Haddock baked with tomatoes, capers and chorizo

Summer holiday morning TV for kids in the 70s and 80s was great. Well, some of it was. Actually, no, most of it was crap. I mean there was an inordinate amount of cheaply bought in stuff from the near continent and Eastern Europe, usually in black and white and badly dubbed. These included things like White Horses, The Flashing Blade, Belle and Sebastian. They were fucking diabolical, if I'm telling the truth. Why Don't You? was OK, I suppose, but gets a black mark against its name for bestowing Ant from off of Ant and Dec onto the viewing British public. I think the biggest problem was there weren't enough cartoons. I longed for a bit of Hanna-Barbera animation. Scooby Doo, Hong Kong Fooey or Wacky Races were always worth watching, but it was the other dross you had to wade through while you waited for these gems to come on. Bear in mind this was the time when there were a mere three channels available and TV didn't start broadcasting until about 9am after taking the night off. There was none of this 24/7 Cartoon Network/Boomerang/CITV/CBBC nonsense that you have nowadays So, knowing that British kids liked cartoons, they bought in some cartoons, but not as we knew them. They gave us Tintin.

 Tintin.
You really couldn't tire of punching that smug fucking face with it's smug fucking "Something About Mary" hairstyle
 Sourve: http://en.tintin.com/news/index/rub/0/id/4465/0/welcome-to-the-new-tintin-boutique

I fucking hated Tintin. It was just so boring and he wore plus fours, for fuck's sake. The programme started OK with the announcer excitedly proclaiming "Hergé's Adventures ot Tintin!", but went rapidly downhill from there. Maybe it was the dreadful dubbing, but I just couldn't connect with the characters and didn't get any sense of adventure from the stories. If the characters were in a rowing boat and it got attacked by a big shark, I was chanting "Go Jaws!". Later in life, I discovered that Tintin is quite a big thing in certain sections of British popular culture, mainly in book form. The books were originally written in the late 1920s, but a translation into English from the original French was popular in middle class families even recently. What can't be denied is the effect of Tintin on British popular culture, particularly music. Acts Stephen "Tintin" Duffy and the Thompson Twins took their name from Tintin, and there is even a former Thin Lizzy guitarist called Snowy White who had a solo hit. (though his name probably has nothing to do with Tintin or his dog of the same name ). Tintin is even referred to in The Beach (the book version, which itself is a middle-class, late GenX, travel wank fantasy, and the film was worse).

Killer on the Loose by Thin Lizzy
Featuring Snowy White on guitar.
I was never going to have somethnig like Tintin Duffy or the Thompson Twins, was I?

So, what the fuck has Tintin got to do with this blog entry? Well, one of Tintin's companions is the sailor, Captain Haddock. He was to the maritime community what the Black and White Minstrels were to the Afro-Carribean community. To say he was a cliché is understating things. The alcoholism, the gruff demeanor, the bushy beard, the knitted sweater, it's all there. To make him any more of a cartoon sailor they would have to have removed his leg, perched a parrot on his shoulder and infected him with a strain of antibiotic-resistant syphilis found only in Jakarta. That he was the foundation for Captain Birdseye is almost certain and a sad indictment of the minds of advertisers in the UK. Even less so in this age of Operation Yewtree. The trope of a grizzled old salt merrily taking a bunch of children away on his boat lost its allure as an advertising premise faster than you can say Edward Heath.

Anyway, back to haddock. It's one of the most popular fishes consumed in the UK, along with cod. As I've mentioned previously, we're shit at eating fish in the UK, especially as we're surrounded by water, and most people will only eat fish if it's deep fried in batter. That fish is usually cod or haddock which are not the most flavourful piscine offerings in the fish mongers, though, given a choice, I do prefer haddock as it has a little more flavour than cod. There are other similar types of fish which are probably cheaper, like hake (great) or coley (grey and dire), or even fish exported from other parts of the world, like hoki. These latter examples were gaining more popularity in the UK up to a few years back due to the crash in popultion of gadidae in the North Atlantic as a result of industrial-scale trawling. More recently they had seemed to have made something of a recovery, but numbers are still on the brink. As a relatively tasteless fish, it does work with a piquant sauce, such as this. The capers really add a great tanginess and pretty much any dish can be improved through the addition of chorizo. 

TIMING
Preparation 10 minutes
Sauce cooking: 30 minutes
Baking: 30 minutes

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
100g mushrooms, sliced
50g chorizo, chopped
150g tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
1tbsp drained pickled capers, chopped
2tbsp dry white wine
1tbsp lemon juice (about half a lemon's worth)
2 frozen fillets of haddock (about 100g each)

 Sauce ingredients
Clockwise from top left: tomatoes, chorizo, capers, mushrooms, garlic, onion

RECIPE
Preheat the oven to 170°C/

Heat the oil in a pan and add the onion to fry gently for about 10 minutes.

Add the garlic and fry for another couple of minute/

Add the mushrooms and fry until they look cooked, about 5 minutes.

Throw in the chorizo and fry for another 5 minutes/

Add the tomatoes, capers, white wine and lemon juice then stir.

Add plenty of black pepper, cover and turn down the heat to a gentle simmer for about 20 minutes, long wnough to brak down the tomatoes.

In the pan

Prepare an oven proof dish by greasing it with a bit of oil.

Place the fish fillets on the dish then pour over the tomato and caper sauce, sufficient to cover both fillets as best as possible.

Put into the hot oven to bake for 30 minutes (or 20 minutes if you're using fresh fillets)

Serve up with oven-roasted potatoes.

