This is more so I can keep up with what I've been doing than anything else, and I really should be taking photos of these, the problem being that as soon as something's ready to be served, you don't want to be mucking about with a camera and light levels - you just want to feed. It's not that I think the food I've made is particularly notable, but one day I'd like to be and it'd be good to look back on these posts to see how I've progressed. Quality-wise my cooking is nowhere near the excellence of Last Night's Dinner (go, read, drool) but it's good to aspire.
Pumpkin soup from the New Covent Garden Book of Soups: New, Old and Odd Recipes. It's a smashing book that I've neglected for far too long and am now making up for lost time. The recipe required about 800g of pumpkin flesh, ended up with two full litre-size freezer bags of pumpkin soup. Tasted good, but not quite as rich and tasty as the roasted squash soup from a couple of weeks back - I think it needed something more, maybe a bit more flesh or time to reduce. Still, perfectly suppable and will go down nicely as lunch during the week. Planning on making the Cheesy Soup with Bacon tomorrow, just the thing for a chilly Autumn Sunday.
Also from the same book, roasted tomato and red pepper soup. Very tasty, but in following the recipe it ended up being very red-pepper-heavy in taste - not a bad thing as such, but I'd expected a bit more tomato and might change the quantities a tad next time. Still, the colour of the soup was incredible, very red and vibrant, all good stuff. Sadly a kitchen calamity meant that all but a few bowls worth were lost, necessitating the need for...
Tomato soup from The Student Cookbook. Yes, granted, it's 8 years since I should have any right to own such a book, but it remains handy for the odd recipe free from faff (surprisingly there's no recipe for a nice simple tomato soup in the aforementioned Covent Garden book). No great shakes but a perfectly serviceable soup, though I deviate shockingly from the recipe in not straining the tomatoes out of the soup but instead blending them together, creating a thicker, almost creamier soup with all those lovely tomato seeds and bits of skin floating about in it. Again, a good 'un for lunch and for freezing.
Two white loaves made using this recipe from Dan Lepard's Guardian Guide to Baking, as posted before. Also, from the same guide, I baked a wholemeal loaf which, unlike the white loaf's overnight sponge, could be made in just a few hours. The requirement for a grounded-down vitamin C tablet caught me by surprise, but presumably it did the job because the finished loaf was fine and relatively light, as wholemeals go, working fine as a sandwich loaf. Pleasing to be able to use Bacheldre Mill's stoneground strong flour again as well, it feels right.
Also from said guide, a golden syrup fruit cake. I took a day's leave on Thursday after feeling a bit run-down in the hope of avoiding any actual illness (I think it's worked, but that's probably tempting fate with a big red cape) and decided to do a bunch of baking. I'm finding this whole 'proper' cooking malarkey to be a soothing experience, almost therapeutic, as though I can leave any troubles aside and just focus on the kitchen. It probably helps that while my day job, by its very nature, has no definitive 'product' or result at the end of the day I can look at and say "I made that", the work that goes into baking (and cooking in general) has a very real, tangible, hopefully edible end result. Which is a long-winded way of saying I enjoyed making this fruit cake, even if it did require the use of two precious drams of whisky (I went with the Highland Park 12 yr, since goodness knows what a fruit cake laced with Laphroig would taste like - distinctive, at a guess), and the finished product is delicious. It's not as sticky as the golden syrup title might suggest and a slice of it goes oh-so-well with a cup of tea, a good book and central heating. Good warm-up for christmas cake cooking too...
Blackberry muffins, made using this free recipe from the BBC. I'd wondered that the sharp taste of the blackberries would be too sour to work in muffins without raspberries to balance them out, but the sweetness of the muffin dough seemed to stop the berries from becoming overpowering. The berries were used whole, and there were a few cases of berries being at the bottom of a muffin during cooking and falling out when taken out of the tray, but it wasn't a problem and the muffins didn't sink in to fill the gap. A good fresh taste, all in all, and the berries tasted great surrounded by the muffiny goodness, even if much seed-picking from between the teeth inevitably followed.
On Monday I had a go at a recipe from New Cranks Recipe Book which the Lass has had for ages and I've never given so much as a glance. It was for roasted vegetables with couscous, the vegetable listed all being in the dark green/purple colour scheme (I served this with the roasted tomato and red pepper soup beforehand and the difference in colours was fantastic, not to mention ludicrously photogenic. Drat.) The cooking went fine, but I must admit to being rather underwhelmed by the finished dish. The couscous lacked much flavour beyond, well, couscous - unlike the lemon couscous recipe from Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries which livens it up gloriously. The vegetables were fine as roasted veg goes, but again felt like they needed something to complement them - a cheese, perhaps? A healthy meal, and easy enough to make, but not one I'll be going back to.
Back to our already-much-loved copy of Denis Cotter's Paradiso Seasons (as blogged enthusiastically about a few days back - we're acquiring his two other books next week and I'm really quite excited about the prospect) for risotto of leeks, butternut squash and sage with braised lentils and, two days later, pumpkin gnocchi with spinach in a roasted garlic cream. Both required numerous pots on the go at any given time - at one point while cooking the risotto I had all four hobs in use and the oven. It can get a wee bit boggling trying to coordinate a recipe with so much consecutive cooking, but that's a pleasure in its own right and getting it right just adds to the sense of triumph at the end. Both recipes were ideal for these Autumn nights, the risotto suitably creamy after absorbing dry white wine and vegetable stock before adding leek, roasted squash and parmesan, served with lentils that had cooked in garlic, lemon and thyme. Took yonks, and the risotto stirring makes for marvelous continuous upper-body exercise, but the result was definitely worth it.
The pumpkin gnocchi recipe was written as a starter for 4, but we just had it as a main course for 2 with a side of pumpkin soup, and it was thoroughly photogenic. The gnocchi were relatively easy to make, the hardest part getting them tender enough for mashing without going too far and turning them into squishy blobs. The 'dough' was formed from mashed pumpkin, flour and grated parmesan, served with a roasted garlic sauce on top. This didn't take as long as the risotto recipe and I can imagine making it again, though next time it would be as a starter - as a main it does require something else to accompany it beyond sauce and spinach.
Et voila! You might think the above must have all got rather pricey, but you'd be wrong chummy. The soup and bread mean I don't need to buy lunch at all during the week, most of the vegetable ingredients came from our weekly Damhead delivery, and the muffins and fruit loaf mean no more chocolate bars. The amount of packaging we use up each week seems to have halved, and if we only had a compost bin our bin would be nigh-on empty. What's coming up? Savoury muffins, cheesy soup and possibly, perhaps, potentially... pumpkin pie!
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