Pasta with tomato sauce - Veggie lasagna - Chicken soup

Pasta with tomato sauce
A bit of a family speciality, this one.

Olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large clove garlic, chopped
300g mushrooms
1 tin plum tomatoes
1/2 glass red wine
Black pepper
Basil
Oregano

Heat the oil in a large saucepan.

Fry the onion and garlic until soft, then add the mushrooms.

When the mushrooms are softening, add the wine and the tomato. You can add a tablespoon of tomato puree to thicken.

Add fresh ground pepper, basil and oregano to taste.

For a meat sauce, you can add minced beef, meatballs or chopped sausage at the same time as the mushrooms, adding the tomato once the meat is browning.

This serves 3-4 with 75-90g of pasta per person and salad, 2-3 on its own.

You can also leave the mushrooms out, in which case a dash of mushroom ketchup adds a good flavour, although it isn't gluten free, unfortunately. This makes a less substantial sauce, but one which works very well mixed in with a large quantity of pasta to serve a lot of people.

Vegetarian lasagna
An experiment. The first iteration also used celery, but we figure it would be better without.

Olive oil
1 leek
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
2 beetroots, chopped
1 courgette, chopped
250g mushrooms, chopped
Black pepper
Oregano
Basil
1 tin plum tomatoes
1/2 pint milk
3 tsp cornflour
250g ricotta
50g grated cheddar

Split the leek to the core and simmer in almost-boiling water to soften.

Grease an oven dish and heat the oven to roughly 180-200 degrees.

Heat the oil and fry the onion and garlic until softened. Add the carrot and beetroot and fry for c.3-5 minutes.

Add the courgette and mushroom and fry briefly, then add herbs and pepper to taste, followed by the tomatoes. Simmer for c.10 minutes.

Warm the milk. Mix the cornflour with 3 tsp milk, then add to the milk pan. Heat and add the ricotta to melt.

Spoon half the vegetable mix into the dish.

Separate the layers of leek and lay across the dish. Spoon in the remaining vegetables, then cover with a layer of the ricotta sauce. Cover with another layer of leeks, the remaining cheese sauce and top with grated cheddar.

Bake for 20 minutes.

Chicken soup
Oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
3 chicken thighs, trimmed and chopped
2 carrots, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
250g mushrooms, chopped
500ml chicken stock
1 glass white wine
Black pepper
Oregano
1/2 cup frozen sweetcorn
1 portion bean noodles

Heat the oil and fry the onion and garlic until softened.

Add the chicken and brown, then add the carrots and celery, frying for c.3-5 minutes.

Add the mushrooms and 1/2 a cup of wine, cover and simmer for 3-5 minutes.

Add the remaining wine, stock and herbs to taste.

Simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the sweetcorn and noodles and simmer until the noodles are soft.

On the first attempt, I blitzed this before adding the corn and noodles, and the result was somewhat heavy. With the bean noodles to add body, I do not think the soup requires blending.

Ghoulish

It's like goulash, but not quite. This can be made as a sort of a recipe of necessity with just the italicised ingredients, but provides a basis for something more substantial.

Ghoulish
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 chilli, chopped
500g braising beef, cubed
250g mushrooms, chopped
2 tbsp tomato puree
1/2 glass port
1 pint beef stock
3 tsp paprika
1 tsp cumin seed
1 bay leaf
3 tbsp sour cream

Heat a small quantity of oil in a large saucepan. Fry the onion and garlic until soft, then add the meat, turning until browned all over. Cover and simmer for 5-10 minutes.

Add the mushrooms, cumin and paprika and stir. Cover and simmer for about 3 minutes.

Stir in the tomato puree. As we were short on other ingredients, we also added some frozen broccoli here.

Add the wine, stock and bay leaf. Bring the liquid to a near-boil, turn down the heat and simmer for about 30 minutes.

Stir in sour cream to finish.

Serve with rice or thick noodles.

Le Weekend en mangeables

Yeah; it's been a while since I sat my GCSE French exams.

Friday was white fish day. As I had the family over, I pushed the boat out and made a rather splendid risotto (props to Andrew for fetching things I'd forgotten from Waitrose twice). The recipe follows at the end of the entry. In this instance I was 'forced' to use cod loin because the more affordable fillets of cod and haddock were sold out; I may try using smoked fish at a future date.

The wine was a pinot grigiot, for those who care, and the vegetable stock was Marigold vegan (entirely gluten free, as a bonus). I used white cup mushrooms for economy; adding another 500g of portobello or other, darker and meatier mushrooms and leaving out the fish converts this into an equally yummy vegetarian dish.

In terms of seasoning, I used oregano and paprika.

If you're feeling flush, you can also use fresh peas, of course. You could also use fish stock, but commercial fish stocks are usually made with a lot of shellfish, a taste I do not care for.

