Domestic Science

Cold roast pork for a cold night

Snowed in today, which feels odd living in North London.  A good day in the kitchen filling the freezer with tubs of stew and individual shepherds pies, so when I came to cooking my own supper I wasn’t feeling up to much.  Fortunately, we still had a good chunk of roast belly pork leftover from yesterday’s dinner, and I had enough energy to chuck together some spicy kare lomen sauce to go with it.  I got this recipe out of the Wagamama cookbook, though I have adapted it a bit over time, because I don’t generally have fresh red peppers or lemon grass hanging about, when I want to make this to go with leftover roast meat.  I’ve detailed my version below, which is very easy if you have a mini chopper, a bag of frozen roast peppers, and a few basic oriental ingredients about your kitchen.  Its perfect for turning cold roast meat and plain rice into a cheering hot meal - I don’t heat the meat up, I really like the cold cold meat and the hot spicy sauce.

I wish I had discovered frozen peppers years ago.  They come ready grilled and chopped, grown in Spain so easier on the carbon footprint than local hot house ones, and because they are frozen you never waste any.  My mini chopper is also a kitchen essential, for me.  It’s a tiny little food processor, designed I think for baby food, but handy for small amounts of sauces that you can’t process in a regular machine.  It was incredibly cheap and always seems on the verge of giving out, but somehow keeps working.  The other ingredients aren’t that exotic, really - Thai fish sauce, coconut cream, lime juice, curry powder, and smoked paprika crop up in so many recipe books that anyone with an addiction to cookery programmes like me will probably have them hanging about, bought after one too many episodes of Jamie or Nigella, and maybe forgotten since.  Here’s your chance to use them up. 

So here we go - cold roast pork kare lomen:

 Get out your mini chopper, and stuff into it a small onion (roughly chopped), a clove of garlic (ditto), and about a teaspoon of that ready chopped ginger you get in jars (don’t let me stop you chopping up the real deal if you have it).  Fill up the rest of the chopper with frozen grilled peppers (still frozen), and blitz in bursts till you have a rough paste.

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a small pan, and fry the paste from the chopper for a few minutes.  Add 1/2 tsp each of sweet smoked paprika and curry powder - I use Bolst’s hot curry powder, and if yours is mild you may need to also add a bit of chilli powder or sauce.  Keep frying until the paste smells cooked, I.e. not of raw onions.

Add 1 cup (250ml) of water and 1 sachet of creamed coconut - I use Bart’s sachets that you heat in a mug of hot water because its easy to deal with.  You could chop up and add about a tablespoon of regular block coconut instead.  Stir all together, then add 1/2 tsp hon dashi powder (japanese stock powder - if not available, leave out.  I get mine from the Japan Centre in Picadilly which is scary as all the signs are in Japanese and you have to guess what you are buying), 1/2 tsp of sugar, and hearty splashes of lime juice and Thai fish sauce. 

Add a good pinch of salt, simmer a few minutes more, and serve with plain white boiled rice and slices or chunks of cold roast pork.  Or lamb.  Or beef, probably, though I haven’t tried it.

My perfect pot roast pheasant

Pheasant is one of those things that I used to eat because I thought I ought.  It’s relatively cheap, nutritious, sustainably produced, a plentiful byproduct of the shooting business - which if we don’t eat it may end up just ploughed back into a field, which is unbearably wasteful.  But I couldn’t find a way to cook it that I liked.  All the recipes I tried seemed to leave the meat slightly rare near the bone - and rare pheasant is, in my view, pretty vile.  Other bits of the bird would be either over-cooked and dry, or just cooked and strangely bouncy.  Increasing the cooking time got rid of the rare bits but increased the overcooked and dry bits.  Even pot-roasting didn’t seem to help - I had no idea what I was doing wrong but it just didn’t work for me.

Then I got my slow cooker - initially bought to make stock overnight, but  I like to get value from my kitchen gadgets so I’ve been casseroling all sorts of things in it to see what works.  And then Christmas came, and I was asked to provide pheasant with haggis for Christmas Eve dinner (something of a tradition in our house as the other half is crazy about haggis - the pheasant is just an excuse really), so decided to give the bird one last chance in the slow cooker.  I was rather startled to find it worked perfectly.  Moist but thoroughly cooked meat, no spooky rare bits, and a really great stock that was easily turned into fantastic gravy.  Cooked like this, the meat is pale, definitely more gamey than chicken - but not as strongly flavoured as those duck breasts you get served rare.  As I serve the breasts off the bone, so that people don’t have to confront ‘difficult’ bits of bird, I would imagine most people would be happy to eat it - if they will eat guinea fowl I think they would be fine with this recipe.  

