An aromatic and very special soup for a friend.

As I'm sure you all know, there are some dangerous types on the internet. We've all heard horror stories about foolish types who have been too trusting and got themselves into a pickle with a stranger that they've met online.

With this in mind, I was suitably cautious when posting a Gumtree advertisement for a new flatmate in January 2009. I waited anxiously, having described in detail the available room and my personality, hoping that I would get a response - preferably from someone on the right side of sane.

When I answered a call one afternoon, from a breathless and excited woman, I didn't realise that this person would become one of the most valued and admired of my friends, someone that I would grow to love, and to consider one of my very best friends.

I showed Gemma around the flat as she sold her personality to me in what I later recognised as true Gemma style: effectively and without pause for breath.

She moved in with me a few weeks later, and history was made.


Gemma and I live separately now. We both moved in with our lovely boys earlier this year: she stayed in East London with her man - and I moved to North London with Mr Meat.

So nowadays, we obviously don't see each other as much as we did when we were flat mates. I know though, that we share special bonds with those with whom we have lived, and I still feel very close to my friend Gemma. For this reason, I know that I will be weeping with happiness for her and her new husband when she gets married next year.

I wish them both every happiness, and hope that their future is the place of sunshine and laughter that they deserve.

A few months ago, I had Gemma over for dinner. I cooked her an aromatic fish soup, with apple tarts for dessert. She was kind enough to compliment it, as she is always kind about my food, and asked how to make it herself.

Here's the recipe, a special treat fish soup. You'll need a food processor, stick blender or MagiMix for this one, sorry!

Gemma's fish soup.
(From Nigel Slater's Appetite - my favourite book)


For the spice paste:
1 or 2 chillies
2 or 3 cloves of garlic
An inch of root ginger
About 2 stalks of lemongrass
A few coriander seeds
A handful of fresh coriander
1tsp ground turmeric
A glug or two of sunflower oil, (or something else with no flavour)

And the rest:
500ml stock, (make it homemade or very good quality, this dish relies on a tasty stock)
1 tin coconut milk
1 lime
About a teaspoon of Nam Pla, (fish sauce)
A handful of mint
1 medium sized piece of cod, or similar white fish
Enough noodles to feed you
1pkt of king prawns

Prepare the bits and bobs for the spice paste. Halve and seed the chillies, peel the garlic, peel the ginger, chop it up and slice the lemongrass into disks. Throw it all into the food processor with the rest of the ingredients for the paste. Don't forget a few glugs of oil to lubricate it all and to let the blade spin properly - but not too much!

Once blended, the paste will be a beautiful, rich shade of green:

Put a deep saucepan onto a high heat and fry half of the spice paste, (put the other half in the fridge for another time), moving it around the pan. After a couple of minutes, throw the stock and coconut milk in there and bring it all to a boil. Turn the heat down and allow the soup to simmer for about ten minutes.

Meanwhile, cook your noodles according to the instructions on the packet, and cut your cod into bite sized pieces. Once the soup has simmered for its allocated time, add the fish and then the prawns. Remember that they don't need long to cook, just a couple of minutes.

Season the soup with salt, lime, the fish sauce and the mint leaves, divide the noodles into bowls and ladle the hot soup over the top. It will be delicious and aromatic.

This is not a frugal supper. It's a very special treat.

Congratulations on your engagement, Gemma and Gary!

An apology, and a special treat.

I've not been posting lately, and for that, I'm sorry, oh imaginary reader. My only excuse is that April is a terrible time of year. For students I mean.

Since I'm studying full time, but also working in a University, I'm acutely aware of the academic calendar. Easter-time is always manic, with late nights in the library, huge piles of exam timetables and mountains of essays to get through. This week I've written three, and I've not got a big workload.

But I'm sorry, reader, to have let you down. It's been beautiful and sunny in Britain, spring is finally here. We seem to have all spent the last couple of weeks in parks and green places, desperately trying to soak up as much sun as is humanly possible. We're such stereotypes aren't we?

So I expect everyone's been cooking beautiful spring-y dishes and I've not been here to jump in with a recipe or two. I'm sorry, but I will be updating you on my kitchen antics in the next few weeks, I promise.

So just a quick one for today, and it's a fish recipe. Fish is a bit of a treat for Mr Meat and myself, it's terribly expensive lately, and there are rarely leftovers, which I don't love. It's a very important part of our diets though, and it would be stupid to turn down all of the brain-assisting properties offered by our fishy friends at this terribly academic time of year. So if you've splashed out on a lovely bit of fish, here's a way of really showcasing it's freshness and it's fishiness.