Ready to eat
Served with roasted new potatoes and roasted cauliflower

NOTES
I used frozen haddock fillets in this recipe which you use strainght from the freezer without defrosting. Paradoxically, frozen fillets are usually fresher than "fresh" fillets as they are frozen almost immediately after being caught. and not having to hang around in a supermarket fish counter for a couple of days. The instructions on the packaging suggested you can cook them in 20 minutes, but I found the fish was still raw, so made the time 30 minutes. If you used fresh fish portions, 20 minutes would be plenty of time, so adjust accordingly.

Haddock and cod are essentially interchangeable in cooking, so you just as easily use cod, You could also substitute the other fish I mentioned in the preamble, such as hake.

The preamble to this entry may sound like notalgia for a bygone day, but it's nothing of the sort. It was shite. The TV in the summer when I was growing up was there for one reason: to keep the kids occupied. This may have been so Mum could sneak in a large gin in the kitchen in peace, or could have been so kids that had been left to their own devices didn't set fire to the house while parents were out at work.

One interesting thing that I discovered when working on this was that Hong Kong Fooey was voiced by Scatman Crothers who also appeared in The Shining.

Captain Birdseye has been in the news lately as Birdseye have decided to revamp the image of the character and he is now a 24 year old woman. This has caused a major meltdown amongst the sort of person who accuse other people of being snowflakes.

Bean and potato hotpot

Northern stereotypes

(at least Micahel Palin is an actual Yorkshireman)

Whippets, cloth caps and coronary heart disease, but we do talk to people on buses and don't wear coats in the depths of winter. We Northerners have had to put up with all sorts of lazy stereotypes. I mean, don't get me wrong, at least we're not Scottish, but, as far as England goes, we get the shitty end of the stick most of the time. Shat upon by the London-centric ruling elite through under-resourced transport and other infrastructure and the arts, we are the former industrial heart of the country given lip service in the modern, service-industry UK. The current government has set up the "Northern Powerhouse" initiative to promote the north of England. It is, of course, a load of hollow-sounding bollocks, in the light of the disparity in funding for transport for London being £708 per capita compared to £289 in the north of England. All that money so people in London can continue to avoid eye-contact with their fellow commuters on better, more frequent trains. Like I say, lip service.

All the same we are fiercely proud of our identity, though. Geordies, Yorkshiremen, Scousers, Mancs, people have a pride of where they are from. A component of this is culinary heritage. Pies are a big thing across the North, especially in the capital of all that is pastry-encased, Wigan. Fish and chips is another, saveloys in the Northeast. Don't even get me started on the regional variation of names for bread rolls. That just boggles the fucking mind. Go into a bakers in any Northern town and ask for a bread bun by the local name and there's no problem. Wander a mile down the road and you ask for a bread roll by the same name and they look at you like you're just regaining the power of speech after suffering a stroke.

One local delicacy that is synonymous with the part of the North is Lancashire hotpot. Basically this is a lamb stew topped with sliced potato, so the potatoes become crispy. It's shepherd's pie for lazy people who can't be arsed to mash their potato.

I don't know why I chose to call this recipe a hotpot as it has fuck all to do with Lancashire hotpot, other than it's got potatoes in it, but the name seems to fit. Like most of my recipes, it's quite spicy hot and made in a pot. It's another meat-free Monday recipe (it's actually vegan, in fact) that I fancied flinging together with beans to give it a bit of extra protein. It's very substantial and tastes great, very much a comfort food type of dish. I've written the recipe for the hob, but I actually made this in a slow cooker, so I've included a timing for doing it by that method.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking:  1½ hours on the hob, 6 hours in the slow cooker

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
200g mushrooms, chopped
1 large courgette, topped, tailed and sliced
2-3 small potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm pieces 
4 medium fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 tin mixed beans (the one I used said it was 290g)
½ tsp dried mixed herbs
½ tsp smoked paprika
Pinch chilli flakes
Good dash of Tabasco sauce
1 bay leaf
Small stick of cinnamon
1 vegetable stock cube
Black pepper to taste

All chopped up and ready to go

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and fry the onion and garlic until soft.

Add the courgette and mushroom and allow to sweat for 10 minutes or so.

Chuck in the potatoes, tomatoes and beans.

Top up the volume with 500ml water and add the rest of the ingredients.

Stir well, turn down the heat, and allow to stew until the potatoes are soft, may be 45 minutes or so.

 In the pot

Serve it up with some fresh bread to mop up the sauce

Ready to eat

NOTES
The beans I used in this came in a spicy, tomatoey sauce (I think they were sold by the supermarket under the name "taco beans"). The sauce added a little extra oomph to the flavour. You could use plain beans, or even use dried mixed beans, but maybe add some ketchup to pep up the flavour. Mixed beans add a nice variety, but you could use kidney or borlotti beans, or even (God forbid) baked beans at a pinch.

Many of the recipes that are traditionally Northern originate from other parts of the world entirely. Liverpool's signature dish, scouse, a meat stew, is derived from a similar dish made around the Baltic ports of northern Europe. Saveloys are originally a type of sausage from Switzerland (the name derived, apparently, from the Latin "cerebrus", for brain, as they were originally made from pig brains), possibly arriving in the UK with Jewish immigrants. Jewish immigrants/refugees from Spain and Portugal are also purportedly the original creators of that most British of dishes, fish and chips.

