fanny hill

Hey, Lou. Um. Look? 

There's an article about it,and bigger pictures,here. 

Sexy puns!

So awesome...yet distasteful.

a soup for you, Lou, too

Okay, Lou. This is a soup which my flat and I have made a few times now. It's based on a Nigel Slater recipe from Tender (surprise!)and is the perfect accompaniment for rainy nights spent watching the Wesley Snipes episodes of 30 Rock. I don't know if this qualifies as being "healthy" but it is totally vegetarian and requires the most mundane of ingredients (although I don't consider cauliflower and cabbage to be mundane at all).

So you get a head of cauliflower, chop it into wee florets and pop it in a pot with about 750mls of boiling water. Salt the water a bit, too. You want the cauliflower to get nice and soft (soft enough for a stick blender to decimate it). You could also add some slices of cabbage, which I enjoy because I think cabbage looks pretty while being boiled, kind of like the ghost of vegetables past.

While the veges are boiling away, chop up whatever onion-y things you feel like adding. As we are slaves to our vege-box, I tend to use whatever is in there, whether it be leeks, shallots, onions or garlic. I trust that you will trust your own tastes enough to figure out quantities. Pop them in a heavy bottomed, deep pot which has some butter and olive oil fizzing gently inside. Cook them til they are nice and translucent. Add a bay leaf or two at some point.

Once the cauliflower and onions are cooked to your liking, pour the cauliflower and its water into the onion mix. Bring to the boil, then cover, and simmer gently for about 15-20 minutes.

Remove the bay leaves, and get a stick blender out (or a masher...friends left their stick blender at our house after a dinner party so I can now attest to the blender working better)and gently puree the soup until it is a texture that appeals to you. I like to leave it a little chunky.

Now you get to pour in some cream and some grated cheese. I use Parmesan because it works well with the nutty flavours of the cauliflower. Nigel Slater would suggest a "hardy British cheddar". You could also add a spoonful of french mustard. Season it with salt and pepper, perhaps some nutmeg if you're so inclined, and some fresh herbs.

Serve the soup with some toasted crusty bread which has been lovingly slathered in butter.

END.

PS. The picture is from The Department Store's blog.Its called a "skyplanter" and I want one.

vege boxes

We get a vege box delivered, usually from here. We are thinking of trying this one, mostly because the website is so pretty and you can have things like fresh herbs and organic meats delivered too. I enjoy the idea of having all kitchen, nay, all household needs delivered to me.

I love the way a vege box forces you to eat things you wouldn't usually or try exciting new recipes. This has been greatly aided by my Nigel Slater vegetable cookbook, Tender, which you should definitely look at if you are interested in vegetables.

One problem with vege boxes is that sometimes they give you way too much of one vegetable. We have three huge pumpkins at the moment. I've made pumpkin scones (wierd), pumpkin pie (wierd), pumpkin soup (good), roast pumpkin (duh), mashed pumpkin with bacon (moreish), pumpkin curries and pumpkin couscous...its all getting a bit much.

We have not tried this yet.

last night's pie

Last night I decided to make a chicken pie. My usual pie co-conspirators were incredibly hung over after a night of doing rolly polly's down hills and ordering vegetarian Big Macs, so it was all down to me.

I'd been at the movies with my Nana and was full to the brim of Nana-ish tips and pieces of pie wisdom which I proceeded to ignore and thusly make a pie that did not live up to its potential. Although, to be fair, everyone said it tasted very nice.

The pie: as per usual, spent a bloody long time cooking up onion, garlic and some chopped celery and a tiny bit of spring onion - just so that we had all the roots covered. Cooked them, added some bay leaves, then some white wine (too much) and then the chicken pieces (free-range, on sale at the super, hurrah!), cooked them off, then chucked in some chopped carrot, courgette, and mushrooms. Let that cook with a lid on so the mushies juices came out, and then added some chicken stock that we had wisely made after having a roast.

A note: this pie was not made according to any recipe. And I was tired and upset after seeing Alec Baldwin topless so much in the movie. So I did everything on the fly and in the wrong order but it wound up tasting really nice. Moving on.

Once the stock had cooked down a bit, I added some marscapone we had lying around, grated parmesan and chopped basil. Perhaps the marscapone sounds like a wierd addition, but it gave the gravy bit of the pie a bit of creaminess. Then I poured that into the pie dish,we put a puff pastry lid on top, made a decorative rose for the lid out of the leftover pastry, and into the oven it went for about 20 minutes.

END PIE.

PS.

This week has been a bit of a boon, vege-box wise.

We made a cabbage and potato soup (not as soviet food shortage as it sounds), which was oddly comforting and stomach-clarity giving, if you know what I mean. I barely do. Anyway, it was refreshing and made us feel healthy. I highly recommend cabbage and the cooking of it in soups (leek/onion/garlic/bay leaves/stock or water/potatoes which are a bit mashed up/chopped cabbage/chorizo).