Enjoy.

Simply cooked fish

A beautiful bit of white fish, (I used one 400g bit of cod, which I cut into two bits for me and Mr Meat)
A lemon
A bit of butter
Garlic
Root ginger
Salt
Pepper

Although it's not an ingredient, you need some tinfoil or greaseproof paper for this.


Pop your bit of fish onto a square of tin foil or greaseproof, about a foot across. Grate over some salt and pepper, squeeze over the juice of a quarter of a lemon and top with a couple of slices of lemon, the chopped up ginger and garlic and a slice of butter, (I used olive oil in this picture because I'm on a health kick, but butter is tastier).

You know that dinner will be brilliant when it looks that beautiful and the process is so simple.

Crunch up the sides of the wrapping, whether it's tin foil or greaseproof. Screw up the edges nice and tight; you don't want any of the steam to escape when your dinner is cooking.

Give it 20 minutes in the hot oven, the fish should be crumbling and flaky. Delicious. Serve with salad and new potatoes. If you've paid around £4 for the piece of fish, like I did, then I think it's important to cook it in a way that shows off the flavour and freshness of it. 

A substitute summer.

I have had a manic week. It's been mental. Luckily, the beginnings of spring has cheered me and I'm feeling very positive. Isn't it amazing that a few buds on the trees can make everything suddenly seem so achievable? It's marvellous.

If summer's coming, then it's time for a picnic!

When Mr Meat and I were first together, he worked late shifts. We could only see each other in the evenings after ten o clock. During a rare heatwave, Mr Meat complained to me that he was missing the summer. Because I was feeling romantic, I decided to surprise him with a night picnic, with loads of picnic type treats laid out on a blanket in my living room. He said that it was the nicest thing that anyone had ever done for him, which may have been an exaggeration, but it made me happy. It was a nice thing to say.

Because it's not very warm in the U.K. yet, it's not quite time for a park-picnic, so I've settled for a carpet-picnic for now. Hopefully it's warm enough where you are to enjoy a picnic outdoors, here are some of my suggestions for nice picnic fare.

My perfect picnic foods


Fried halloumi
Prawns
Tomato salad
Crusty bread
Pizza muffins
Cured meats
Chopped up fruit
Cider

How to make them


Fried halloumi


Cut the halloumi into slices about a centimetre thick and fry them in a good glug of olive oil. Squeeze lemon juice over the top while it's cooking, if you like.

Tomato Salad

(Really nice served with the halloumi and crusty bread.) Just chop up some nicely ripe tomatoes, season with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil.

Prawns

Fry some king prawns in butter with a couple of crushed garlic cloves and a chopped up chilli.

Pizza muffins

200g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
2 eggs
A few big glugs of olive oil
A pinch of salt
A few tomatoes, maybe 3 or 4
Some dried oregano
Half a mozzarella ball
A few grates of parmesan
1tsp tomato puree

Preheat your oven to 180c. Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and oregano, before beating in the eggs and enough olive oil so that everything starts to loosen up. It'll still be thicker than normal muffin mix though, so I added a couple of tablespoons of water. Just keep going until you get the right consistency, (which should be like thick double cream). Once that's done, tear up the mozzarella, chop up the tomatoes and add them to the mixture along with the tomato puree and a couple of grates of parmesan. Mix it all to incorporate, pour into a muffin tin and bake for about 20 minutes, until they're beautiful and firm and golden.

These things make up my perfect picnic, which I think is a glorious thing. What a treat.

Happy summer.

Birthday cake?

Baking a cake always reminds me of a childhood friend. Our games growing up always seemed to involve food. We'd buy a load of sweets and chocolates from the corner shop and make some sort of concoction with them, or, more often, we'd bake a cake. When I'm baking these days, I always think about the moment when my friend said these fateful words: "Why do we need to follow a recipe? Just put in a bit of flour, a bit less sugar, some eggs, some butter, mix it up until it looks right, then bake it in the oven."

And lo, my style of baking was born.

I knocked one together last night for a fellow lover of Germany, Justine, whose birthday it was. I'm convinced that there's no nicer cake than birthday cake, and I think that she was pleased with it!

Baking is incredibly simple - don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Cake.


125g Flour
125g Sugar
125g Soft butter
2 Eggs
Vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to about 180c. Mix all of the ingredients together in a big bowl with a wooden spoon. Pour into a greased cake tin, or two greased sandwich tins and bake for about 25 minutes or until golden and shrinking away from the edges of the pan.

