Burns Day Food Ideas

Em... better late than never?  I half wrote this and it got lost in my brain for a while and I just don't want to waste it... So!  Burns day food ideas.  I'm going to keep this simple, things to do with haggis and how to make shortbread.


Haggis is still on offer in the shops up here in Scotland so it's still fair game to eat far too much of it in my book!  Haggis is a funny beast that lots of folk don't like because they've only ever eaten it with horrid mash and wet turnip, and then there are the folk who just don't like the idea of it.  I am not one of them - I love the stuff.

Shortbread is not hard to make, I promise.  It doesn't have to be hard anyway.  This is one of those things that my Gran Betty can just make happen like magic and my Mum has he same skill.  Maybe one day I'll get there, but I promise it's not hard!  I also think this is the only recipie that I have committed to momory in ounces as it's so easy to remember!

Ingredients:

2oz (55g)  room temperature butter
4oz (125g) butter
6oz (180g) plain flour

And the rest is pretty easy too!

Preheat the oven to 190 deg C and beat the butter and sugar toegther till smooth.  Make sure it's really smooth, no short cuts here!  Stir in the flour little by little and you will end up with a smooth paste. Roll out on a floured board till it's about 1cm thick.  Now shape it however you want to!  Cut it into fingers, cut it into shapes with a cutter, keep it whole in a round and press it with a shortbread brand... use your imagination!  Bake it in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes (if you do a round it will need more time).  When it is baked and golden brown remove from the oven, place on a cooking rack and dust with castor sugar immediately.  Leave till it's cook and enjoy.  Or share.  But mainly enjoy.

And there we are, better late than never!  Yeah?  I promise the next Celebration will be up in time for planning (as I'm away to write it very soon indeed!).

Menu Planning and Produce Box Three

Menu planning has become on of my Monday tasks and I am really starting to enjoy it!  I wait for my Produce box to come and then I make a list of all of the things I have been sent - then I sit down with my folder, with my books and with coloured paper and pens... and get cracking!  

This is my though process for this week... starting with this weeks Produce Box contents.

a small-ish bag of kale,

a head of broccoli, 

400g mange tout,

a box of grapes,

2 bananas,

a massive courgette,

a parsnip,

3 pears,

yellow bell pepper,

2 fat, dirty, winter carrots,

a sweet potato,

3 round fat tomatoes,

a leek,

a red onion,

a white onion,

3 massive tatties,

3 oranges,

2 apples, and,

2 nectarines. 

So now I have my list I work out what I will do with what.  This isn't a science, but the way that is working for me is to pick out the things that I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with and purpose them first then I can work with the rest.  The fruit I do not worry about as I eat it for breakfast and Brian eats it for lunch, and any left over will go in smoothies and in custard for pudding!  I also make a list of what I have left over from last week, what's in the fridge and what I have procured from the Mother and the Mother in Law (I got this and it was buy one free, would you use one? - the answer is almost always yes!).  

The existing, use it up list looked like this:

a white onion,

two lemons,

two small courgettes,

a head of celery,

a leek,

half a cucumber,

new potatoes, and

sugar snap peas.

These become the priorities to use before they are past their best.  

From the produce box list of mystery I picked out:

a small-ish bag of kale,

a massive courgette,

a parsnip,

a sweet potato,

a leek, and,

3 massive tatties. 

Now I think about what we are doing in the evenings each day of the week, and this week looks like this:

Monday - 

Tuesday - 

Wednesday - Silly busy day.  Needs to be an easy meal. 

Thursday - to the in laws for dinner.

Friday - 

Saturday - Lunch - 

Saturday - Dinner - Geekfest night.  No dinner needed as take out is happening at us! Whooo!

Sunday - Lunch - 

Sunday - Dinner - 

So now we finally look at meals!  I don't really plan lunches during the week but I do make sure that there is pleasant enough and planned out lunch at the weekend.  Brian almost always has a flat bread with meat, salad, cream cheese and some form of spicy condiment for the main element of his lunch so he's easily pleased.  I live on eggs, left overs, meat, soup and cheese.  Especially cheese.  

Please note that I was going into the stationary I use to plan all of this madness out, but I will do that separately as this post is turning into quite a thing!  

Ok!  Meal ideas.  I steel my self with a cuppa and grab my books that I refer to most (currently Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstalls River Cottage Veg and the Innocent Hungry?  Book) and we get cracking.  

Hit one - kale.  I am not a big fan of kale but it is excellent in soup, so soup it is.  My plan for this bag of kale is cannellini bean, barley and kale soup (recipe coming soon!) - so that's Saturday lunch sorted.  

