Lazy Caesar

This Lazy Caesar took me no more than 10 minutes.

Caesar approves of laziness.

Ingredients
150 ml Caesar dressing
2 heads of Romaine lettuce
2 large eggs
75 grams of Parmesan cheese
1 prebaked garlic baguette

Bake the baguette and tear into pieces. Soft-boil and peel the eggs. Roughly chop up the lettuce. Grate the cheese. Mix the lettuce, cheese and dressing. Serve with the baguette and a halved egg on top.

Unsolicited Advice and Cauliflower Soup

The world's full of unsolicited good advice. My crisps have a label on them that tell me I shouldn't eat them every day, the cheese I buy comes with a red warning label that makes me feel as if I'll die tasting it and the veg I buy scream out 'Nice try, but you should eat 5 portions of us!'. It's starting to feel like a  competition - can you meet the requirements every day? (Funnily enough, this man tried and nearly died.)

That is not to say of course that this advice is all rubbish. Some of the arguments out there make a lot of sense. I particularly like this one, a talk by Mark Bittman about our eating habits. He promotes eating less meat (for reasons explained well in his talk) without becoming a vegetarian completely (basically because it's so tasty). 

Cutting back on meat is what I try to do, too. (It all started when I read this book.) Next week, I'm going to take this to the next level by trying to cook only vegetarian meals for me and my partner. A huge feat, but after buying this book by Madhur Jaffrey I got inspired. She is all about accidental vegetarian food, taken from countries in the East. Next week I'll try one of her dishes, plus a couple of exotic others from this fun volume:

Indian aubergine and potato curry with naan (from Jaffrey's book)

Halloumi skewers on a fennel and white bean salad with flatbread

Tofu and pak choi stir-fry with egg noodles

Falafel burgers on buns

Tacos with chickpea salsa and home-made guacamole

I'll keep you posted about the results! Until then, how about this nice veggie soup?

Ingredients

1 cauliflower

2 large potatoes

200g carrots

2 large onions

2 cloves of garlic

200g mature organic cheddar cheese (yes, the one with the red warning label)

1 tbsp English mustard

2 veg stock cubes

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Clean the vegetables, remove the green bits from the cauliflower and the eyes from the potatoes. Dice the potatoes, carrots and onions finely, chop up the garlic and slice the cauliflower in thin slices (about 1cm). Heat some olive oil in a large pan and put in all the vegetables. Fry until the onions are soft and yellow, making sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan. Meanwhile, bring a litre of water to the boil. Add the water and the stock cubes to the vegetables and bring to the boil. Then, let the soup simmer until the vegetables are nice and soft. Use a masher to mash the vegetables. Grate the cheese and add the cheese and mustard to the soup. Season to taste. I served this with garlic bread. 

From Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food book. I did not use celery and I did not pulse the soup. I also used less water.

Boring Old 2005 Burgers

Tonight I made a pretty boring dinner. Or at least, it would have been pretty boring in 2005. In that year, I moved into a place of my own and I didn't know a thing about cooking. (So one of my best dishes (honestly) consisted of putting oil, frozen veg, pre-boiled potatoes and a can of fish in a pan and turning on the heat. Woo!) So had I bought these vegetarian burgers, corn on the cob and two huge baking potatoes for dinner then, that could have ended badly...

Ingredients
Vegetarian burgers
Corn on the cob
2 large baking potatoes
Butter

As you know, I'm not a big fan of things that pretend to be meat. But I decided to try these, they looked nice. They weren't, really. (Always trust your instincts.) So what to do? In 2005, I guess I would have tried ketchup (woo!). Today, I tried this:

Fry the burgers in some olive oil. Meanwhile, microwave-baked the potatoes. Yes, that is a thing - it's actually a lot easier than baking them in the oven. Just prick them with a fork and place them in the microwave at maximum power. Ten minutes will do, just turn them around halfway through. Keep checking, the microwave time of course varies if your potatoes are slightly bigger or smaller. And, meanwhile, put the corn in boiling water with some salt and cook for about 8 minutes. Then, make the following little side dishes.

Ingredients
Mushrooms
Mexican spice mix (smoked paprika, crushed cumin seeds, garlic powder, oregano, chili powder)
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

Chop up the mushrooms, fry them in a little olive oil and sprinkle over the spice mix, salt and pepper. This really masked the dull taste of vegetarian burgers!

Ingredients
Half a small onion
Half a chilli
100 grams of cherry tomatoes
Juice of 1/2 lime
1 clove of garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
Smoked paprika
Cumin
Oregano
Salt and pepper

Chop up the onion, garlic and chilli really finely. Chop up the tomatoes. Mix these together with the lime juice and olive oil. Add all of the spices. This makes for a nice and tangy, spicy salsa.

To serve, put everything on a plate and put a small knob of salted butter on both the corn and the baked potato. Enjoy your dinner reminiscing about 2005: the World Year of Physics, the year the Kyoto Protocol came into effect, the year with the first leap second since 1998 (December 31st, 23:59:60) and the year I moved out of my parents' house.

Next time, I swear I'll try to make my own veggie burgers!

