Cooking lessons 3

This is going to get hopelessly out of order very quickly, as there are now two lessons I've missed out on actually posting. Never mind.

Yesterday I took Michael spice shopping. I was actually a bit unimpressed with where we went, so if anyone can tell me some good places to go spice shopping in London I'll be really grateful. We bought ground cumin, ground red chilli, garam masala and (gasp) curry powder. I went for all powders because they're a bit easier to work with to start with. Also because the selection of whole spices was crap. We can get on to the subtleties of spice usage once we've covered the basics, and once I've found a decent place to go shopping for them.

Here's one of the first Indian recipes I ever learned to cook, about four years back when I was first trying out this 'vegetarian' thing and Tariq came into our kitchen and found my attempts at making a curry. They were umm... not very impressive. Ask nicely and I'll tell you about it some time. Here is a very simplified and tinkered with version of the recipe he showed me.

Ingredients

• One small bowl of lentils (about a serving size in order to make two to three servings). Preferably green, brown, puy, etc. Black or red won't really work here.


• One medium-large onion.


• Sunflower oil.


• One large spoon of ground cumin.


• One spoon of garam masala.


• A quarter of a spoon of curry powder.


• Water.


• Salt to taste.

Instructions

Mix the dried spices and salt. Dry fry them on a medium heat for about a minute, stirring constantly, and then transfer to a bowl.

Add enough oil to the bottom of the pan to just cover it. Dice the onion and fry it on medium heat until soft, and then add the spices. Fry for a few minutes more.

Now add the lentils and fry for about a minute. Cover with boiling water (say two to three times as much water as you had lentils) and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to simmer, cover the pot, and leave it.

It will probably take about half an hour to cook. Be more worried about undercooking it than overcooking, but check on it every now and then to see if it's getting dry and needs more water. The end result can either be dryish or soupy as you prefer. If it's going to be soupy you might want to consider adding more salt and/or (horrors) half a stock cube. When the lentils are soft to eat it is ready.

Cooking lessons 2

Right, here's the first real cooking lesson. There would have been one before this in which I discussed how to make the garlic lentils in a slightly more sane manner, but stuff got in the way. So I didn't.

At the moment Michael is still spice free, causing me to need to be vaguely creative to work with the limited flavourings and ingredients available. Here's what I came up with as a suggested dinner for tonight. It's basically a mixture of things which are easy to make.

Pan fried potatoes

These have, for all intents and purposes, no nutritional value. However they taste great and are cheap and easy to make, so why complain?

First of all, you'll need boiled potatoes for this. Cold is better, because hot potatoes are a nuisance to cut and don't retain their shape as well, but either is fine. So, first we need to boil some potatoes. I recommend making excess potato and storing the rest in those sandwich bags I told you to get, as these are always useful to have to hand and if you have precooked potato in the fridge then this becomes even easier to make.

This is a complicated procedure akin to rocket science. You take a large quantity of unpeeled potatoes, given them a rinse and put them in a pot. You cover it with water. Put the heat on high until the water boils and then reduce the heat to medium and leave it to cook. Check them after about 20 minutes, and remove when cooked. They need to be soft when you stick a knife into them (check several as this will vary with potato size and they're better slightly overcooked than undercooked).

Once the potatoes are cooked, let them cool for a bit (it may help to leave them to sit in a pot of cold water for a few minutes), then cut them up into roughly cm cubes (you don't need to be too careful when doing this).

Now get a frying pan and add enough oil to cover the bottom in a thin layer. You may want to add a small amount of butter as well. Let it get hot and then add the potato cubes and sprinkle a fair bit of salt over the potatoes.

This will need to fry for quite a while until the cubes get crispy. Stir it every minute or so, but not constantly - prolonged contact with the frying pan is needed to crip the potatoes.

Spicy tomato sauce

Ingredients: One medium sized onion, garlic puree, lazy chillies, tomato passata, oil, salt

What to do:

Dice the onion fairly finely. Fry on medium heat with a little bit of oil and a pinch of salt.

After about five minutes, add a small spoon of lazy chillies and garlic puree (slightly more garlic than chillies if anything) to the onions and continue stirring until the onions are soft. Then add about half a bottle of passata, mix it up thoroughly and reduce the heat. Leave it on a low heat, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens.

Serve with the pan fried potatoes (you probably don't want to put the sauce directly on them, as it will soak in and they'll lose their crispiness. Serve on the side and mix as you eat).

Next post: Salads.

Cooking lessons 1

A few months ago I was walking through London with a friend of mine. For the sake of the argument let's call him something implausible like Michael. In the course of conversation two things came up. Firstly, that he was very low on money. Secondly, that he wanted to go to McDonalds because he could get a meal's worth of food for only five pounds there.

