Quick, tasty & frugal - Tortilla Española (Spanish Omelette)

I wanted to whip up a quick lunch yesterday and was going to make an omelette when I remembered there was half a *tins worth of potatoes in the fridge to be used up.  I love Spanish Tortilla so it was a bit of a no-brainer decision what to do with them.
This is quick, easy and cheap yet satisfying and a bit more of a meal than just an omelette would be.  In fact really this makes enough for a snack later too.  As the Spanish generally advocate serving it at room temperature this is most definitely not a problem for me!
So - what do we need?

1 small onion, halved and sliced finely
Half a tin potatoes- use the value ones
2 eggs
EVOO
Fresh parsley
S+P

Heat a slug of EVOO and sweat down the onions whilst you slice the potatoes.  You can make them thick or thin - it' a matter of personal choice. I've seen recipes for both ways on line and they all claim that theirs is the 'authentic' way of doing it.
Add the potatoes and a pinch of salt and cook gently, half covered, until nicely softened, getting a little colour and taking on all the lovely oniony flavours.
Beat the eggs, add plenty of salt and pepper and pour swiftly into the pan.  Throw in the chopped parsley and give the whole lot a very quick stir so everything is coated in the egg, then cover and leave to cook.
Once you judge the bottom is cooked through, cover the pan with a plate and quickly invert the lot, then slide the tortilla back in to finish cooking.
Serve.  That's all there is to it.  J

You could add other bits to this depending on what you have lying around to use up.  You could also add another egg for an even more substantial final product if wanted.  It's one of those very un-strict recipes.  Have a play with it!

*I don't normally use tinned potatoes but had wanted to experiment with them for my lunch at work.  Our work kitchen is woefully under equipped - there's a coffee maker and a boiling water tap and that's it.  No microwave, toaster, kettle, anything of that sort.  This can make it a bit of a challenge (and one I embrace) to come up with hot food for lunch in the winter.  One day I might get round to a mini-series of posts on 'cooking without a cooker' or something along those lines.

I'm adding this to Chris's Bloggers Around the World - Food World Cup challenge.  Do check it out - there's going to be a lot of posts for this one!

