Operation Stop Cooking: Part 5 - Kitchen wishlist

I've bumped this post up the list because Christmas is approaching, so it might be handy to eye up what you fancy while people are asking for gift ideas. This isn't a comprehensive list of everything a kitchen needs, just the things I find especially useful for bulk-cooking, from stocking-filler stuff to Big Gifts. And I wouldn't suggest anyone rush out and buy the whole kaboodle, just add bits and pieces as time and money and gifts allow. (As you'll see, masses of mine were gifts.) I'm putting them in approximate order of what I'd consider most essential, with a bit at the end of how the hell I fit all this stuff in my dainty kitchen.

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 4 - Lasting Salads

The One Big Dish and More of the Main Bit tend to be heavier slow-cooked foods, rich on flavour, but not much crunch. Some of the Very Lazy Sides bring in a bit of crunch and freshness, but we want more than that and more variety: lovely fresh crisp and crunchy salads, in the same spirit of utterly venal sloth that I've been inculcating for the last three posts. Enter: salads that last!

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 3 - Very Lazy Sides

The One Big Dish has you covered for veg as well, cooking More of the Main Bit leaves you free to make elaborate sides like pomme dauphinoises or hasslebacks should you so desire, but you can also crowd a plate with side dishes with minimal extra work. My definition of Very Lazy Sides is that it takes less than 3 minutes of prep AND that you can get it ready beforehand or throw it together just before you eat - no faffing about with multiple steps. So even Will's Amazing Seared Broccoli doesn't make the cut for a Very Lazy Side, because the broccoli needs chopping and it's about ten minutes with occasional shaking. When I say lazy, I mean lazy. And also delicious.

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 2 - More of the Main Bit

The One Big Dish gives you two complete nights off cooking, but it's also the most freezer-space-hungry option and it restricts your choices to one-pot dishes with cooked veg only. So the next trick up your sleeve is to make more of the main bit of the meal, which is usually the schleppy bit. This takes up half the space in your freezer, and then you only have to make the sides that go with it. (The next post or two will be about Lazy Sides and Lasting Salads, so that even there you're streamlining your cooking.)

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 1 - One Big Dish

 

 The secret to loving cooking more: not cooking

Newbie cooking

When I began to blog, I also started photographing simpler dishes, for friends who weren't taught to cook at home and didn't spend swathes of their childhood sitting on the kitchen counter chatting to Mum and co-incidentally witnessing dozens of techniques and orders-of-cooking.  "It's like computers," I explained to one friend, who was frustrated by his own ignorance. "If you just grow up doing it, like we did, then it's simple and easy, but actually there are all these little things you learnt along the way. And if you didn't, it feels like there's so much to learn, and you're just expected to know, and no-one's teaching you." No-one should be left out. Cooking is a joy.

Spontaneous pasta

This one's a total winner because it's ridiculously fast, hugely variable, pretty damn easy, and relies mostly on store-cupboard ingredients.  I invented it when I was about 27 and living in Hythe Bridge Street, and me, Will, and my housemates got home at about 2 am, all thoroughly trashed, and everyone said they were hungry. And looked at me. Expectantly.

We decided the challenge should be to make the pasta sauce while the pasta was boiling (no extra time) and hence Spontaneous Pasta was born. I pretty much always have tinned tomatoes about, and pasta, and a few jars of olives (the cheap ones in brine, already depipped), that's the store cupboard stuff.  And then there are usually some herbs laying about the place and a chilli or two. And garlic. Always garlic. And really it mostly just gets blitzed up and thrown over the pasta to heat.

I sometimes forget about this for years and then sneer at the notion of it, and then make it again and realise OH HELL THIS IS HELLA TASTY. You don't actually have to make it at lightning speed while the pasta boils, but anything that can be made in ten minutes flat while drunk is fairly easy. And it tastes equally amazing sober.

Vegetarian chilli

A spicy tangy chilli is the basis for tortilla and nachos. My meat chilli takes forever, slowly evolving from a magnificent bolognese through chilli con carne and re-emerging to appear in tortillas and nachos - the veggie one is a lot quicker! Prep time is about 5-10 minutes, cooking time is 40-50 minutes.