The slow cooker I got is fucking amazing. I've been doing shitloads of recipes in it. Chuck the ingredients in and fuck off for a few hours. When you come back, supper's ready. Speaking of which, and if you have a half hour to spare, get a load of this turgid slice of prog rock

Supper's ready!
You could watch this at least twice while the dish is cooking

For the slow cooker version, do the frying of the onions, garlic, etc on the hob then transfer to the slow cooker for the main cooking part.

Ratatouille

Smooth jazz from The Manhattan Transfer
Nice!

The 1970s were great*. Cooking (since you're probably interested if you're here) was all about Fanny Craddock, The Galloping Gourmet and the new CILF on the scene, Delia Smith. Films mirrored these culinary giants of the small screen in the shape of Alien, Jaws and Princess Leia in Star Wars (or Star Wars Episode VII: A New Hope as it's known now).

Music had a massive shift also, with disco and, most significantly, the advent of punk happening in this decade. It needs stating, though, that while there was a revolution going on in popular music, there was still a major stream of less challenging fare flooding the UK top 40. There was a slew of easy listening and novelty songs throughout the decade, from the cliche-ridden Europop celebration of the package tour to Spain, Sylvia's "Y Viva España"; to the Rupert Holmes cheesy ballad telling the story of a bored married bloke who replies to an ad in a lonely hearts column in order to have an affair, but with an obvious twist, the Piña Colada song. Another one was Chanson D'Amour by The Manhattan Transfer as seen in the video at the top of the page. The latter is a piece of light jazz which includes the actual lyric "Rat-ta-tat-ta-tat". However, as anodyne as that song is, that lyric starts running untrammeled through your head as soon as you hear the name ratatouille. Less ear worm and more ear rat, or maybe it's just me on that. I can guarantee, however, that, if you know the song, the very fact that I've mentioned it means that the tune will now be in your head for at least the next couple of hours. You're welcome.

70s TV chefs and iconic 70s movies. The similarities are mindblowing!

Left to right, top to bottom Fanny Craddock; HR Giger's Alien from the Ridley Scott movie; Graham Kerr, the galloping Gourmet; Jaws; Delia Smith; Carrie Fisher as Star Wars' Princess Leia. Coincidence? I don't think so!

(Images from http://www.turnipnet.com/whirligig/tv/adults/other/cookery.htm, http://www.wallpapers-web.com/aliens-movie-wallpapers/3789979.html, http://bunchedundies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/real-men-jump-over-chairs.html,  https://www.kentuckycenter.org/all-shows/family-film-night-on-the-belvedere-jaws, https://www.eatyourbooks.com/library/12849/delia-smiths-complete-cookery-course, http://www.xaluan.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1668805)

Ratatouille is a classic vegetable stew from Provence and is best described as pure sunshine in a pot. Fresh aubergines, peppers, courgette and tomatoes, they're all there. As a meat free meal it's a great way to use the fresh produce you get in the summer and it tastes fucking amazing, especially if it's with some fresh, crusty bread.

*They weren't. They were pretty shit. We had the Three Day Week. We had Baader-Meinhof. We had flares and wing collars (see here for my take on this). The Cold War was still quietly raging and virtually nobody in the UK had even heard of couscous, let alone eaten it.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 60 minutes

INGREDIENTS
4 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 aubergine, cut into 2cm dice
1 courgette, sliced into 1cm rounds
1 yellow pepper, cored, seeded and chopped into 2cm squares
1 red pepper, cored, seeded and chopped into 2cm squares
4 medium-large tomatoes, skinned and chopped
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste
handful of basil leaves

Chopped and ready to cook

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and gently fry the onion and garlic for 10 minutes.

Add the aubergine and fry for 10 more minutes.

Throw in the courgette and fry for another 10 minutes.

Add the peppers and fry for another 10 minutes.

Stir in the tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, tomato puree plus salt and pepper to taste before adding 100ml water.

Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for 20-30 minutes (until the vegetables are tender).

 I smell a rat
And it smells fantastic

Makes plenty for a big bowlful each for two people plus a decent lunch with the leftovers.

Serve with fresh bread.

 Ready to eat

Just add bread

NOTES
Big, ripe tomatoes work best in this.

Other herbs would work well in this, like oregano or (sparingly) thyme. The fresh basil is sublime, however.

As I mentioned, this dish is from Provence which became the Nirvana favoured by the British middle classes in the late 80s/early 90s, thanks in main to the book A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle and the subsequent TV mini-series based upon it. It spawned a load of imitators as people with more money than sense followed through on their French rural wank fantasy, with often limited success and financial insecurity, the gullible cons de chez con, as they might say in France.

There is a little known incident on a teatime programme called Nationwide in the UK which had a cooking piece presented by Fanny Craddock in which she was making meringues. When this piece was finished, the anchor man of the programme, addressing the viewers, said "And I hope all your meringues turn out like Fanny's"

The most famous version of Chanson D'Amour is the one I put at the head of this post. However, this is not the best. That belongs to the version in the video below, as perfomed by the Muppets, which is actually sublime.

The Muppets do Chanson D'Aamour
They weren't only just about mna mna

Aromatic courgette curry

So it's another recipe for meat-free days. I went into some of the environmental arguments for going vegetarian in my last blog entry but one real advantage for eating vegie is that it's just much cheaper than meat. It's not that I'm pleading poverty, and I've no intention of giving up meat any time soon, but there is something great about knocking up something like this which costs next to fuck all and takes little more than an hour.