Bloggers around the world - a Mexican feast

This month’s theme for Bloggers Around the World by Chris over at Cooking Around the World was Mexico. Well - other than opening a tin of refried beans (a long time ago) and making (once) guacamole from scratch I've never done any actual Mexican cooking despite being a fan of the country's cuisine so I set out to find some interesting recipes to try.
There's a lot with meat in so I hunted a bit further; I wanted to try and find something that I could enjoy whilst being at the same time authentically Mexican.
I met with some success finding this blog and this site both with recipes on, and the second one introduced me to Esquites, a corn based street food complete with cheese, mayo, lime, chilli and the herb Epazote that I’ve never even heard of let alone can get here!  Nevertheless I decided to give it a bash as I love sweetcorn.  After some more searching for an actual recipe I stumbled on this video from a Mexican restaurant and loosely based my version on that.  This was served with Mexican rice (admittedly from a USA site), refried beans (BBC!) and preceded by a Seabass ceviche from here - I’m sad to say that she isn’t Mexican either!
So – how did it go?
The ceviche was super easy to do and tasty too.  It’s the first time I’ve ever made ceviche or indeed eaten it and I was very much taken with it.  Not sure the coconut came through a lot but then I didn’t see coconut making much of an appearance in any other of the Mexican recipes I looked at so I’m not sure how authentic it’s inclusion is or isn’t.  I had a moment’s worry when I realised I had totally forgotten the tortilla chips to serve it with and that my avocado was still rock hard but I muddled though.    We both found this refreshing, though perhaps more of a summer dish.  Although there’s a lot of lime in it (I used the juice of 2 limes as this was enough to cover the fish) it isn’t too overpowering, just being citrusy and zingy.  I added a minimum of avocado to serve and sadly dumped my plan for guacamole to go with the other dishes as the 2 avocado pears I bought at the weekend had obstinately remained too solid to be used yet, despite putting them in a brown paper bag to hasten the ripening process.
Next to be started was the rice.  Here again I had a minor panic when I came to add the rice to the hot oil as I realised I only had about 1.5 cups of long grain white rice rather than the 2 called for.  I made up the quantity with Arborio rice and the dish seemed none the worse for it.  The Chap hadn’t noticed anyway so it can’t have been too bad.  Again this dish is fairly simple to do and I had great hopes of it but… I found myself a little underwhelmed if I’m honest.  It was nice but it didn’t really ‘sing’ to me.  It needed more heat for sure but I still found the flavours a little lacking and the only thing I changed in the recipe was to use veggie stock instead of chicken which I don’t think would have made that much difference. 
I like the idea of whizzing up your raw onion and tomatoes to make the ‘stock’ for it to be cooked in though and I may borrow this technique for future experimentation.  (Although I did manage to break the only tin opener in the house getting into the tin of tomatoes!!)  If you do check the recipe out however I must state that I most definitely do not advocate discarding any extra you may have like the recipe states!!  Put any left in the fridge for use another day like a good frugal bunny.  Oh and one more thing – this made a lot of rice.
Refried beans.  I must admit to having had a previous fling with refried beans many years ago, back when I was at uni in fact when I used to regularly buy a tin (sorry) and eat them…in something?  In what however I have no recollection.  I have been looking at them again on the shops for a year or 2 now and wondering what exactly it was that I did with them and I’m forced to draw the conclusion that I just ate them as they were.  Which seems to be what a lot of people do; they’re just another element to the meal.  The BBC recipe I used was to actually make them for quesadillas, I just used the start of the recipe that told me how to do the beans.  These were tasty enough although another small problem reared its head here when I ran out of smoked paprika; I think this Mexican meal was starting to be jinxed!  This was after I'd opened the tin of beans by going round the edge individually piercing the lid over and over until all the holes joined up. 
I realised I’ve gone off the texture of these a bit in the last decade  and would enjoy them more in a quesadilla with cheese and toasted tortilla for some contrast but I can see me making these again as a fast easy cheap meal.  Not a lot to report other than that.
Which brings us to the part I was looking forward to trying out most – the esquites!!  Complete with some fresh basil and mint and dried tarragon in an effort to replicate the taste of the missing epazote.  Having scribbled some instructions watching the video I set off.  First problem – I couldn’t get the lid off my jar of small dried chillis that looked the closest equivalent I had to what they fried off first in the film.  No matter how I tried it wasn’t coming off, I was hopping about the kitchen sprinkling the environs with a few choice words but to no avail!  So – some finely minced fresh chilli it was instead.  I fried this off for a few minutes stirring pretty much constantly to ensure they didn’t burn, just fragranced the oil nicely.  Next I added the corn which I judged by eye as enough for the 2 of us.  I now have to own up here to using frozen sweetcorn not the fresh off the cob you should really use, that was my entire forgetful fault though rather than the gremlins that had been dogging me so far!  Fry this until slightly browned – it gives off a lovely popcorny sort of smell.  I must admit to being a little impatient plus aware that this was all taking me absolute acres of time and there was a voracious Chap waiting to be fed so mine weren’t quite browned, but the flavour was getting there.  Add the torn up herbs and keep stirring and frying.  After watching the video I used a sprig of fresh basil and one of fresh mint torn up as that was what the chef described the epazote taste like.  If you read the Wiki article however it claims an aniseedy edge to the taste so I added a couple of decent pinches of dried tarragon too.

Serve in a glass dish (for authenticity you understand, or in a paper cup as you would purchase it off the street) topped with mayo, feta (this being the closest you can get to the queso fresco that should be used), a squeeze of lime juice and a sprinkle of chilli powder.  this was my favourite dish by a mile, it had the most taste and as mentioned before I love sweetcorn so it could only ever be a win for me. 

