43 posts tagged “main meal”

Now I've gone back to work, I'm finding it diffcult to guarantee enough energy to cook properly in the evenings. Plus it's COLD, and we want the sort of food that takes ages and ages. And we're poor. So I've been cooking several stews or similar over the weekend, that can just be finished off and reheated. Today I've made:

• red cabbage in red wine, with onions, bacon, goose dripping, thyme, bay and lots of pepper - to be finished with vacuum packed chestnuts and to eat with gammon steaks and baked potato if we're really hungry
• beef braised with fresh ginger, star anise, slices of mandarin orange, lots of carrots, beef stock and sake

I've got something with celeriac and blue cheese in the pipeline, but that will have to be last minute. There's a curry sauce and veg waiting to be stir-fried with some chicken. Which makes four huge meals and puts me ahead of the game. In the past few weeks we've had:

• goose legs cooked in fat with garlic and thyme in the slow-cooker, fished out and flashroasted
• venison liver braised with bacon and lots of red onion in stock and redcurrant jelly
• soft tortillas stuffed with beans, or veg, or chilli, coated with spicy tomato sauce, topped with cheese and baked
• giant suet herb dumplings cooked in thin veg soup

The larger Christmas meats are beginning to show up now, especially in freezers, and I'm thinking about how to do those and then portion them up.

I bought a tube of good sausagemeat at the farmers' market on Thursday. Today I spread it in the bottom of a square baking dish (it came out about a quarter inch thick). Then I topped it with some slabs of mature cheddar, and spread those with wholegrain mustard. I had a tin of pear halves hanging about, so I put a half a pear in each corner of the dish. Topped the whole lot with a square of ready rolled puff pastry, and baked at gas mark 7 for 40 minutes.

We ate all of it, with some peas, but with some more forethought and some potatoes and other veg, it would have easily served four.

I've been thinking of variations -

• cheese and branston pickle
• a layer of braised red cabbage, maybe with chestnuts
• apple sauce or chunks of apple instead of the pear
• cranberries
• a chunky tomato sauce
• hard boiled eggs
• apricots / dried fruit and maybe some curry powder
• blue cheese and braised celery or chicory

all of them easy to do, easy to make in advance, cheap, filling and tasty.

Cheap and yummy, what more could you want? Get a big baking potato, lay it flat and slice off the top. Scoop out a hollow in the big piece (a melon baller really helps), season it, and drop in a cored lamb kidney. Put the top back on and bake it at about Gas Mark 5 for about an hour and a half.

The potato is crisp, the kidney is gently cooked and moist, and the juices have oozed through into the floury potato inside.

I served it with broad beans in a mustard cream dressing. Next time I might put a bit of butter and mustard in the potato underneath the kidney. It would be good with a bitter green salad, or breakfast things like baked beans or mushrooms. I'll have to make spare next time, it drove the cat beserk - worse than catnip.

I never thought of kedgeree as a budget supper dish before, but the astonishing cheapness of smoked hoki the other day persuaded me otherwise.

• Cooked white rice
• Smoked fish (boneless skinless smoked hoki fillet)
• Hard boiled eggs
• Leftover peas from a roast dinner
  
• Leftover kashmiri veggie curry (sweet and creamy with bananas - about half a takeaway portion)

I used a wok. Cut the fish into bite size pieces, and stir fried. Add the rice and peas, stir fry again until hot through. Add curry (or mild curry paste and sour cream if no spare leftover curry), some pepper, no salt as the fish and curry are salty enough. Stir in chopped hard boiled eggs. I would have put in a load of fresh chopped parsley, but John doesn't like it.

It was gorgeous. One fillet and three eggs made about four servings, and it was creamy, rich and very moreish. Didn't need any side dishes or extras, and you could stretch it easily with more rice and green veg.

John came home late and tired the other night, wanting comfort food for supper. There were no tins of baked beans in the house, so I made him this.