I've twatted on about courgetttes and how great they are in a previous post, but what I was unaware of is that this humble vegetable is another import from the Americas. So, along with peppers, chillies and tomatoes, which were also brought over from the New World, European and Asian cuisine would have been so fucking dull before the Conquistadors made it to America. They also brought back syphilis, so, I guess that's a case of swings and roundabouts. And let's not forget that chocolate also came from the New World, so, on balance, it's a win for white Europeans, in addition to the devastation they wreaked on the native civilisations and the population as a whole on the other side of the Atlantic. We got a whole new pantry full of ingredients, they got genocide.

Conquistadors
OK, we'll swap you horses, the wheel and Catholicism for the contents of your gardens

picture from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/10/conquistadors-sacrificed-eaten-aztec-acolhuas

TIMING
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 50 minutes

INGREDIENTS
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp ground tumeric
1 whole star anise
1 tsp ground coriander
3 cloves
4 whole green cardamom pods
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp whole fennel seeds
1 bay leaf
1 10cm piece cinnamon stick
pinch ground black pepper
pinch  dried chilli flakes
1 small onion, roughly chopped
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 large courgette, topped, tailed and sliced
2 medium tomatoes, peeled and chopped
100ml water
1 tbsp tomato puree
Salt

More spices
(clockwise from 12 o'clock: ground cumin, bay leaf, tumeric, cinnamon stick, ground coriander, star anise, cloves, chilli flakes, black pepper, cardamom pods with fennel seeds in the middle)

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a pan and add the spices for 2 minutes.

Throw in the onion, ginger and garlic, and fry gently for 10 minutes.

Add the courgette and stir-fry for another 5 minutes.

Add the tomatoes and water, stir then add salt to taste.

Bring to a boil, turn down the heat and simmer for 30 minutes

Serve with rice

Ready to eat 

(on right of plate with aloo gobi on left on a bed of plain, boiled basmati rice)

NOTES
 This is a great dish to serve with aloo gobi that I posted a recipe for recently. This uses more earthy flavoured spices which contrast well with the richly fragrant nature of this courgette curry.

Courgettes are members of the pumpkin/squash family, the cucurbit. It's not all about versatile vegetables, mind. This family also contains the penis gourd which has made an appearance in this blog in a previous post.I'm not sure who dreamed up the idea, but they must have had a pretty eccentric outlook.
"That's a funny looking vegetable. Does it taste nice?"
"Not really. Not sure what to do with it"
"Well, if you dry it out it would make a great cover for your cock"

A decorative penis gourd from Papua New Guinea

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka

Laksa (Leftover Symphonies 5)

The US sitcom from the late 70s/early 80s, Taxi, was a launchpad for several actors including Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd and Marilu Henner. It also starred established comedian, the late Andy Kaufman, who is widely regarded, amongst the comednicenti (ie those that know comedy), as a true genius. He played an immigrant from an unmentioned Eastern European country called Latka in the show. Otherwise, latkas are potato pancakes made as part of Hannukah celebrations in the Jewish community and are not to be confused with the subject of this recipe, laksa.

Latka
T'ank you veddy much
Image from https://in.bookmyshow.com/entertainment/5-comedians-left-us-soon/48357

It's difficult to categorise laksa. Is it a soup? Is it noodles? Is it a curry? Fuck knows, but it's bloody lovely. It's southeast Asia in a bowl.

Comfort food varies around the world. As I mentioned in a previous post, in the UK it's usually soup (very often out of a can) or hearty stews. Laksa ticks many of the boxes necessary to qualify as the comfort food of the Malay Peninsula: noodles; rich, thick gravy; lots of vegetables; and a good bit of spice. It couldn't provide any more comfort if it was down-quilted and gave you a shot of muscle relaxant. Like this recipe for vindaloo I posted previously, the dish is another bit of natural fusion as the dish derives from ethnic Chinese people settling in the Straits towns of the peninsula and incorporating local ingredients. It's a staple of Peranakan food which is a particularly eclectic cuisine combining influences from China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the European colonisers (Dutch, British and Portuguese).

This is yet another way of using up some leftovers, this time the remains of a roast chicken but you could do it with fresh chicken or seafood, particularly some big, juicy, shell-on prawns.

TIMING
Preparation:20 mins
Cooking: 1 hour 45 mins

INGREDIENTS
3 cakes of dried egg noodles
1 tbsp oil (neutrally flavoured like rapeseed or sunflower)
1 leftover carcass of a roast chicken (with plenty of meat, a good 150g or more)
4 small shallots, peeled and sliced
1 carrot, roughly diced
1 stick of celery, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 stalk of lemon grass, chopped
1 thumb-sized piece fresh tumeric root, chopped (or 1 tsp dried)
2 thumb-sized piece ginger, chopped
4 red chillies, whole
1 whole star anise
5 cloves
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 stick of cinnamon (approx 5cm)
2 chicken stock cubes
200ml tinned coconut milk
1 lime,juiced and husks retained
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp fish sauce
10 cherry tomatoes
100g okra, topped and tailed and cut into 2cm chunks
3 large mushrooms, sliced

RECIPE
Cook the noodles according to the instructions.

Drain and set aside

Pick the chicken meat off the carcass and set both the meat and the bones aside.

Heat 1 tbsp oil in a large pan and add the shallots, carrot and celery and fry until soft (around 10 minutes).

Add the garlic, lemon grass, tumeric, ginger, chillies and dry spices and continue to gently fry for another 5 minutes.