A good panful will still give you plenty to freeze, unless you're feeding a very large group - each tortilla only needs about 2 heaped tablespoons of chilli (about 50ml); for nachos, you need about 250ml of chilli per person. This recipe makes about 1.5 litres of chilli - that's about 30 tortillas, or nachos for 6. Or, nachos for 4 and then 10 tortillas, which would feed 4 nicely if 2 of them are very hungry, or feed 10 if they're all me and only want one tortilla each. You get the idea - whichever which way, you probably have enough to freeze some as well, and chilli freezes very happily and is even nicer the next time.

Spicy tomato sauce

A very simple spicy tomato sauce which I use to top mushroom and lentil bake, but which you could use for anything. Very few ingredients and super-easy, all this baby really wants is time. So get it going first and let it simmer in the background.

Mushroom and lentil bake

For a writer, I'm pretty rubbish at naming things. My twelve-week writing course was called, for the first four years, "the twelve-week course", before in a fit of uncharacteristic brilliance and after four years of writing emails in which I explained that it covered the key elements of stories, I renamed it "Story Elements". The follow-up course I created at my students' request is now in its fifth year of being known as "the follow-up course". Occasionally, this troubles me.

I called this dish "lentil bake" for years before I had the epiphany to make it sound at least a tiny bit nicer by mentioning another of its key ingredients, so now it's "mushroom and lentil bake". But in my defence, most dishes are named after their ingredients, it just sounds fancier when you're naming them in French or Italian or Hindi or Urdu. So feel free to rename it champignons et lentilles cuits, funghi e lenticchie al forno, masharoom aur masoor kee daal bekd (shoot Google translate, not me), or indeed مشروم اور دال پکایا. (The original recipe is from Rose Elliot's Bean Book, but I can't remember what she called it.)

It's much tastier than its name suggests and it's also a good one for the leftovers list because you could substitute whatever leftover veg you like, in the place of the mushrooms, and it's an absolute winner for using up old bits of hard cheese and even edible rind.

The Eating List

As I said on the liver paté post, both Mum and I felt uneasy about the huge amounts of food and food-wastefulness around Christmas. And my take on it is, "As long as we don't throw anything away." Put stuff in tupperwares, freeze stuff, cook stuff as needed, pay attention to leftovers, make an "eating" list the way you'd usually make a "shopping" list - putting on a feast and having leftovers really doesn't have to be wasteful. And if you're exhausted, just get everything you can into the freezer, in small containers, and you'll have lots of easy meals to come. I've already frozen everything that could be frozen (here's the freezing & food-hygiene post) so now we're down to non-freezables and mustn't-refreezes.

Mom thought the Eating List was worth blogging, so if she thought so, with her amazing cooking know-how and years of experience, I figured I'd share it! It's like a shopping list, except you're shopping in your own fridge, so it's a bit quicker than going to the shops and also it's free. TL;DR: list everything in the fridge, note its use-by dates and put it on a traffic-light system, plan meals accordingly.

What to do with leftover cream

My friend texted me this morning demanding recipes for leftover cream, so I leapt to it (and out of bed) to gather up a range of options, which also reminded me we have 220ml leftover from yesterday's liver paté. She has 450ml left over and it's hard to find a recipe that uses more than 100ml, though soured cream will do the trick, so here are the options - the coffees, the desserts, the savouries, and the soured cream! Each batch of ideas is arranged easiest to most cookish. Plus it also leads to ideas for how to use leftover clementines, vegetables, and meat!

Liver paté

If you're Doing Things With Giblets, this is part two and you already have your chicken / turkey / capon livers, otherwise fowl livers are ever so cheap to come by, especially if you buy them frozen. This is my mum's gorgeous recipe (as you'll see by the fine lettering, though she will probably decry it as Early Work) and makes a silky-smooth rich flavoursome paté.