Put a bit of oil in a heavy frying pan, cut up a small tin of PEK or Spam (or some fresh bacon if you've got it, or leftover ham), and fry it, along with half an onion, chopped quite small.
When it's hot and starting to crisp, add a drained tin of random beans (haricot this time, but borlotti, cannelini, or kidney would be fine), and a sprinkling of dry seasonings (paprika, black pepper, thyme, mixed spice). Stir it all up, and add the wet things. A tin of tomatoes, a big squeeze of tomato paste, garlic puree, a glug of BBQ sauce, some Henderson's Relish or Worcestershire sauce. A cup of chicken stock or some water and stock concentrate, or salt if necessary. A spoonful of brown sugar.

Stir it all together and cook for a bit, squidging the tomatoes so they break up. You should end up with a hot dish of beans and meat chunks coated thickly in a slightly spicy, sweet, red sauce. Taste it as you go, and add the things you like. Indian chutneys, brown sauce, ketchup, treacle, chilli sauce, fresh herbs, chunks of cheese.

The whole thing took about quarter of an hour and was very well received - he's asked for it again so I'm doing proper beans with pork belly for tea tonight. Even though it is the middle of summer.

We liked the lamb shank braise, and I was reading Nigel Slater the other day, and he suggested oxtail. And I remembered I'd seen some excellent fresh oxtail in Waitrose, so I went and bought some. Stupidly cheap, half the price of braising steak and not that much bone. Nigel had a recipe variation on the standard red wine braise, which had a Chinese theme, with ginger and star anise. I like star anise with carrots, Dad does them like that for special dinners. I was most of the way through preparing this when I realised it's also a variant on the beef stew with clementine and ginger that we had before Christmas. I didn't follow the Nigel recipe, which involved flouring the oxtail and included onions. I just assembled in a casserole dish:

4 pieces of oxtail (weighed about 1.3 kgs)
3 capfuls Winter Pimms (the orange brandy one)
10 slices of peeled ginger, each about the size of a 10p / quarter
3 cloves garlic, chopped in half
4 medium carrots, in wedges, cut on the diagonal
3 sticks trimmed celery, ditto
3 tablespoons low salt soy sauce
2 whole star anise
A few grindings of black pepper

I brought it up to hot but not necessarily boiling, covered and bunged it in the oven at Gas Mark 3, it's had three hours so far and will get about another one. Every so often, I took it out, turned the oxtail over, and submerged the veggies more in the juices. Smells lovely. John has some work to do this evening, as soon as he's ready I'm going to zap some Thai noodles and dish up, probably in time for Coronation Street.

We like lamb shanks. I normally do them casseroled with a classic onion and red wine sauce, but I saw this recipe in the Waitrose magazine. It was in an article about steaming things, and to be honest I couldn't be farted running in and out of the kitchen checking on the steamer water for a couple of hours. So I did it slightly differently:

• 2 oz butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tsps coriander seed
• 2 tsps ground cumin
• Big pinch saffron threads
• 2 preserved lemons, cut into strips
• 1 tbsp garlic puree from a tube
• 2 lamb shanks (we had some small New Zealand ones)
  

Heat the butter and olive oil in an ovenproof casserole. When it's frothing, stir in the spices, lemons and garlic. Mix well and allow to cook down a bit until the fat is impregnated with the flavours. Don't let it burn, though. Put the meat in, turning a couple of times and making sure it's well coated with the spices. Put in a low oven, Gas Mark 3 or thereabouts, for a couple of hours, longer if you like, turning occasionally.

We ate them with a steamed cauliflower, which was lovely coated with the lemony garlicky buttery sauce. The original recipe suggested serving it with a herby couscous, and that would be yummy too. It's very rich, and a gorgeous winter evening dinner.

I had a recipe years ago, on a scratty bit of paper. An award-winning chilli cook-off recipe, from somewhere in Texas. The bit of paper is long gone, but Heston reminded me of how much fun it was to make, and I started again from basic principles. As follows.

Day 1, Pan 1

• 4 rashers of pork belly, about half a kilo
• Splash of sunflower or other light oil
• 3 teaspoons chipotle paste
• 2 tablespoons lime juice
• 1 x 275 ml bottle lager beer

Fry the pork in the oil in an oven-proof casserole, top with the other ingredients and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook for at least 2 hours in a low oven, Gas Mark 2-3. Or longer if possible. Allow to cool.