Served all together the 3 dishes following the ceviche certainly filled us up, I did feel the lack of a contrasting texture though; and of course guacamole would have gone down a treat.
So – some interesting ‘finds’ – ceviche is easy and gooood, rice cooks nicely in whizzed up veg  in a dish in the oven – add more flavour and the missing umami note next time though,  and fried sweetcorn with cheese can only ever be fab.  It’s got cheese in it though hasn’t it…  J  And I need to be a bit more generous with the chilli!

Someone else's kitchen Random Recipe - Sicilian Style Tuna with Salsa Verde plus a giveaway!

This month's Random Recipe theme from Dom over at Belleau Kitchen was to use a book picked from another's collection.  I asked my Ma and she dutifully counted all the books and booklets in the house and gave me a total of 37.  I used an on-line random number generator and we came up with 25 which was 'Fillipo Berio Winter Recipes' which flipped open to Sicilian Style Tuna with Salsa Verde.  *I've got a couple of the Fillipo Berio booklets myself but not the winter recipes one.  The recipe sounded packed full of flavour and fairly simple to do.  You can see it online here though they seem to have left out the instruction as to what to do with the second half of the lemon juice - I made the fairly safe assumption that it went into the salsa.
So - here we go - for precise measures see their recipe.  I'm sure it's copyright so I'm not giving them here. :-)  (I will say though that 1 lemon and 1 growing plant of parsley cover the requirements.)
Mix EVOO, half the lemon juice and chopped fresh parsley, season and marinate the tuna in it for an hour, turning periodically and stashing in the fridge in the intervening periods.

Meanwhile into a small blender (I'm soooo chuffed we got a little 'mill' blender attachment with the new blender the Chap's bro got us for chrimble - this was it's inaugural outing) put the rinsed capers, the rest of the EVOO, lemon zest (and remaining juice), garlic, parsley and anchovies and whiz it up.

Once the tuna has had it's allotted hour marinating cook it under the grill or in a cast-iron-ridged pan for 3-4 mins per side and serve with the salsa perched atop.  I sort of scooped up the marinade with the tuna and cooked it all in the pan together.
That's it - easy eh?
We made a meal of it by serving on spaghetti with some wilted spinach and the juices from the tuna pan stirred through, and plenty of black pepper.

This was lovely - really zingy and fresh and lemony.  We'd been slightly concerned it could turn out too salty with both capers and anchovies in but not at all.  We liked the salsa so much that I'd easily knock this up to stir through pasta for a quick and easy supper and if you buy your fresh parsley plant, lemon and tin of anchovies from Aldi it works out pretty cheap.  I also had the idea that this would work with the addition of a good handful of wild garlic which is even cheaper at nuppence!  Win win as the yanks might say.  :-)
I've decided to also enter this recipe to the Herbs on a Saturday blog challenge by Karen of Lavender and Lovage which is being hosted this month over at Bangers & Mash.  It seems appropriate with the use of a whole plant of fresh parsley.  This is my first ever submission to them so I hope they're as nice to me as the Random Recipe tribe were on my first time!

*I in fact have 3 of their booklets, 2 of which are the same one, so with such abundance on hand I will give one of them away.  :-)  Just leave a comment mentioning you'd like it and I'll pull a winner out on Sunday.  I'm not going to specify that you have to follow me as I want my followers to be because they find my witterings vaguely interesting and perhaps even informative.  Having originally started this blog kind of by accident to record stuff for myself it's somewhat odd / gratifying / worrying that there's folks out there reading this drivel!!  Thank you, even if you do it only through sympathy.  :-)

