Quick and easy fried bread

One of the excuses people use for living on precooked convenience foods is that it takes too long to make a decent meal from scratch. Utter tosh. Granted, if you want to eat burgers and fries, then yes, it will take quite a bit of time to make that meal from scratch. But what’s the point of making burgers and fries when you can get them anywhere and everywhere. Surely one of the good things about making a meal from scratch is that it’s not food you’re going to see on every restaurant menu (including the fast-food ones).

When I lived in the UK, I rarely made Indian dishes because there are so many excellent Indian restaurants on almost every high street in the south east of the country – in a lot of other places in the country too. The food’s excellent and it’s reasonably priced. However, that’s not the case here in Edmonton. While there are Indian restaurants, they’re not that accessible for me (at least not without having to drive miles).

I sometimes try my hand at the odd curry but having tasted such good Indian food, it’s always just an OK dish. I find that it’s much easier to whip up a cracking pasta dish. And now we really are talking quick cooking! Jamie Oliver has a recipe in one of his cookbooks that uses no more than half a dozen ingredients and it’s excellent. I’m always amazed that something with so few ingredients in it can taste so good. It’s spaghetti, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, chilli, anchovies, and lemon. However, what really makes this dish so good, I suspect, is the pangritata that’s placed on top of the spaghetti after cooking. Pangritata is poor person’s parmesan cheese – what the pheasants in Italy used to use instead of parmesan. It’s basically fried bread so probably not that good for you, but at least it’s cooked in olive oil and not lard! In Jamie’s chilli spaghetti recipe, you cook breadcrumbs – and these have to be course breadcrumbs, it won’t work with fine ones – in olive oil with sliced garlic and thyme. Once they turn crispy and golden, drain on absorbent kitchen paper all ready for when the pasta’s finished.

To make the pasta dish, cook the spaghetti. While it’s cooking, soften a chopped garlic clove in three or four tablespoons of olive oil. Add the anchovies to the pan. Once they start to melt, crumble in a dried chilli or sprinkle in some chilli flakes, and squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Once the pasta’s cooked, add the chilli mix and give it a good stir so that all the pasta’s coated. Divide between two bowls and then sprinkle on the pangritata. It takes no longer than around 15 minutes to prepare – including all preparation. I would happily eat this every day if I could only convince myself that fried bread was good for my health!

Spicy squash soup - a simple one that is

Another first for me living here in Canada was cooking with squash. I never tried it before back home, but I was so tempted by all the interesting looking squash in the supermarket that I had to give it a go. Admittedly, this recipe isn’t that adventurous but I am just beginning remember; and at least I can claim this recipe as my own (and if it exists elsewhere then that’s pure coincidence – on my part at least!). However, I now know why I don’t bother devising my own recipes: I can never remember all the ingredients I used (never mind how much I used!). And even when it comes to no more than five ingredients (see below), I still struggle – must be an age thing.

Spicy Squash Soup

Vegetable oil
1 butternut squash – skinned, gutted, and chopped into manageable chunks
1 large onion – skinned and chopped
1 garlic clove – crushed (I may be getting this ingredient mixed up with another recipe but I don’t think it would hurt to add it to this soup)
2 tablespoons garam masala
1 teaspoon ground cumin (don’t worry – these spices were both used and the measurements are exact!)
Half a litre of vegetable stock (or enough to cover the squash)

In a large saucepan, gently fry the onion (and garlic if using) in the oil until soft and shiny. Add the cubed squash and the spices and stir until everything’s coated. Add the vegetable stock and gently simmer everything for around 20 minutes until the squash is soft. Place in a blender and blend until smooth.

Bean and gone

I have a great recipe for broad (fava) beans (or rather Rose Elliot does), which is why I decided to grow them this summer. When buying seeds I’m always tempted by the packets with those little veggie cartoons on the front: if kids can grow them, surely I can! I had moderate success with the broad beans. The beans I picked were of a decent size, color, and shape, and tasted good; however, some pods were soft and misshapen and their beans weren’t good. I’m not too sure if the beans were blighted by a disease or if I just didn’t give them enough room in which to grow (I have a modest sized veg patch in my back garden). I also think they may have suffered from a lack of water when I was away for a week or so.

Anyway, they take a good photo!

Rose Elliot's Penne with Minto Pesto, Peans, and Beans (or a variation thereon):

Boil up a pan of penne. While the pasta is boiling, finely chop some mint leaves, crush a garlic clove and stir these into some olive oil. When the pasta is almost ready, add peas and broad beans. Once the pasta’s cooked, drain it (taking care not to lose any of the small peas during the process!), then stir in the mint pesto and season. Serve with parmesan cheese.

Note: If the broad beans are particularly tough, you may need to boil them first, remove their skins, and then add them to the pasta once it's cooked. Frozen peas and beans work just as well, and if you can’t get broad beans, use lima beans.

Lovely jubbly

Unless I’m in a really good mood, I can usually count on the fingers of one hand - excluding my thumb - what I like about living in Edmonton (although when I lived in the UK I rarely needed more than one hand for the same exercise). One of those things is cooking on the barbecue in the summer. I know that barbecue cooking isn’t exclusive to Alberta, but to me it sort of is as before I moved to Canada I had never used a barbecue. I had eaten food cooked on one, but never used one to cook on myself.

When our landlord was showing me and my boyfriend round the house we’re now in, she pointed to the contraption tucked away at the back of the shed and said that we could use it (the barbie) if we wanted to. Seeing as my boyfriend is vegetarian we didn’t think we would ever bother to roll the thing out of the shed, but this being my third summer in Alberta, I find I’m using the barbecue more and more.

