Stephen Brandwood

Very interesting breakfast recipes from Nigel Slater, including a ham, cheese and apple muffin and reinvented baked beans on toast.

I know what you’re thinking, it sounds like a weird combination, but actually it has a fantastic taste and is far more interesting than your typical pepperoni. The base is from the Veg Book’s magic dough and the topping is too a Veg Book recipe.

It’s as simple as softening some onions for 7 minutes, adding some garlic for 7 minutes and the shredded kale for 5 more, then dumping the ultra-thin base on a blistering hot baking sheet, covering with the toppings, sprinkling with grated mature cheddar and putting it in a full-temperature oven for 10 or so minutes.

In my haste to get the dough on the sheet, the edges got a bit squiffy and overlapped, creating what turned out to be an awesome crust.

The household is feeling under the weather, so a beef casserole was called upon to bring us back to strength.

It contained:

• 700g diced beef (farmer’s market mix of chuck and best-end braised)
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1 leek, roughly chopped
• 3 carrots, chopped into big chunks
• 5 bay leaves
• some sprigs of thyme
• 2 tbsp flour
• 2 tbsp tomato purée
• 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2 beef stock cubes, crumbled
• 450ml boiling water
• 150ml red wine (adjust water and wine proportions appropriately)

1. Set the oven to 160°C and put the kettle on. In some butter and oil fry the onion, leek, carrots, bay and thyme, softening for about 10 minutes. You can brown off your beef in batches in a separate pan, if you like.
2. Add the flour and mix well, then add the purée, Worcestershire and stock cubes and gradually stir in the water and wine, add the beef and bring to a simmer.
3. Cover in the oven for 2 hours 30 minutes, then remove the lid for around 30 minutes until the sauce thickens.

This Saturday I braved the cold to pop down to Stoke Newington Farmer’s Market to pick up some supplies for a beef casserole (see the next blog post). They have a nice selection of stalls, including a large supply of bread (see below), raw milk, cheese, some fish, a meat van and a selection of veggies.

The best part about a farmers market is that the stall staff know about the products they sell. I need only ask for “beef for a casserole” or “Are these potatoes good for roasting?” and they will direct me towards the perfect product - try doing that in Tescos.

The day’s food became a celebration of local growing and where that wasn’t possible, from local independent shops. I picked up the more exotic veg from the brand new veg shop on Stoke Newington Church Street, (one that serves no fewer than 4 types of garlic) and a bottle of wine from the well-stocked Clissold Wines. It was a fun trip that I’ll definitely be repeating.

Kedgeree is another of those easy to make dinners, and being fond of fish it’s a flat favourite. Cook some rice, hard boil some eggs and fry some smoked mackerel (skinless) in butter for five minutes, breaking it into pieces. Put it all together with quartered eggs and a bunch of peas, heat until sticky and add a splash of soy.

Lunch for a week. You should also add a splash of chilli oil as well, if you have any lying around.

One of my favourite dishes is this prawn stir fry, based on a Nigel Slater’s Real Cooking recipe. I can prepare, cook, eat and wash up in 30 mins and it tastes delicious.

For 2 servings you will need:

• 2 garlic cloves, finely sliced
• 1-2 red chillies, finely chopped
• bunch of spring onions, finely chopped
• teaspoon ginger, finely chopped
• 300g noodles, preferably fresh
• 200g raw prawns, preferably king sized
• soy sauce (or alternative of your choice)

And the method:

1. Heat sunflower oil in your big pan until very hot
2. Dump all of the veg into the pan and let it sizzle for a couple of minutes, until it starts to brown
3. Add the prawns (if using cooked prawns then wait another minute)
4. As the prawns go pink, add the noodles. You’ll find the pan dries up significantly at this point, keep stirring and then splash on a little soy sauce before anything sticks.
5. Eat.

The resulting dish is hot and focuses nicely on the noodles. I’ve tried adding bigger veg like peppers, but find they add too much bite to what is a very simple dish. Keep to the original seven ingredients for the best results.

