Thermos overnight porridge

So I've been following and feeling inspired by the wonderful Girl Called Jack blog lately. She's done a few posts about porridge and other oat based breakfasts. Big'Un has been using her Berry Bircher (Starbucks-alike) pot recipe for a few months for her early morning starts. She makes enough for 2 days at a time in the evening and it is all soaked, creamy and plumptious by the morning. 

Papa has a couple of 5am starts a week, and he has been taking those "just add boiling water" instant porridge pots, but the cost of those quickly adds up, even if we buy them on offer! 

I looked into slow cooker porridge but it seemed to be very fraught, so I carried on searching. Then I saw a couple of very interesting posts from the lovely Jack about instant porridge and so we decided to give her method involving milk powder and oats and the kettle a go. However this seemed very heavy when made with ordinary oats, (and I didn't want to use more processed quick oats) and Papa felt very uncomfy after this. We also tried the microwave version but it also wasn't quite right. I looked again at more slow cooker methods, and even found there are multicooker machines which will cook porridge on a timer, ready for the morning. Yes, I know both hob top or microwave porridge don't take long to make, but they do take a while to cool down, and that is a problem unless we start getting up yet another half hour earlier.

Eventually, I found a few posts discussing thermos cooking. I was intrigued. I gave it a go.

Wow I'm so glad I did!!  Here's how:

So first we made the Girl Called Jack oat/milk powder mix and stored it in a cereal container. Papa had added ground ginger and lemon sugar to flavour his. 

I then boiled a kettle and preheated a proper metal thermos flask. Then I refilled the kettle and boiled it again. Once the kettle came to the boil again, I emptied the flask out (into the washing up bowl, so as not to waste it) and using a jam funnel, I put in one mugful of the oats mixture. I then quickly added 3 mugsful of the fresh boiling water. I sealed up the flask, shook it around, and then left it on its side overnight.

The next morning we had gorgeously creamy, smooth, cooked, warm porridge!! The perfect consistency and the perfect temperature. There was at least enough there for 4 people, in a 1.5 ltr flask. We had to mix it up as there was thin liquid on top and stodgy lumps at the bottom, but it evened out. That was a huge food flask, so I'm trying it again with a standard 1ltr drinks thermos. I will report back on how it works out. 

Seriously, try it! You will love it!! You could try adding cocoa to the mix for a change, the flavours you could add are endless. 

Post-Christmas leftover yummies

Some of you may recall that our household doesn't do roast turkey at Christmas, so we don't always have a lot of leftovers, but this year my parents were unable to fly south to warmer climes for the winter, so they came to join us on Christmas day. This made us 5 adults and 3 kids of varying ages, all of whom like their roast dinners.
It is quite hard to find a chicken that will feed that many, and particularly if you are looking at free range or organic. For that reason, I bought 2 chickens, and roasted them together, using some tandoori paste butter on one to baste the breast under the skin. Of course I wanted to get similar sized birds, so they would cook evenly, but this did mean we had a proper amount of meat left over. We decided to cut ourselves some slack and we bought in a lot of the accompaniments, such as the red cabbage, bread sauce, and yes, the gravy. (Don't judge!!) It was all really tasty, (thank you Sainsbury's, much tastier than Waitrose or M&S last year!) and it meant we had all the delicious pan juices to use another day. These were poured into a pyrex jug and put in the fridge to separate.
So 2 days after Christmas, I scooped the fat from the jug into a container, and melted some with some olive oil in my lidded sauté pan. I fried some chopped onion and garlic until soft and added some frozen veg. A sprinkle of marigold powder went in of course, and then some of the rich jelly stock from underneath the fat in the jug. Once that had melted, I sloshed in a little white wine, reduced it down slightly and then stirred in the chopped up leftover chicken as required. This then simmered to absorb the flavours for a few minutes, with the lid on. Right before serving, I swirled in a little soured cream. Yoghurt, cream, creme fraiche or plain cream cheese would do if those are what you have to hand, just a couple of teaspoons.
I then served this with rice and buttered greens.
Complete hit!!! Almost a free meal!
Oh and in case you are wondering, the full Christmas meal I did, including all the preprepared items costed out to £6.55 per head. Not bad for the fact of splashing out for the special day!!

