Cleaning out the fridge

Jueves,antes De Volar, originally uploaded by Lobstersquad.

We're going home tomorrow, and before you can see those red tail lights heading for Spain, the fridge needs to be emptied. which means indulgence; blueberries with custard, risotto with lots of leeks and chicken, s frittata tonight with all the scraps of cheese and spring onions. and those beautiful chanterelles a friend has just given me.
And a picnic for tomorrow, to sustain us through the long hours of travelling with two babies.
but for now, all is calm; they're both asleep and I can enjoy my mint tea and the Times' Thursday food supplement.

Storing potatoes

Now, I don´t know if this is going to sound like I´m the biggest idiot, but anyway.

I never got why potatoes were always referred to as a "store cupboard ingredient", because my potatoes always seemed to sprout within seconds of my bringing them home. So I´d only ever buy a few, and then only with some specific dish in mind.

But now I know better. I found out reading this book "Just like mother used to make", and it´s not that great, really, a sort of poor man´s "The Prawn Cocktail Years", which is fantastic, but still, it opened my eyes. The chapter on potatoes begins by saying that supermarkets sell potatoes washed and bagged in plastic, and store them under bright lights, and that potatoes are only happy when covered in mud and in the dark.

And then I banged my head on the wall. I mean, really, of course! What an idiot! Those winter storage things you hear about, and basements, and everything! Duh. I must have read this a million times and it hasn´t percolated my thick head, or else I haven´t, which would be strange.

So I took the opportunity of buying a great big 5 kg sack of potatoes for next to nothing at the very enticing and friendly farm shop called The Store, and putting them away in a cardboard box on the stairs leading down to our garden.

Now I´m not only happy in the knowledge that my potato needs are being met, but also dangerously vindicated in my impulsive purchase of books I don´t need even remotely, but can´t resist, because, really, how can I, when they cost the same as a capuccino and a croissant at the Coffee House?

I could forgo the croissant, of course, but who am I kidding?

Let me remind you of a fantastic way to cook potatoes, and let me add that you can also slip a few frozen fish fingers in there, which make for a very good sandwich with some tricked out mayo and a few salad leaves or pickles.

Kitchen

It´s out! Another big whopping fat book from Nigella Lawson. Mind you, though it looks as fat as How to Eat it ain´t, because there´s a full spread picture for every recipe, plus the inevitable shots of Nigella looking buxom and ever so slightly  demented. But that´s ok. I don´t mind. I love Nigella, she´s my favourite writer, and I know I´m going to have the best time reading again about risotto and bread pudding and soup. There´s probably not much new in there, but that´s just as it should be; it´s wonderful home food, what she does best.

Pressure cooker tag, and a potato and mussel stew

A reader reminded me to put a sidebar with pressure cooker recipes on the side, so I have.

Also, to recommend a pressure cooker. I can only do that with the one I have, which is the only one I´ve ever used. It´s not a very informed opinion, but for what it´s worth, I think the WMF Perfect is the bee´s knees. I have the 6,5 litre model and pine for a 3 litre one too. I can´t quite justify that, as it´s an expensive piece of crockery, but it´s so useful and so great that I might someday. The big model is great for soups and stocks and beans, since you can´t fill it up to the brim, but for rice, or a flan, it might me more comfortable to use a pot that´s not so heavy.

So there.

As for a recipe, here´s one for a simple mussel and potato stew. It takes about fifteen minutes total time to put together, which is pretty impressive for something so satisfying. The beauty of it is that the rythms are perfectly synched. One thing leads to another so there´s no waiting around, just some mindless chopping and debearding and then a beautiful dinner.

Dice an onion and sautee it in the pressure cooker, with a smashed garlic clove. Meanwhile, peel and break a few potatoes into rough chunks. Add as spoonful of tomato puree and a splash of white wine (have a glass, do, and if you don´t have wine, do it with beer, or cider), and then the potatoes. Now add water to just cover, salt sparingly, lock it, bring it up to pressure and when it´s up, count five minutes.

In this time, about seven minutes, you can clean a kilo of mussels. When the five minutes are up, bring the pressure down with cold water and throw the mussels into the pot. Cover but don´t lock and give it a couple of minutes, until the mussels are open.