For two people, you will need:  1 oven ready pheasant (currently £4 each in my butchers, or 3 for £10); handful diced streaky bacon, couple of carrots, an onion, a stick of celery or a sprinkle of celery seed, a big glass of red wine, a clove of garlic and a sprinkle of dried rosemary.    To finish the sauce you will need some redcurrant jelly and some butter, and to go with you will need some veg - a few potatoes and some green cabbage should do it.

Note: Every pot roast recipe I ever read suggests you brown the bird first.  I don’t.  Trying to brown a pheasant in a frying pan is really tricky, the thing keeps rolling around and you end up stabbing it all over with a fork as you try to hold it on the right place to brown it, or you use your hands and get third degree burns.  You fill the kitchen with pheasanty fug, and probably set the smoke alarm off.  And then your lovely golden skin just goes all soggy in the casserole anyway.  My way gives you great crispy skin with very little effort.  Trust me.

Start about 8 hours before you want to eat.  Get out a frying pan and slowly fry the bacon so the fat runs. Wash and chunk up the carrot, peel and chunk up the onion.  Add to the bacon and fry a while - maybe 10 minutes - till the veg is golden.  If you are using celery then chunk and fry that too, but I always use celery seed because it keeps well so I just sprinkle that on.  When the veg and bacon are nice and golden, tip it all into the base of your slow cooker, and add the garlic clove, peeled and crushed, and a sprinkle of dried rosemary.    Pour over the glass of wine, and sit the pheasant on top, breast upwards.  Close the cooker, and set to slow cook for 7 hours.  If you don’t have a slow cooker, use a small casserole and do exactly the same as above, cover with the lid and put in a very low oven (less than 150 oC).   Now go off and do  whatever you want for a few hours.

About an hour or so before you want to eat, put the oven on to about 200 oC and peel some potatoes.  (Or celeriac is nice.)  Toss the potatoes in olive oil and salt in a small  roasting dish, and put in the oven.  Slice your cabbage ready, and go and have a drink.  You earned it with all this labour in the kitchen.

15-20 minutes before dinner, get the pheasant out of the cooker/casserole.  Sit the bird in a clean roasting tray, and put in the oven with the potatoes.  (Don’t put in the same dish as the potatoes, the bird will exude lots of yellow fat as the skin crisps, which is best kept to itself.) Tip the rest of the casserole contents into a sieve over a small saucepan and let it drain.  Chuck away the contents of the sieve.  You should have a good lot of juices ready to be turned into gravy - the slowcooker, being sealed, doesn’t lose any to evaporation.  Turn up the heat under the saucepan and boil hard to reduce by maybe half, to make a good strong sauce.  If you used a casserole that was less tightly closed, you may have more concentrated juices to start with, so you might need to reduce less.  While that is happening, quickly fry your sliced cabbage in some olive oil or butter and season it well.  Keep an eye on the potatoes and pheasant, so they don’t burn.  Turn the oven off when they are done. 

When your sauce is reduced and a bit syrupy, and generally tastes like posh ‘jus’, stir in a small spoon of redcurrant jelly and check the seasoning - you may need salt though probably not because the bacon was salty and will have seasoned the sauce for you.   Whisk in a knob of butter while still boiling, to make the sauce really glossy and smooth.  Plate up the potatoes and cabbage, and take the breasts off the pheasant  with a sharp knife and put one on each plate.  Pour the sauce round.  Serve with pride.

You can of course eat the legs too, but I usually leave the legs and carcass alone, and make game soup with it the next day.  But that’s another story.

In quest of dumplings

When I was little, we used to have stew and dumplings.  The stew was sometimes good, sometimes terrible, but the dumplings were always tip-top.  Big fluffy balls of tasty goodness, filling and comforting but not stodgy. 