That is how easy it is to make a cake. I iced mine with strawberries. For the filling I whipped up half a pot of cream and a couple of tablespoons of sugar, then I folded a few chopped strawberries into it. For the icing on top I mixed one tablespoon of jam, two or three tablespoons of icing sugar and some boiling water.

Baking your own cake is such a fun and rewarding way to cook. It's really easy and cheap to do too, so why not do some baking on your next day off?

Chicken pie and exhaustion.

It's been a mad week. I am completely wiped out. I made leftover chicken pie on Thursday night and I've only just got around to writing about it. My apologies, oh imaginary audience.

Leftover chicken may possibly be nicer than roast chicken. The cold, leftover meat is always delicious, it always seems to be even juicier and more flavoursome than the first time around!

One of my favourite ways to use up leftover chicken is to make a pie. It feels like such a wholesome thing to do and it's always so satisfying. The recipe below is inspired by Jamie Oliver's leftover turkey pie: as seen here. I've adapted the recipe though, bulking it out with lentils and removing the bacon element, which I felt added too much expense to the proceedings.

As Jamie says, if you've got enough time to make puff pastry from scratch, you really need to get a job. Even though it's fairly expensive, (£1.79 in it's ready to roll form), I really feel that it's worth it for this meal. You could easily make this pie with a mashed potato topping if you wanted to save money though.

Lovely chicken pie.


Leftover chicken, (about a cupful if possible, or as much as you have)
Two leeks
One onion
A handful of lentils, (I used puy, but any would do)
A handful of spinach
Leftover gravy
1pt chicken stock
A glug of white wine, (if possible)
flour
1pkt ready to roll puff pastry
About a tablespoonful of double cream
An egg, to glaze the pastry, (or milk if you like)

Slice the onion and the leeks and pop them into a pan with a lid. Make sure it's nice and hot, and that there's a glug of olive oil in there. One they're sizzling nicely and starting to soften, add a tiny bit of water and put the lid on, turning the heat down to low. Give them half an hour, until they're soft and squashy looking. Tip your leftover chicken in there too.

Add a handful of lentils and a tablespoon of flour and give everything a couple of minutes to cook together. Keep stirring so that it doesn't stick. Chuck in the wine and allow the alcohol to cook off, then add the leftover gravy and the chicken stock. Keep stirring, bring it to the boil, then turn the heat down and allow it to simmer for about 15 minutes.

Throw the cream and the spinach in there and stir until the spinach has wilted and the cream is nicely incorporated into the sauce. Taste for seasonings and add as much salt and pepper as you think the dish needs. 

Now for the magic part. Sieve the mixture, keeping the strained liquid aside, (do it over a jug or something). This liquid is your gravy to serve with the pie. Doing this means that the pie filling is thick and dense and delicious, and that you have a tasty gravy to moisten your potatoes with!

Put your pie filling into a rough, thick pile in the middle of a roasting tray, I like to grate some extra black pepper over at this point. Unroll your puff pastry and lay it over the filling, tucking the edges under, making a couple of scores over the top to let the steam out. Beat your egg in a cup and brush it over the top of the pie, or just brush the milk over if that's what your using. 

Your dinner's nearly ready! Just pop it in the oven for about 40 minutes.

I love cooking meals like this, I feel so frugal and wholesome. This dish costs very little to cook, I estimate about £4.23. The pie did two teas for us though so that's £2.11 per meal. Bargain. Especially for something as gorgeous as this:

And with that, dear reader, I leave you. Until next time.

Roast Chicken, my favourite thing.

Aah roast chicken. I can't get enough of it. I'm almost glad that I didn't get to have it on Sunday, because I'm so looking forward to it tonight!

A whole chicken is not just a delicious and indulgent treat, it's actually a very frugal dinner to have. My chicken tonight cost £4.10. It's not a free range one, (Sainsbury's had run out officer, honest.), but it is corn-fed and freedom food endorsed, which is the best I could do. I never buy cheap meat, I always spend as much as I can afford to in that department and go super cheap for everything else.

So, a few weeks ago, my parents visited from Scotland, we did nothing but eat good food and drink good wine from the minute they met me at the station until the minute I put them back on the train.

I love family visits.

We went to this gorgeous place one their last day. They served us whole chickens, bread sauce, roast potatoes, vegetables and gravy. It was amazing. A highly recommended Sunday lunch. The chickens themselves were tiny little things - each was enough to feed one person - and they were stuffed with bay leaves, garlic, lemon and onion, all chopped up small. Perhaps it was because the chickens themselves were so little, or maybe it was because the stuffing was chopped and intermingled, but the meat was flavoured incredibly. It was fragrant and delicate and moist. We all went home more than satisfied.