Massively late - it's my Caribbean recipe - Jamaican Veg Soup

The rather fantastic blog Cooking Around The World by Chris has food from every continent on an almost daily basis it seems. Chris writes in an endearingly idiosyncratic style all of his own that I love. To make things even better he has a newish monthly challenge ‘Bloggers around the World’. Each month he picks a different country (or group of, this time round) and one should cook a recipe from that country. This month was the Caribbean. As the title may have hinted I’m somewhat tardy in getting this post up, I should have had it written and published by the 13th! Anyway, having made my recipe I figured I’d share it anyway. Maybe I can sneak it in the comments section of this month’s round up…
I had problems finding a recipe for the Caribbean. The Caribbean covers a lot of countries; mainly islands, all of which have a very different climate to our own and therefore a very different selection of ingredients readily available. Each time I looked for a recipe it seemed it had breadfruit (??), or there would be meat sneaked in. Looking for fish recipes I realised a lot of them used salt fish – not readily available in my corner of the West Country. So – I eventually settled on this veg soup recipe. Ok not as exciting as some of the recipes on this rather good resource site but at least do-able. It said it serves 8. I must say on reading the ingredients list we scoffed at this. However this is how it went – their ingredients in black, my differences in purpley-blue:

Jamaican Veg Soup

3 tbsp olive oil
1 onion chopped – 3 small red onions
2 sticks celery – 3 plus the inner small sticks to use it up
4 cloves garlic – ours were huge so I used 3
2 tbsp root ginger minced – grated mine on the zester
1 tbsp demerara sugar – had none so used 2/3 white and 1/3 dark brown
2 tsp sea salt – 1 tsp only [sea salt is stronger than normal salt]
0.25 tsp ground turmeric}
0.25 tsp ground allspice } I added some later on as you’ll see to make a heaped 0.5 tsp of each in total
0.25 tsp ground nutmeg }
2 potatoes peeled and diced – we only had small ones so I used 4 then added another 2 when I realised I was short on courgette = 6 in total

450g courgette chopped – my courgette was small and was only 220g
1.5 l veg stock
1 pinch cayenne – 2 pinches
30g fresh spinach chopped – I added extra so about 80g in total
½ red pepper minced to garnish

Heat the oil in a large pot and add the onion, celery, garlic ginger and sugar. Fry gently for 5 mins until softened.
Add the salt – having added 1 tsp I decided against the second one as it seemed too much, especially as I was using stock cubes for the veg stock which have salt in already. Add the turmeric, allspice and nutmeg then the spuds and courgette. At this point I added only 0.25 tsp of each spice as per the recipe.
Add the stock and bring to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer for 10 mins until the spuds are soft.
Turn off / remove from the heat and stir in the cayenne and spinach – at this point I added the 30g spinach quoted.
Blend. At this point it’s an entertainingly vibrant green colour and tastes of…not anything that zingy to be honest. It was a nice veg soup, but that was it. So…
Having only blended half of the soup I then added the extra spice to the unblended portion still in the pot and brought it back to a boil then simmered for a couple of mins extra to cook off the spices. Turn off the heat then added the extra spinach. Blended that portion then mixed the 2 batches together.

Verdict now – much tastier. Still not sure it’s shouting ‘Jamaican’ at me but then I’ve not exactly had a lot (any?) Jamaican food in my life to compare it to. It was nice and a good thick warmer for the colder weather we’re apparently headed for. I’m not so sure I’d bother again though.
The Chap liked the contrast provided by the minced red pepper, I was less of a fan finding the bits too cold and watery against the thick warm soup.  Oh, and that 'serves 8' thing - well it did make a mahoosive pot full.  :-)
Soooo – that’s my Caribbean recipe. Chris’s next country for us to visit is Mexico – now I just need to find a recipe, cook it and post it all on time….

Meat cooking for the faint hearted #4 - Chinese Roast Chicken - w' oyster sauce and honey no less!!