Gobble gobble turkey

I've been buying turkey meat recently and really enjoying it. It is cheap and tasty, especially if you go for the dark, leg meat.
I had used a lot of turkey as a student, but mainly white breast meat, and I really went off it. We never have turkey at Christmas, I find the roast bird dry and gamey, and not to my taste. But the dark meat is lean and succulent and cooks up very similar to goat or spring lamb.

Three recent dishes have been great successes; all very different, and none left ius feeling we were about to turn into a turkey...
I first made turkey mince keema a few months ago, the recipe is given in a previous post, but recently I used turkey leg mince to make a simple ragu for pasta. It was very tasty, with my usual addition ofaniseed flavour, in this case, a piece of cinnamon, and a drop of marmite.
The following weekend, I pressure cooked a turkey leg. I had to trim the bony bit to get it to fit well so I could brown it a little, then I added quartered onions, chunks of celery, lots of chunks of carrot, a bag of organic spuds from Abel and Cole, chopped up, a little wine, some stock. Really really basic and simple. But oh so delicious! The meat was so tender, just falling off the "dinosaur" bone. Littl'Un had a blast fishing out the bone and gnawing on it.
Today's turkey meal was made from a pack of pre-cubed leg meat. I know prediced meat costs more, but most weekdays, I save so much TIME with these, time I just don't have what with listening to Littl'Un read her reading book, and making sure Tiny doesn't get left out, and waiting to see if Big'Un needs picking up after school, especially when she's got rugby after school...So i choose to save money elsewhere, and on the days when I am not time-poor.
So I made a middle Eastern inspired stew type thing, using  chopped onions, ground cumin and cinnamon, tinned tomatoes, frozen griddled aubergine slices which I snipped up with scissors. Then I chucked in a tin of chickpeas and let it simmer while I toasted some couscous in butter, then cooked it in stock. By "cooked" I mean stir stock powder through and then add boiling water, simmer for 10 seconds and then switch off and steam for a few minutes. This whole meal was luscious and enjoyed by all. The meat was tender and soft and the aubergines were melty and a delicious extra dimension.
If you haven't tried turkey except at Christmas, give it a go! It's cheap, tasty and pretty healthy too!

raw tomato sauce for pasta and meatballs.

I often have a pack of organic meatballs (similar to the type you get in Ikea) in the fridge, they are so easy to zap in the microwave and I usually serve with spaghetti or rice or even in sub rolls with lots of salad, and everyone loves them and they are cheap, tasty and filling and not too full of silly nonsense. 

If I have a glut of tomatoes that need to be used, I often blitz up this sauce for pasta, and that makes this meal ready in no time at ALL.

Put the water on to boil.  Add your pasta when the water is ready. I don't have to tell you how to make pasta.  Yes, you can do this with gluten free pasta, any shape of pasta, wholemeal pasta - in fact I often use a mix of basics and wholemeal spaghetti.

Put all the tomatoes into the beaker for your stick blender, or into the jug of your blender, or bowl of your food processor.  Add 2-5 cloves of garlic, and at least a teaspoon, maybe more, of salt, depending on how many tomatoes there are.  Blitz it all up.  If you have some basil, add it if you feel like it.  A drop of nice olive oil and maybe of cider vinegar, or a pinch of brown sugar can all add a little zing.  Maybe you like spicy, in which case some chilli - powder, sauce, Tabasco, whatever will be good here too.

Pour the meatballs into a microwaveable dish and heat for as long as the packet says.

Drain the pasta, and serve the 3 together.  If you have some green veg you want to eat too, that would be nice, but you won't die if you don't have any.  Enjoy, it shouldn't take more than about 15 mins to get to the table.

foraging is fun in summer

We've been picking blackberries! We have lots and lots of them! Mainly we eat them as is, but we've also had crumble, sponge and now we've had salad and fool too!