Day 1, Pan 2

• 1 onion
• Splash of light oil
• 1 red chilli
• 1 green chilli
• 3 cloves garlic
• 500 gms beef mince (quite fatty)
• 2 tsps oregano
• 2 tsps cumin
• 2 handfuls chopped coriander stalks
• 1 tsp ground ancho chilli
• 1 tbsps tomato puree
• 2 tins chopped tomatoes
• 1 mug good concentrated beef stock
• 1 tsp Splenda or sugar

Fry the onion, chilli and garlic in the oil. When everything's softened and starting to brown a little bit at the edges, add the mince. Sprinkle the spices and herbs on top of the slab of mince, and mix it all together, cutting and stirring until the meat is well-seasoned and brown. Add the puree, tomatoes, stock and sweetener. Cover and simmer very slowly for about 3 hours, adding water if necessary. It shouldn't be dry at this stage. Cool in the pan overnight.

Day 2 (or 3)

Take the meat out of the jelly in pan 1 and cut it into small pieces. Some will just fall into shreds, that's fine. Tip the whole lot, meat, jelly and fat into pan 2. Heat very slowly and mix together. Simmer gently for 2 - 3 hours, After about an hour, add 4 fresh tomatoes chopped up. The longer you cook it, the drier and milder it will get.

Serve with whatever you like - we had sour cream, avocado chunks, chopped fresh tomato, chopped fresh coriander, refried beans and savoury cornbread. You could have rice, tortillas, nachos, cheese, guacamole.

You can add beans to the chilli if you want, but it will seriously mess with the seasonings. This is a very mild chilli anyway, if you want it hotter, don't cook it for so long, use more raw chillis at the beginning, or add your favourite ground chilli with the ancho - something a lot hotter. I like the smoky taste, I would put in maybe crunched up smoked hot chillis.

It was enough for a good-sized dinner portion for 2, a couple of lunch portions cold, and a couple of dinners in the freezer. With side dishes, it would easily feed 6 - 8 for a dinner, it's very rich.

I made this on the fly for dinner the other night, and didn't write it down at the time, but it went something like this:

• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 thumb-size piece of ginger, finely chopped
• 1 finely chopped onion
• Butter and oil, or ghee
• 4 small boneless chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
• 2 handfuls raw shelled pistachios
• 1 handful vanilla-soaked dried apricots (or organic apricots and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, or half a bean)
• 2 tablespoons ground cardamom
• 1 tbsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tbsp ground coriander
• 1 small tin coconut milk
• Chicken stock
• Small tub creme fraiche
• Ground almonds
• 2 hard bananas
• More butter
• A tub of dry crispy fried onions

In a big heavy pan, melt the garlic, ginger and onion in the fat, slowly. Soften but not colour. Add the chicken, nuts, apricots, and spices. Stew gently and stir until the chicken is coated in the spices and cooked on the outside. Add the coconut milk and enough chicken stock to cover. Cover and simmer gently for up to a couple of hours, if you can, but at least half an hour. Take the lid off and mash the apricots into the sauce. Simmer again for at least another half an hour, longer if possible. Top up with water if necessary. When you're getting close to serving time, add the creme fraiche and stir in. Sprinkle a few tablespoons of ground almonds on the top and stir in well. This will thicken the sauce, let the first lot swell and do its work before adding more if you want thicker sauce. Watch it as the thicker it gets, the quicker it's likely to catch and scorch. While that's happening, chop the bananas into chunks and fry quickly in butter until golden.

Serve the chicken with the bananas on top, a sprinkling of fried onions, and some plain rice or naan bread to soak up the sauce. We had it with lamb stewed for hours in a low oven with tomatoes and hotter spices, and an aubergine and red pepper madras.

If you can't find the onions in your regular ethnic stores, try the IKEA food shop, or make your own by finely shredding shallots, frying in light hot oil until crisp, and draining well. Dry on paper towels. Or don't bother - a bit of crunch adds a nice texture but it isn't necessary.