After a slack section in my blogging recently I am returning with - what's this?  A meat recipe??!!  Yes - sorry m'dears but I figured it was a post I could hopefully write up fairly quickly as there's not masses to the recipe.
I get oodles of emails along the lines of 'visit our sparkly website and buy our shizzle' as I am in the habit of signing up for all the freebies I can find left, right and centre which invariably means giving them an email address in return.  Still - if you want free stuff (and after all - there's enough free providers of email addys out there that you can set one up specifically for this kind of sign up) I don't see the issue.  Sometimes you even get something that interests you pop into your in-box.  Hence this recipe which came from the Chinese food company Lee Kum Kee as part of their suggestions for mother's day.  It's easy, the ingredients aren't massively expensive; the chicken forms most of it but do get a decent welfare one and make sure you get your soy sauce from a Chinese supermarket - this recipe does us half a litre of the stuff!!  Most importantly for the beloved meat eater in your life it is; according to the Chap, most yum indeed.  [I'm fairly sure as a burly builder type he didn't utter those actual words - but don't you wish he had?!  That was certainly the sentiment he expressed anyway.]
Here goes then:

Chinese Roast Chicken with Honey and Oyster sauce  [I've linked the original recipe here but as it's listed under the mother's day options I'm unsure how long it'll stay on their site so I'm putting it here too - I figure me mentioning the company a few times over the course of this post is fair exchange for promoting their recipe don't you?  Especially as said recipe was on the web for purposes of monetary gain in the first place.]
1 chicken - approx 1.5 kg in weight
500ml soy sauce
2 fat cloves garlic - minced
1.5l water

10 'slices' ginger - don't ask me what this measurement is - I guess depends how much you like ginger.  I peeled a bit of root and did lengthwise slices of the section.
4 star anise
100g Oyster sauce
60+ ml honey - the recipe says 1/4 cup which is 62.5 ml.  Use 4 tbsp and you won't be far wrong.

The more observant of you may have noticed that the last 2 ingredients are in a diff colour - they are the 'glazing' ingredients.  The rest are the 'seasoning mix'  - boiling ingredients.

 
Put all the boiling ingredients (bar the chicken) in a pan large enough to hold them all and the chicken and bring to the boil.  Carefully manoeuvre your chicken into the mix [I declined to just 'drop' it in as the recipe said - fearing a soy sauce splash back incident!], cover and reduce the heat to a simmer.  Simmer for 30 minutes.

Put oven on to heat at 160.  Mix together the glaze ingredients of oyster sauce and honey.  As it turned out both the soy sauce I already had and the oyster sauce I purchased for this recipe from my local Chinese supermarket were the Lee Kum Kee people's products but any would do I'm sure.  The honey I used was just S'burys basics stuff - perfectly good enough for cooking and baking with I find.
Carefully remove your chicken from the water - at this point I realised that perhaps you're supposed to leave the damn thing trussed up as it comes in the packaging rather than carefully snipping through it's ties before boiling the thing as I did.  Legs and wings were flopping about everywhere I tell you!* 
Lay in a baking tray and pour the glaze over ensuring evenly covered as much as possible.  It does all slide off into the tray as it warms though.  The recipe suggested uing a brush here - I didn't bother as I found spooning it over and spreading it with the back of the spoon was adequate without having to thoroughly gunge up my pastry brush.

Cook for 30 - 45 mins (the recipe says) - I did 45 mins basting with the glaze every 15 mins.  Check the chicken is cooked through properly usng the old 'juices run clear' technique.
Serve.  Apparently this was authentically like the 'Chinese' chicken bits you can get pre-done in the shops and was thoroughly enjoyed by the Chap.  It's a low prep recipe so easy to do with little time having to be spent watching over it.
* [This bit did make me a bit uncomfortable - the whole 'recognisable shape' thing I guess that did a good job at eroding the distancing I use when cooking meat for The Chap.  It was the way the limbs moved - far too easy to see the form of the hen it once was bounding about a yard somewhere.]

Salt, Pepper & Chilli Squid & Prawns

I made this for us on Sunday.  It's one of my favourite things and it's pretty quick and easy to knock up.  Perhaps not the ultra healthiest as it's fried but drain off any oil really well and as you only have a starter size portion it could be worse.  (That is assuming you do only have a starter size portion!!)  I adapted my recipe from one found here on the Gastronomy Domine blog.

