50 posts tagged “untested”

Just-cooked chicken livers on a bed of spinach leaves and fresh orange segments, dressed with pan juices deglazed with port, redcurrant jelly, orange juice, lemon juice. Salt and pepper.

Recipe suggests slightly warming and wilting the spinach leaves in a sprinkle of oil and lemon, that might be interesting. Just under 500 cals allowing 100 gms liver per serving.

From a Tesco Recipe Collection booklet, 1997

In a Sainsbury's magazine from October 1997, nicked from a Portuguese cookbook. Gluten-free, but loaded with sugar.

• 12 oz mashed sweet potato (3 - 4 potatoes should do it), cooled
• 3 oz good quality candied fruit or peel, chopped as finely as possible
• 2 large eggs
• 12 oz caster sugar
• 1 oz unsalted butter, softened
• 5 oz ground almonds
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

To coat:

• A large egg white, lightly beaten
  
• Caster sugar

Heat the oven to Gas Mark 5, grease 2 baking trays.

Take walnut sized lumps and make into little cakes about 2" in diameter. Place on the greased trays brush with beaten egg white and sprinkle with caster sugar. Bake for about 20 minutes until lightly golden and cool before eating.

Definitely sweeties more than cakes.

Another recipe from Sainsbury's magazine, June 1999. For 6 portions.

• 18 crab sticks
• 3" piece cucumber
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tbsp light soy sauce
• 2 tsps vegetable oil
• 1 level teaspoon finely grated ginger (or some wasabi paste)

Dipping sauce:

• 120 mls sake
• 1 tbsp caster sugar
• 1 small red chilli, finely diced
• 1 tsp finely grated ginger
• salt

Mix the eggs and soy sauce, heat the oil in a 7" pan and make 6 thin omelette wrappers, cooked on both sides. Cool.

Quarter the crabsticks lengthways, cut the cucumber into pieces the same size and shape as the crabsticks, discarding the seeds but leaving the skin on. There should be some spare cucumber.

Trim the top and bottom edges of the omelettes, to about 5" across. Make rolls with the crabsticks and cucumber pieces (crabsticks to the outside, 2 pieces of cucumber in the middle) and a dab of ginger or wasabi. Keep them firmly rolled, but don't tear the omelettes. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for about an hour.

Make the dipping sauce, incorporating any spare cucumber, finely diced.

Let the rolls come to room temperature for about half an hour, and just before serving, trim the ends with a sharp knife to tidy them up and cut each one into 6 pieces. Serve with the dipping sauce.

(Not too unhealthy, it works out at half an egg per portion - although it's only really a starter. You could use Splenda instead of the sugar, and rice vinegar instead of most of the sake in the sauce. Could be a nice little lunch with some salad?)

A recipe in Sainsbury's magazine from June 1999. It's very complicated, but boils down to this:

Puree some toasted sesame seeds, sake, sugar, soy sauce, lime juice, fresh ginger, tofu, and a little salt until smooth and creamy, chill.

Take some block tofu, cut into small fingers, coat in cornflour, eggwhite, then sesame seeds and deep fry, three fingers together on little skewers.

Make a salad with Chinese leaf, asparagus, mangetout peas (blanched), cucumber, enoki mushrooms, carrot ribbons, spring onions, and finely chopped chilli.

Top with the tofu skewers, and a drizzled dressing of sake, soy sauce, plain oil and sesame oil. Serve with the tofu-sesame sauce to dunk.

I think it's messy and overly fussy, but there's a good idea lurking in there somewhere. You could cut the calorie content by grilling or baking the tofu, combining the dressing and sauce and making it sharper. The salad itself could be simplified as well.

I'm trying to focus on more healthy food at the moment, but this was just too weird to pass on. It's a party dish, quantities are for 25 - 30 canape portions. I don't think you'd want to eat a lot of this ... and it would take up a lot of space in the fridge to prepare. From delicious magazine, January 2004, recipe by Valli Little.

• 150 gms grated Parmesan
• 375 ml double cream
• pinch of paprika
• 250 ml balsamic vinegar
• 1 baguette, sliced
• 125 ml red wine
• olive oil
• 1 -2 garlic cloves, peeled

Put the cheese, cream and paprika in a bowl of simmering water, stir until the Parmesan has melted, season. Strain through a fine sieve, pressing through with a spoon. Cool and refrigerate overnight.

Simmer the balsamic vinegar until reduced by half. Cool. (Or you can buy ready-made glaze, I've got some somewhere.)

Using a small ice-cream scoop, place scoops of the cheese gelato on a lined tray and return to the fridge.

Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 4. Drizzle the bread slices with the red wine, brush with oil, lay out on a baking tray and cook 6 - 8 minutes until golden. Rub with the garlic while still warm. Cool.

To assemble - put a scoop of gelato onto each toast, drizzle with glaze.