I've been trying to make dumplings like that every since I left home, and I just can't do it.  Everybody, even quite experienced cooks, has a few culinary Waterloos lurking, and that's one of mine.  (Other cooking tasks I will go out of my way to avoid include poaching an egg, icing fairy cakes, and carving pretty much anything in public).  It's odd that I can't make dumplings, given my suet puddings and suet crust on pies are acknowledged to be pretty damn good.  But there it is.

Then today I decided to have another try.  It was so horrible and cold this weekend, so I made a big pot of beef stew and it was crying out for dumplings to go with it.  So here we go. 

The first recipe I tried was from Nigel Slater - he proposed plain flour, half as much suet as flour, and salt, and cold water to mix, then add to a pan of stock at a rolling boil.  I wasn't going to risk my pot of stew (past horrors of dumplings dissolving into the gravy and ruining the whole pot put me off that idea) so I boiled a pan of water.  The dumplings sank straight to the bottom, but did eventually rise to the top, and acquire some lightness. 

But, you'd definitely call this batch stodgy.  NOT the light and fluffy dumplings of my childhood.  I remembered that in suet pastry I always add baking powder, so I tried again (luckily a few dumplings are very cheap)
with baking powder this time, and there was a definite improvement.  But, during the boiling phase, two of the dumplings practically dissolved, and the survivors were still a bit soggy round the eddges. 

At this point my other half strolled into the kitchen (no doubt wondering what was holding up the delivery of his stew, given all that was usually involved was ladling it out into a bowl), and mentioned he always balanced his dumplings on top of the stew to steam them.  I did spend a minute trying to remember the last time that he cooked dumplings, or stew for that matter, but gave up and admitted he was probably right.  You steam suet puddings, rather than boil them, at least I do, so it makes sense.  I'm still not ready to steam them in my stew though - I think I might try a steamer basket or sieve first. 

At least the second batch today were edible, if a bit on the damp side - which was fortunate because I was too hungry at that point to make any more. 

The search for the perfect dumpling continues. 

Inconvenience food

I was reading Observer food monthly, and noted I’m not the only one who’s concerned about the need for bigger and bigger kitchen storage. Lynn Barber notes that “you would need a cupboard as big as a house” to cope with Delia Smith’s new cheating  approach to cooking, where you stock your kitchen with things like frozen mash, ready chopped onions, and sundry other semi-prepared ingredients, and stand by to rustle up dozens of exciting recipes at a moment’s notice.  I just don’t have the room.  My freezer isn’t that small, but after I’ve fitted in the usual things like frozen peas and oven chips, mince and prawns, and a few boxes of leftover pasta sauce and soup, there’s not really room for a stack of frozen mashed potato discs.  Same with the cupboards - I don’t know how it is, but what with the tins of beans and tomatoes, the bottles of soy and packets of flour, jars of jam and emergency supply of Illy espresso, I haven’t got room for fancy bottled peppers. 

Since most of these clever ingredients can only come from Ocado rather than my local Tesco, and as I try to only use Ocado once a month - particularly since they virtually eliminated free delivery, I’d need to find room for a few packets at a time.  And if I can’t get it at Tesco or Ocado, forget it.  This is something that drives me nuts about those ‘tried and taste-tested’ features in magazines - the one they score top is always the one from the supermarket I never go to.  It’s no good telling me that Asda pilau rice is the tops.  I have no idea where my nearest Asda is - and I’m not about to get the car out and drive halfway across North London to get my hands on the world’s best microwave rice.  A couple of years back, Good Housekeeping ran a feature on how to  get your entire Christmas dinner ready-made - pre-stuffed turkey crown, frozen roast potatoes, the works.  But if you looked closely you’d have had to visit seven different supermarkets to get their recommended configuration.  Hardly convenient.  Now if they could tell me which supermarket was best for the whole meal, taking all the bits into account, that might be some use. 

And it’s not just a problem of sourcing just a few things.  You flick through the pages of these convenience books and there are dozens of things you’d need to keep on standby to whip up these convenient concoctions - count up how many times Nigella Lawson says she’s ‘never without…’ whatever ingredient, and you’ll understand why her larder on the set of Nigella Express is the size of a small bathroom.  It costs a bomb, and you waste so much, too. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve bought some wonder ingredient for one recipe and never used it again until it got chucked out two years after the use by date. It’s much better to have a few standbys that you use all the time - for me, it’s ready chopped garlic, and ready grated ginger - I loathe grating ginger.  I’m also a big fan of frozen ready grilled peppers, and chuck them into lots of things - soups, stews, noodle things.  But that’s pretty much it.

