Making the most of local arts

Work is really busy at the moment, so we are relying quite heavily on our stock of freezer meals. However, when I feel as though there might be a bit of time for cooking, I relish the opportunity to cook a meal completely using fresh ingredients. Friday last week was one of those opportunities, I finished work in the morning and took my son to a local arts centre, New Brewery Arts in Cirencester for lunch. This is a regular lunch date that I share with my son and it's fair to say that we both love it. Normally we have a bowl of delicious home-made soup and a child's sandwich. This has recently been joined by a shortbread star which is my son's favourite pudding treat. I love the food that they serve, the bread is from a local bakery and they always have a fabulous range of home-made meals and cakes on offer. Afterwards, we'll go and look at the current exhibition that is showing, at the moment, this is a tactile ceramic exhibition which is so much fun, especially as you can touch everything! My particular favourite is the noise making ceramic pots, including the readymade sticks to beat them with.

Anyway, I digress from what I actually cooked on Friday night! This is a meal that will need your attention from start to finish but it can be prepared and on the table in 30 minutes (it is easier with a little help if you can get it!) Children love little meat balls and this sauce is a great way of including a couple of vegetables to make it really colourful. I can understand why parents try to hide vegetables in tomato sauces but this isn't the reason why I use a mini food processor to finely chop the onion and carrot, it's simply a really convenient way to get finely chopped vegetables. This easily fed two adults and our son on Friday night but if you wanted to feed more people, you could increase the amount of meatballs or you could add more vegetables to the sauce or cook some garlic bread to go with the dish. We served ours with a small pack of cooked gnocchi.

Pork meatballs, tomato sauce and gnocchi

Pork meatballs

250g Pork mince

50g breadcrumbs

50g grated parmesan

Salt & pepper

1 tbsp chopped fresh sage (use less if using dried sage)

1 tbsp vegetable oil

Tomato sauce

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 onion

1 large carrot

Tin of chopped tomatoes

1 tbsp tomato paste

1 tsp oregano

200g spinach

1. In a large bowl mix together all of the ingredients for the pork meatballs. I use a fork to help me get this started but it is best to get stuck in with hands.
   
2. In a large frying pan, pour 1 tbsp vegetable oil and place on a medium heat. Make your pork mix into small meatballs, you can make them whatever size you prefer, but I tend to keep them small so that they cook through relatively quickly, about the size of a walnut is good. Place them in the frying pan, try not to turn them too early, they need to brown so that they don't stick to the pan.
   
3. Chop the onion and carrot finely (this is where I used my mini food processor). Once the meatballs are starting to look cooked add 1 tbsp vegetable oil and the carrot and onion. Let this cook for a few minutes until the carrot and onion start to soften.
   
4. Find a large saucepan and fill the kettle and set it to boil (this is for the gnocchi).
   
5. Add the tin of chopped tomatoes, tomato paste and oregano to the frying pan containing the meatballs. Make sure the heat is medium or lower as you don't want to burn anything. Keep stirring the sauce.
   
6. Cook the gnocchi according to the packet instructions.
   
7. Add the spinach to the frying pan and if you have a lid, put the lid on. Give the spinach a few minutes to steam and then stir into the sauce. Drain the gnocchi once it is cooked and add to the frying pan. Give everything one last stir to make sure the gnocchi is coated and serve.
   

Cookery books are brilliant for inspiration

This is from a book I bought a long time ago called The Essential Baking Cookbook" published by Murdoch Books. I am terrible for buying books, I always joke that I don't drink and I don't smoke but my addiction is buying books. Just borrowing them from the library isn't enough and one of my dreams has always been to have my own library. Anyway, as a result I have a reasonable collection of cookery books and quite a few of them are about baking. This particular one was bought from a book club that visited where I was working at the time. It has turned out to be a really good book as there are several recipes that I use regularly, including my breakfast blueberry muffins which are adapted from this book. I think it is important to have books as they can inspire you to try new things. Don't get me wrong, I don't think a book will ever inspire me to eat more mussels or squid (sorry seafood lovers) but the recipes can give good ideas which you can either use as they are written or adapt to suit your needs more.