I like making simple noodle broth dishes, they're quick and healthy, refreshing in summer and warming in winter. But it's always been a pain to do one quickly without using stock or flavour concentrate, or tinned consomme. Wine isn't appropriate, and water doesn't cut it. The bought concentrates from the Chinese shop are very salty, or too hot, or just come in HUGE packs. I found a recipe for Vegetable Pho by Sophie Grigson in the Waitrose food magazine for July 2005, which is fairly standard, but did include this roast vegetable stock. It's my intention to make it once to try it, and if it works, make it in quantity and freeze in portions enough for 2-3 servings. This amount serves 4, supporting 125 gms rice noodles, lots of veg and 150gms tofu for the protein.

• 6 cm root ginger, sliced thickly
• 1 large onion, cut into 8 wedges
• 3 whole star anise
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 3 carrots, quartered lengthways
• 3 stems celery, thickly sliced
• 1 leek, trimmed and thickly sliced
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 litres water
• 3 tbsps soy sauce
• 0.5 tbsp caster sugar

Preheat oven to Gas Mark 8. Toss the veg and spices in the oil, and tip into a roasting pan. Roast for half an hour, until the veggies are patched with brown. Transfer to a big pan, scraping all the residues in. Add water, soy sauce and sugar. Boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain.

It says summer, but this might make a good lunch for a stuffy overheated office in winter. Another Waitrose card, serves 6, 224 cals per.

• 1 tsp butter
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 sprigs fresh rosemary
• 250 gms courgettes, sliced
• 250 gms peas
• 750 mls hot stock, chicken or veggie
• 20 gm pack fresh mint
• 500g tub greek yoghourt

Melt the butter and add garlic, onion and rosemary. Cook until onion is translucent, about 5 minutes, stir in courgettes. Cook for 5 more minutes, until courgette is starting to soften but not colour.

Add peas, and stock. Boil and simmer for 10 minutes until courgette is tender. Cool, and discard rosemary.

Blend soup with mint and yoghourt. Season to taste and chill.

(They suggest Fudges Mature Cheddar and Black Pepper flatbreads to serve, but if you needed something else almost any crispbread or toasted pitta bread would be fine. You could cut the calories with a low-fat yoghourt, but I suspect the richness of the yoghourt is crucial to the taste and texture of the soup.)

Back to the recipe library backlog ... A Waitrose card for a salad, good at any time of year. Serves 4 at 412 cals per.

• 500 gms carrots, cut into 2cm lengths
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 2 tbsps white wine vinegar (unless you're using pickled or marinated beetroot, in which case miss it out)
• 3 tbsps olive oil
• 2 oranges
• 250 gms cooked beetroot, cut in chunks
• 2 x 100 gm packs goat's cheese, in chunks
• 20 gm pack flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped

Cook the carrot until tender. Toast the cumin seed, and mix with the vinegar, olive oil, and seasoning (salt and pepper, presumably). Coat the hot carrots in this mix and leave to cool to room temperature.

Peel the oranges and cut into chunks. Fold everything together and serve.

(I'd be tempted to marinate the cheese in with the carrots, and not add salt until I was sure it needed it - goat's cheese can be well salty. That's a lot of calories to say there's no bread with it, but the carrots and beetroot should keep it quite filling.)

From the ASDA freebie Christmas magazine, December 2006. Says 66 cals per biscuit, this amount makes 44 biscuits, should cost 6p each.

• 225 gms plain flour
• 0.25 tsp cayenne pepper
• 0.25 tsp dry mustard powder
• 125 gms butter, chilled and cut into small cubes
• 50 gms stilton, crumbled
• 75 gms mature cheddar, grated
• 75 gms pecans (or 44 whole or pieces of broken nuts)
• 2 medium eggs, lightly beaten - ed: - separately, you need them at different stages
• coarse salt

1. Preheat oven to Gas Mark 4. Line 2 baking trays with paper.
2. Sift flour, cayenne and mustard together.
3. Add butter and rub in until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Add cheeses, and 1 egg. Mix until it forms a dough. Knead lightly. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.
4. Roll out between 2 sheets of clingfilm to a thickness of 5 mm. Cut into rounds. Put on baking trays.
5. Brush with egg and put a pecan on each. Sprinkle with the coarse salt. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Cool on a wire tray.

What a pants recipe. It probably works, but they could have told you to keep the eggs separate, if I see "2 medium eggs, lightly beaten", I beat together 2 eggs. Idiots. And I'm thinking that rolling out a cheese dough between 2 sheets of clingfilm, as thin as 5 mm, would not be as straightforward as they make it sound. It tells you 44 biscuits @ 5 mm thick, but not how big the rounds should be. They'd have to be pretty small to get 44 on to 2 baking trays, but then, do they tell you what size baking trays? No. If you're supposed to put a whole pecan on each of 44 biscuits, I think you might need more than 75 gms.