Hey Pesto

Pesto is one of my favourite things ever - I usually have jars of both red and green in the fridge at all times, plus spares in the cupboard. And for some reason that I don't quite know, I'd never made my own until this week. Our basil plant was growing out of control, and there was only one thing to do...

Ingredients:
- 50g pine nuts
- 50g fresh basil
- 25g fresh parsley
- 2 cloves garlic
- 150ml olive oil
- 50g veggie parmesan
- 2tsp lemon juice
- salt and pepper

1. Fry the pine nuts (without any oil) until lightly toasted and golden brown.
2. Tip everything into a food processor and blitz! Season to taste, and enjoy.

If you have a bit more time on your hands, you could always roast the garlic first - or even try using wild garlic if it's in season. Pesto is super versatile - use it as a dip, stir it through some pasta or add it to a pizza. It'll also keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

Ultimate Beans on Toast

Everybody loves beans on toast. It's a student staple, and is perfect for a quick hunger fix at the end of a long day. But it doesn't have to be just emptying a tin into a saucepan - with a few more basic larder ingredients and an extra five minutes, you can transform it into something spectacular.

Ingredients (serves 2):
- 1 small red onion, chopped
- 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
- ½ a red chilli
- 1½ x 400g tins baked beans
- 200g tin kidney beans, drained and rinsed
- handful fresh parsley
- 4 slices bread, toasted and buttered
- handful grated cheddar cheese

Alternatively, you could just use two tins of Heinz 5 beans, though they're a bit more expensive unless you can get them on offer.

1. Pour a dash of olive oil and a knob of butter in a saucepan, and add the onion, garlic and chilli. Cook for five minutes until beginning to soften, then tip in the kidney beans.
2. Add the baked beans and simmer, stirring regularly, until they're beginning to go slightly mushy (or however you like them - this is my preference). Add the parsley and a twist of black pepper.
3. Pour the bean mixture over the toast, and sprinkle over the cheese. Enjoy!

Stuff My Mushrooms.

 

The evenings are getting lighter! 

It's seven o' clock as I write and it's still light outside. Which is lovely. 

This time of year always makes me want to go wandering round National Trust properties and do lots of studying. It's sort of lucky that I have a dissertation and a whole bunch of exam revision to do really... (I also got to go to a National Trust place this weekend - Ightham Mote, it was lovely-pictures below.) 

These lighter evenings make it an awful lot easier to take food photos - living in a flat in halls with awful neon lighting doesn't make for particularly appetising ones. But, tonight I was in the kitchen making dinner, the light looked lovely and I just had to get some photos. 

 Basically, I love mushrooms. (Bryony doesn't! Which means that if we're out and she has food with mushrooms in I always get to eat her mushrooms, so I'm not really complaining...) These are my rice stuffed mushrooms. I've blogged stuffed mushrooms before, but these ones are different. Possibly better.... 

But you'll just have to make both recipes and try them out for yourselves... 

 

Rice stuffed mushrooms (to serve two as a main or four as a side):

150g long grain rice 

2 white onions 

6 spring onions 

2 cloves of garlic 

2 tsp mixed Italian herbs 

1 stock cube 

4 flat cap mushrooms 

A liberal handful of grated cheddar cheese 

A knob of butter and a dash of olive oil 

Salt and Pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 180C. Cook the rice (You place in a saucepan of boiling water and cook for about fifteen minutes until the rice is tender. Don't stir it too much or the starch from the rice is released and it goes all gooey. Drain the rice in a colander, and rinse it through with hot water.) 

2. While the rice is cooking, finely chop the onions. Heat a knob of butter and dash of olive oil in a large saucepan, and add the onion. Fry gently. 

3. Slice the spring onions and add to the pan, along with the dried herbs and a crushed stock cube. Stir in thoroughly. 

4. Crush the garlic (using a knife, or a special garlic crusher if you have one) and add to the pan. 

5. Cut the stems out of your mushrooms, chop these and add to the pan as well. 

6. By now your rice should be cooked. Add it to the onion/garlic/spring onion pan, season with salt and pepper and stir through thoroughly. Turn off the heat. 

7. Place your mushrooms in a reasonably high sided dish or roasting tray, and add a generous spoonful of the rice mixture to each mushroom. If there's any left in the pan after you've run out of room in your mushrooms just stuff it into the gaps between them in the tray, burying the mushrooms. Top with the cheese. 

8. Place the mushroom/rice tray into the oven and cook for about twenty to thirty minutes until the cheese is melted and golden. 

9. Take the tray out and serve the mushrooms. I ate mine with parsnips, but I think this would go really well with cheesy leeks, or even as a side to go with a quiche or a tart.

A Vegetable Feast

Like a veritable feast, but with more vegetables. ALL OF THE VEG.

I haven't been cooking as much recently: there, I said it. Things have been too stressful and busy (which is why there hasn't been much blogging - there hasn't been anything to blog...), BUT last week I decided enough was enough and that I needed something super healthy and delicious to make up for it all. So I made this: baked, stuffed aubergine with cous cous, feta and all things lovely.

Ingredients (serves 1):
- half an aubergine
- 1 small red onion, roughly chopped
- 10 cherry tomatoes
- 3 cloves garlic, peeled but left whole
- 100g cous cous
- 200ml veg stock
- 3 spring onions, chopped
- 100g feta cheese, crumbled
- handful of fresh coriander, chopped
- salt and pepper, to taste

Method:
1. First, preheat the oven to 220°C. Place the aubergine into a baking dish with the onion, garlic and tomatoes, then drizzle with olive oil and a good amount of salt and pepper. Put this into the oven for 40 minutes, taking it out half way through to flip the aubergine and stir the rest of the veg.
2. Put the cous cous into a pan with the hot stock and heat gently for about five minutes, until the grains have expanded and the liquid has been absorbed.
3. Scoop the middle out of the roasted aubergine and add it to the cous cous, along with the onion, tomatoes and garlic (the cloves will be soft enough to just squash now). Stir in the spring onions, feta and coriander, then place the mixture back into the aubergine skin and bake for a further 15-20 minutes.