What to do with giblets

Anyone who roasted a fowl yesterday probably got an alarming little bag of Bits with it - The Giblets - alarmingly close in name to gibbets, and a kind of "finishing present". (A Finishing Present entered family folklore some years back. In the late 80s / early 90s, making pompoms was all the rage. They're surprisingly work-intensive. One of my small cousins started a massively over-ambitious pompom, with a huge disc, for a birthday present for me. She wound the wool around it until it had reached about a centimetre thick around the disc. The rest of the wool-winding would have taken about three years and resulted in a pompom the size of my head. Nevertheless, she gamely gave me the unfinished pompom, and said it was "a finishing present".) So your purveyor of meats has given you a finishing present. Wtf do you do with it, besides put it in the fridge for a decent interval before chucking it? Or give it to your daughter, alongside a carcass with rich pickings, for her to do magic with? TL;DR: pull out the liver for liver paté, turn the rest into a fabulously rich stock.

How to make yogurt

I recently read an article which suggested, to my absolute horror, that my friends in the States don't have proper access to real yogurt, only the kind to which sugar and syrups and suchlike have beeen added, an idea I find so upsetting that I have to put it right immediately by teaching you how to make it.

Baked Camembert supper

Baked camembert is ususally touted as a starter, which is odd, because it's everything a starter shouldn't be: very filling, rich, and satisfying. It doesn't work so well at the end of a meal, either: it's hard to make a main course light enough that people will welcome quantities of gloopy, melty cheese after it, instead of groaning inside at the prospect, trying to swallow enough to be assuage their host's feelings, and then feeling a food coma setting in so fast that they must either take their leave or nod off at the table.

What it does make, however, is an absolutely brilliant romantic supper for two! Or for one, if you're very very hungry, or for more, if you are more, and add additional camemberts. Bizarrely, it's also incredibly healthy - because once you have your splendid Baked Camembert centrepiece, you surround it with fresh raw foods that want to be delved into melty hot cheese, and end up eating more raw vegetables than any usual supper might feature. Plus once the oven's hot, it only takes 15 minutes.

Aubergine sausage and olive stew

I threw this together as one of those random oh-and-we-have-that-too stews and was so astonishingly impressed with it, I immediately scrawled all the ingredients down in the Little Living-room Book of Thoughts. (It's important to have spangly wee notebooks stashed about the house generally, but in the living room especially, because you never know when Doctor Who or Farscape will trigger a major ephiphany, or you'll be struck with a thought about right-angles, or need to jot down a poem or plot line, or, indeed, a recipe.) The main point of amazement, though, was OLIVES! IN A STEW! IN STEW! OLIVES! You can put olives in stew. PUT OLIVES IN STEW.

How to make (chicken) stock

Very short summary: after a roast, throw the carcass, some onion, any veg peelings, and maybe bay leaves and peppercorn into a large pot, cover with water, and simmer gently until you go to bed. The next day, drain it, simmer some more to reduce it if you want, done.

Stock cubes are to homemade stock what packet soup is to homemade soup. I hate foodie snobbery so if you don't have homemade stock and some recipe's insisting on it, whatever, use a stock cube - but that is the difference. A considerable one. (Whereas the difference between fresh tomatoes or tinned is generally very minor. Provided you're making a sauce, not salad.) Some recipes are very insistent on homemade stock - the recipes that really need it are the ones that rely heavily on the flavour of the liquid, eg risotto, a broth, French  onion soup, without much else (as opposed to bolognese, which has tons else). But sometimes the recipe writer is just demanding, so if they're also insisting that something has to be pancetta and bacon won't do, or that you must specifically use gorgonzola and no other blue cheese, then take their advice with a pinch of salt. They are living in their own, rainbow-filled unicorn-populated magical ideal world. Bless.

ALL THAT SAID - stock is very, very easy to make, especially if you don't forget about it and nearly burn the house down. Three times, people. Three times.

Garlic pickle elixir of life

There is nothing* better than friends who like the same sort of food that you do, but have different recipe books. We invited said friends (not knowing this about them yet) for dinner. Did they like curry? Yes, they said. And if it was quite hot, chilli-hot? Um... some of it really quite hot? Yes, they said. But we were nervous. It used to be, English people would say they liked really hot food, and then you served them really hot food, and then they died, and it was your fault they were dead, but you'd asked and they said yes. (If you're not born and bred here, it's very hard to know when English people don't like things. Because asking doesn't work, and there are no visible signs, but apparently there are minute signals with which they communicate with each other. I've done my best to go native since I started living here, but some of the finer details still elude me, to my frustration. At times I've suspected some of the information is passed on chemically, as plants do. Anyway.) So we prepared a wide range of curries, a veritable feast, all the way from the mildest up to a Balti phal, and I added fine green beans to the Balti phal, and thus by accident camouflaged the whole green chillis, which added an unexpected Russian-roulette dimension to that part of the dinner. They seemed very happy, though I always wonder if I'm missing chemical signals, even with people I know well.

