German Potato Egg and Onion creamy bake

I've cooked this many many times over the years, since I first ate and learned it from my Aunt in Germany when I lived with her and my Uncle during my university year abroad.

It's good solid, tasty, traditional food, and I love it, but for a couple of reasons I hadn't made it in a while.

1) the kids only recently really got into actual eggs, like the kind of eggs that LOOK like eggs.

2) Maggi is owned by Nestle, and we don't buy from baby-killers.

Anyway, I was really craving this, and I thought I'd give it a go.

Ingredients needed:

• about a kilo of white potatoes 
• 6 eggs
• 2 - 3 onions
• 300ml cream
• an indecent amount of butter
• something to replace Maggi seasoning - Kikkoman soy sauce along with a splash of worcestershire or hendersons will work, and since you probably don't know what it's supposed to taste like, it won't matter too much!

Method:

Start off by hard boiling the eggs (put in pan, cover with water, boil for 8 - 10 minutes.)

Slice the potatoes into half thick centimetre rounds.  I like to microwave them for around 10 minutes, but you can also boil them in a pan until just done.

Slice the onion into rings and fry slowly in a mix of butter and ghee or oil until soft and a little browned.  Add a little salt near the end.

Now you are ready to assemble.

Butter a dish that will go in the oven, I have a shallow cast iron round pan from Aldi which is a dupe of a popular Le Creuset casserole but honestly, anything will do!

Make a layer of the cooked potato circles using around a half of them.  Salt and pepper the layer.

Now add the cooked, buttery slightly salted onions and spread them over the potatoes.

Now add the hard boiled eggs, sliced into discs also. Spread out in a layer and salt and pepper this layer too.

Finally add the remaining potatoes, season with salt and pepper and dot with more butter.

Now, open the cream, and carefully add 2 - 3 tablespoons of the not-Maggi seasoning, until the cream looks an odd grey/brown and tastes decidedly SAVOURY.

Pour the whole tub gently over the layers, making sure you cover every bit.

Now pop it in an oven for about 40 mins.  You can put a lid on for the first 10-15 minutes, but then uncover it so it dries slightly and goes wonderfully brown.

Serve with green beans or a salad or any other green vegetable you feel like.

Ebly with gammon and cream

 

Our recent quick family weekend in Calais reminded me of how much we like Ebly, which is a part-cooked whole wheat berry and they are delicious, quick cooking and full of fibre and very nutritious.

Serves 4

225g ebly

4 gammon steaks - 150 - 200g each 

2 - 3 shallots

3 cloves garlic

100ml white wine (optional)

1tsp stock powder

1 tsp tarragon

750ml water

1 tsp Dijon mustard

Green beans to serve.

Fry the gammon steaks until browned. Peel, halve and slice shallots and peel and mince garlic.

Remove gammon once browned and golden in places and set aside to cool slightly. Once cool, chop into bite-size pieces.

Add shallots and then garlic to pan, adding ghee, butter or oil to fry.

Fry gently until soft.  Add ebly to pan and stir to coat.  Add wine if using and simmer until almost absorbed.

Add stock powder, tarragon and mustard and stir and mix well.

Then add water and stir well. Bring to boil again and simmer for 10 - 12 mins.

Test a grain, it should feel soft all the way through.

Take off the heat and finish by stirring through 100 -150ml cream. 

Serve with steamed green beans.

another courgette disguising trick - cheesy green sludge

Friday afternoon and I couldn't think what to make.  The veg drawer contained mainly carrots, courgettes and mushrooms.  Deciding not to take too many risks, I avoided the mushrooms and decided to see if I could do something new with the courgettes.

First I wanted something different with the carbs also, and we've had a lot of pasta and rice, and we don't often have a lot of bread in the house, so I got out the bag of red potatoes and using my Bamix SliceSy I made thin slices of potato.  I steamed them in the microwave for 5 mins and then tipped them into a baking dish.  I got not-so Littl'Un to spread them out, season with salt and pepper, cover with milk and cream and dot with butter.  We then put them in a preheated oven and let them cook while we got on with the courgette transformation.

Now I chopped up half a pack of streaky bacon and got that frying in a pan.  I finely chopped a couple of shallots (because I had them from earlier than the onions - one onion would have been fine also!) and added those to the bacon once it had started browning.

Swapping cutters, I got Big'Un to grate the courgettes in the SliceSy and once the bacon and shallots were cooked the way I like (brown and almost crispy bacon, soft and translucent shallot) we tipped in the grated courgettes, seasoned it all with black pepper, and stirred well.  I lowered the flame and allowed it to simmer with the lid on until it eventually turned to almost mush.  At this point, I added the thicker cream which was still stuck to the pot after adding the liquid double cream to the potatoes, and a good dollop of butter.  Finally, just before serving, I chucked in a good handful of grated cheese and waited for it to melt completely, after stirring it through.

