Coq au Vin

This one is a bit of a classic which I semi-improvised around. The onions and garlic should be good and chunky in this recipe. The carrots should be in fat slices and the mushrooms quartered. This is a hearty, rustic stew, so the veg should be chunky.

6 thick rashers bacon (or pack of pancetta or lardons)
2 small-to-medium onions
3 cloves garlic*
6 chicken thighs, bone in
300g mushrooms
Two carrots
600ml red wine
300ml chicken stock

Chop the bacon up and fry in a large saucepan or stock pot. Trim the fat, but do not remove it all; much of the cooking fat should come from the bacon.

Add the onions and garlic, roughly chopped. Cover and simmer until the onion starts to soften.

Add the chicken and brown on both sides.

Add the carrots and mushrooms, roughly chopped.

Add the wine and stock. Bring to the boil, then turn down to a steady simmer. Cook for about 30-40 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through.

Serve with mash, noodles or rice.

* Some recipes describe the garlic in coq au vin as 'optional', but how can anything with that strong a flavour be optional?

Veg Box

This weekend, we mostly cooked using Hannah's organic veg box. Ingredients from the box are marked with an asterisk (*).

Friday - Chicken Casserole
1/2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
3 medium carrots*
350g chicken breast fillet, cubed
500g mushrooms, chopped*
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp oregano
2 medium leeks, sliced*
1/2 glass white wine
2 chicken stock pots
1 red pepper, sliced*
1/2 cup rice

Heat the oil in a large stockpot over a medium-high heat.

Add the onion, garlic and carrot. Stir well, cover and sweat until the onion begins to soften.

Add the chicken and mushrooms and the paprika and oregano. Keep turning until the meat is sealed on all sides and beginning to brown.

Add the leeks, stir, then add the wine and one of the stock pots, stirring until it melts. Melt the other stock pot in 500ml of boiling water.

Add the stock, stir and cover. Bring to an easy boil, reduce the heat and simmer for about 10 minutes.

Add the peppers and the rice and simmer until the rice has absorbed enough liquid to be al dente.

Saturday - Lamb Tagine
This is the same recipe as my last entry, but with lamb shoulder from the local butcher. Being mostly fruit, we didn't use the box veg.

Sunday - Chicken Soup
1/2 tsp olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 medium carrots, chopped*
1 leek, sliced*
200g chicken breast fillet, cubed
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp black pepper
500ml chicken stock
2 nests rice noodles

Heat the oil in a saucepan.

Sweat the onion, garlic and carrots for a few minutes, then add the chicken and leek. I was using the chicken from frozen, so I actually sweated the vegetables in a separate pan until the meat was defrosted and sealed.

Add the herbs and stock. Simmer for about 15-20 minutes until the carrots are almost cooked through.

Add the noodles and cook for 5 minutes.

Sunday - Sausages and new potatoes with cabbage and bacon

1 tbsp olive oil

6 sausages (I used Fen Farm venison and pork, which at 100% meat are also entirely gluten free)

6 medium new potatoes, roughly chopped*

2 small carrots, roughly chopped*

1 tsp rosemary

1/2 tsp black pepper

2 cloves garlic, halved

1/2 tbsp olive oil

1 small onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

3 rashers unsmoked bacon, chopped

1 medium cabbage, shredded*

Coat the base of a large roasting dish in oil. Arrange the sausages, potatoes and carrots in the dish and season with the garlic, rosemary and pepper.

Place in a preheated oven at 180C, turning the food in the dish every 10-15 minutes for 30-40 minutes.

After 30 minutes, heat the oil in a saute pan. 

Sweat the onion, garlic and bacon until softening, then add the cabbage a few handfuls at a time, stirring and adding more as it reduces in size.

Cook the last of the cabbage for about 5 minutes and then remove from the heat. Cover the pan while cooking if you want to soften the crunch.

Serve the sausage and potatoes on a bed of cabbage. The carrots in this recipe were the last in the box, included mostly for show (and because we know that our baby daughter will eat them), but they could be scaled up easily.

The veg was excellent quality. The carrots and cabbage were notable for their flavour, and the richness of the mushrooms created a much darker and earthier casserole than I had been expecting.

Creamy mushroom pasta

This is a really good, simple recipe. It's also very flexible, if you fancy something more substantial.

1 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
600g mushrooms, sliced
4-5 tbsp creme fraiche
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp basil
1 tsp oregano
Black pepper

Optionally
3 rashers bacon, chopped and fried with the onion and garlic
150g chicken thighs, replacing 300g of mushrooms

Heat the oil in a saute pan on a medium-high heat. Add the onion and garlic, lower to medium heat and fry until soft.

Add half the mushrooms and stir. After about a minute, add the other half. I usually use half plain white mushrooms and half portobello or chestnut.

Add the herbs and spices, cover the pan and allow the mushrooms to saute in their own juices, stirring occasionally.

Stir in the creme fraiche and simmer while stirring.

Serve with tube or thick ribbon pasta.

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.