THEN: they invited us around to theirs for dinner, on their boat. And prepared us a veritable curry feast! Of splendidly hot rich and various curries, a marvel of food joy, and totally different recipes to the ones we know! And they fed us garlic pickle. And only courtesy stopped me eating the entire lot out the jar with a teaspoon.

Green tapenade

I was going to share garlic pickle next, with a bit of story-time, but let's complete the dips triumvirate first, of black-olive tapenade, hummus, and green-olive tapenade. Some people might put taramasalata into the mix, but in case you haven't noticed, I don't much like fish. (I deeply regret this and am trying to work on it, slowly; so far I can actively enjoy mussels, oysters, shrimps, and salmon, and can eat other kinds of shellfish, but no actual fish besides salmon, and I will swill my mouth with sour milk to get rid of the taste of anchovies.) So, green-olive tapenade it is!

Hummus: it's not middle-class, it's chickpeas.

I get alternately baffled and a bit harrumphy when perfectly innocent food-stuffs get designated as being a particular class. Lentils as middle-class bewilders me especially - lentils? Seriously? The incredibly cheap, nutritious staple eaten by most of the subcontinent? Likewise hummus. It's not middle-class, it's chickpeas. With some other stuff. You could call it Greek fairly accurately, if you wanted, but not middle-class. And yet despite its now being very widespread and familiar, the 'orrible little label persists. So: sod that. It's not middle-class, it's chickpeas.

Nachos to share

A great big bowlful of nachos, dumped squarely between you, eaten with your fingers, oh joy joy joy! Memories of Panchos in Obs, sharing a towering mound of nachos with Nikka, while the Gipsy Kings played... I used to make this loads, then forgot about it for years, and it's burst back onto the menu recently. This is part of the vat of bolognese meal cascade, so if you haven't made a vat of bolognese, you should start here.

Socca pizza: prepare to be AMAZED!

When I'm not eating wheat for whatever reason, the thing I miss most is pizza. Even pizza restaurants can't seem to manage a wheat-free pizza, it's always something a bit soggy and disappointing. My current food hero is Jack Monroe, so when she posted a recipe for socca pizza, made with gram flour (chickpea flour) I leapt to it. It was brilliant! ...ish. Almost there. Not quite... crispy. So I started experimenting. And refining. And tweaking. And obsessively measuring every detail. Happily, Will's fallen in love with it too, so me repeatedly making us pizzas with tiny variations on a theme (science tip: you can't change two variables at once), is fine. And when I burn my hand again, he's very happy to take over, while I sing Aranjuez with my hand under the tap. So: after extensive, tasty research, here's how to make perfect, crispy gluten-free pizza. After the recipe I'll go into all the ins and outs, because not everything has to be perfect all the time, but it can be if you want it to be, and then toppings ideas.

Printable shopping lists & menu plan blanks

Who wants a visit from the organisation fairy?!

The golden rule of organisation: organisation should be less work than sorting out the chaos would be. If it takes you more time / money / effort than living with the muddle, that's not organisation, that's bureaucracy! So these are to make life easier and simpler, so you don't run out of things like tinfoil or toilet paper, or stand staring despairingly into the fridge, asking that age-old question, what the hell to make for supper. I made these shopping-list and menu-plan templates for myself, and then for my cousin, and there's different versions depending on how much planning you want / like to do. Also each set comes in two fonts.

Click on the image to preview, click on the link underneath to download it. How to use them is further down.

Option 1: Combined shopping-list + flexible menu plan

Choose one, in the font you like, and print out a batch.

Download Matchbook shopping-list / menu-plan

 

Download Lobster shopping-list / menu-plan 

Option 2: Shopping list + detailed menu plans

1. Choose one shopping list, in whichever font you prefer, print out a batch, and chop in half.

 2. Choose your meal-plan style (lunch + dinner only or breakfast, lunch, and dinner) in whichever font you prefer, and print out a batch. All versions have a "do in advance" column.

