Category Archives: Food & drink

Roast Chicken with Fennel, Garlic and Lemon

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For four people:

  • 1.5kg organic chicken
  • 1 bulb of fennel
  • 1 lemon
  • 1 large or 2 small heads of garlic
  • 125ml dry vermouth
  • Extra-virgin olive oil
  • Salt and pepper

Heat the oven to 190 deg C or Gas 5.

Wash the chicken inside and out, dry and salt the cavity generously.

Remove any leaves from the fennel. Slice the bulb thinly. Lay the sliced fennel in the bottom of the roasting pan, and put the fennel leaves inside the chicken’s cavity.

Cut the lemon in half and squeeze and rub the juice liberally all over the chicken.

Cut the garlic through crosswise and put in the cavity with the squeezed lemon halves.

Drizzle the chicken all over with good quality olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

Place the chicken breast-side down on the fennel in the roasting pan and put in the pre-heated oven. After 30 minutes, add the vermouth, and cook for a further 60 minutes. Turn the chicken over for the last 30 minutes.

Let the chicken sit for 20 minutes before carving. Remove the fennel and keep warm. Reserve the pan juices.

Pour off any fat from the pan juices, and bubble to reheat. Stir to incorporate any roasted or sticky bits, adjust seasoning and pour over the carved chicken.

Serve with roast potatoes and seasonal vegetables.

Sam’s low-fat banana milkshake

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For two:

  • Three scoops of vanilla frozen dessert (low-fat ice-cream substitute)
  • Two ripe bananas
  • Semi-skimmed milk

Put the frozen dessert and the peeled bananas into a blender. Top up with milk to around the 500ml mark.

Process until smooth – add more milk if you prefer a less intense banana flavour.

Mango, raspberry and orange smoothie

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Makes nearly 500ml – I call that one serving, you may call it two ;-)

  • The flesh from half a large mango or one smaller
  • A handful of raspberries
  • One orange, peeled and quartered
  • Half a banana
  • A splash of apple juice from a carton to get the whole lot going (or if you want to dirty your juicer, the juice from one apple)

Dump the lot into your blender goblet and blend until, er, smooth!

Beef and Beer casserole with mushrooms and rosemary

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Nothing out of the mainstream here. Just a comforting casserole for one of the cold, stormy nights we’ve been having recently.

Feeds two

  • 350g braising steak
  • Around 20 pickling onions or small shallots
  • A small pack of button mushrooms, sliced or left whole according to size
  • Two sticks of celery, finely chopped
  • Oil – whatever you prefer, groundnut, vegetable or olive
  • Flour
  • Salt & Pepper
  • 500ml of dark ale – my wife bought Wychwood Hobgoblin, but anything with a bit of body will do just fine
  • 3 bay leaves
  • A handful of rosemary leaves, stripped from their stalks

Heat the oven to 140C/Gas 2.

Cut up the beef into cubes – be guided by the thickness of the steaks. Don’t be too obsessive about this, as long as the chunks aren’t too small. The long cook will treat big cubes and smaller ones around the same.

Heat a non-stick frying pan and add the oil. Meanwhile, season the flour and coat the beef. Fry in a couple of batches until nicely browned on all sides – don’t be timid with your browning!

Remove the meat, add a little more oil if necessary, and gently fry the onions or shallots, mushrooms and celery for 10 minutes or more, until everything is getting nice and soft.

Put everything into a heavy casserole – I’ve had a Le Creuset one for 20 or more years that always gets pressed into service – and pour on the beer.

Bring to the boil, put the lid on and put in the oven for 2.5 hours, or more.

About half-way through, spoon off any fat that has found its way to the top and add the bay leaves and rosemary. Stir in the herbs and heat the casserole to boiling before replacing in the oven.

Serve with a steamed green vegetable and mash. We like mustard mash with this.

Mustard mash

Peel and boil potatoes – you know how many you’ll eat – for about 20 minutes, until soft.

Drain the potatoes and mash over a low heat until fluffy. Take off the heat and add butter (or low-fat Flora if you’re watching your fat intake). Stir in a dessert-spoonful or more of grain mustard. Stir it in gently, but thoroughly, with a wooden spoon and taste. Not mustardy enough? Then add some more. Mustard was made for beef.

You might like dumplings

This would be great with herb dumplings, but waistlines preclude beef suet, while suspicions of the health implications of vegetable suet kill off that option in my kitchen.

Roast Pork with Onion Stuffing and Roasted Fennel

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The ideas for this one came from a programme on the Food Channel (The People’s Cookbook or a similar title, and a recipe for roasted belly of pork in Jamie Oliver’s latest, Cook With Jamie that I cooked for friends on New Year’s Eve). It’s a simplification of both recipes and worked out really well as a way to pep up a piece of supermarket pork for Sunday lunch.

Serves 6-8 hungry carnivores. Easily stretched further by increasing the veggies.

  • 1.5-2kg boneless shoulder pork
  • 2 onions, finely sliced
  • Olive oil
  • A handful of thyme leaves stripped from their stems
  • 1 large or 2 small fennel bulbs, finely sliced
  • 250mls dry vermouth
  • Marigold Vegetable Bouillon

Heat the oven as hot as it will go – we’re going to get crackling from this recipe!