Place the stock cubes and chicken bones into the pan, add 1.5l water, heat to boiling, cover and simmer for 45 minutes

Remove the chicken bones and blend the broth until smooth

Return to the hob and add the coconut milk, fish sauce, lime juice, sugar and lime husks.

Throw in the remaining vegetables and stir

Boil and simmer for another 30 minutes.

Refresh the noodles by running them under cold water

Add the noodles to the soup and stir to warm through

Makes enough for a good working week's worth of lunches or would make a decent dinner for four people.

NOTES
Fresh tumeric is another wanky, foodie ingredient that is not usually that easy to come by in the UK. I used it in this dish as I had some left over, having bought some for another dish I had planned. Use dried as a replacement. The fresh root looks like the picture below.

Fresh tumeric root
Looks like ginger or maggots
image from http://foodfacts.mercola.com/turmeric.html

Tumeric is currently touted as a miracle food that can cure all sorts of shit, including cancer, heart disease and, aptly enough, diarrhoea. Though there is some evidence it contains some potentially active compounds, a recent scientific review suggests these claims are largely bollocks. Besides which, if it does to your insides what it does to a cotton T-shirt, it's actually going to fuck you up. The number of tops I've had to discard because of yellow stains from curry is nobody's business. Of course, feel free to take a good dose when you've got a cold and you'll feel much better, as long as you back it up with a Lemsip.

I used tomatoes, mushrooms and okra in this recipe, but these vegetables could be substituted for others like aubergine, green beans or peppers. You can also substitute light soy for the fish sauce.

Having mentioned Andy Kaufman, I really need to link to this song by REM:

Man in the Moon by REM

Spicy tomato and pepper soup

Recently on the children's TV channel Cbeebies they started showing a new version of the classic 60s/70s animation The Clangers. It was pretty faithful to the original, even down to using the same traditional stop-motion animation technique over modern CGI. If you don't know what it's about, it centres on the adventures of a group of mouse-like things, the Clangers, that live on a planet in the middle of space. It's got a definite whiff of the psychedelics about it as, in addition to the Clangers there is also an iron chicken, flying cow things and a Soup Dragon. Not that I'm implying that there was consumption of any mind-altering substances on or around the set of the original series but, yes,  a Soup Dragon. A Dragon that makes and sells fucking soup. Furthermore, the Soup Dragon (or SD) is a lone parent with a baby or, a little Soup Dragon. An LSD, if you will. As I say, I don't mean to imply anything. Anyway, if the good old Soup Dragon produced something like the soup from this recipe, I can see why the Clangers were happy and well fed (they are quite portly, see below).

A Clanger and the Soup Dragon
It's kind of like Breaking Bad for toddlers

Image taken from https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC59ACN_the-soup-dragons-secret?guid=858f9ee6-89d0-4f96-9433-6d65ab0e9d32

I've really got into making soup recently. It's just so fucking easy, it tastes great and it saves shitloads of cash. You make a pan full of soup and it costs maybe a couple of pounds, then take a big portion to work the next day when it saves you three or four quid that you might pay in buying a sandwich. Then you take it the next day, and the next... Nothing can beat that first taste of your freshly made soup of a Sunday night you use to check if it's any good. Thing is, it's a good job if it does taste great because you're going to be eating it for lunch for the next three or four days. I admit it does get a bit boring by Wednesday. It shows you really can get too much of a good thing.

Thing about soup, though, is, what's not to like? Warming (usually, gazpacho is on my to-do list come next summer), tasty and filling. As I said in a previous entry, it is the ultimate comfort food, though usually in the UK that equates to something you open a tin to heat up or a sachet of dried gunk you add boiling water to. Tomato soup from Heinz is advertised as being the comfort food of winter. So much so that some twat they have on the advert is looking forward to the end of summer and welcoming the dark, damp, cold winter evenings so she can enjoy the tomato soup.Talk about over-egging the pudding. That's like looking forward to sleeping on the wet patch after sex, for fuck's sake. It hardly fits the image they peddle as being wholesome, either, as it's made by the megatonne in some fuck-off huge factory in Wigan and it contains, amongst its ingredients, modified cornflour, milk proteins, acidity regulator and herb and spice extracts. Just like mother used to make. Not that I have anything against industrial-sounding ingredients in prepared food. People whine about "chemicals" in their food, but food is actually nothing but chemicals, whether it comes from a wanky, organic delicatessen or from a huge factory. No, the problem I have is marketing this shit as something "wholesome" to give it the veneer of being made in an earthenware pot by some buxom farmer's wife when it's actually produced in a massive stainless steel vat in an industrial plant the size of an aircraft hangar somewhere.

While I really, really object to food fads and that kind of bollocks, tinned soups are rightly gaining a bit of a reputation for being very high in salt and sugar. Tinned tomato soup especially tends to be incredibly sweet and quite sickly. But, if you make your own, you know what's in it and it won't be as cloying.

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 60 minutes

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp olive oil
2 medium red onions, roughly chopped
1 stick of celery, roughtly chopped
1 carrot, roughly chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 red chillies, chopped
1 red pepper, roughly chopped
1 yellow pepper, roughly chopped
700g fresh tomatoes
½ tsp dried mixed herbs
2 vegetable stock cubes
1 tbsp tomato puree
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 litre water
2 tsp sugar

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a good-sized pan and throw in the onions.

Gently cook these for a good 10 minutes then add the garlic, carrot and celery

Keep these cooking for another 10 or so minutes, so it gets soft but not brown, and add the peppers and chilli and cook for another 5 minutes

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well

Heat to a gently boil, turn down the heat and leave to gently simmer for 30 minutes.