Matchbook font menu plans

or

Download 2-meal menu plan or Download 3-meal menu plan

Lobster font menu plans

or  

Download 2-meal menu plan or Download 3-meal menu plan

 How to use...

 

 The shopping lists

Print a batch of shopping lists and put them up somewhere in the kitchen. (Mine are the combined version, so they're folded in half.) If you don't have a pinboard, some combination of crocodile clip / paperclip / string / blutack should do the trick. Maybe on the inside of a cupboard, but I like to keep mine visible, so I remember to add stuff.

Any time something's running low - tinfoil, loo paper, salt, the random things that are easy to forget - add it to the list. (When I had a utility room, I always had a backup of stuff like that, and replaced the back up, but this kitchen has less space.)

I have pens cached everywhere, all over the house, so that's not a problem, but you could attach a pen, except in a pen-short house, someone would steal it. So instead you could empty a cheap pack of ballpoints into the cutlery drawer. (One of my many pen caches.)

The combined shopping list / meal plan

Before we go shopping, or while we're wandering around the shops, we jot on the meal-list side what we're planning to make, in no particular order, and add the ingredients to the things already on the list. There's only the two of us, so no need for military menu planning and it all stays quite flexible, but I do allocate specific easy & quick dishes for teaching nights when I finish at about 10. That meal list then stays pinned up on the pinboard while we cook our way throught it; meanwhile, a new shopping list is gathering up anything we're now running out of.

The detailed menu plan

I made this at my cousin's request, as she needs to do more planning - she has two kids, and does complicated things involving pre-soaking all the ingredients, hence the "do in advance" column which is also handy for remembering to defrost stuff. I only menu-plan with that kind of detail when I'm cooking or planning for someone else.

The meals list

Old menu plans don't get chucked away - they go in the magic meals list envelope. I've had that envelope since about 2008, at least, so some lists must've strayed, but it's still bulging. It's been pinned on the pinboard, blu-tacked on a cupboard inside, magnetted to the fridge and the side of the boiler... Whenever we can't think of anything to cook for the coming weeks, we rifle through the assorted scraps.

The meals list is especially useful when the season changes, and our heads are still full of stews & soups and we can't even remember what we eat in summertime. (That's why I added "season" to the detailed menu plan.) Occasionally I think about writing or typing up a masterlist, but I like seeing the constellations of dishes, and find that useful, and also like the fragments of memory and other houses.

Enjoy! (Also, if you want other versions and want me to make them with those lovely fonts and with the organisation fairy, let me know.)

Sag paneer

Sag aloo (aloo = potato, remember) is one of my always-orders for Indian food (and if you're in Oxford, you should be going to the Standard Tandoori, which is a marvellous story that shall be told another time, but trust me, ignore the name, and just go) and another one I figured was unreplicable at home... nope, not at all. Quite easy to make. But as I usually have the aloo served up in aloo gajjar, and paneer is basically cheese (cheese... CHEESE... CHEESE...!) , sag paneer is now one of my always-makes for curries. Or just sag, if we don't have paneer. (Paneer, I should add, is cheese, quite mild-tasting, white, often comes already cubed, and I buy it from the Indian grocers aka the spice shop. You can also make it but I haven't learnt how yet.)

Sag actually just means "greens", which could be spinach or not; palak means spinach specifically. So most of the year round I'm making palak paneer, but occasionally, when the season and the stars are right, it's most definitely sag paneer, because I'm using this:

Aloo gajjar

Aloo gajjar (which actually just means potato-carrots, but sounds more glamorous) is a staple side dish for almost every curry I make - humble ingredients, quick, yummy and spicy, and been in my repertoire for long enough to feel like comfort food. It even predates the Balti Bible curries, as a quick bit of cookbook archaeology shows:

Kimchi

A quick break from the avalanche of curries, because the cold / flu is still going strong, and a bowlful of kimchi is suddenly the most magical salty-chilli-gingery-garlicky elixir imaginable, and a brilliant fuschia-purple to boot. You know the way a spoonful of Branston pickle can make your mouth spasm in sudden pickle-lust? That's what kimchi does.