The trick you end up falling for is to imagine you should be able to stagger through your front door and whip up a different high-speed dinner every night of the week - no planning ahead needed.  You gratefully adopt this new approach, and then realise that you’ve now landed yourself with an even tougher task of keeping your kitchen perennially stocked with the makings for about 100 different dishes.

I’ve recently adopted a simpler approach.  On Friday night or Saturday morning, I sit down with my notebook, and plan dinner for every night of the week.  Then I nip out to Tesco (or if I’m feeling energetic, to the better shops in Crouch End) and buy the things I need for the week ahead.  Job done.  And if I feel like throwing in some ready made stuff I will, but at least I know I’ll use it up.  The wonderful thing is, I no longer get home really tired and end up drinking too much wine while I stare at overflowing cupboards, overwhelmed by choice and desperately trying to think of something to cook.  I just consult the list and get on with it. 

I can’t claim this as a totally spontaneous conversion.  On a recent holiday to Canada. I ended up watching Canada Food Network perhaps more than is good for anyone (well I had a cold…) and saw a rather fab programme called Fixing Dinner.  The chirpy mother-of-seven presenter sorted out various badly-fed families by teaching them to plan their meals a week ahead.   I won’t be adopting her recipes (tuna casserole made with tinned soup?  Ick!) but the principle was just what I needed to get my kitchen back under control.

Cheating at a price

Hurray! Delia Smith says it’s okay to cheat at cooking.  And introducing the world to frozen mashed potato, a product I had hitherto never heard of.  I make do with instant mash powder, should I end up desperate for mashed spud and be right out of real potatoes.  If I have real potatoes I just peel them (enough for two people isn’t exactly time-consuming), microwave them, and bash them to bits in my Kenwood Chef using the K beater.  Nigella Lawson bakes ready washed baking potatoes and scoops the middles out.  Even lazier, but with a longer lead time.  And rather cheaper.  At Ocado today, four baking potatoes cost 99p and you could get 2.5kg of white potatoes for £1.19, whereas a packet of Auntie Bessie’s frozen mash is £1.69 for 650g.

That's one of the big problems with Delia’s cheats - they come at a price.  For example, lets assume you are planning to serve a really fancy fish pie for a dinner with friends.  You don’t really cook so you aren’t likely to have much in the fridge.  You decide to tackle Delia’s salmon and quail egg pie.  So you go off an buy your ready cooked salmon and ready peeled quails eggs and frozen mash, cheese sauce, ready grated cheddar and parmesan and dill, cornichons, capers…by my reckoning you will have spent about £20 and generated a range of random leftovers you are unlikely to use again given that you can’t really cook.  Ocado offer you a range of fish pies and even if you buy two of the most expensive, to feed your mates in quantity and style, you will only spend £16, avoid a fridge full of half used ingredients, and waste rather less packaging.  You want to hide your cheating from your mates?  Well don’t expect Delia to save you - those rounds of frozen mash are completely obvious, even under the blanket of cheese.

To be fair, I costed up the same recipe as though I’d made it all from scratch and it came in at about £16, same as buying ready made pies (though significantly cheaper than Delia's version, enough for a bottle of wine to go with it).  But then, if you insist on putting quails eggs in a fish pie you are going to end up splashing out  People who can cook a bit will put in what fish is on special offer that day to save even more, and won’t waste quails eggs under a pile of cheese sauce.

For more workaday feasts, Delia offered us Shepherd’s Pie.  Made with a tin of mince and onions - which brought back ghastly  memories of student days until Delia reassured us that it had 75% meat and really tasted alright.  So far, so cheaty, until she whipped out a packet of ready diced root veg and proceeded to fry those up on the stove before adding them to the mince.  If you are going to mess up a pan,  you might as well fry the mince and onions while you are at it.  Then having scattered on the statutory frozen mash discs, she proceeded to rinse and slice a leek - surely one of the most annoying vegetables to prepare, with all that hidden grit - and sprinkle it on top of the mash.  So what we got was how to cheat at a relatively labour intensive pie (assuming you can locate the ingredients - Ocado don’t sell tinned beef mince, which I take as a bad sign), when in the same time and the same number of dirty pans we could have made a straightforward one with raw ingredients.