For 4 starters: (Halve it for 2)
500g raw squid and raw shelled prawns mixed - or all one or the other whatever you like.  Get your fishmonger to clean the squid for you and cut into thin rings and the tentacles into short lengths - 2 inches ish.
3tbsp rice flour
3tbsp cornflour
1-2 fresh chillies - to your taste
2 tbsp Szechuan peppercorns - whole
1 tbsp freshly ground (for preference) black pepper
1-2 tbsp sea salt (I actually used the lemon fennel and chili salt I bought at the farmers market a little while back)
Oil - for frying so sunflower / vegetable etc

Dry fry the Szechuan peppercorns in a heavy pan for a few mins to release the flavours.  (If you have trouble finding Szechuan peppercorns try health food shops or oriental supermarkets.)  They're less solidly dense than the black ones so you can crumble the odd one up a little with your fingers to add to the textures of this dish and make the flavour of them more accessible having more available surface area.
Slice and chop the chilli finely aiming for small squares no bigger than the peppercorns - it's up to you whether you leave the seeds in or not - of course depending what type of chilli you're using as well.  I used Aji Limon - a yellow one with a slight citrus taste that's nicely hot but doesn't blow your head off and I only used one so I left the seeds in.  [This is the one plant of mine from the 13 chilli plants in 11 different varieties the Chap brought up this year!]  Incidentally if you're as rabidly paranoid as I am (fueled by all those horror stories of people inadequately washing their hands then touching their parts in the bathroom or rubbing their eyes etc) then you can get a pack of these plastic gloves and use those for chopping chillies.  They can be washed and reused as long as you haven't holed them and their tight enough to the hand to enable you to feel properly to chop.
Place the chilli, flours, salt and black pepper in a bowl and add the Szechuan peppers once done and mix well together. 

Put the oil on to heat - about an inch deep will suffice.  It needs to be frying temp - 180/190ish C (that's 350-370ish F or when a cube of bread browns in 60 secs).
Gently dredge the squid pieces and whole prawns in the mixture and fry them off in batches.  Use a slotted / holed spoon and keep turning them regularly; removing from the oil once golden and crisped to your taste.
Drain on  kitchen towel and serve.  A fresh crispy lettuce side would provide a refreshing contrast with this and a piquant chilli dipping sauce of some kind would also work.  Yum!

Arrabiata prawn pasta - speedy supper

Speedy supper for when  it's late, you're tired and hungry and no - you really can't be bothered being virtuous and make a sauce from scratch.  Nowt wrong with that in my opinion.  'Arrabiata' means Angry - which is a reference to the chilli kick this sauce has.  You could use whatever sauce you have in the cupboard though and add your own chilli - or leave it out as you like.  It's quick and simple but still tasty - ideal.

Speedy prawn pasta
Stock cube - veg
EVOO
Pasta
1 onion
2-3 cloves garlic
Butter
Mushrooms
Salt
Jar arrabiata pasta sauce - ours was Aldi for about 75-80p-ish but not bad
2-3 tbsp tomato puree
Mushroom ketchup
Dried basil
Handful prawns
Handful spinach
Grated cheese - parmesan if you have it in, cheddar if you don't [or are forgetful of your recent parmesan purchasing activities like I was - dur!!]
Black Pepper