You can scatter some parsley on top, or better still, coriander for a Portuguese touch. I don´t know why but this dish looks Portuguese to me. 

Omelette Elizabeth Bennet

This is just a silly way to justify making the drawing above. There´s the famous omelette Arnold Bennet, a grand thing involving bechamel and hollandaise sauce, and smoked fish that must be poached. And then there´s a pared-down version in the book Cupobard Love, which the author calls Omelette Gordon Bennet .

And then there´s the even lazier way, which is really more of a frittata but none the worse for that; an omelette of smoked fish, dotted with cream and sprinkled with parmesan, then briefly grilled. It emerges puffed and pretty, and is just the thing for a quick lunch, with buttered brown bread and some salad.

I used smoked mackerel because it´s my new favourite thing, but salmon or trout would do just as well, and look even more girly and sweetly pink.

Entertaining

We´ve had lots of visitors, which accounts for not having done any of the serious things, like work, or changing the curtains, or learning how to use the power drill. Not even the frivolous, like blogging, could compete with trips to the sand dunes, complete with seals, and all the fish and chips.

One thing we´ve learnt is that taking a toddler and a baby out for lunch means that by the time dessert should roll around, they need to move on. So we leave before, take them home, put them away in their cradles, and try to snatch some sleep ourselves. And only after all that do we go for the sweets. Ice cream, out of a freezer bulging with the local delicacy, tubs of Mackie´s Chocolate, Honeycomb, Raspberry Swirl, Mint Chocolate Chip and Cream of Scotland. There are ten other flavours to try, so we have to be dilligent and get through that stash before I can fill up the freezer again.

Kid friendly recipes

In case the previous post sounded a bit breezy and off-the-cuff, let me direct you to the side bar. If you click on the recipe labels you´ll be taken to a selection of recipes. Soups and Comfort food are good places for kid´s food, although I don´t think the gazpachos would be much of a hit. Sweet things, of course, and Spanish food, too, will be full of good things.

You´ll find pancakes, banana bread, tomato soup, melted cheese sandwiches, beef stew and melting roast pork, pizzas and flatbreads, marmitako and macarrones con chorizo, chickpeas with spinach and all sorts of good stuff. Have a browse.

Feeding toddlers

Giving advice about children´s food is as useless as giving advice about unsuitable boyfriends. Just as all unsuitable boyfriends are the same, no two toddlers are alike, and just as your friend will not leave the fascinating cad just because you say so, so your precious darling will not like cabbage with nutella just because your friends´little one does.

Also, embarrassingly, my daughter doesn´t have the dazzling, cute and varied diet. She eats most the same things every week, which is fine, really. Novelty is not the number one priority to a two year old who would only be too pleased to live off ice cream.

No. Pía eats whatever we eat, more or less. Usually her dinner is what we had for lunch, which may be soup, risotto, pasta, beans or lentils. Two nights a week she has eggs, in the form of omelette, and they usually have some steamed broccoli on the side. A good get out of jail free card is a cheese toasted sandwich. And on Friday nights we make pizza, which is a great opportunity to smear everything with flour.

In fact I´d say that cooking for a toddler is the same as cooking for an adult. It´s the logistics that are different. The important thing is not to be caught off guard, and to always have on hand things that can be turned into dinner while they´re in the bath, or even when they´re already in the high chair, wet hair slicked back and smelling of soap. The thinking parent´s best friends are the ziplock bag, the tiny plastic container, and the freezer.

I aim to have a few or all of these stashed away, in kid friendly portions, or in big bags for the plain stuff. They make life a lot easier, and all you have to do is squirrel them away as you make your own stuff, to be prepared like a good Boy Scout.

Many of them are meals in themselves, but many times I use them to help out leftovers from the fridge. A few beans and a couple of broccoli florets, simmered in stock, make a great soup. A bit of ham and a few peas and you´re only minutes away from great fried rice. The beauty of it is that even a couple of spoonfuls of something can be bulked up into a child size portion.

1- rice. white or brown, just make more than you´ll need and put it in a big ziplock bag. When it´s frozen, drop it from shoulder height so the grains sepparate, and there you are, ready to scoop out as much as you need for fried rice, or for soup. This goes also for quinoa, barley or any grain you like.

