed there until about half-past nine (an hour longer than the recipe suggested, because there was a late decision to have braised cabbage and I left the pork in until the cabbage was more or less ready.
Possibly as a result of the additional cooking time, the pork was practically falling apart by the time it came out of the oven and didn't look as though it would stand up to being browned while the cooking liquid reduced; instead I simply boiled down the cooking liquid a little at a time, with a splash of red wine added fairly early on. That seemed to work fine, and it made a very nice dinner with the braised cabbage and some mash.
We'd got a piece of pork shoulder to have yesterday, and plans to slow-cook it. After some googling I settled on this recipe from the Waitrose website. We didn't have any rosemary or sage, but the pork went into the oven with garlic, thyme, lemon zest and water at five o'clock and stayed there until about half-past nine (an hour longer than the recipe suggested, because there was a late decision to have braised cabbage and I left the pork in until the cabbage was more or less ready.
Possibly as a result of the additional cooking time, the pork was practically falling apart by the time it came out of the oven and didn't look as though it would stand up to being browned while the cooking liquid reduced; instead I simply boiled down the cooking liquid a little at a time, with a splash of red wine added fairly early on. That seemed to work fine, and it made a very nice dinner with the braised cabbage and some mash.
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