Cook the pasta in plenty of water seasoned with the stock cube and a splosh of oil to prevent sticking.  (I always put the kettle on for the water for things like pasta as it takes a lot less time than boiling the water on the hob from cold - especially if you have an electronic hob - I'm soooo glad I have gas!!)  Ensure to cook al dente as it'll be added to the sauce and heated again later.
Meanwhile heat a little butter and oil in a large wide saucepan.
Chop the onion and garlic and add to pan.  Cook gently to soften.
Chop the mushrooms - use however many you like / have in stock.  I used 5/6 I think.
Add to the pan with the onion and garlic, sprinkle a little salt and cook covered to keep the juices in, stirring occasionally until the mushrooms have sweated right down.
Add the pasta sauce.  As I mentioned ours was an Aldi effort - not bad but it did taste a little sweet to me so I added a good squirt of tomato puree - probably 2-3 tbsp and a splash of mushroom ketchup to counteract this and give the sauce some depth.
Add a decent pinch of basil - I was out of oregano otherwise I'd have added this too.  Any Italian herbs you have will do.
Stir thoroughly then add the pasta and stir well again to get it all covered in sauce.  We had S'bury's basics penne - the grooves hold the sauce nicely and it's v. frugal at a mere 17p for 500g dried product - that's even better than Aldi or Lidl can manage!
Ensure it's heated through thoroughly then add your prawns.  I buy the S'bury's basics frozen 300g bags at £2 a go.  As long as you don't overcook them they're fine, just smaller.  (Hence if overcooked they'll a) vanish and b) turn hard - yeurgh!)  It means that for that price I don't mind adding a large handful - I love prawns!!  [I also know myself and after defrosting while they're sat on the side waiting to go into the pan we seem to magically lose half of them - very odd it is...]
Cook only enough to just heat them *through then add the spinach and turn it into the pasta and sauce, cover the pan and remove from the heat.  Let stand for a bare minute to wilt the spinach.
Serve and sprinkle with grated cheese and a good few twists of black pepper on top.  Voilà!!  Shouldn't have taken too long so now feel free to go collapse and chillax.
*Obviously using your common sense where seafood and the heating / cooking thereof is concerned.  I accept nowt &c &c...
If you don't have spinach use whatever you have; adding at the right point so it gets cooked.  EG - if it's calabrese I'd add for the last 2 mins of the pasta cooking time and thereafter drain it etc all together.  Treat this as a vague guideline suggestion type iof thing and ensure you have value pasta and a jar of sauce in the cupboard for those times and you're away.

Adventures in food - Dried Squid

Bet you're going 'ick' right now eh? Here in Exeter we've got a fair few Chinese, Oriental, Indian and general World Food shops. Having booked off a half day last Wednesday for the abortive IT system switch over (now delayed for a week) and the Chap having been rained off we spent a greater part of the afternoon poking around several of these shops. It's fascinating and often much better value than buying these ingredients in English stupormarkets. Even if you don't fancy some of the more exotic offerings they're especially good for big packs of noodles or rice - works out a much more frugal way of buying these basics as well as things like soy sauce. We ended up with potato based noodles, dried shrimp, shrimp paste, dried squid, water chestnuts and some 'pickled' veg. [I think the 'pickled' bit here is something of a misnomer, at least sometimes. These packets come in a wide range of veg combos with chilli etc added.] Then we looked up what to actually do with the squid! :-D We decided to make a general stir fry with veg, noodles and the squid. This is how it went:

Dried Squid Noodle Stir Fry

Straight potato noodles - approx 1/3 - 1/2 pack

1 dried squid - soaked in water overnight, water changed then soaked for the day*

1 onion

2 carrots

Pack babycorn

6 Mushrooms

Half pack green beans

Half tin (small one) water chestnuts - sliced

0.25 pint veg stock

Pack pickled veg - ours was a kelp and bamboo shoots mix

Splash (big) fish sauce

Splash soy sauce

2 big tea spoons Tom Yum sauce in 0.25 pint hot water

Generic veg oil for stir frying

Sesame oil (if you have it)

These noodles take 8-10 mins boiling according to the packet so we boiled them for a little under that, taking into account that they will be added to the wok again later; drained them and put them on one side. Note here - they stuck together evilly after draining - apparently I should have added a little sesame oil during cooking to prevent this much like you would oil to pasta. [I don't know the proper name for these but check the picture if you want to find them - they end up looking a bit like glass noodles once cooked but don't in the pack.]

Drain your soaked squid and rinse well under running water to ensure no dirt could be left on. It was still fairly tough feeling so we decided to chop it into smallish strips - about 0.5 - 1cm wide. I just used the kitchen scissors, think this was far easier than using a knife would have been.

Heat the veg oil with a little sesame oil for flavouring.

Chop onion and add. Chop rest of the veg and add, stir frying.