I won’t be rushing out to buy the book.

Queen Nigella

Nigella Lawson might be the most annoying celebrity on TV, but the woman can cook.  I couldn’t watch her last series - Nigella Express - as it made me want to throw things at the TV.  Although watching the wife of a millionaire do an impersonation of her former hard-pressed boho working girl self, in her Petit Trianon on the South Circular, was rather tragic.  The poor woman has so lost touch with the ordinary world that she thinks a larder the size of a corner shop, a giant fridge stocked daily by unseen hands, and nipping to Waitrose in a black cab, are perfectly normal aspects of life. 

Never mind.  She still turns out fantastic recipes.  I was given Nigella Express for Christmas and it is fabulous - full of lovely recipes that are quick without resorting to packets and bottles of dubious ‘convenience’ food.  She never lectures at you about where your food is from (like lots of cooks these days) or tries to make you feel guilty for occasionally grabbing a packet of unhappy pig from Tesco on the way home.  She is still the TV cook that is closest to how I really cook - bottled lemon juice and all. 

My new Nigella reminded me of a recipe I’ve been meaning to cook for ages, from her Feast book.  Its a sort of stuffing-flavoured roast chicken tray bake, with sage and onion.  You just get a chicken and cut into 10 pieces (or get 10 thighs or 5 legs or similar) and marinate with olive oil, lemon juice, English mustard, dried sage, and onions. When it’s time to cook, you tuck in a dozen sausages, and season with salt and pepper, and shove in the oven for about an hour.   I made it for dinner on Friday as we had friends over to plan our snowboarding trip to Canada.  It was delicious, all the flavours of roast chicken and none of the carving. I couldn’t do the easy-looking potato gratin she suggested, as one of our friends doesn’t eat dairy - so I made boulangere potatoes instead - layers of potato and onion with butter, baked in chicken stock for about 90 minutes.  Only I used some of my goose fat instead of butter.  It was the best boulangere ever. 

Oh and  if you were wondering, my soap turned out just fine.  I’m hooked now.  I’ve ordered a book on how to make your own cosmetics.  Cooking without calories.  Perfect way to start the New Year.

Dining with the devil

It’s autumn, and we have builders.  This is growing to be a habit with us, but we do live in a 100-year-old house so something is always breaking or wearing out.  This time the front garden needs restoring.  One week into the project, the wall between the pavement and the street has been carted away in rubble bags and the lockable store that we use to hide deliveries from the nice people at ABel & Cole (so they don’t get stolen - yes, some people in London N4 really are that cheap…) is uprooted and piled up at the back, waiting for the new paving to be laid.  So, no Abel & Cole deliveries for some time to come.  On top of this, I’ve been having a cold and not feeling up to cooking.  Time to reacquaint myself with ready meals.

I do this every year or so - there’s always some reason where for a week or two the usual catering arrangements collapse and we end up living out of packets.  I think this is a good thing, as I spend a fair amount of time railing against the horrors of ready meals and it wouldn’t be fair to rail against something I know nothing about, like people who condemn drink and drugs as the work of the devil when they’ve never tried anything more intoxicating then an occasional port & lemon.  I  consider most ready meals as the work of the devil too, but at least I’ve tried them first.  So, last Monday, off I toddled to Marks & Spencer to grab something for dinner.

The tricky thing about ready meals is that they seem to fall into two categories:  ordinary food like pasta bakes that always taste like they are pumped full of sugar and salt, and ‘smart’ food that is much lower on additives and can taste like home made food.  Try Tesco Finest lamb shanks and you'll see what I mean.  The smart end is a bit too smart for every day: it’s aimed at people who like hosting dinner parties but have lots of money and believe they can’t cook.  They may have been watching those M&S adverts that try to convince us that however hard we try, we’ll never produce anything as mind-blowingly delicious as the lovingly shot and erotically described dishes on the TV.  Very distressing.   

