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!