Fry the onions gently in the olive oil until soft. Remove the string from the joint and unroll, skin side down. Mix the thyme and the onions and spread over the meat. Roll up and tie the joint. Put in a roasting pan, rind up and sprinkle with Maldon salt.

Put in the hot oven for 20 minutes – the crackling should be starting to form clearly at the end of this period. Leave it a little longer if you’re unsure.

While the meat is in the oven, slice the fennel and measure out the vermouth.

Take the meat out of the oven and reduce the temperature to 190C/375F/Gas 5. Take the joint out of the pan, or move it to one side and spread the fennel slices over the bottom of the roasting pan. Pour in the vermouth. Settle the pork on top of the fennel.

Roast for 35 minutes per 500g. Have a look now and again to make sure the vermouth hasn’t dried out. This isn’t a problem in my pan, but if you’ve a larger one, you may suffer more from evaporation. Add more if it looks as if it’s drying out.

When the pork is cooked – I use a meat thermometer to check – remove the meat from the oven and turn the temperature up if you have roast potatoes in the oven (the pork will go equally well with garlic and olive oil mash, but Sunday demands roasties, IMO). Put the pork on a carving dish and let it relax while you finish the sauce and vegetables.

With a slotted spoon, remove the soft and slightly caramelised fennel to a warmed dish and cover to keep warm.

How you make the sauce depends on how much liquid remains. You may need to dilute things down a bit with some water, but whichever way, I like to sprinkle in some Marigold Vegetable Bouillon powder as it somehow brings the flavours together. You may need to boil to reduce the liquid to get the flavours. My aim is to get taste not volume – this isn’t a great, heavy, all-encompassing gravy. Perhaps just a small puddle of interesting flavour to complement the pork.

Remove the crackling from the joint and break, cut or otherwise make it into individually sized pieces. Carve the pork and serve on a platter drizzled with some or all of the sauce – put the remainder, if any, in a sauce boat.

Smoothies…

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I mentioned in the previous post how I’ve not been well. A succession of nasty viruses had left me feeling both tired (in need of plenty of sleep) and generally lacking energy.

After the doc said he couldn’t do anything to help me, I embarked on a course of Organically produced stuff for boosting my immune system, a rigorous regime of smoothies and a general upping in the quality of food I’ve been eating. I’m glad to say that I’m feeling much better, although I haven’t quite got all my energy back.

Anyway, I thought I’d share some of the smoothie recipes I’ve been playing with:

Pomegranate & Raspberry Smoothie

  • 2 pomegranates
  • 1/3 punnet raspberries
  • 1 apple
  • 1 orange
  • 1/2 banana

Cut the pomegranates in half and squeeze in a citrus squeezer. Squeeze the orange. Juice the apple.

Put the juices in a blender with the banana and whizz.

Low(-ish) fat sausage casserole

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Sausage casserole is one of those things I love to cook during the winter, and I think winter is definitely here.

I bought some low-fat pork sausages and dry-cure smoked back bacon from Waitrose for brunch on Sunday; I used up the remaining sausages and bacon last night in what Sam said was an excellent sausage casserole. I agree, so I thought I’d share the recipe with you.

For two

  • 4 low-fat sausages
  • 2 rashers of back bacon, most of their fat removed and cut into strips (not too small, or the bacon will get lost in the gravy)
  • 3 or 4 leeks (I used organic ones from our weekly veg box)
  • 2/3 of a can of flageolet beans (use whatever you have to hand)
  • Olive oil
  • A glass of supermarket ruby port
  • Beef stock from a Knorr cube (use the real stuff, if you have it)
  • A good few sprigs of thyme, tied together like a bouquet garni
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the sausages gently under the grill to eliminate as much fat as possible. Fry the bacon until golden in a little olive oil in the pan you’re using for the casserole (I used my trusty Le Creuset pot). I want as much flavour as possible from the bacon, so I’ll put up with the extra fat.

Remove the bacon and drain on kitchen paper with the cooked sausages.

Slice the leeks into 1cm rings, and fry gently until soft and starting to turn golden. Separate the leeks as you cook.

Add the port and stock. Tip in the washed and drained flageolet beans. Add the thyme and seasoning – not too heavy on the seasoning; you can check it and adjust just before serving.

Bring gently to a simmer. Pop on the lid and forget it while you cook the mash.

Sweet potato mash

  • Equal quantities of sweet potato and potato (you know how much you like to eat, so I’ll leave the amounts to you), peeled and cut into cubes for boiling
  • Salt and pepper
  • A little freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 or 2 tablespoons low-fat creme fraiche

Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Drain, then mash over a low heat. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Beat the creme fraiche in with a wooden spoon.

Serve with a green vegetable – our veg box, rather bizarrely, came up with some spring greens!

Tortas de Aceite

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Ines Rosales Sweet Olive Oil Tortas. What a find!

Tortas de Aciete

I had some time to kill in Hove this lunchtime, and wandered into the Bona Foodie delicatessen. These were irresistible. ‘Delicious snack. Made with extra virgin olive oil. Serve with tea, coffee or cheese’, it said. Along with: handmade in Spain since 1910.

£2.50 was duly handed over for a pack of six, and served with cheese when we got back.

So what are they like? They’re kind of thin crisp flaky pastry with a slight aniseedy background. And, yes, I can confirm they are absolutely yummy with cheese.

I’m shortly going to try the tea or coffee claim, too :-)