Hit two - courgette.  I have been keen to make courgette fritters for a wee while but I'm not sure how I was going to fit them in to a menu that doesn't involve a roast chicken where I can serve them with left overs and new potatoes.  So I shall save that idea and for now the courgettes will go in a pasta bake.  This use of courgette is a good replacement for pasta (cut down the amount of pasta you use) to keep the calorie count lower.  

Hit three - sweet potato.  After last weeks soup incident I am not using this is soup... so what am I going to do with it?  It's getting roasted and we are eating it for Sunday lunch with... er... something.

Hit four - leeks. I have two of these now as I did't use last weeks one (bad Karen!) but I will use this up in my chicken parcels as they go so soft, so sweet and just yummy.  

So now we can fill in the week plan:

Monday - Roast gammon, new potatoes, and, sugar snap peas.

Tuesday - Baked risotto with left over gammon, mange tout, celery, onion, carrot and anything else I fancy!

Wednesday - Pasta bake, left over gammon, peppers, onions, home made tomato sauce. 

Thursday - to the in laws for dinner.

Friday - Mince and tatties, carrots, peas, broccoli.

Saturday - Lunch - Cannellini bean, barley and kale soup and bread. 

Saturday - Dinner - Geekfest night.  No dinner needed as take out is happening at us! Whooo!

Sunday - Lunch - Haggis toasties with cheese, onion and tomato.  

Sunday - Dinner - Chicken Parcels with roasted sweet potato, roasted white potato and mange tout.

And that's us done!  I know it looks complex but I can do this in about twenty minutes now and I actually enjoy doing it.  I do love a bit of a read and a plan.  So there we go... all planned out!  I'm not saying it always works which is why there is one more meal to plan... the emergency back up! This is almost always macaroni cheese, as we both love it, it's easy to make and it can be made in advance - so if I'm having a bad day I can make it early, if we get in later then it can be thrown together easily.  Done!  

I promise.  

Exploding Soup

Soup.  I love soup.  This weekend I decided that I was going to make soup as a reward to Brian and I for being such good humans and painting our hall.  We have been putting it off for two years...

So, I chopped up a butternut squash, a sweet potato and two carrots.  I put them in a pan with enough veg stock to cover them and then let them boil till they were soft.  

Then I let it cool, put it in the blender, and this happened...

I could have cried.  The bottom of my blender unscrews so that it can go in the dish washer and either I didn't screw it back in tight enough or it worked it's way loose in the blending process.  How unimpressed can one Karen be... fucks sake I was angry!  Almost a whole roll of kitchen roll later, a clean t shirt and a lot of swearing we had tinned soup for lunch, and the kitchen was tidy again.

And do you want to know what the worst bit is?  It was really, really tasty! I ate some from my hand before I cleaned it all up to see if it was worth making again some day.  It was, but if this ever happens again I will not be a happy bunny!

Easy Peasy Quick 'Baked' Potatoes

 I love baked potatoes but they take so long to cook that I can never be bothered baking them when I'm at home.  I never have them when I'm out to eat because it feels like a waste of 'eating out'.  So, imagine my joy when I saw a magic way to bake potatoes in forty minutes...  I had to do it, cover it in butter, salt and cheese and put it in my face.

This is so easy that I feel a fool for typing it...  Take a potato and cut down into it but not all the way to the bottom, it should fan open a bit.  If you do manage to cut all the way down it (like I did) then stab it back together with cocktail sticks.  Cover it in oil and then put it in the oven at at least 220 degrees C for forty minutes.  The skin will go all crispyand the flesh will bake but in a whole new way!

Take them out of the oven and remove the cocktail sticks, season and cover in butter.  Then just treat it like a baked potato.  Brian had his with mixed baked beans and cheese and I just stuck to my favourite, cheese and butter.  Delicious.  

This is Brian's review...

So I'm taking that as a ringing endorsement (what can I say, the boy loves baked beans) and I will be making these again, for sure.  There are three pre-baked baked potatoes in our freezer and I'm not sure if I can bring myself to eat them now!  The produce box is doing good things for my soul...

Veg Box Number One

I have tried a veg box before and to be honest it was a bit of a fail.  It was from a local-ish farm shop and for weeks on end I got bunches of kale and pumpkins that I could do little with.  So, I stopped for ages and recently signed up with my local green grocers to recieve one of their boxes.  

The deal is £10 of vegetables and £5 of fruit and it's delivered to the house on a Monday, just after lunch time.  It has come from Clementine of Broughty Ferrywhich is a lovely shop that I could spend a lot of time and a lot of money in.  One day I might find the courage to go in with the camera and ask if I can take photos... Maybe.