Add packet of pickled veg (if using), veg stock and squid.

Add approx 2 tbsp fish sauce [sorry for the approximate measures here but chap did this bit and didn't measure like I would!] and less of soy - maybe 1tbsp-ish.

Mix Tom Yum paste into a little hot water (if you have sauce instead of paste you may not need to do this) and add to the wok. Continue cooking for a short time until veg are nearly cooked to your liking [bear in mind they really should crunch in a stir fry - at least a little bit] then add the noodles and stir to ensure they are evenly coated in sauce and bits.

Serve. [We're 'not very good at quantities' type of people so this made enough to easily feed 4, or 2 and 2 lunches for the next day!]

Hmm - well I'm glad we tried this but simple answer - we're not going to bother with dried squid again. [Any takers for the second one in the pack?] Small pieces were ok but the texture was rubbery, reminiscent of the limpets we had before I blitzed them, only not as nice! Any pieces that were a little larger took a lot of chewing - they did not have a nice mouth feel to me and made me feel slightly icky. Not recommended! that said the general flavours in the sauce we came up with here were nice - just leave out the dried squid!!

*Dried squid smells, no 2 ways about it. Expect your kitten friend to be climbing the cupboard next to you as you prep the squid for this dish. Frankly he may well end up getting the second one, suitably soaked and chopped into treat size portions. Bleargh.

:-( I just can't seem to get the stupid spacing and formatting of this post corrected - down to having manually retyped the whole post. Pah - enough!

So many potential posts, so little time...

Where to start? Hmm - chronological order always has a certain something about it don't you think? Lol.

This then was an adapted risotto dish I made on the Saturday prior to Chap's son arriving on the Monday. I'd fancied trying Risotto Milanese for a while - I love risotto and the Milanese variant was the first dish I had at the Chap's peres - me being a pescatarian really threw them so his dad looked this up especially and it was gorgeous. It's a fairly basic risotto flavoured with saffron and parmesan. We however were quite hungry on Saturday so I adapted the recipe I had from the BBC Good Food website and bulked it out with some additional veg to end up with the dish below.

Risotto Milanese-ish

2 small onions finely chopped

50g butter
8ish mushrooms finely sliced
250g / 8ozish risotto rice [sort-grained; pudding stuff also works]
0.25 pint white wine

2 good pinches saffron strands

1 pint veg stock

Cupped handful broccoli florets

75g / 2-3ozish parmesan + few shavings to top

S+P as needed

Gently melt half the butter in a wide based deepish frying pan.

Add the onions and stir then cover whilst you slice the mushrooms.

Add the mushrooms to the pan and cook gently for few minutes to soften. Keep the lid on to keep in all the nice mushroomy juices.
Once the onion and shrooms are lightly cooked add the rice and stir it all around to coat in the butter and juices.

Add the wine and turn the heat up. Simmer to evaporate off the alcohol, just leaving the wine taste behind.

Add the saffron and a splosh [1/4 pint ish] of stock. Stir until the stock has been absorbed - the heat should be enough to keep a gentle simmer going.

Add another splosh of stock and stir until absorbed.

Repeat until almost all stock used - should be 15-20 mins for all of it. [Risotto rice (arborio) should end up creamy with a hint of bite left to it.]

With the last splosh or 2 of stock add the broccoli florets so they get 3ish mins cooking.

Beat in the remaining butter and the parmesan. Taste and season if necessary.

Serve with a few shavings of parmesan sprinkled over the top.

This was tasty and more than enough for the 2 of us, even ravenous as we were. I think the saffron was lost a bit under the mushroom taste but it was nice to give it a try.

Risotto is one of those p*ss easy dishes that actually don't take that long if you don't subscribe to the 'one ladleful at a time' school of stock-addition; which I don't. Just don't walk away from it - it must have constant stirring or you'll end up with a sticky mass burnt onto the bottom of the pan!

Woop - finally got this to post, albeit minus the pic. That's up there ^ see? Blogger does like to test me sometimes...