Needless to say I objected rather strongly to this statement. Both to the notion that one can acquire food at McDonalds and to the notion that five pounds for a meal is good value. And so it arised that I would be teaching Michael how to cook.

Michael has now returned from the barbarian lands which he calls home, and so the lessons are to begin. Because it will allow others to benefit from them, and because I'm a total show off, I'll be doing it via a series of blog posts.

Today is shopping day, and I'm suggesting a list of bare minimals he'll want to stock before we do this. Spices will come later, as I refuse to instruct anyone to buy spices at a supermarket.

Cooking implements and general kitchen stuff

He actually has most of these, but I'm including it for completeness. Some of these aren't essential, and one can always improvise, but it's irritating to have to do so.

• Cutting board


• Sharp knife


• Frying pan


• Pot (Having two pots is ideal, but not neccesary)


• Wooden spoon


• Cooking spatula.


• Large sandwich bags


• Cheese grater


• Aluminium foil

Cooking essentials

These are the ingredients which I feel it would be useful to always have to hand.

• Sunflower oil. This can be as cheap as you can find.


• Garlic puree


• "Very lazy chillies"


• Table salt


• A couple packs of green, brown and red lentils respectively


• A couple bottles of tomato passata.


• White rice. Preferably basmati.


• Stock cubes. Something of midrange quality is likely fine.


• Bag of cheap white onions.


• Bag of potatoes


• Marmite


• Soy sauce


• Sugar, preferably brown

Not all of these are things I would use. I've replaced some of my ingredients with equivalent shortcuts.

Short term stuff

Things which I'd recommend picking up in the short term. This is definitely not a required list, but will give rise to some nice easy starting meals.

• Eggs


• Carrots


• Cucumber


• Fresh fish from the fish counter - if you buy whole fish rather than steak you can find some quite reasonably priced examples.

Other stuff

I like to have the following around, but it's totally nonessential.

• Balsamic vinegar


• Sesame oil


• Miso (if you get the fish I recommend picking up some of this)


• Sweet chilli sauce

Sweet carrots and chickpeas

About a week ago when it was one of my nights to cook for the family I was talking with Boy. The proposed dinner plan was a chestnut and sweet potato curry, and I asked him if he'd be ok with that. He said yes, which I was pleasantly surprised by. Then he said something else.

"It doesn't really matter what you put in a curry anyway."

Excuse me?

"Well, once you've put the onion and curry powder and stuff in it all tastes the same."

I can't remember what I actually said in reply to this, but I suspect it wasn't more coherent than vague sputtering noises.

Later when eating the curry he observed "See what I mean? You can hardly taste the sweet potato or chestnut."

On the one hand, he was wrong. The curry was basically chunks of sweet potato and a spicy chestnut sauce. The chestnut was subtle, sure, but chestnut sauces are always mild. On the other hand, he did have a point. My spice selection has become a bit lacking in variety recently. So I've been meaning to experiment with more interesting combinations.

Today's recipe was a case of that. I was hungry and didn't have any convenient food (and didn't want eggs, as I had far too many of them yesterday), so I decided to cook something. Here's how it went.

What I used:

Two largish carrots
Two small onions
Can of kala chana (brown chickpeas)
Handful of raisins
2 tbsp sunflower oil
About 3cm cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamon seeds
4 cloves
2 dried red chillis
1/2 tbsp coarse salt

What I did:

First of all I dry fried all the spices and then ground them in the mortar and pestle. The grumbling about this can be taken as read.

I'd had quite a lot of success with the shredding implement on the food processor yesterday when making the latkes, so rather than fussing around with chopping things I just peeled the carrots and onions and shoved them through it. Instant well chopped carrot and onion for almost no work. I think I could very easily grow to like this attachment...

So, I heated the oil in the pan, added the carrots and onions and fried for a few minutes. Then I added the spices and continued frying it until the carrots had softened somewhat.

At this point I decided it would be a crime not to have raisins with the carrots, so I took a handful of them and added them in and continued frying, adding the kala chana a few minutes later. Fried it for another five minutes or so then took it off the heat and covered it for another five while I heated up the pita bread to eat it with.

Conclusion

Very nice. The combination of sweet and spicy worked very well as usual, and it augmented the flavour of the carrot wonderfully. Also, with the food processor to do most of the work, this was incredibly easy. The spice could possibly have done with being slightly milder. I think when I make it again I'll only use one chilli.

Latkes

I was bored.

I don't just mean the sort of boredom that arises from not being very interested in what you are doing, I mean the sort of soul crushing mind numbing boredom that rises up from the deep, saps you of all your energy and causes you to reach the point where anything you might do to prevent the boredom just seems like too much work.