Blend to smooth with a hand blender

It's a pan full of soup.
Not much to add, really

Serve with bread. Makes a great lunch or, I suppose, if you're into that sort of thing, a starter. A panful this size would make a good four to six hearty lunch portions.

NOTES
Pretty much all of my soup recipes are like this: onions, celery, carrot, other vegetables. Stew, blend, done. You can use any old crap you have in the fridge or vegetable rack, season it and there's your soup. You can put anything in it, tinker with the flavour with a few spices and other stuff and Bob's your uncle. I've done lots of different soups and they all tasted pretty good.

I'd be doing a disservice to pop culture and the very ethos of this blog if I didn't do a call-back to the Soup Dragon and post this piece of early nineties Madchester scene by the band of the same name

Leftover symphonies 1: Lamb in garlic, tomatoes and white wine

I've slated my parents' cooking skills while I was growing up in several previous posts and I've also had a significant go at the British contribution to world cuisine. However there is one thing that puts we Brits on the throne of cooking, at least once a week: the Sunday roast. 

A random example of a roast dinner
Source: https://foodism.co.uk/guides/londons-best-sunday-roasts/

I was raised on a Sunday roast every week, be it chicken, beef, pork, lamb. It was the diamond in the dust of what was otherwise domestic culinary mediocrity. It's very much a British thing which really can't be beaten and it's simplicity means you have to try quite hard to fuck this up. If not the absolute pinnacle of cuisine, it's certainly one of its munroes. Tender, melt-in-the-mouth slivers of meat, roast potatoes, a couple of gently cooked vegies, all caressed in rich gravy and a whisper of the right condiment (mint sauce, horseradish, apple etc), maybe with Yorkshire pudding and or a nice stuffing (and everyone knows nothing's better than a good old fashioned stuffing. Well, unless you fancy a good, hard shag). More than any other facet of weekend life, it lessens the impending blow of the working week that you know is heading your way, like the proverbial shit towards the fan, to scatters the last of your weekend comfort into the air when the alarm clock goes off 15 hours later.

As utterly wonderous as the Sunday roast is, I truly fucking hate the leftovers. The cold, roast meat that was a common meal in my household for dinner on Monday, accompanied by chips (fucking chips) and something like baked beans. That once delicate, silken-textured meat has, in the fridge overnight, become some sort of tough, greasy, stringy-textured secondhand chewing gum, akin to freshly lubed shoe leather. It's such a crime to do this with a lovely cut of meat, because those wonderful leftovers could still be used for something nice. It cost enough, why not get yet another decent additional meal out of it? I have tried a few recipes for leftover roast meat in the past and most of them have been, quite frankly, a bit shit. Then we came across this wonderful way to make your leftover lamb almost as nice as the first time out. It's a Spanish dish and I've raved about my love of Spain and its food in the past, and the flavours in this recipe are as Spanish as you can get with all that garlic, the tomatoes and olives.

TIMING
Preparation: 15 minutes (not including the roasting of the original lamb, obviously)
Cooking: 40 minutes

INGREDIENTS
Cooked, leftover roast lamb, trimmed of any excess fat and cut into bite-sized chunks (ideally about 400g for two people)
Plain flour for dusting
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 good-sized cloves of garlic, crushed
3 medium-sized tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped (around 400g, or use tinned if out of season)
1 tbsp tomato puree
100ml white wine
Salt and pepper to taste
50g pitted green olives (about 25 actual olives in total), drained

The basic ingedients: white wine, tomateos, onion, garlicand the floured roast lamb

RECIPE
Dust the lamb with the flour and a good grind of black pepper to lightly coat.

Heat the oil in a pan and fry the lamb until it gets a nice golden brown.

Remove it with a slotted spoon to leave the oil behind.

Add the onion and garlic, adding more oil if the pan is too dry.

Fry for 5-10 minutes, so the onions are transparent.

Add the tomatoes and allow them to break down over a gentle heat for 10-15 minutes.

Stir in the white wine and tomato puree.

Bring to a low simmer and cover for 10 minutes.

Return the lamb to the pan and stir in to allow it to heat through.

Before serving throw in the olives and mix.

Serve with sauteed or oven-baked potatoes and bread to mop up the sauce.

In the pan

NOTES
A decent cut of roast lamb would usually be leg or shoulder. Leg is better as a roast with shoulder usually fattier, though this does add flavour. Either one is good in this dish, but the fattier shoulder probably works better.

The wine cuts through the greasiness as well as tasting great.

Don't skimp on the oil for the first part of frying the lamb as a lot of the rehabilitation of previously roasted meat in this recipe is in the frying part. This also goes for the garlic, you can't use too much garlic. Ever.

Plain olives work in this though I like pimento stuffed ones. These are not to be confused with Olive from On the Buses.

 

Olives

If in doubt, go for the ones on the left 
Sources: https://www.therealoliveco.com/products/copy-of-anchovy-stuffed-olives

https://pumpkinfm.com/on-the-buses/

Potato Gregg's Last Stand: Tandoori style potato curry

All good things come to an end and so do potatoes bearing vague resemblance to celebrity greengrocers, so it's time to make him useful. Well, I couldn't let him just putrefy into a mouldy, slimy mess, could I? It would do him a disservice to make something boring with him so I decided to make this great curry. It's what he would have wanted.

 Alas, poor Potato Gregg.