Luxurious dhal

This is a gloriously luxurious dhal, so a bit more effort than most, so I go into a bit of a disquisition on dhal and lentils first, and then a random tangent of family folklore, and then get back onto the subject of how to make it, but you shouldn't think all dhals are this as involved as this one, but it is, of course, thoroughly worth it.

Fragrant stock

All the curry dishes keep saying "fragrant stock or water" - most of the time I'm really not fussed about it and just use water if I don't have fragrant stock; occasionally, when I can be bothered, I'll make up a batch of fragrant stock for a curry I'm cooking and freeze the extra in 200ml batches, for future curries. When it comes to a luxurious dahl, though, I really will bother, because those lentils want all the soak-in glorious flavour they can stand! And actually it's ridiculously easy, and quick. It only takes 20 minutes, so for most curries, you could pop it on once you've got the onions frying, and it'll be ready in time. It also smells glorious.

Balti madras

So far on the many marvellous curries list, we've got how to make some major spice mixes (balti and garam masla and green masala paste) and perfect rice, but the only main dish so far is the bright fresh-tasting jalfrezi. And for a true curry cascade, you need many many curries: you need "main" dishes and dahls and vegetable side dishes, all tucked away nicely in the freezer, so whenever you want curry, you only need to make one dish and still serve a curry feast. Or do what I've just done: crawl from a fluey sofa to pull a selection of curry dishes out to defrost, then curl back up with lemsip and a laptop. To muse on Madras.

Lots Lasagne

It's just as easy to make three lasagnes as to make one, so this makes three, each serving 4-6 people, so you can eat one and freeze two, or invite an extra twelve friends around, or turn up to someone's move with enough lasagne to feed all the helpers for a couple of days.

There's nothing for lunch!... Green masala & egg

Another emergency lunch where I'd failed to defrost a soup in advance and didn't have the makings of a nice big salad and the fridge was looking accusatorily empty and unpromising. In fact, the fridge's total Fresh Food quota was four baby sweetcorn and a tablespoon or two of leftover cream. There were, however, eggs. I also don't have much time for lunch. Mental process: egg on toast? But that'll make me sleepy all afternoon. There's frozen peas: pea omelette? But an omelette without cheese is no fun... Oh look! I have green masala paste! Toast takes 5 mins, hard-boiling eggs only takes 10...

There's nothing for lunch!... Dahl soup

(You are bearing witness to a process of discovery here. If you want actual recipe thingy, scroll down to the photo of the typed bit.) It's lunchtime, the fridge is a barren wasteland with some dead leaves clinging to the bottom of the salad drawer, there is nothing for lunch - but wait!

Breakfasts: anything but cereal

These days, I eat breakfast every morning and have really delicious breakfasts that I actually want to eat, which is a total revelation, because I spent years miserably spooning cold milk into my face, with the occasional floating husk caught up in it, out of a dutiful sense of Doing The Right Thing. For the Most Important Meal of the Day (total myth, btw), it was an utter misery. I hate cereal. All cereal. Pronutro, that South African staple that turns instantly to stodgy baby food the moment milk touches it most of all. But also sweet cereals, bran cereals (oh the years I spent dutifully eating all-bran!), even muesli if it's with milk. Crunchy muesli with yoghurt is acceptable, but that's it. I don't eat toast much, either - I like it, but it's not an especially healthy staple. I think back and for most of my twenties, I started each day far too early, simultaneously brittle and woolly with sleep, sitting up at a table because That's What You Did, with that horrible bowl of cold milk and its horrible floating bran flakes, trying to get it over with 15 mls at a time. And then, because this was my twenties, went off to an ill-fitting job in ill-fitting clothes that I sort of hoped would pass muster but it was very possible that one half of my body would lose bloodflow when I sat down at my desk. (That wasn't my entire twenties, obviously, but it's what stands out when I think of those miserable breakfasts.)

Well, ring the changes! Around 28 or so, with a very nice job and clothes that fitted, I had the revolutionary idea: what if I ate a breakfast that I actually liked? Even if it wasn't on the Official Breakfast List?