As you can imagine, this sort of boredom is a problem. I get it a lot, and being currently unemployed (which will change soon, hurrah! I just need to decide which offer to accept.) while all my friends are gainfully employed in jobs or PhDs, I'm particularly prone to it at the moment. There are plenty of things I could be doing, but if I get into a slump then they all seem like too much effort.

This time however, a solution arose. Lunchtime.

My stomach grumbled. "David", it said "I hunger. You should feed me."

"I don't know. That sounds like a lot of work.

"Yeah, it is. But if you don't feed me then I'll be forced to escape from your body and go on a rampage. Millions will die to sate my hunger, and it will be all your fault."

"Hmm. Well, that would be bad, yes. But I'm still not sure..."

My brain chimed in. "Yes. You should cook something. I'm bored out of your mind here. Cook something new and write it up for 'Playing with your food'. That way you'll have an hour or two of entertainment, and your three readers will get something to amuse them as well."

"Alright, alright. You've convinced me."

When your body parts conspire against you there's really nothing to do but to go along with their wishes.

Unfortunately I was still uninspired. This needed to be remedied if I were to effectively produce a new meal. So, Robin, to the blogmobile!

My method of finding new cooking blogs to peruse was very simple. I wandered over to Food, in the main... and clicked on every link on the right hand side of the page.

Eventually I settled on this. I've heard about latkes before and I keep thinking "Hmm, I should try to make those." but never get around to it. Well, the time for procrastination was over. Latkes it is.

Purely by chance, somewhere in between deciding on this and cooking it I thought I'd check my weight (I haven't in months) and noted that I'd somehow managed to drop down to about my desired ideal weight with no conscious effort on my part. Right after christmas and new years.

How much oil was in that recipe again?

Anyway, time for some cooking.

What I used

About 7 small to medium potatoes, peeled
Three small white onions
1/2 tbsp of salt
Two eggs
1/2 a cup of flour
1/2 a cup of sunflower oil
1/2 tsp baking soda

What I did

As you will probably have noticed if you've followed the above link, there's not really an awful lot of resemblance between my ingredients and Debbie's ingredients. They're the same sort of things, but the quantities are only tangentially related. This is in part due to my usual tendency to adapt, in part because I peel potatoes on autopilot and peeled far more potatoes than I actually needed before I knew it, and mostly because the recipe was all the way upstairs and it would be so much work to go up and check it.

I used the grateresque attachment for the food processor and got a large pile of shredded potato. As directed I put it into a metal colander and squeezed as much of the juice out as I could, but it was still quite damp. It was at this point I decided to employ low cunning to complete the task and sprinkled the salt over it, mixed it up thoroughly and went to do the onions. These I decided that rather than shredding I would do with the normal processor blades, turning them into more of an onion puree.

As an idle observation, if you run the grater attachment to the food processor and just drop a potato on top of it then it bounces about in an amusing manner. I can't help but imagine the little potato pleading for its life as it avoids the spinning blades.

But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I'd decided to mix the Latkes in the kenwood. Why? Because I'm lazy, that's why. And it's the same amount of washing up, so why not? I transferred the onion to the kenwood bowl and returned my attention to the potato. The salt had done its work quite admirably and I was able to squeeze a lot more liquid out of it. Having done so I transferred it to the kenwood as well.

I then added the eggs, flour and baking soda and mixed it all up. It produced a batter with a texture fairly similar to my normal pancake mix, which was encouraging.

I then poured the oil into a nonstick pan and heated it. At this point I looked at the pan, slightly disbelieving. Buddha on a pogo stick that's a lot of oil... I know I have recipes which use almost that much oil, but that's in a large curry. The sole purpose of this oil is for frying things in. This somehow makes it more alarming.

Anyway, I used a heaped spoonfull of batter for each latke. The pan fit about four of them, and there was enough batter to make eight. I fried them for five minutes on each side until they were a darkish brown.

Towards the point where I wanted to flip the first batch I noticed that the best spatula was currently in a pile of washing up leftover from my brother cooking bacon and egg earlier (the irony amused me briefly). I quickly washed it up and moved to flip the latkes.

Point of reference? Putting a wet spatula into very hot oil isn't a great idea. Ouch.

Anyway, latkes duly flipped, they cooked for another five minutes and then I transferred them to a plate and put the next batch on.

Conclusion

I was already pretty sure these would be good. They smelled wonderful.

Good lord. They tasted even better. These are really really good.

I'd made far more than I was going to be able to eat, so I rushed upstairs to get the Boy. ('The Boy' is my affectionate name for my brother).

"Boy", says I, "Would you like to try something indescribably delicious?"

