Meal planning

I've written quite a lot about credit crunch cooking, but it's actually getting to the stage of planning meals weeks in advance to cut back on waste. I receive my lovely bag of fruit and veg once a fortnight from The Whole Shebag, delicious they are too. That can often form the basis of a few nights' dinners, as the produce is seasonal and so you get the odd surprise!

I'd recommend the bags to anyone who wants to eat real organic veg, not in packaging. My next bag comes on Wednesday and I am genuinely excited by what might be in it! It means that I can buy rice, pasta and bread to have with the lovely veg, some meat from the butcher and I'm all set.

Happy New Year!

The dearth of posts on this blog over the last month or so has partly been down to a dearth of eating out! Christmas has put paid to that for now.
But I have been in the kitchen a lot, cooking my first Christmas Day dinner for one thing (fairly successful, but still not as good as my Mum's!)

I have been getting into soup-making, partly out of thrift and to use up the organic veg bag I receive fortnightly. In the past couple of weeks we've enjoyed

* Roast Parsnip and Cumin
* Carrot and Orange
* Cream of Cauliflower

and today I think it will be cream of mushroom, to use up a bulk bag of cheap mushrooms I bought a couple of days ago for a curry.

I did do some entertaining over the festive period, though, including New Years' dinner with pals. We ate smoked salmon on coarse oatcakes with dill creme fraiche, wasabi crabcakes, courtesy of Nigella Christmas, coq au vin and a huge wedge of Webster Blue Stilton to pick over along with wine and chat.

Here's the crabcake recipe as it appears in Nigella Lawson's book Feast - courtesy of the BBC Food website:

Ingredients
4 spring onions, chopped
1 garlic clove
500g/1lb 2oz white crabmeat
3 tsp Japanese wasabi
2 tsp rice vinegar
2 tsp tamari or Japanese soy sauce
100g/4oz brown rice flour
groundnut or other vegetable oil for frying
limes sliced into segments, to garnish


Method
1. Place the garlic and the spring onions into the bowl of a food processor and blend until they become finely chopped.
2. Add the crabmeat, wasabi, rice vinegar, tamari or soy sauce and the rice flour to the bowl. Blend the mixture again until it has combined to form a rough paste.
3. In a large frying pan, add enough oil to fill the panto a depth of 0.5cm/¼in. Heat the oil until a breadcrumb sizzles and turns golden-brown when added (CAUTION: Hot oil can be dangerous. Do not leave unattended).
4. Roll teaspoonfuls of crab mixture into balls with your hands. Flatten the balls slightly and carefully place them into the hot oil. Fry the crab cakes until they turn golden-brown on both sides and are cooked through (only cook 8-10 crab cakes in the pan at one time so that they can be turned quickly and the oil temperature doesn't drop too much). Drain the crab cakes on kitchen paper.
5. To serve place the crab cakes on a clean plate and place the lime segments around the plate.




I have to confess that I didn't have the vinegar - and in Nigella's Christmas book, the brown rice flour is replaced by breadcrumbs... I also used tinned crabmeat (horror!) but they did taste amazing with a cold lager (or so Mr Gastro told me)!

The coq au vin was my own recipe - and very simple, but with a bit of a cheat in the middle. I usually start making it the day before - frying onions in butter and garlic, I add a carrot, some celery and a couple of splashes of Worcester sauce (or soy if you don't have it) and a litre of chicken stock. I let all of that cook down, strain and then return the stock to the heat. I add a bottle (or near enough) of good red wine. Again I leave this bubbling away on the hob. When it's reduced I let it cool and put it in the fridge, this is a good way of taking the fat out of what is quite an oily mix. In the morning, skim off the excess fat on what looks like a weird gelatine stock. And start again - with butter, onions and garlic - this time I brown chicken pieces before stirring in the dark mixture. I add some boiling water, some seasoning and taste. If it needs more wine, do it.
I add mushrooms in when it's nearly done, to keep the texture - and I served it with maple syrup roasted sweet potatoes (hardly very French, I know, but oddly comforting), and buttered baguette.



I have also been reading food blogs for ideas - my fellow bloggers have certianly come up trumps. I absolutely love reading Niamh Shields' Eat Like A Girl blog. A girl after my own heart! I'd also recommend Just Bento for anyone interested in Japanese cookery...

All the best for 09
GG X