I knew him, Horatio

Really, the potato is taken for granted, especially in the UK. Chips (and I did mention the British obsession with the fucking chip previously), mash and the horrendously bland, plain boiled old potatoes were the accompaniment to much of the nutrition in my formative years. I mean chips are OK and mash is great if made right (it rarely was back then), but the plain boiled potatoes were just so fucking bland. Serving them up like that is just such a waste of a really versatile vegetable. Let me count the ways. There are crisps which come close to the very zenith of the art of potato cookery, but nobody I know makes their own crisps. You can have them baked, sauteed, roasted, or get exotic and go for something like hasselback, duchess, dauphinoise and, let's face it, you know if it's got a French name it's going to have a good 50% extra on the price in a lot of restaurants. Alternatively, incorporate your spuds in a stew or casserole for them to braise and they not only absorb the flavour of what they're cooking in, but actually enhance it.

There is a lot of bad press about potatoes as being full of carbohydrate and therefore amongst certain healthy/faddy diet circles (yes, adherents to the Paleolithic diet, I'm looking at you as I mentioned previously, you gullible twats) they rank up there with the jism of Satan himself as a food to avoid. However, it's a little known fact that potatoes, before the global transport network and advances in cultivation made pretty much every vegetable available all year round, were one of the major sources of vitamin C in gloomy Northern Europe in the winter months. Indeed, there is actually more vitamin C in a packet of salt and vinegar crisps than in a fresh apple. Well, I say there is, but I've not checked that fact so it might be bollocks.

Thing is, potatoes are just so fucking versatile and one of the best ways to use them is in curries where they can be a main ingredient in their own right.

INGREDIENTS
½ tsp ground tumeric
½ tsp onion seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp tandoori spice
½ tsp paprika
½ tsp salt
pinch chilli flakes
1 small onion, sliced
2 large cloves garlic, crushed
400g peeled potatoes in 2cm cubes
300ml water
100g fresh tomatoes, peeled
2 tbsp vegetable oil 

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a heavy pan and fry the spices for a minute. Throw in the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is transparent, stirring frequently.

Add the potatoes and keep stirring for 10 minutes to par-cook them and give them a nice coating of spice mix. Add the tomatoes, stir and cook for another couple of minutes before adding the water.

Bring the pan to the boil, cover and leave to cook for twenty to thirty minutes, when the potato should be tender.

This is plenty for three or four people as an accompaniment to another curry, or is substantial enough to be served on its own with rice and/or bread. Like most curries, any leftovers taste better as lunch the next day

Served up with a chicken curry, pilau rice and naan bread

NOTES
So, goodbye then, Potato Gregg. There may be other guest appearances in the future.

This is yet another vegetarian/vegan dish. It's great on its own but it makes a great part of a thali along with some of my other vegie curries and accompaniments like baingan tamatar and butternut squash curry.

I made this with old potatoes in this instance, but making it with new potatoes also works really well.

Stuffat Tal-Fenek, Maltese rabbit stew

See, only a very vague resemblance

First of all, I've decided that all this cooking malarkey is a difficult job to do on my own so I could do with a hand. Please allow me to introduce  my new assistant, Potato Gregg. He's a potato who happens to bear a fleeting resemblance to Cockney reformed football hooligan-cum-modern day greengrocer Gregg Wallace. Potato Gregg will be assisting in my preparation and chipping in to this blog with snippets of wisdom and culinary tips.

"Mr Potato Head doesn't get tougher than this! Cor blimey! Apples 'n' fackin' pears!"

Indeed he doesn't, Potato Gregg. Let's get on with the recipe, shall we?

Despite them being a widespread pest because they breed, well, like rabbits, we don't do much with rabbit in this country. No, because we're a nation of "animal lovers" and the little bunnies are just so cute. I mean, so are lambs, calves and piglets but they don't usually live in your garden (well, unless you're a farmer or small-holder) or indeed your living room (well, unless you get off on that sort of thing) before you eat them. And let's not forget the place of the rabbit in our culture: Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Brer Rabbit, Watership Down. Then again there's also Frank from Donnie Darko.

"Rabbits don't come any scarier than that Frank. I had nightmares about him. Myxomatosis is too good for that bastard"

Actually, Potato Gregg, I beg to differ. You forget the Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (see clip below) which was far scarier. That rabbit actually brutally murdered people while Frank was merely ominous and looked a bit iffy. Besides, he was clearly a man in a rabbit suit, looking more like Harvey after he left his head too close to the radiator overnight.

Sharp pointy teeth...

All this preamble aside, the point is that rabbit is a fantastic meat: lean, tasty and cheap. It takes a bit of cooking to ensure it's not to tough. It tastes a lot like chicken although this is the description that applies to pretty much any meat when trying to tell other people what it's like. You do wonder what the first person to eat chicken said it tasted like when telling other people how great this new bird that they'd just barbecued was.

TIMING

Preparation: 30 minutes plus marination (overnight if possible)

Cooking: 3-plus hours on the hob (you could put it in the oven for the same time at 160°C or even do this in a slow cooker)

INGREDIENTS

1 gutted rabbit, cut into 6 or 8 portions

400 ml red wine

4 or 5 bay leaves

1/2 tsp black pepper

4 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 carrot, sliced

1 large onion, chopped

1 stick of celery, finely chopped

1 tin of tomatoes

1 tbsp tomato puree

3-400g potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-sized chunks

RECIPE

Mix the wine, garlic, bay leaves and black pepper in a dish. Mix well and add the rabbit. Cover, stick it in the fridge and marinate for a good few hours, ideally overnight or as long as possible otherwise.