 
NB: There will be cous cous mixture left over but this is a good thing - my extras were eaten by our house mouse (aka Rebecca) but it would be great to put in the fridge and have for lunch the next day.
4. Sprinkle with an extra bit of coriander to make it look pretty, then serve with something delicious like sweet potato fries. Yum.

What a Tart

So I thought it was about time I blogged something savoury because all I seem to be doing at the moment is cake, bread and pudding, though that's a pretty accurate representation of my current diet...

 

I made this in the summer holidays for my sister, who likes neither leeks nor anything that even vaguely resembles a quiche, BUT when I gave her this she ate it all and went back for seconds. And when Rebecca ate it yesterday she exclaimed 'I don't even like leeks!' as she also went back for seconds. It's an excellent crowd pleaser, very easy to make, and it looks awesome.

Also Dad's lent me his fancy camera, so I can now take food photographs again without having to beg Zosia to leave the library and trek all the way over just so I can take a picture of my soup/cake/etc, which is just great for everyone (except maybe my Dad's nerves).

Ingredients:
Pastry
- 175g plain flour (I use 100g of white and 75g of wholemeal)
- 110g butter, cubed
- ½tsp salt
- sprinkle of black pepper
- ½tsp thyme leaves
- 2-3tbsp cold water

Filling
- 25g butter
- 2 onions, chopped
- 1 large leek, washed and chopped
- 1tsp caster sugar
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 200ml double cream
- 1 egg, beaten
- 125g soft goat's cheese, crumbled
- 1tsp French mustard
- salt and pepper
- 1tsp thyme leaves, plus a few extra sprigs for decoration

Method:
1. First, make your pastry. Using the tips of your fingers, rub together the flour and butter until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the salt, pepper and thyme, then add the water a little at a time. You only need enough to bring everything together into a dough, so be careful not to over-do it.
2. Wrap the dough in clingfilm, and put it in the fridge while you get started on your filling.
3. Put the butter, onions, leek and garlic into a pan, then turn the heat up and add the sugar. Make sure you stir fairly often so it doesn't stick and burn, but there's not much else to it! Cook for about 15-20 minutes, until everything's lovely and caramelised, then take off the heat and put to one side. At this point you should also turn on your oven, and set it to 180°C.
4. Take your pastry out of the fridge, lightly flour your worktop and roll the pastry out to about 5mm thick. Then use your rolling pin/bottle to drape it into your quiche dish (if you don't have a quiche dish, you can use the lid of a casserole dish or anything similar - just make sure it can go in the oven).
5. Gently ease the pastry to fit properly in the dish, then grab a fork and prick lots of holes in the bottom of the pastry (which is a great alternative to baking beans) before blind baking in the pre-heated oven for 20 minutes.
6. While your pastry case is baking, you can get the filling sorted out. Grab a large measuring jug and measure out the cream, then add the egg, mustard and goat's cheese and mix it all together (alternatively, you could put a third of the goat's cheese to one side and sprinkle it over the top before baking). Tip in the leek mixture, the salt and pepper and half the thyme leaves and stir together.
7. Once the pastry is out of the oven, trim the edges and tip in the filling. Sprinkle the goats cheese (if using this method) and the rest of the thyme leaves on top, then put back in the oven for 30 minutes.

8. Voila! Decorate with the thyme sprigs, and eat with something yummy like potato wedges (or a salad if you've been living off cake like I have). Jamie and I intend to take the leftovers to eat on our Windsor Great Park picnic tomorrow, along with some very exciting blackberry and elderflower cakes which I shall also blog soon. NOM.

Smokey Red Risotto

If you've been reading this blog for more than five minutes, you'll know that Zosia and I have quite a thing for risotto, and we also like playing with recipes. Therefore we have posh risotto, gin risotto, red wine risotto and pink risotto among other things - and this is another new one.

It embodies everything you could want as the weather starts to get colder: it's smokey and warm and comforting, and fills your kitchen with the sweet scent of spice. I'll also be using it in future as a way of getting Zosia round for tea, because it's very odd not living with her this year and I miss her.

Ingredients (serves 6):
- 2 red onions, chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 2tsp dried basil
- 1tbsp smoked paprika
- 400g arborio rice
- 1 ½ tins chopped tomatoes
- 400ml red wine
- 1000ml vegetable stock
- 6 sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
- bunch fresh basil, torn
- salt and pepper
- soft goats cheese, to serve

Method:
1. In a large pan or wok, cook the red onion and garlic with a knob of butter for about 8 minutes, until starting to colour. Add the dried basil and paprika and cook for another minute or so before adding the rice.
2. After another minute, add the chopped tomatoes, the red wine and a ladle-full of the stock and stir in. Bring to a simmer, and add more stock as the liquid is absorbed by the rice - this should take about half an hour. Stir it as often as you can.

Stirring fun: the reunited cookers

3. When it's almost done, stir in the sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil, and season to taste. Serve with the goats cheese and lots of garlic bread. If you have it, drizzle over a little garlic olive oil too, for an extra bit of yum.

Awesome. Also I should say that term has started again and the current amount of business is unreal. Seriously - yesterday I threw some pasta together and had to put it in a tupperware box to eat while I ran/was on campus. Also I have freshers' flu. So bear with us for a little while, while we find our feet again!