On Saturday we were persuaded by the swordsman of Steamer Trading Cookshop in Cambridge to purchase a new knife. After discovering the secrets of knife forging I purchased a Robert Welch Santoku knife. As you can see, it makes short work of chillies.

I decided to turn my left over bread dough into a couple of flatbreads, following the instructions of the great veg book. It was a bit of a battle to roll the dough on my small work surface and it kept trying to shrink back into its shell, but eventually I got it ready for cooking.

The proposed method is simple: heat a pan until smoking hot, drop in the flatbread for two minutes on each side. Turns out there is a little more to it than that:

The second attempt was much better, though I’m not completely sure what I did wrong. Maybe I need a thicker based pan?

In celebration of three years together, my lovely girlfriend gifted me a bamboo steamer, with the intention that I’d use it to cook vegetables.

All I saw was dim sum, dim sum and more dim sum.

It took a couple of weeks before we finally made it over to Soho and Chinatown to pick up some wonton wrappers, in preparation for this BBC Good Food recipe.

The idea is quite simple: mince some pork, prawns, spring onion, garlic, ginger and water chestnuts, a splash of oyster sauce and put a teaspoon of the mixture into each little wonton parcel.

Load up the steamer, arm yourself with chopsticks and some dipping sauce and celebrate the new year in style!

We had a fridge filled with leeks and the Leek, cheese & bacon tart from BBC Good Food is an excellent way to use them up. 

A puff pastry boat, filled with softened leeks and bacon, on a bed of soft cheese, topped with even more cheese. 20 minutes in the oven and you’re welcomed with some golden crust and a very yummy dish!

A tasty one from the veg book tonight - pittas stuffed with carrot and chickpeas. The trick is that the carrots are softened for 10 minutes in a big pool of butter (and a tad of oil, though I’m not sure why) and some cumin seeds; garlic, orange zest and chickpeas go in for a couple of minutes and then a big squirt of orange juice right before serving.

A blob of soured cream in the pitta completes the lovely harmony of flavours, the orange perfectly complementing the veg. Mmmmm…

I decided to go wild this weekend and make some bread, for the first time ever! Using the recipe in the great veg book I set out to make a portion of ‘magic’ dough.

In retrospect I should have watched some Youtube videos before I started, but it turns out my natural kneading technique isn’t too shabby and I got some dough that proved quite nicely. I dumped 1/3 of it in the freezer for a pizza later in the week and turned the rest into bread rolls and (unexpectedly-)mini-pittas.

They are actually very yummy! Will definitely be making more in the weeks to come.

Tonight’s dish was a simple mix of greens from the fridge along with onion, chilli and garlic; based on a recipe in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s veg book. Brief run-down on how to make it:

1. Put 6 tbsps of olive oil in a pan on a low heat; add thinly sliced onions and cook gently for 10 minutes; then add some finely chopped chilli, sliced garlic, salt and pepper and cook for another 3 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, cook 350g pasta until al dente. You’ll want to add your veg into the same pot and have it all finish cooking together. In my case I chucked some broccoli (cut into small florets) in for 4 minutes and some cabbage (shredded) for the final 2.
3. Throughly drain the pasta, mix with the onions and serve - with a big pile of cheese on top.

For extra points, have some home-made mini-pittas for the side!

Pinto bean chilli on its way!

Our veg box arrives, sadly lacking the promised kale and leeks :-(

For the last few weeks we’ve been constructing our fortnightly food intake around an Ocado vegetable box, a lovely mix of 11 seemingly random organic vegetables, from the pointy parsnips to the lovely leeks.

After being gifted the amazing River Cottage Veg book, I’ve decided that it’s time to do this properly and concentrate on getting a proper amount of vegetables into my diet; and of course having some fun while I do it.

This blog is the story of my journey from beetroot to turnips (two vegetables I have yet to eat, as it happens).