However, someone at M&S has clearly realised that there is a market for ‘middle of the road’ food, made to the same high standard as the dinner party stuff but with recipes that you might fancy for mid week supper.  I brought home a dish of meatballs in a chorizo and tomato sauce, with crispy potatoes, that was very like something I cook anyway, though we tend to have meatballs with pasta.  It even tasted like something I might make myself, and made a very tasty tea.  It cost around a fiver, which isn’t bad, though I think for a fiver I could have made twice the amount, two dinners for the price of one.

But before you all rush off thinking I’m reconciled to the evil ready meal, think for a minute:  there are a few other dishes in the Gastropub range that might do for mid week supper - fishcakes with lemon butter sauce, cottage pie, toad in the hole…enough for a different dish every night.  But what to eat next week?  You’d end up eating the same food over and over.  And you’d be broke.  My meatballs were pretty much the cheapest thing there.  So, once my cold has gone, I’ll be back to wielding the wooden spoon on some real food.  But for emergency food when you’ve got builders or whatever, M&S is okay.

Old friends

Sometimes I go back and cook something I’ve not cooked for ages, and it’s awful.  A real disappointment.  Like the recipe I learned from my mother for what we called at home ‘macaroni and peas’.  I ate it heartily through my student years, and then I moved to London, got a job and  Gary Rhodes cookbook, and started cooking things with the word cappuccino in the title, usually applied to things totally unrelated to coffee.  Then a while later I returned to my old stalwart macaroni dish…I’ll give you the recipe, just in case you are a student (it is really filling and cheap) and like this sort of thing.  Honestly, I loved it once.  But then, I also used to eat Tuna Bolognese on a regular basis.

Take an onion, and fry in a bit of oil.  Add a diced carrot, and carry on frying.  Tip in an appropriate amount of macaroni, the old fashioned sort that takes about 20 minutes to cook, and pour on a kettle of boiling water.  Simmer.  About 5 minutes before the macaroni is cooked, add a handful of frozen peas.  When the time is up, drain the pan into a sieve and return the macaroni and veg to the pan.  Add a couple of tablespoons of Carnation milk.  Evaporated milk, I think it’s called.  I don’t know if you can even buy it now.  It comes in a tin and you used to buy it mainly for pouring on puddings.  Then, add a big handful of grated cheddar.  No, not Parmesan.  Cheddar.  Honest.  The cheese melts in the milk from the heat of the pan and makes a thick gooey sauce.  Stir it all up, and scoff.  Or recoil, depending on whether the sweet/savoury thing with the milk and cheese is your bag.  It was mine once.  It isn’t now. 

But sometimes, you return to recipes and you think, “Why on earth don’t I cook that more often?”  This week, I had two Romero peppers, a punnet of cherry tomatoes, and a handful of red onions in my veg box.  It was like the nice   people at Abel & Cole were egging me on to revisit Cous Cous with Roasted Peppers and Goats Cheese, from Sophie Grigson’s Taste of the Times.  It’s a great book, instantly transporting you back to a time when goats cheese was still chic and rare, and cous cous was dangerously radical.    But this particular recipe is well worth going back to, because it is so easy and nice.

Get a couple of red peppers, seed and chunkily chop.  Chop a roughly equivalent amount of tomatoes to the same size.  Peel and quarter 2 or three red onions.  Toss in a roasting tray with olive oil, chilli flakes, dried thyme, a drizzle  of balsamic vinegar (oh yes, we are going totally retro!) and a good sprinkling of sugar, salt and pepper.  Roast for about 40 minutes at 200 degrees centigrade (or maybe 220 if you haven’t got a fan oven), stirring a couple of times.  Meanwhile, go out for a run or have a drink or something (get someone else to do the stirring if you opt for the run).

Boil a kettle and make up cous cous for two (about 100g couscous, 200ml boiling water, and a teaspoon of Marigold vegetable powder).  When the vegetables are nice and caramel dark, take the tray out of the oven.    Scoop half the veg into a liquidiser or other blender and whizz to a thick sauce, maybe adding some hot water from the kettle if it’s too thick. 

When the cous cous is ready, pile it into two bowls, tip over the sauce, pile on the rest of the veg from the roasting dish, and crumble on some goats cheese.  Or if you are struggling with the totally 1995 thing, maybe some feta would be as nice?