Mexican scrambled egg

This is the sort of breakfast you want when you wake up so hungry that the person next to you is in real mortal danger, but you only have about ten minutes' worth of energy max so a full English is out of the question. Yes, I eat spicy food for breakfast. I eat all sorts of weird things for breakfast, which I'll post about in a sec. So this is me stumbling sleepily and ravenously downstairs on a Saturday morning at a quarter-to-whatever-you-think-is-early, and this is what my rummage turns up:

Not-just-Christmassy Red Cabbage

I haven't overshared for ages, because the day after my birthday, all the horrible EU VAT stuff hit, and then while I was still wrestling with that hydra-octopus, I got a wipe-out two-week-plus flu. So instead of spending my much-anticipated holiday making spice mixes and cooking muchly and doing odd decorative things to the house, I spent it sipping lemsip and banging up on EU legislation and stats. Fun fun fun.

Everyone else in the world might already have their red-cabbage recipe, but I only discovered this for the first time last New Year's (the one a year ago), for a dinner party, and thought it was so marvellous that... I didn't make it again until this winter. Which is ridiculous. Like the special notebook that's too nice to use, or the fancy ingredient you save for the right moment until it grows mould and has to be thrown away. I meant to post this recipe before Christmas, and then at least before New Year, but instead I shall stick to my original realisation, which is that it's for all of winter. Also, for a dish I'd mentally pigeonholed as "special occasion", it's very cheap, and for anyone whose New Year Resolutions feature cabbage heavily, this is for you. It is wonderful.

Cheese fest

This isn't cooking per se, but I always have to look up the quantities that I once helpfully wrote down for Future Me, along with a shopping list, so I thought I'd share that, as it's coming up to party-time, and share some of my cheese lists courtesy of my Cheese Hero, plus some of his Ineffable Wisdom on the subject of cheese. Also, because I had my Birthday Cheese Fest last night (my birthday's on Monday). So when I scavenge through my recipe files for Cheese Party Quantities, I find this:

Cheese party quantities

for 10 people
150g cheese per person = 1.5 kg total
Biscuits: 5 boxes (you could do 1 packet each water biscuits, digestives, oatcakes, cream crackers, rye crackers, but now I just bite the bullet and get three kinds of Millers Damsels because they serve the cheese so much better)
Grapes: 3 punnets
1 head celery
4 apples
Chocs: 5 per person = 50 chocs
1.5 bottles port, 8 bottles wine (yeah, yeah, whatever, it's a party people)
Cheeses: Thick blue A5 notebook, Nov 2012

Fresh, lively jalfrezi

This is the best freshest liveliest curry ever. I make large quantities (surprise!) and freeze it in 250 ml batches. That and a 300g bag of frozen prawns = perfect curry for two. For this one, you need to have already made your green masala paste as well as your balti and garam masala. These quantities make about 1.25 litres, which is enough sauce for 5 curries for 2.

Curry Cascade

Curry is its best when you have lots of different dishes - I usually try to have at least the main curry, two sides, and perfect rice:

And even better, several different curries, several different sides. BUT if you try to do all that at once, you end up with insanely complicated prep arrangements like this:

Freezing (even without a freezer) and some food safety tips

I said that I freeze and freeze and freeze - I've worked out some useful ways to do that (and useful quantities) and learnt a lot about food hygiene from Will's restaurant experience. We now have two freezers: one is part of a fridge-freezer; the other (same size, about waist height) we got for twenty quid off The Daily Info (Oxford's lovely classifieds site) in April, when my endo was coming back and I wanted to be able to more in-advance cooking. We also spent three years living with just an icebox, though, so I'll add what I learnt from that, and also totally ice-zone-free fridge-only suggestions. Whatever you're using, though, HEALTH WARNING: FOOD SAFETY.

Random marinated olives ~ with future flavoured oil

Sometimes I do large quantities of marinated olives in big jars with much planning and special Buying Of The Olives And the Olive Oil; this evening I absentmindedly and sleepily pootled about the kitchen throwing stuff in a jar and literally throwing coriander seeds about the place, all because I'd absentmindedly and sleepily drained too many olives at lunchtime, for salad, and the remaining olives were starting to look all dry and sad in the colander in the sink. It took about ten minutes. It would've taken five, if I'd been less absentminded and sleepy, and hadn't spent quite as much time collecting coriander seeds I'd thrown around. You also end up with amazing flavoured oil.