Marinating

Heat the oil in a heavy pan and brown the rabbit pieces on all sides, reserving the marinade.

Remove the rabbit with a slotted spoon and put on a plate

Throw the onion and celery into the pan and saute until the onion is cooked. Add the carrot, tomatoes, tomato puree and the reserved marinade.

Heat to a simmer for about10 minutes or so to break down the tomatoes a little

Put in the potatoes and mix well then return the rabbit pieces to the pot

Cover and turn down the heat to a gentle simmer for 3 hours or more.

Ready to serve

Serve with bread to mop up the rich sauce. The meat should be falling off the bone

NOTES

This recipe is the national dish of Malta. I've never been to this archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea (not yet, anyway, but it's on my list). I find it surprising that the national dish isn't some sort of seafood, given that it's a collection of small islands where you are never more than a few miles from the sea. Mind you, as a former British colony, maybe, along with the red post boxes, there's an element of British influence in the non-use of easily-obtained fish, as is the case with Brits (and as mentioned, nay ranted on, in a previous blog entry)

I'd expect the rabbit would be prepared by your butcher, but in principle you could make this with something you caught yourself or even roadkill if you're that way inclined. The rabbit I used was cleaned and portioned, but did have its various other organs like liver, kidneys, etc which I kept to enrich the sauce. It was bloody cheap as well at £4 to make a meal sufficient for 4 or more people. Parochial reference again, but I bought it at my favourite butcher, Allums of Wakefield.

If you are bothered about eating something so cute there are two things to think about making them less cute. 1: they are coprophagic and 2: they are, for all intents and purposes, just long-eared, grass-fed rats. Actually, these points may not make actually rabbits more appetising to eat, but at least you can look at them as less cuddly

This dish is called stuffat tal fenek and I've not made one double entendre out of that first word. I'm clearly losing my touch.

Like most stews, the recipe needs to cook long and slow, or else the rabbit would be stringy and chewy.

"Meat don't get any tougher than that!"

Oh, do give it a fucking rest with the catchphrase, Potato Gregg, you tuber-faced twat.

Baingan Tamatar (aubergine and tomato curry)

Aubergines are funny things. They're called eggplants in the States, apparently because the first ones that Europeans saw were like the little white ones in the picture below. You do wonder though if they may have got a different name if they'd first seen one of the others, like a purple and white stripy arse plant (far right), or a deep violet penis fruit (do I need to point that fucker out?). I should stress that the latter ought not to be confused with a penis gourd.

United colours of aubergines

And what of other vegetables if they had been named after what they look like? I've already alluded to the sex toy appearance of the butternut squash and the phallic appearance of the courgette in previous recipes (to paraphrase the title of my own blog, it's not big, but it is funny). Would we find the "goth carrot" (parsnip); the "leafy stinking football" (cabbage) or the "You wouldn't want one of them up your arse" (artichoke) quite so appetising?

Of course, we Brits, being proudly European (apart from those of the UKIP persuasion), name them aubergine from the French word for the vegetable which is derived from in turn from Arabic al badinjan which itself comes from the Sanskrit vatimgana which is also the root of the Hindi word for aubergine, baingan, the title of the recipe.

All this linguistic nerdism is well and good, but the word aubergine does sound uncomfortably close to the French word for an inn, auberge, which spawned the Chris Rea song below and I'm not entirely sure that can be forgiven.

Whatever you want to call it, the aubergine is a fantastic vegetable. It is often thing of beauty with its vivid colour. It's also substantial enough to make the basis of a good main course dish in its own right, tastes great, and works really well in curries like this one. As I've said before, I've got a lot of respect for vegetarians and a great vegetarian dinner is all the better for the smug satisfaction you get in the knowledge that it didn't have any dead animal in it (at least, none that you knew about. I mean, there's no accounting for the odd fly or spider that made its home somewhere in the ingredients). This makes a decent main course for a couple of people with rice and/or a nice Indian bread.

INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 big onions, sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1bay leaf
~10cm piece cinnamon
2 tsp whole coriander seeds
1 tsp onion seeds
1 tsp ground black pepper
4 cloves
pinch chilli flakes
1 tsp salt
1 good sized aubergine (about 3-400g worth if you use smaller ones), topped, tailed and cut into 2cm cubes
1 tin of tomatoes (ideally chopped)
200ml water
1 tsp garam masala

RECIPE
Heat the oil in a nice, solid pan and add the spices.

Fry for a minute then add the onion and garlic and sautee gently to soften.

Add the tomatoes and aubergines and stir well.

Add the water, bring to the boil and simmer.

Leave for at least half an hour, until the aubergine is tender.

Add the garam masala and stir well.

Taste and add more salt if it's needed.

Serve it on its own with rice and/or naan bread or with other accompaniments.

NOTES
Vegetable oil should be neutrally flavoured, like sunflower or rapeseed.

About 30% of the population of India are vegetarian. This amounts to over 350,000,000 people, over five times the entire population of the UK. It's therefore not surprising that probably the best vegetarian food in the world is from India, like this dish. I've got a few more great veggie curries up my sleeve for later blog entries.

I've mentioned before that aubergines are part of the nightshade family, also including tomatoes, peppers and potatoes. We could survive without these plants (in Europe we actually did without most of them before Columbus), but food would be so ridiculously dull.

Garam masala is a mixture of aromatic spices that pep up the flavour of a curry that might be lost during the cooking process.