The best fast food

Lovely lovely John Lewis, in Oxford Street, London, has opened a food hall.  A dizzyingly wonderful place where you can buy everything from organic miso soup to ready dressed lobster,  oysters to easy-carve pheasant, artisan-made pasta to smoked venison.  The cheese room alone is a head turning experience, fragrant and wonderful.  And if you are trying to lose weight don’t even go near the deserts counter. The best thing of all is that it is conveniently located near Oxford Circus tube, the mid point on my journey home. 

On my own this evening, I headed for the butcher’s counter, to be served by a deeply serious young mad who earnestly discussed the appropriate thickness to cut a piece of ribeye steak.  Dry aged on the bone, smeared with olive oil, liberally salted and peppered, and fried for three minutes a side in a very hot non stick pan: heaven on a plate.   Crisp lettuce, Caesar dressing, Parmesan and croutons (from the Waitrose Cooks’ Ingredients section), and a good helping of Dijon mustard, was all I head with it.  Oh and a good glass of Roches Fleurie organic Corbieres. 

Why DO people buy ready made lasagne?

Enchiladas without a safety net

I used to regard Mexican food much as I regard furniture: best bought ready made; if pressed I would make it from a kit (Ikea in the case of furniture, and those yellow boxes with a sort of red roof effect in the case of the Mexican food); I would no more think of freestyling my fajitas than I would contemplate buying a lathe and turning my own table legs.  It never really occurred to me that native Mexicans had been cooking for centuries before Old El Paso rocked up to make life easier for everyone, and therefore it must  be possible to make this stuff from scratch. 

Overtime, I managed to figure out that I could make chilli without a packet of seasoning mix, but strangely I never made the leap to anything more complicated.  The real breakthrough came last February when I acquired a wonderful book, the Big Book of Potluck (previously credited for the feta cheese dip), which included a recipe for enchiladas.  I realised that this delicious dish was actually perfectly straightforward and could be made with ingredients I already had in the kitchen.  I generally have chopped tomatoes in the cupboard, beef mince in the freezer and cheese in the fridge.  I also quite often have tortillas knocking about somewhere - the flour sort you make wraps from.  If not, Tesco’s round the corner does.  Which means I am generally able to rustle up enchiladas at a moment’s notice.  Well, actually it takes about an hour and a quarter, but as for the last half hour it’s in the oven it’s not exactly a trial.   In case you fancy making your own enchiladas without the aid of a dinner kit, here’s the brief.

First, make your enchilada sauce.  Actually no, if you are using frozen mince, first bung your mince in the microwave to defrost.  Then make your sauce.  This is basically a tomato sauce with the addition of peppers in some form.  This evening, I fried an onion and some ready chopped garlic in oil, added smoked paprika and dried chilli, two tins of chopped tomatoes, and a handful of frozen roasted peppers.  More civilised people would use fresh peppers and fry them with the onion, but I didn’t have any knocking about.  I added salt, sugar, a splash of wine vinegar, and a dash of chilli sauce and simmered it for about 30 minutes.

Once your sauce is simmering, start the mince.  I brown the mince first and then add a chopped onion to cook in the beef dripping, because I use proper beef mince with fat in it.  Honestly, it tastes loads better than the super lean stuff.  Once the onion is cooking, add chilli flakes or similar, oregano, and about a teaspoon of cumin.  I’m working with 500g of mince here - you might need more cumin etc for more mince.  Add a tablespoon of plain white flour to the mince and stir in, and follow with 300 ml of beef stock.  Stir in a tablespoon of tomato paste and simmer until you have very little thick gravy around the mince.  You sauce and mince should now be ready, so leave them to cool a while if you have time, to avoid burns during assembly. 

When you are about 40 minutes from dinner, turn the oven on to about 175 degrees, get out cheddar cheese and a grater, find and oil an oven proof dish, and put a pinny on (the assembly can be a bit splashy). Smooth a couple of spoons of sauce in the dish.   Take your first tortilla, smear sauce on it, top with a spoon of mince and grate over cheese.  Roll up and place in the dish.  You may find it helpful to plan how many tortillas you are going to fill and pre-divide your mince.  I do 6 from 500g of mince.   Which feeds 3, roughly.

Once you have all the tortillas filled and in the dish, top with the rest of the sauce and lots more cheese, and bake for about 30 minutes.  Leave for about 10 minutes before serving.

Now, that wasn’t so hard was it?  Dinner kits…who needs them?!