You might have noticed
that it's been a bit quiet on the slack lasagne front recently.
That's for two reasons:
1. We've been on holiday
– to France. We ate out a lot, and self constructed meals consisted
mainly of bread and cheese and a bit of salad.
2. Other than being on
holiday I've been eating a lot of jacket potatoes. These have mostly
been consumed with cottage cheese, beans and cheese, or tinned
sardines; as you can appreciate there's little blog material there.
On return from our
holiday we ordered a big top-up from an online retailer. This was
mainly successful but resulted in an extreme over supply of
mushrooms. I had selected two packs of the cheapest own brand fresh
mushrooms and one pack of dried mushrooms. The delivery driver
informed me that the mushrooms had been substituted with premium own
brand fresh mushrooms and even showed me what I was now getting. I
was initially delighted as this appeared to be a £1 bonus in the
mushroom stakes for us. However on further unpacking it transpired
that we had been sent the premium fresh mushrooms instead of the
dried mushrooms and I was now in possession of 4 punnets of fresh
mushrooms.
Now I like mushrooms (and
apparently they are very nutritious), but I was going to have my work
cut out to use all these up before they turned into a horrible slimy
mess. The first punnet (cheap ones) went into a sausage casserole. I
hadn't planned to make a sausage casserole because I was catering for
a visiting German friend. She's not a typical German so I thought
that she might not want sausages. But she did (they were veggie
sausages though which I think might be a blasphemy to many Germans),
and this was a great use of 350g mushrooms. The next punnet (posh
ones) were the main feature of a risotto. Half of the next punnet
(posh ones) went onto a pizza (courtesy of Matt, my husband). Which
left us with half a punnet of posh mushrooms and a whole punnet of
cheap ones. Having eaten mushrooms for 4 days consecutively I wasn't
particularly fancying more, but they had to be used or I would risk
the slimy mess.
The solution would be
curry. I love mushrooms in a curry. The usual would be mushroom,sweet potato and chickpea
but I was going to try something slightly different: mushroom, sweet
potato and vegetarian “chicken style” pieces. (I don't usually go
for meat replacement options much (apart from the mince which I think
is fab) but had a few lapses into carnivorism in France (they can
just about cater for vegetarians these days but not yet pregnant
vegetarians) and since then have found myself fancying that sort of
“meaty” taste.)
As usual I started by
sweating off a couple of onions (although I heard on the TV that they
don't always use onions in India because it displeases the Gods).
Usually one onion might do but one of these onions was slightly old
and had a slight pickled aroma about it until I peeled off a good few
layers and the other had that weird thing where you get a second
layer of onion skin a few layers in. At the same time I also added a
good lot of fresh ginger that I had finely chopped (maybe about an
inch off the piece of ginger root) and a tablespoon of special curry
powder. Sometimes I make up my own spice mixture but we have recently
replenished with a fantastic product called “Magic Mix”.
This is a big pot of a blend of spices which we discovered at a
market in Cornwall a few years ago, where we had a taster and met the
lady who runs the company. Since then it's become almost as much of a
staple beside our hob as a pot of vegetable stock powder. It has no
chilli or ginger in it so you add those (and anything else you fancy)
to taste.
Next I added chopped
sweet potato. Sometimes I chop it big but today I chopped it small.
That cooked for as long as it took me to prepare the mushrooms. The
remainder of the posh punnet (they were already going slimy) and half
of a cheap punnet (still in perfect nick – and they have the same
expiry as the posh ones). I added them to the pan along with the
“chicken style” pieces. I was a bit concerned as I could smell
burning but on closer inspection this turned out to be some grime on
the hob ring rather than anything bad happening in my cooking. Once
that had cooked down a bit (usually signified by juice release from
the mushrooms) I would usually add a tin or two of chopped tomatoes.
Today this would be impossible because the pan was already at
capacity. So I just added enough boiling water to cover the contents
– essential to ensure adequate cooking of the potato – along with
a spoonful of branded yeast extract and then left it on a low heat
while I got on with other things.
The problem with adding
water is that it ended up a bit too liquidy so after a while (once
the potato seemed soft) I chucked in a handful of lentils, mainly for
the purpose of thickening but with the added benefit of protein and
fibre, and left it on a low heat again. Unfortunately I forgot to
turn the hob off when we went out for a swim, we could take a gamble
and leave it but this would risk a horrible mush on our return.
Fortunately Matt was in a chivalrous mood and dropped me off at the
pool while he headed back to rescue the dinner. (He joined me about
after about a quarter of an hour and as I'm a bit slow at the moment
we did the same number of lengths.)
Upon our return it was
already time to think about eating (it's the season for my favourite
TV dancing programme so I didn't want to be faffing about in the
kitchen while that was on). To me it didn't look like we had much
rice left (Matt was cooking the rice) so I got it in my head that we
should have something else to go with the curry. I had a quick look
at recipes for typical “Indian” breads and decided that chapatis
were significantly more achievable than naan in the available time.
Even then it would be cutting it fine and I would have to take some
short cuts, this was risky as I had never made chapatis before but at
least I had nothing to compare them against. 
It was all ready in the
nick of time (and it was a treat of Saturday night dancing). The
curry itself was rich and spicy, possibly better for the absence of
tomatoes. In the absence of chilli I “hotted” mine up with some
lime pickle and we both enjoyed some mango chutney and some of our
brother-in-law's delicious home made runner bean chutney. The
chapatis were a great success – I can't believe I've never made
them before.
No comments:
Post a Comment