Lucious, Luxurious Lamb and Lentils

I have been looking forward to this soup since  I decided to make it, earlier this week. It is one I have made before at home, and I multiplied the quantities by one and a half to make seven portions, which is enough for my week of meals. The name of the recipe is Lamb, Lentil and Chilli Soup, and there aren't really many more ingredients! Just celery, carrots, onion and stock. Oh, and ground cumin and coriander. But that still isn't many.

What looks like industrial quantities of vegetables!

My lovely browned lamb. I'm glad I took the time to brown it properly in batches, I do think it's worth it. This may not look like a lot for seven people, but the lentils and vegetables more than make up the amount so it does go quite far. I browned the lamb in chilli oil as the only chilli in the original recipe was the garnish. I'm not sure that it made a huuuuge amount of difference, but it's been quite a while since I made it so I don't know. Oh well, I'll just have to make it again soon with plain oil to conmpare...

The vegetables softening.

So. Close!

About half way through cooking.

Garnished with parsley, a blob of natural yoghurt and a blob of chilli paste.

 

 

I love this soup. As it simmers for an hour and twenty minutes, you occasionally give it a 'mash', so it is pretty much smooth by the time it's done. But, there is the lamb, and of course, you can probably see in the photo that not all the lentils are mashed. I wouldn't want it to be totally smooth anyway, the bite of the lentils is good. Next to the tender lamb, and the velvety spiced pureé of the smooth vegetables, this really does make for a very special dish. 

Crisp and Crunchy?

This is my last noodle post, I promise... For a week at least, anyway ;-) I said in this post that I wanted the noodles to be crispy, and that I had some ideas of what to do tonight to make them crispy. I have to say, it kind of worked! Again, the noodles weren't all crispy, but it was much closer to what I wanted so I can't be too unhappy. This is what I ended up with.

All I did was to tip the noodles on to a baking tray, add some peas and stick it on the top shelf of the oven. The edges of the mixture-spread-thingy did go really crispy, which was exactly what I was aiming for. The middle, not so much, but I actually really enjoyed it anyway. The dish changed in other ways as well, in terms of the vegetables. The peppers went quite soft and tasted even sweeter. The mangetout dried, and went crispy at the ends. And the peas which I just added this time, sort of dehydrated and had a more chewy inside but a slightly crisp outside. I would eat them like that as a snack! I've never had peas like that, and I'm pleased I found a new way of eating them. I also looked in the cupboard for something to drizzle on the top, and instead of the usual Chinese garnish of soy sauce, I went for oyster sauce. As the main taste of the noodles was quite mellow, the ever so slightly sharp oyster sauce really complimented them. Yes, it looks like a mess, but I was happy with it and that is what matters!

Freestyle Friday #16

Sorry if you're getting sick of posts about noodles... but I'm not. Especially ones with peanut butter in! Anyway, for Freestyle Friday with my noodles, I only needed to add one extra ingredient, which was an egg! I had only bought the eggs that day, but as I hadn't planned on using them for Freestyle Friday, it still counts. Well, I think it does!

What I made was an egg noodle... thing. I can never think of names for my dishes! Let me explain, and it will hopefully become a little bit clearer. To start with, I heated the noodles in the microwave to make them a little bit mroe malleable, so they would be easier to mix in the egg and shape. While that was happening, I heated a frying pan, and beat one egg. Then I just mixed the egg into the noodles and tipped the whole lot into the pan!

 

 

You can see that I rather messed it up getting it out of the pan, but it still tasted good! I wanted the noodles to go crispy originally, but I think the reason they didn't was because either because the pan wasn't hot enough, or the mix wasn't spread thinly enough. Or maybe both.

 

 

I have one more portion of noodles left, so I have another crack at getting them crispy. I have two ideas in mind, so I will try one of them tonight and let you know how it turns out...

Sumptuos Sesame and Perfect Peanut Noodles

Last week, I had a pretty firm idea of what I was going to cook as my meal for the week. I was going to do a beef stew, for no other reason than that I really wanted one! But then I got to thinking. I am going to be transporting this to work in a plastic tub four days out of the seven. As the tubs I'm using aren't 'click-lock' ones, there is slight potential for sauce leakage. Which would mean a smelly, wet bag, and wasted sauce. Neither of which are good. So I decied to wait until after work finishes, in four weeks time. The way the meals I want to make are stacking up, I'll have planned them until Christmas soon!

I am a little disappointed about the beef stew, but I did make something equally delicious. It is a recipe from the Kindle app I have on my ipad. I made a point of looking through them the other day because I always forget about them when I do my menus! I bookmarked all the larger serving recipes that would be good for my week-long meal plans as well. One that I came across was Sesame Peanut Noodles. It was a Nigella Lawson recipe. But you probably could have guessed that...

Theses are the salad ingredients; beansprouts, mangetout, red pepper, spring onion, coriander and sesame seeds...

...and noodles! I think I need to get bigger saucepans and bowls if the ratatouille and these noodles are anything to go by.

Even though the dressing has quite a few ingredients, quite a few of them you'll probabaly have in the cupboard already. Well, I do anyway! I have had very similar dressings before, and it is one that I really like- it has the whole sweet and salty thing going on. In this case, there was also a really great kick from some chilli paste. Plus, it had peanut butter in. And anything with peanut butter in can only be a good thing, right?

 

Even though it wasn't in the recipe, I added some tinned tuna. I knew I wanted to add something to it, and toyed with several ideas (sausages and chicken amongst others!) and in the supermarket I went for tuna. To be honest, you don't need to add anything, the noodles were yummy on their own, but the tuna did go very well. I have to say, I am really looking forward to this for the next week.