As I've mentioned previously baking is the 'thing' my son and I share. He can play cars and tractors for hours with Daddy but baking is our special time where we work together and enjoy sharing. He's learning some great skills that I hope he will be able to use one day. Actually, whilst we were making these at the weekend my husband even said to our son that he ought to learn to cook so that he can get himself a decent wife when he's older. Apparently if he can cook her a good meal he will! I'm not sure how far I believe that philosophy but I do believe in getting our son involved, he's much more likely to eat something he's been included in preparing and it gives him the confidence to try out new things. He loved helping to rub the butter into the flour and stir in the cheese but admittedly got a bit carried away with combining the wet ingredients, so some of the later scones were a little bit tougher! A recent equipment purchase I made was a set of different size scone cutters, so ours varied in size. We visit a really great local art centre that makes really good quality food and when you buy their soup it comes with sliced bread and a mini cheese scone, now I can recreate those mini cheese scones.

Cheese scones

Makes 6

Prep time :15 minutes

Total cooking time: 15 minutes

125g self-raising flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 tsp dry mustard

Pinch of salt

15g unsalted butter, chilled and cubed

15g grated parmesan

45g finely grated cheddar

125ml milk

1. Preheat the oven to 220C and lightly grease a baking tray. Sift flour, baking powder and mustard and a pinch of salt into a bowl. Rub in the butter with your fingertips.
   
2. Stir in the parmesan and 30g of the cheddar then make a well in the centre and add most of the milk.
   
3. Use a flat-bladed life, use a cutting action to bring the dough together. Work the dough as little as possible. Use remaining milk if necessary.
   
4. With floured hands, gently gather the dough together and pat into a smooth ball on a floured surface. Use cutters to cut out shapes to the size you want. Gently bring the remaining dough together and cut out more shapes.
   
5. Place shapes together on the baking tray and sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top. Move the scones away from each other so that they don't stick together whilst baking.
   
6. Place in the oven for about 15 minutes or until the tops are golden. Best enjoyed warm
   

Cod with lentils and bacon

I'm sure that there are fancier ways of cooking this that you would get if you visited a good restaurant. Well, restaurant visits are few and far between in this household so I guess that's one reason why this meal is a tasty change. I have to admit though that it did fox our little boy, he's normally quite adventurous and did try a few bites of this, but he was tired and really didn't want to try it tonight. I'm sure though that I'll serve it again another night and he'll try it again. We didn't make a fuss of him about it, merely encouraged him and when he was clearly not interested left him alone. He has to wait until we've finished our main course before he's allowed to leave the table and tonight I let him have pudding (sliced mango and a strawberry fromage frais) as he did try his main course.  

I'm still trying to use dried beans and pulses more but at the moment my biggest enemy is forgetting to put the beans in to soak the night before I intend on using them. However, the lentils I used for this dish are great, they need cooking for 15-20 minutes and then they're ready. I've got them in a jar because it looks nicer, but it means that I've lost the packet, so when I say they're green lentils, check your own packet first for preparation guidelines just in case! I had time this afternoon to pre-cook the lentils before assembling the dish but the recipe card that originally inspired this dish used ready prepared puy lentils. You could use a tin or pouch of lentils and it would cut down on preparation time but the end result would be just as tasty.

Cod with lentils and bacon (served 2 adults)

Cooking time: 30 minutes 

2 long sweet peppers

80g cooked green lentils

2 skinless boneless cod loins (another white fish would work equally as well)

1 mozzarella ball

3 slices of thinly sliced smoked bacon (this was all I had left after the weekend)

2 tomatoes (or baby tomatoes)

1 lemon

1 tbsp olive oil

Black pepper

1. Preheat an oven to 200C. Slice each pepper down the middle, keeping the stalk intact and remove the pith and seeds. Place in a large/medium oven dish and cover with the lentils.
   
2. Lay the cod on top of the lentils. Slice the lemon into quarters and place into the oven dish along with the tomatoes. If you're using full sized tomatoes, slice them into quarters, if using baby tomatoes put them in whole.
   
3. Thinly slice the mozzarella and place all over the dish, including the fish. Drizzle the olive oil over the whole dish and ground some black pepper.
   
4. Drape the bacon over fish and put in the oven to cook for about 30 minutes. If the bacon is cooking too quickly, lower the heat. I prefer crispy bacon so don't put tin foil over the top.
   