Saturday was 'anything you like day', so Andrew and I had all-day breakfasts at the pub during Geist and Hannah had a chicken salad. For dinner we had macaroni cheese, made with cheddar and brie and cherry tomatoes in the sauce, followed by a lettuce, tomato and beetroot salad.

Sunday was vegetarian day (I slightly cheated and had a tuna sandwich, but they're relatively cheap and the alternative seemed to be Marmite). Dinner was a carrot and lentil loaf from Mean Beans, a cheap veggie food cookbook I've owned since my student days and rarely used (self-catering facilities in college having been a bit of a joke) with new potatoes and corn on the cob, as Waitrose were selling bags of 6 cobs for £2.

The loaf was experimental for me, and not unsuccessful; although in the end a little loose for a loaf, it was most tasty with a little chutney. It would also have gone well with Andrew's homemade ketchup.

Fish and Mushroom Risotto (serves 3-4)
Olive oil
350g white fish
1 chilli, finely chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
White wine
500ml vegetable stock
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
500g mushrooms, chopped
Herbs and spices to taste
150g rosotto rice
1 cup frozen peas or petit pois
1/2 cup crated parmesan

Heat a little olive oil in a small frying pan and add the fish, whole, and the chilli. Add the lemon juice and almost cover with wine. Simmer, turning the fish occasionally, until it is just cooking through and flakes easily.

Meanwhile, heat some more oil in a large saute pan. Add the onion and garlic and fry until it begins to soften. Add the mushrooms and seasoning, and cook for approximately five minutes.

Add the rice and stir until coated, then add the cooking liquor from the fish. By this stage, this is a sort of lemon and white wine half-way fish stock with a pretty serious chilli kick.

Stir regularly until the stock is absorbed, then add another glass of white wine. Once that is absorbed, add vegetable stock gradually, until the rice is almost cooked to your preference.

Add a final portion of stock, the peas and the parmesan, and then flake the fish into the dish and stir. Once the rice is completely cooked, serve.

THE PLAN

At the core of my current weight loss attempts is THE PLAN, which runs as follows:

Breakfast
1 scoop muesli or 60g cereal, semi skimmed milk; cut down (or preferably out) sugar.

Lunch
Salads and soups for preference; cut right back on executive scrounging. This is at odds with my attempts to cut back on spending, of course, but a balance will hopefully out.

Dinner
MONDAY - Vegetarian
TUESDAY - White meat
WEDNESDAY - Oily fish
THURSDAY - Red meat
FRIDAY - Whitefish
WEEKEND - One day vegetarian, one day 'free'

Desserts
Fruits, fruit salads

General notes - cut down on cheese (such a sad face), sugar, salt and bacon as seasoning. Exercise proper portion control.
Of the two meat and two fish days, only one of each should be starch-heavy (pasta, rice, bread, potatoes).

And now, a food blog

That's right, I am starting yet another blog, this one as a record of my eating habits and recipes, both as a place for musing about food and in order to motivate myself to improve my habits.

Where I start from on this is as a man of thirty-some years of age, a shade over six feet tall and rather heavier than I would like. I am adopting a number of strategies to reduce my weight, having found direct calorie counting to be ineffective for me, and complicated by the fact that I am seeking to coordinate my diet with Hannah's (and Andrew's, although he's working in the other direction) across our two households.

Key strategies include:

• Portion control, as I know that I am guilty as anything over overfilling my plate.
• No snacks.
• Strategic scrounging; my place of work often has left over conference food, which I get to scavenge. It makes good economic sense, but I need to be smarter about it, in particular saving scavenged food for the next day if I have already eaten.
• Preparation for lunch; I need to have fruit, soups, sandwich fillings and good, wholemeal bread in at all times.
• THE PLAN, a long-term dietary plan.

A lot of this will be easier once I get my own place and am not wrestling with a crippling storage shortage (currently my bread tends to be stored on top of the spice sprawl), but I also need to be open and public about these steps in order to maintain my motivation.

But on top of this, I also want to celebrate food. I love food, and I love cooking. It's a key warning of depression when I find I don't want to cook. With that in mind, this is what I ate yesterday.

Warm Tuna Salad for 1

1 small tuna steak (you could use tinned tuna)

2 eggs

1/2 lettuce (I used a sweet gem, but anything would do; something with a bit of crunch though)

2 medium tomatoes (although I actually used a handful of cherry tomatoes)

1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1/2 tbsp olive oil

fresh ground black pepper

Hard boil the eggs.

Heat a small amount of olive oil in a small frying pan.

Grind pepper onto the tuna steak and place in the pan, peppered side down. Grind more pepper onto the top side and then flip over. You should only cook the tuna for about a minute on each side; you want the last bits of pink in the middle just turning, no more, otherwise the fish will be too dry.

Chop the lettuce, rinse and place in a bowl. Chop and add the tomatoes and drizzle over the dressing.

Shell and slice the eggs. Break the tuna into small pieces and add the warm ingredients to the salad bowl.