Spicy Spanish soup for lunch

I'm not a big bread person, so I love to have soup for lunch instead. Most of the time I just buy read-made soup pots, but today being Sunday I decided to cook my own Spanish-style potato and sausage soup. The most important element of this dish is the chorizo, you really can't get the same taste without it. Not bad for the first non-vegetarian dish on this blog! (If you do want to leave it out, try adding a lot of paprika for the smoky flavour).

Ingredients
500 grams of sweet potato

2 medium onions
2 cloves of garlic
2 sweet pointed peppers
150 grams of carrots
150 grams of celery
100 grams of chorizo (a spicy Spanish sausage)
1 red chilli
2 vegetable stock cubes
salt and pepper
olive oil

If you're extra-keen, skin the pointed peppers. In any case, remove the core and seeds from the peppers and the chilli. Finely chop the peppers, chilli, onions, garlic, sweet potato, celery and carrots; slice the chorizo thinly. Fry these ingredients in a big soup pan in a little olive oil and let them soften for about ten minutes. Bring a litre of water to the boil. Crumble up the stock cubes and add them to the soup with the water. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and let the soup simmer for another ten minutes. Just before serving, squash the vegetables with a masher. Serve with chunky bread, if you're that kind of a person.

Not Actually Crumble

Yesterday I had three hard-working men for dinner. I had some indication when they'd be round, but not exactly, which made timing the dinner a bit complicated. I decided to buy ingredients for a 15-minute pasta dish to cook when they arrived, but I still wanted to impress, so I went all-out on the dessert instead. I had a vague notion of what I wanted to do: there was a big bag of frozen fruit in my freezer, flour and dark sugar in my pantry and a package of salted butter in the fridge. So I did a sort of crumble, making it up as I went along.

Ingredients
400 grams of frozen raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrants & redcurrants (or other summer fruits)
100 grams of salted butter
100 grams of dark brown sugar
150 grams of plain flour
Double cream

Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees centigrade. Grease a casserole, set aside. Cut the butter into tiny, tiny cubes (this is my way of making sure I can work with hard, cold butter - probably not the right way, but you warm it up with your hands and all goes well). Mix with the flour in a big bowl, using your hands, until the butter/flour mixture gets the consistency of breadcrumbs. Add the sugar and mix a bit.

Put the frozen fruits in the casserole and pour over the crumbs. Put in the oven for about 40 minutes or until the top layer of crumbs is golden, just while you're preparing the rest of the food and waiting for people to arrive. Leave in the oven (mine makes sure the temperature goes down as soon as the 40 minutes are over) until you serve it. After serving, pour over some double cream.

Say it was a crumble experiment!

Long Day at the Office

OK, OK, technically I don't have an office. I do, however, spend long days working so it's nice to be able to put up an essy, yet tasty dish when I get home. My partner has it even worse - during the week, he has the most terrible commute, so I end up cooking most of the time. Luckily I find nothing more relaxing than cooking!

Today I decided to do a pasta dish with fresh tagliatelle and spinach.


Ingredients
200 grams of fresh tagliatelle (store-bought for convenience!)
a knob of butter
1 small onion
2 cloves of garlic
250 grams of fresh spinach
100 grams of ricotta cheese
Zest of half a lemon
100 grams of parmasan
freshly ground black pepper
plenty of salt

The tagliatelle only takes a small while to cook, so be careful about your timing. Boil some water with a pinch of salt and put in the tagliatelle (check the package for the required time). Meanwhile, chop the onions and garlic very finely and put some butter in a hot pan. Add the onions and garlic. 4 minutes before your pasta is cooked, cook the spinach.

Cooking the Spinach, an Alternative
Because I hate watery spinach (and so should you...) I microwave mine. It only takes 3 minutes. If your spinach comes in a plastic wrapping bag, pop some holes in it and put that in the microwave (careful, it will get hot!). If you have bought loose fresh spinach, put it in a (microwave safe) bowl, cover it, and microwave for the same amount of time.

Now that the spinach is cooked, add it to the pan with the garlic and the onion. Add the ricotta and lemon zest. Drain the pasta, add the pasta to the pan and mix the ingredients. Shave over the parmasan and taste. Season well - this dish needs quite a bit of salt and pepper.

Mmm, Soup!

A couple of years ago, I came across a lovely cooking ingredient in a small whisky distillery. They sold mustard that they had infused with the taste of their fairly smokey, unfiltered and unblended whisky. I decided to add some of it to soup, together with fresh mixed mushrooms and mascarpone and thus the triple M soup was born! You can make it with your own favourite type of mustard; in the recipe I've used a course grain French mustard.

Ingredients
600 grams of fresh mixed mushrooms (such as chantarelles, oyster mushrooms, chestnut mushrooms, button mushrooms)
4 tbsp coarse French (whisky) mustard
150 grams of mascarpone
3 fresh stalks of rosemary
2 cloves of garlic
1 litre of vegetable or mushroom stock (from a stock cube)
A knob of butter
Freshly ground pepper
Salt

Chop up the mushrooms into bites small enough to eat, but make sure you can still discern the different types. Finely chop the garlic. Fry the mushrooms and garlic in the butter until soft, then add the stock. Put in the rosemary and mustard to add some flavour and bring to a boil. Once the soup is boiling, return to a low heat to simmer for 30 minutes. Before serving, add the mascarpone and stir. Check if the soup needs seasoning and add pepper and salt to taste.