Tired after a party, it's so nice to come home to a warming stew

This is a really yummy meal, in my husband's words "the sauce is really tasty". I had bought some stewing beef on a freezer trip to our local butcher and because I knew that the meat would be good quality I wanted to keep it simple to let the flavour come through. I also knew that I would be going to a birthday party in the afternoon with my nearly 3 year old son and didn't want to be having to prepare and cook food when I got home. As it's the weekend, I was able to quickly prepare this after lunch and leave it in the bottom oven of the Aga cooking whilst we enjoyed a bouncy castle, party games and birthday cake. I also used it as an opportunity to make a portion for the freezer. We've both been really busy with work lately and the next month is just as busy, so having 'freezer meals' ready to go in the oven is proving a real blessing.  

As we were organised we managed to get to the supermarket relatively early for us and so when we got home had time to prepare some cheese scones. We mainly made these to enjoy with some shop bought tomato soup for lunch, but had a few left over and we really enjoyed eating them with the beef stew and using them to soak up the sauce. It does have alcohol in and if you are a non-drinker you could choose to leave it out. I don't drink alcohol but I do like to cook with it as I think it adds to the meal, particularly a stew such as this.  

Beef stew

Serves 4 (or 2 people and portion for 2 in the freezer) plus our toddler

1 tsp vegetable oil

20g butter

400g (less or more is ok) stewing beef

Ground black pepper

1 tbsp plain flour

1 large glass red wine

1 beef stock cube

1 onion

3 large carrots

300g baby new potatoes

2 dried bay leaves

Dried thyme

1 tbsp tomato paste

Splash Worcestershire sauce

1. Preheat the oven to 140C. Over a medium heat melt the butter and oil together. Add the meat and increase the heat. Meanwhile peel and chop the onion and carrot.
   
2. Once the meat has browned add the flour and black pepper and stir in. Next add the red wine. Turn down the heat to medium and cook the alcohol off. You can tell that this has happened when you smell the steam and can't smell the alcohol. Meanwhile set a nearly full kettle to boil.
   
3. Add all the remaining ingredients and enough boiling water to just cover everything. Stir gently and bring to the boil.
   
4. Once it has reached boiling, cover and place in the oven. I left mine cooking for over 4 hours in a low temperature oven, but if you are short(er) on time 1 to 2 hours would be ok.
   

Honey mustard chicken

There are some things in my fridge that I buy, use once or twice and then forget to finish using it, curry paste and mustard are two that often thwart me. Now that I'm thinking more about what I buy and throw away, I'm trying to be more creative with the contents of our cupboards and fridge. So as well as cooking curry from scratch more often, I thought I'd try out a recipe using the wholegrain mustard sitting in the fridge. My husband isn't the biggest fan of mustard in any shape or form and whilst our son is adventurous I was worried that too strong a taste would put him off. This was also a good opportunity to cook with a cheaper cut of chicken, namely, thighs. I think that they work out about half the price of a chicken breast but are much tastier. There is a bit more fat and bits that you might want to cut off but it is de-skinned and de-boned but the end result is juicier once cooked.

Honey mustard chicken (feeds 2 adults and 1 toddler)

5 Chicken thighs (or whatever is in the packet of chicken)

1 tbsp oil (I used sunflower)

1 tsp wholegrain mustard

1 tsp honey

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Place the chicken onto a baking tray. Mix together the oil, mustard and honey in a bowl.
   
2. Brush or spoon the mix onto the chicken. If you prefer a stronger taste, make more mix or use more to cover a piece of chicken.
   
3. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes or until chicken is cooked through.
   

I cooked ours this evening with potato wedges and parsnip wedges roasted in the oven. My mum gave me a magic mat for Christmas which is really useful as you don't need to have oil and the potatoes/meat/whatever doesn't stick to the tray.

Quick I need a salad

This is such a quick and easy salad but livens up a dull carrot completely. I bought a huge bag of carrots in the supermarket and knew that to make the most of this economy I needed to be creative in my cooking that week. I also had a friend coming over for lunch and had decided to cook some baked potatoes (my go-to lunch option for visitors it seems) but wanted more than just cheese, ham and home made chutney to go with them. Grated carrot is always nice and can be a lovely addition to a salad. My downfall at this stage was that I didn't have any green leaves so I wanted to make my carrot into more of a salad in its own right. A quick root through my store cupboard and this is what I came up with. It is better if it can be left to chill for a while in the fridge, overnight and the flavours really blend together well. Simply stir all the ingredients together into a dish and enjoy

Carrot salad

2/3 medium carrots (grated)

1-2 tbsp raisins

2 tsps poppy seeds

Juice of 1/2 orange