The Boy is skeptical. I cook strange and unnatural things, with vegetables and hardly any dead animal to speak of. However upon my description of what a latke is ("It's basically a pancake made out of shredded potato and onion") he is convinced to give it a go.

The Boy agrees. They're really very good. He's rather full from having had the aforementioned bacon and egg, so he only has one, but I make up for this by having three (and another one halfway through writing this post). The rest will keep to be reheated in the oven later.

So, a definite success. They do generate a lot of washing up, and they do stink up the house, but they taste amazing.

The only thing I would do differently in future is make sure that they really were a quite dark brown. Some of them were slightly undercooked and, while still nice, they were a bit to soft inside and lacked the crispness of the really well cooked ones.

Spicy pumpkin and bean stew

I still haven't learned my lesson with pumpkins and how much water they give off when you cook them. Eventually I'll figure it out, but until them I appear to be doomed to have watery pumpkin dishes. In the end it didn't turn out too badly. It was just a bit more of a soup than I'd intended it to be...

Anyway, on to the recipe. I'm afraid this is another one I didn't measure very carefully.

What I used

Lots of cinnamon (about 5cm)
Two dried red chillis
About half a tbsp of coarse sea salt
1/4 cup sunflower oil
Three small white onions
Lots of chopped pumpkin (maybe a bit under a kilo?)
Two cans of red kidney beans

What I did

First of all I had a pumpkin to dismember. As I've probably mentioned, my mother grows an awful lot of pumpkins. This is great, but when we have a large number of them we don't manage to sell it means that there's an awful lot of pumpkin to process.

This is normally a massive chore, but I for christmas I was given some extremely nice knives. All three of which tout themselves as the "World's sharpest knife", supplied by the rather dubiously named Twin Towers Trading (I can't view their site because a) They're idiots who don't know how to correctly design a site and b) I don't have flash installed). Sounds like it's the lead up to a massive joke and/or disaster, doesn't it?

It actually didn't. These turned out to be really good. The serrated carving knife in particular is scarily effective and cuts through the pumpkin almost effortlessly.

Good lord. I sound like an advert. But seriously, it's true. These things are great.

So, summary version for those of you whose eyes glazed over: One large pumpkin rendered into conveniently sized chunks. A lot of time spent, but relatively little effort. Most of it was bagged for later use or turned into soup, but the aforementioned about a kilo went into making this dinner.

Next, the spices. I dry fried the cinnamon and chillis (having broken them up suitably) and then powdered them in a mortar and pestle with the salt. Yes, this is exactly as much work as you think it is. I really need to get a spice grinder. (I suspect I've complained about this before, but blogger is currently down so I can't actually check. Also on to do list: Make local copies of my blog posts)

Towards the end of this my mother pointed out that the food processor had a mini attachment that would work well for spices. I looked skeptical, but was fed up so decided to give it a try. It worked about as well as I expected. Worse yet, it managed to not screw up in an entertaining fashion which I could relate to my enthralled audience. It just didn't do anything to them. At this point I declared the spices to be good enough.

Anyway, I now had a food processor that was going to need washing up anyway, and after two long and involved tasks I didn't really feel like chopping onions, so I just shoved them in the processor.

Now, obvious things ensued. Heat oil, add the onions, fry for about 5 minutes. Yawn. Add the powdered spice mix, fry for another five minutes. Taste the fried onion to make sure I'm not about to poison people (I wasn't. Mmm... cinnamon and chilli).

More standard obviousness continues. I added the pumpkin and fried for another five minutes. Added the beans and fried for another five minutes.

Hmm. At this point the recipe book says 'bring to the boil then reduce heat and simmer'. Errr... what? There's no water in this recipe. I double checked it and confirmed. No water. This presents me with a dilemma: Am I supposed to boil the pumpkin? How do I do that? Wikipedia lists the boiling point of carbon at about 4000k, and my oven barely reaches half that temperature!

Instead I resort to covering it and sticking it in the hot oven to see what would happen. After about 5-10 minutes I was somewhat skeptical about whether or not it was really doing anything, so I added boiling water to half cover the pumpkin and put it back in. This did indeed cook it, but of course once the pumpkin started cooking it began giving off its own water, ending up with what was really closer to a pumpkin soup. After about twenty minutes I uncovered it and put it back for another 15 in an attempt to reduce it a bit. This rather failed, but never mind.

Conclusion

This was really nice. I should have used less water of course (probably about half a cup of boiling water to start it off with steaming is enough), but the taste was great. The cinnamon was my own addition, and I consider it to be a total success - this would have been boring without it.

So, if you have prechopped pumpkin (and I'm going to for ages now) and a sane way of grinding spices then this is a low work recipe which tastes great. Definitely a winner.