I roasted a chicken (from the 3 for £10 promotion in Sainsbury's) with a little butter mashed with garlic and cumin, pushed under the skin of the breast.  I just boiled some salad potatoes and steamed some broccoli to go with the chicken, but I also made a salad using a bag of mixed watercress, baby spinach and rocket, added a handful of blackberries, and made a dressing of finely chopped shallots, cider vinegar, good olive oil and a squirt of SweetFreedom.  Of course I used the stuff in the roasting tray (I had the chicken on a rack) to make a nice thin jus (or gravy, as we call it!) Glorious glorious comfort food, and the dressing and the gravy mingled to make a luscious sauce with a tang and a good hit of savoury satisfaction.

For pudding we had two different fools.  So easy to do, and no time at all take, really.  I simmered a punnet of gooseberries in a frying pan with about 60-70g of golden sugar.  When they were bubbling, I mashed them lightly with a fork until really soft, then poured into a jug and put to cool in the fridge.  I quickly washed out the pan, and put in all the blackberries we had.  It was probably slightly more than the goosegogs, but I added the same amount of sugar and did the same. 

When we were ready for pudding, I whipped up a BIG tub of double cream in my Bosch, and divided the softly mounded up cream between 2 glass bowls.  Into one I gently folded the gooseberry mush, and into the other I mixed in softly and dramatically most of the blackberry mush. (I kept some of the quickjam as there was a LOT, and it will be nice in porridge!) The blackberry fool went such a gorgeous deep colour, but I was careful to keep streaks of white and swirls of purple still separate. 

Both were a total hit, and a really luxurious way to finish off a lovely summery family comfort food meal together.

Backwards jeera chicken in a hurry

Since the playground opened across the road from our house, and a few days of nice weather, it has been harder to get prepared and start cooking dinner early enough for the young hungry tummies in our house. I had planned to make a pot of saayi daal yesterday after a council fun day but stayed out too long and completely forgot that the lentils needed soaking for half an hour before cooking. 

So I thought I'd switch tactics and improvise with the food that had just been delivered which I hadn't yet planned or put in the freezer. I took a pack of chicken, thinking about the simple yogurty jeera (cumin) chicken but then remembered that that needs an hour of marinating. 

I already had the pressure cooker out in preparation to make daal, so I thought that might hold the answer...

I began by frying some garlic purée in the pressure cooker. I used ghee, but veg oil would be fine too. I then added both ground cumin and cumin seeds and a pinch of turmeric. I then fried the chicken (in this case chunks of breast, it had been on offer) until brown, with half a teaspoon of salt, and once sealed, I put the lid on and cooked it under pressure for 13 minutes. 

Meanwhile I put the rice on and cleaned and prepped a bag of spinach. I steam-fried the spinach with some mustard seeds and a pinch of garam masala. Don't do what I did and burn the bottom tho :(

Once the chicken was done, I released the pressure quickly and then bringing the heat back, but gently, I then stirred in some plain yogurt. This made a lovely creamy sauce to mix in with the rice, and the finished dish looked and tasted virtually the same as the original version.  Well improvised, and something I shall bear in mind in the future.

Birthday Mango Cake for Big'Un

We are currently a house of sickness, and I wasn't sure if I'd manage to give Big'Un a decent 11th birthday, but we just managed a day out, and came home in time to cook her fave supper of yorkshires and sausages.

While I had the yorkshires in the oven, I used the Bosch to make a quick cake mix, which I baked while we ate dinner.

I did an enriched sponge mixture - 3 of everything, - eggs, ounces of flour, caster sugar and butter, plus a spoon of baking powder. I spooned some mango puree from a can into the mix also, and baked it into my heart shaped silicone cake form.  I think that takes a normal 3 egg sponge mix, looks too small to fit a 4 egg mix.

When the cake was done, out and cool, I used the Bosch again to whip up some double cream, which was done beautifully in minutes, and then I swirled through some more mango puree*.

I splodged the cream onto the cake and served the excess cream alongside for extra dolloping.  We had received some fresh mangos from my aunty and also a couple from Abel and Cole, so Godpapa peeled the ripest one and we ate slices of the sweet fruit with the cake. They were the less sugary South American mangoes, so made a lovely fresh accompaniment to the cake.

Needless to say, it was a success!

*A note about mango puree - it's available from Indian shops in quite large tins.  I had opened the tin and used about 2 thirds the day before to make mango lassi.