 

 

You may have read about the calzone I had for Freestyle Friday #15. Well, I did indeed have it for tea on Friday. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it was quite handy to eat at the train station as I didn't need any cutlery and I could hold it in one hand while I got on the train! So if you find you have to eat on the go and still want to enjoy homemade food, calzone or a pasty could be the way to go. 

Freestyle Friday #15

I know this is a bit in advance, but I thought that as I've already made the meal, I may as well tell you about it. I had a pizza base in the freezer, as I quite often do, and I decided to use it in a slightly different way to normal. Instead of making a normal pizza, I made a calzone. If you don't know, a calzone is a folded over pizza... it is a bit like an Italian Cornish pastie really! Inside I had tomato pureé, a little mozzarella, some jalapenos, and slightly more unusual, turkey mince and capers. I have had pizzas with turkey mince and capers on, but never together. But you never know. It could be the best combination I've ever had. Oh, and I also added one each of a shredded cos lettuce and iceberg lettuce leaf, and some peas, just because I like a bit of vegetables/greenery with all my meals if I can! The turkey mince was a portion I had cooked previously and frozen, but the peas I just put in from frozen, as they don't take much cooking at all... and I could see through the hole that they are cooked so it was clearly the right decision...

 

Yes, it's a bit messy, but I don't mind (too much!). It was okay until I streched the half without the filling on over the top of the filling to seal it. Maybe it was a bit overfilled, but at least it will be filling, and I didn't want to have all crust and no filling. Saying that, I like a large crust margin on my pizzas, and I always eat the crust at the end! I didn't know how long to cook it for, but I just trusted my instinct and took it out when it was this lovely golden brown colour. As the meat was already cooked I wasn't too worried, but I didn't want the dough to be raw. I know the dough is cooked, as I had to break a corner off to fit it in my tub! It smelled lovely when it came out of the oven, very pizza-like- I can't believe I have to wait until Friday to try it! 

Ratatouille is Ready for the Week!

So I said on Friday that I was doing something different with my menu this week. Well, my menu is actually not very different this week! I am having the same thing every day. While I am at work, I don't have that much time in the evenings to prepare my food for the next day, so only having to prepare lunch instead of two meals will hopefully make things that little bit easier. And it is cheaper too! Now, I'm not saying I'll do this every week from now on, but certainly for the next five weeks while I am at work. My first experiment of mass cooking for a week is ratatouille.

Aside from a bit of chopping at the start, ratatouille really looks after itself. I have quite a few recipes for it, but this one served six, which is just how many servings I wanted. Some of the recipes were oven baked, but this one was cooked on a hob.

All this to chop!

 

All my vegetables chopped and ready to go. The tomatoes had to be skinned but even this didn't take up much time as I nicked a cross in the bottom of them and covered them with boiling water before I started chopping everything else, and just did them last. 

 



They only just fit in my saucepan! This created a bit of a problem at the start as I couldn't stir it very well, but once the bottom layers had cooked down a bit it was much easier. And all the pieces were evenly cooked, which I was glad about.

Everything is just about mixed in at this point...

 

See, it worked!

The recipe itself contained herbs (basil, parsley and thyme), and I decided to rip up some more to go on top as I had quite a bit left over. It was quite chilly here yesterday, and a piping hot bowl of this for tea was just right!

All ready for the next five days.

 

 

I was a little bit dubious about doing this as I like to get as many new recipes as I can ticked off in my recipe books, but like I said earlier, I don't have to do it every week. And I have a lifetime to try them all, so no need to rush!

This Week's Wonders

Again, due to my shift pattern, I haven'thad much time to blog so I'm now going to do a run down of what you've missed this week.

I made a nut roast for the first time last week. I loved nut roasts, even though I'm not a vegetarian. I know nut roasts might seem like the 'token vegetarian dish', but if done right I think they can be really nice. This is what I did to make mine.

 I dissolved some Marmite in water...

...and then added chopped mixed nuts (Brazil nuts, walnuts, pecans and almonds)...

...breadcrumbs...

...chopped onion...

... and seasoning...

...and mixed it all up!

 

I baked mine in a ramekin as I was only doing the one portion (a mistake, I could have eaten that many times over!), but the normal recipe is done in a loaf tin or oven proof dish. However, even if you are doing this for more than one person, it would be a little but different to do it in individual ramekins. Saying that, I do like it sliced as well... so I'll leave it up to you how you do it!

 

 

And Freestyle Friday #17. This week, I had a bit of leftover roasted butternut squash from this recipe. I also had quite a few general salad bits. This is what I came up with.

 

These are two of the massive leaves you get on the outside of whole lettuces. I have seen quite a few recipes that use various types of leaf to wrap things in so I thought I would do something similar.

I roughly mashed the squash and divided it equally between two leaves so I would have the oppurtunity to do two different fillings.

The two I decided on were crumbled blue cheese, and sultana mixed spice. I came up with blue cheese because there is a dish that I absolutely LOVE called Butternut Squash and Blue Cheese pasta, so I knew the combination would go well. As this type of squash is slightly sweet, I tried a sweeter filling for the other wrap.

To keep them together, I had to wrap them in the clingfilm straightaway, hence the horrible picture! I can promise though, they tasted a lot better than they look here. The sultana spice one I had as a sort of 'pudding' after the blue cheese one. It wasn't too sweet though, just right. I had originally planned to use cinnamon, but I didn't have any, and I think it would have been sweeter if I'd used it. That is a combination to try another day!

 

 

I am cooking my meals a little differently this week, and I'll be posting soon about the how and the why...