When cooking chicken, we always need to remember that it's not a very moist meat, so we need to help it out a bit. That's why stuffing it with something like onion or lemon is a good idea; it imparts some of it's moisture to our chicken. If you don't have time/can't be bothered to chop everything up in the way that I describe here, just cut an onion in half, (no need to peel) or cut a lemon into rough quarters, and shove it into the chicken's cavity. It'll make all the difference, I swear.

Oh, and sorry for posting a recipe for roast chicken, you probably already know how to make it. This version really is killer though.

Roast chicken.


A whole chicken, (buy one that's had as nice a life as possible please!)
An onion
Half a lemon
A few bay leaves, maybe three
A couple of cloves of garlic

Chop the lemon and the onion up and pop them in a bowl, halve the cloves of garlic and put them in too, tear the bay leaves and add them to the mix.

Get your chicken out of his plastic wrapping, put him into a roasting tin and cut the string that's tying him up off. He's already dead, let's not humiliate him. Let his legs roam free! You're not supposed to wash poultry anymore because the act of doing so spreads so much bacteria around the kitchen that it's safer not to bother, so just put him straight into your roasting tin. Put the chopped bits and bobs inside his cavity, but don't fill it right up, definitely leave some room in there for circulation as it will allow the chicken to cook properly. Keep some lemon pieces aside, they're nice to squeeze over the outside of the chicken.

Once the stuffing's in there, rub some leftover lemon bits over your chicken, tucking them in between the legs and the breast, to flavour and moisten the meat. Pour some olive oil and grind some salt and black pepper over and your chicken is ready for the oven! I hope you were keeping your hands nice and clean while handling him. Don't touch things in your kitchen with chicken-y hands.

Whack Mr Chicken in a hot oven for about 90 minutes, more if he's bigger. I normally just do 90 minutes and then check. He should look golden, bubbling and beautiful. He should smell delicious and his juices should run clear if you pierce in between his thigh with a knife and push his leg up against him.

Yes, £4.10 is a lot of money to pay for just one element of a meal, but if you keep watching this blog in the next few days, I'll be putting up recipes using the leftovers. I plan on getting three more meals out of our chicken friend, which works out as a pretty good deal in my book I reckon.

Now onto the second part of this blog, and equally as important.

The gravy.

I hope that my Dad doesn't mind me including our secret ingredient in the recipe here. It adds such depth to the flavour of the gravy, it takes it from ordinary to mind blowing. You'd be a fool to miss it out. See if you can spot it in the following list of ingredients.

Juices from the chicken

White wine

Flour

Hot water (preferably some that you've just boiled vegetables or potatoes in. You only need a ladlefull or so)

Soy sauce

Add a tiny bit of boiling water from the kettle to your roasting tin to melt all of the caramelised juices from the bottom of the pan. Go for those deep brown bits that look almost burned. That's where the real flavour lies. You want your gravy to be rich and chicken-y don't you? I thought so.

At this point my Dad usually pours the juices into a fat-seperator like this, but that's because his fat-intake is limited. I don't bother, I just pour the worst of the fat into a glass, it's pretty easy to do as the fat floats on top of the juices, so the fat pours away first. As soon as the clear liquid that you're pouring away becomes brown liquid, stop, because you're throwing away all of your flavour!

Put your chicken juices into a small pan, adding a tablespoon of flour or so to thicken it. Don't over-do it with the flour, the mixture in the pan should be a sort of a greasy paste, delicious. 

Give the flour a minute or two to cook off, then chuck a generous splash of wine. It makes all the difference here, enriching the gravy and adding great flavour. Keep stirring and slowly add the hot water, once the wine has cooked off. You might want to use a whisk here, as you're at risk of lumps. If your gravy is looking too thick, add some more water. If it looks too thin, boil it off a little bit.  Keep going until your gravy is at the thickness that you want it, I like mine really thick. Shake in a few drops of soy sauce and season with black pepper, give it a quick taste to see if it needs any more of either and you're ready to serve!

Whenever I have roast chicken, I think about my darling friend Lauren, because this is her jug. Thank you Lauren, and sorry for pinching it. But know that I think about you when I'm eating my favourite tea.

Honestly, is there anything better in the world than a roast chicken with gravy? I normally serve mine with rice and broccoli. The rice thing is a family tradition, it comes from a few trips to singapore, where roast chicken is served with rice. It goes really well with gravy, try it one Sunday.