The whole meal was a masterpiece!! Everyone wanted more, and even Tiny didn't patronise me when I called it "cheesy bacon vegetables" - he didn't seem to clock that it was courgettes this time!!!

Creamy paprika chicken and rice

Regular readers will have realised I love anything that's sort of creamy chicken with rice.  As a Bengali, I adore rice, and I find a creamy sauce stirred in with rice is a wonderfully comforting and soothing element of a meal.

As I'm working outside the home now, I like meals which I can put together quickly in that short gap of time when the kids are taking a bit of downtime after school, or something I can put on and leave for a bit while I keep and eye on them, and make sure all is well.

This paprika chicken is a bit of both and definitely good for the increasingly chilly evenings.


1 pack chicken thigh fillets
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1 tbs olive oil
1 tsp tarragon (I only use the dried or freeze dried)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp Marigold powder
half a cup of boiling water
3 good dollops of soured cream
a handful or 2 of some green veg - I used green beans which were left over from the meal the dinner before.

rice and another veg to serve.


Heat the oil in a saucepan or saute pan and then gently fry the onion and garlic.  While that is softening, cut the chicken thighs into bite-size pieces, and then add them to the pan.  Stir to prevent the onions and garlic from catching, and cook until the chicken is browned and not raw any longer.

Now add the tarragon, ground cumin and paprika, and stir through.  Next, add the Marigold powder and half a cup of boiling water.  If the handful or 2 of green veg you are adding is raw, add it now too.

Now cover the pan and allow to simmer.  At this point, I cook the rice (in the microwave, or in my rice cooker, or the old-fashioned way - in a saucepan!) and also prepare the side vegetable.  On this occasion, I grilled some corn cobbettes.

Once the rice and vegetables are done, the chicken should also be cooked through, so switch off the heat and then add the small amount of green vegetables if they are already cooked as mine were.

Finally, stir through your generous dollops of soured cream and serve with the rice and side vegetables.

more on no-drain pasta - in which leftover chicken is utilised

As I've mentioned before, I have an issue with draining pasta.  This is partly due to the fact that I have problems with my wrists and hands, and lifting and tipping a full pan of water is painful and uncomfortable for me.  But partly I just don't like doing it.  It feels slow and wasteful and somehow just annoys me.

So when I stumbled across this method for cooking pasta in 4 minutes in the Instant Pot (IP) with minimal water - like an absorption method of cooking pasta - I HAD to try it!  And it is fantastic! Admittedly I probably spend as much time using a slotted spoon to scoop out the pasta as I used to do waiting for water to boil etc, but somehow this just makes me less stressed and irritated than the standard method, and that can only be a good thing! In the future I may use this method to cook the pasta in the IP when I can then just stir something directly into the pot and then serve straight out - cream cheese and smoked salmon/ham springs to mind...

Anyway, I started by letting Tiny choose a pack of bow tie pasta from the corner shop, and we used the whole 500g pack in one go.  This gave us PLENTY of pasta - after cooking, I filled a locknlock box with cooked pasta which was a nice quick and easy lunch for Tiny on the weekend - and the rest served 4 of us generously with another couple of lunches.

As the recipe in the link says, we added about 4 cups of water to the IP, so the pasta was just about covered, maybe a few corners poking up here and there.

I then set the IP to cook for 4 minutes on manual.  I had added boiling water so this went even more quickly than normal.

Once the pot has cooked the pasta for the 4 minutes and beeps that it is finished, switch it off immediately and perform a quick release.

Remove the pasta with a slotted spoon and if required box some up for another day.

I then fried some chopped onions and garlic in a little oil straight in the pan I'd just taken the pasta out of, and then I added a chopped up chicken breast left over from a very frugal Lidl roast chicken supper we'd had recently.  Then I added a bag of prepared cauliflower and broccoli florets which I'd bought in Lidl, along with the obvious spoon of Marigold, and a good squirt of mild mustard.  I finally chucked the cooked pasta back in, and stirred through some soured cream which we'd opened for the not-so-chilli recently.

The result was completely delicious and moreish.  The chicken was not dry, the veg was still slightly crunchy, the creamy but tangy sauce was very comforting and the whole meal was filling and satisfying!  The kids all devoured it hungrily, and the 2 little ones both asked for seconds!  Big'Un and I ate it drizzled with Frank's Buffalo Wings hot sauce, and the little ones even had a taste that way too, and really enjoyed the added flavour.  And when I went to put the leftovers into a tupperware, and I picked a box that was slightly too small, Godpapa was more than happy to just eat up what wouldn't fit, straight from the pan!