2- polenta. Let it congeal, slice it into squares and pop them in a bag. When you want to eat them, either thaw a couple of squares in the microwave and dust with parmesan, or else grill/broil them until brown and crunchy. Great with vegetables or any saucy pasta topping prepparation.

3- soup. Pureed or chunky, any kind seems to go down well, and is a great place to throw in a lot of vegetables they might otherwise peer suspiciously at.

4- Stock. So good for you, so delicious, will make everything better. And it´s the best thing when they´re feeling under the weather.

5- tomato sauce, or pisto. Don´t bother with the ice cube thing, it´s better to freeze it in small containers and then pop them out and into a big bag.

6- macaroni cheese. Pía´s favourite, and also a good vehicle for vegetables in the cheesy sauce

7- risotto, either rice or barley.

8- meatballs. Cooked or uncooked, these will pep up mostly anything. Likewise, sausages, which can also be used as quick meatballs by taking off the casings.

9- fishcakes. Fried or baked til crisp, they´re irresistible, and a great way to use up leftover mashed potato.

10- cooked frozen broccoli. Yes, I know the texture isn´t great, but it´s the only way if you´re really pressed for time. Likewise carrots, and peas, of course, but you don´t have to cook those, just blitz them in the microwave as they are.

For the rest, Pía loves a whole lot of things that I didn´t eat until I was much older, but she usually only wants them if they´re on my plate. And sometimes she loves eveyrthing and sometimes she doesn´t, and there are three bowls of porridge days and days when she hardly eats, but I roll with it. There are no rules; just remember, don´t make a big deal about it, don´t be offended if they don´t want it, and try to give them properly delicious things, because they just work better.

I´ll leave you with a recipe, if you can call it that, for a cold smoothie. You need:

11- frozen sliced bananas, which are great to have on hand for this or for banana ice cream, and fresh berries. Or else a fresh banana and frozen berries. To these you add liquid, either milk or juice or a mixture or both, and a spoonful of honey. Blend, serve with a couple of straws, and call it a milkshake. Toddlers are maddenning, but their saving grace is that they are also gullible.

Aubergine dip

It all began with this recipe from the Wednesday Chef. I decided to try making it in the pressure cooker, and then I decided to double the quantities, and the result was a whole lot more  eggplant sauce that I knew what to do with. It was ok, but not stellar, due to my tinkering with the recipe. So here´s what I did, and what I´ll do a lot more, because it´s pretty awsome. I remembered a Persian dish in Stevie Parle´s My kitchen, an equally irritating and charming hodge podge of recipes with very pretty design, and one thing led to the other. 

Toast cumin and sesame seeds together in a dry pan, and when they´re all fragrant and crunchy, spread them out to cool on a cutting board. Mix the aubergine puree with yogurt, salt, pepper and the seeds, and add mint or parsley or both or none. 

Great stuff, to start a meal, to serve alongside a dish of lentils, with flatbreads, or chips,  or anything, really. 

Sally Schneider´s Magic Peppers

I was going to write a long(ish) post about food for toddlers, but I´ve just found out that it´s the custom here to take a cake to nursery on your birthday. In my day in Spain we used to take a bag of sweets, and take care to give the aniseed ones to the mean girls. 

Lord knows what they do now, but in the meantime, I have to go and make a tray of cupcakes for a gaggle of two-year-olds to crush underfoot, so I´ll leave you with a quick recipe, Sally Schneider´s Magic Peppers.

That´s her name for them, and while she may be exaggerating a little, she´s on to something. These are not your usual sort of red peppers slowly roasted into slippery submission. 

Instead, they are cut into four, lengthwise (Spanish readers, cut them into eight; guiri peppers are small), brushed with olive oil, sprinkled with herbs and salt,and a bit of sugar too, for good measure, and blasted for half an hour in a very hot oven, to emerge caramelized, chewy and irresistible. The recipe is nothing much, but the result is well worth the effort. You´ll notice that it´s light, quick, and pretty. I made five peppers for a side dish yesterday, thinking to have about half left over to do something with, a la Sally in her improvisational way, but J and I polished them all off within seconds.