This is box number one and what I received in it:

three apples

two pears

two plumbs

two oranges

three bananas

a pomegranate

a courgette

half a cuecumber

a beetroot

1kg potatoes

a cauliflower

300g mushrooms

one red onion

one white onion

100g fine green beans

one massive sweet potato

one leel

a quarter turnip

3 massive dirty carrots

one red bell pepper

10 cherry tomatoes on the vine

one yellow bell pepper

If I had bought this all in my local supermarket it would have cost me £17.50.  Actually, I say if I had bought it all, I couldn't if I'd tried as my local shop doesn't sell pomegranates, raw beetroot or plumbs.  So paying £15 for all of it was not only cheaper but I got some lovely things that I wouldn't have been able to get my hands on otherwise.  

Everything smells and looks delicious - what we have eaten so far has been lovely and Brian loved the look of one of the apples so much de adopted it as his very own.  This box worth won't keep up going for a week, we will need more apples, oranges and bananas but other than that vive la veg box!  More next week with produce box number two!  

Lemon Hummus, Wraps and Carrot Sticks

Yes, it's hummus in a tea cup - what else does one serve hummus in?  Hummus is one of those things that I really enjoy to eat but had never made.  I have thought about it, but not actually done it.  Well... I have now!  

This was such an easy lunch to serve and pull together come lunch time, but making the hummous was not quick.  I used dried chick peas, in the name of trying to do things properly, but I shall not be doing that again.  By the time the peas have boiled and simmered for the time needed I think I used enough gas to justify buying tinned chickpeas!  So I have stocked up. I also found getting my hands on tahini a bit of a challenge and had to try three separate supermarkets, so don't give up hope if you can't find it!  Health food shops also stock it (well, most of 

I served this with, as you can see, carrot sticks and some wraps that had gone a bit past fresh, cut into bits and toasted under the grill.  These turned into the perfect hummus boats!

To make the hummus:

125g dried chick peas,

3 tablespoons of tahini,

2 tablespoons of olive oil,

one garlic clove,

the juice of two lemons,

a bay leaf and, 

water.

The night before you're wanting to make the hummus soak the chick peas in enough water to cover them, and leave them overnight.  

The next day drain them and rinse them well.  Put the chick peas and the bay leaf in a pan and bring to the boil.  Then reduce to a simmer for up to three hours - until you can push a fork happily through the peas.  Now drain the peas and keep the water.  

Into a blender place half of the peas, the tahini, the oil, the lemon juice and the mashed garlic.  Add the cooking liquor slowly till the mixture is quite smooth.  Now add the rest of the chickpeas and more of the liquid till you reach the consistency you like.  I made mine quite fine, but I think next time I will blend it less to get more bite.  

And that's what I did... but next time I think I shall add more lemon juice and maybe some chilli for Brian.  Maybe.  There are hundreds of variations to the recipe and I do fully intend to play with it! 

Magic Bread Dough

Since I embarked upon my quest to make better food bread has been a big focus.  I started looking at ingredients in shop bought bread and before I had done much research at all I decided action was needed.  This is the second bread recipie I have tried so far and I love it... but this one is magic.

As much as I love making sourdough it takes it's own precious time and I know that finding the time to do all that's needed to make it can be a challenge.  To this end I decided to stretch my skills and this felt like a sensible way to stretch them.

This is Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall's Magic Bread Dough recipe and I bloody love it.  I am experimenting with different things to do to it and I will keep you updated.

This dough can be used for:

pizza bases,
flat breads,
rolls, (see below)
bread,  (see below)
bread sticks,
stuffed bread sticks (work in progress here), and,
pitta breads.

You can also freeze it (according to Hugh), I have some in the freezer at the moment so I will report back...

Enough waffle, let's make bread.  These are the shortest instructions ever...

Take 250g of plain flour, 250g of string white flour, 10g of salt, 5g of fast action yeast and 325ml of warm water.  Put all of these things in a bowl and combine them together.  Then knead till it comes together, it will be stciky but try not to add too much flour, just stick with it.  Once it's come together and you have put 10 or so minutes kneading into it leave it to prove in a warm, dry place for up to two hours, till it's doubled in size.  Knock it back and it's ready do do stuff to!  How easy was that?

For a loaf or rolls shape it now and leave to prove again till it's doubled in size and then bake.  For rolls take a squash ball sized lump and round it off, it will be a tennis ball size when it's proved.  Then bake them in the oven at 220 degrees C for up to 12 minutes till they sound hollow.  For a loaf shape it and prove it, then tip it onto a hot floured oven tray and put it in the 220 degrees Celsius oven for 25 minutes to start, and bake for longer if needed till it sounds hollow.

This is my new quick bread recipe.  You could make up the mixture at the start of the day, prove all day and then knock back and bake in the evening.  Easy!  Coming later on this week I will have an even quicker bread recipe for emergency eatings (but I need to decided which recipe I prefer, oh no!  I need to make more bread!) so keep your eyes peeled for that!  Enjoy!