Yesterday evening I thought I would try cooking chips on it using Jamie Oliver’s “recipe” from his Jamie at Home cookbook. It’s not so much a recipe more a suggestion (but then I suppose all recipes are): slice potatoes in half inch rounds, par boil for five minutes, drain the water, throw in some olive oil and herbs, shake around, and then place the potatoes on the barbecue. I had only one of the herbs Jamie suggested using, which was rosemary, and I think that most of this got washed away with the olive oil at the bottom of the pan as there seemed to be very little green stuff stuck to the potatoes when they went on the barbecue, but nevertheless, these chips were bloomin’ lovely! (As the geezer himself would say.)

What helped with their loveliness was serving them with rhubarb habanero ketchup. I picked this up when I was downtown yesterday in the city’s gourmet supermarket (for gourmet read sells sundried tomatoes). It’s a locally produced ketchup-cum-chutney and very tasty. Habanero peppers are small spicy peppers from Havana (habanero meaning from Havana – La Habana – my clever boyfriend told me). The ketchup is made by Cooks Corner with all natural ingredients. Lovely jubbly!

So that’s two things I like then…

Cheez pleaz

There’s a great scene in the film Infamous (starring Toby James as Truman Capote) where, having recently moved to Kansas, he's invited to a dinner party (of sorts). Being used to spending his days dining in the best restaurants in New York, Capote goes in search of a fine cheese to take as a gift to his hostess. At the local supermarket he's horrified to find that the only cheese on sale is Velveeta. Velveeta is far from fine cheese, or any cheese come to that; it's a "cheese product" – the original Cheez Whizz.

Capote was right: You can tell a lot about the civilization of a place from the cheese its inhabitants consume. I felt a bit like Capote when I first went to buy cheese here in my local Safeway's. On first sighting, I took the orange colored cheese in the supermarket to be slabs of Red Leicester and found it a bit strange that this particular cheese was so popular in Alberta. Until, that was, I discovered that the orange cheese was in fact regular processed "cheddar." In Alberta, the cheddar we get in the UK is referred to as white cheddar (and isn't orange).

But if you're looking for something a little more exotic than orange cheese here in Edmonton, then you may have a problem, especially when it comes to halloumi cheese. Because it seems that this cheese can't be had for love nor money. Well, actually you can find it if you venture out to the bigger supermarkets - but only during the summer months. The assistant in Save on Foods, where I was unable to buy some the other day, advised me that it's only stocked during the summer (it's the middle of August now but seeing as it's winter for six months of the year here, I suppose it's conceivable that autumn's already upon us).

The reason that halloumi is only stocked during the summer here in Edmonton is that, as it doesn’t melt, it’s a great cheese for the barbecue. And it certainly is: no more having to worry about what to feed vegetarians, and no more having to worry about whether what your guests are eating is actually cooked! But halloumi is more than just a gimmicky cheese that holds its shape when heated; it's also a delicious tasting cheese, creamy and salty with a lovely soft and chewy texture. There’s also something else that’s a little gimmicky about it; it squeaks when you eat it.

For great tasting halloumi kebabs (or kabobs as they're called in North America), marinate chunks of the cheese, with cherry tomatoes, squares of red pepper and red onion, and mushrooms in olive oil, crushed garlic, a little lemon juice and some chopped herbs (thyme, parsley, mint, and oregano work well). A few hours in the marinade should be enough. And then thread the cheese and veggies on to skewers and away you go. Use the remains of the marinade to baste the kebabs while they’re cooking. And if it’s raining, just use the grill.

Halloumi shouldn't be a "seasonal" cheese; it tastes just as good cooked indoors as it does out. So if anyone knows where to get it (all year around) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, please let me know!

Let's get this party started

Nigella says that her party popcorn is a thrifty recipe. Not many ingredients are needed and of those that are, only very small quantities are called for in this recipe. Popcorn's not expensive and you get lots of it for your money. So, yes, I suppose she's right. Although I find it difficult associating the word thrifty with anything connected to the divine Domestic Goddess...

As much as I like popcorn, there are a few drawbacks to eating it. It gets stuck between your teeth for days after you've eaten it (and yes, I do floss). And if you eat it at the cinema with melted butter poured over the top, then you end up with grease stains on your clothes. That's why I decline the offer of butter whenever I eat it at the cinema - that and the conversation I once overhead in the queue for popcorn during which the young woman in the popcorn kiosk told the guy in front of me that it wasn't really butter but margarine (pronounced mar-ja-rin in Canada) that they used. Urgh. (It's always important to get the balance between thrifty and taste right.) But if you wanted to make Nigella's party popcorn even more thriftily then you could substitute margarine for the butter in the recipe.

If you do decide to try this recipe - and it's well worth it as it's quick to make and tastes very good - then here are a few tips (plus photos)...

On the YouTube clip (the one in which the Domestic Goddess is looking glam in a LBD and natty cardigan), Nigella says that all you need to do once you've melted the butter and mixed in the spices is to pour the mixture over the popcorn and stir. I think she's opted for this method so as not to ruin her party look. It won't really work, as given the ratio of spice mixture to popcorn you will coat only about a fifth of the popcorn. What you need to do is what Nigella suggests in her recipe book, and that's take a big paper bag (although plastic will do if you don't have a paper bag), put the popcorn in it, dribble the spice mixture over, and then close the top of the bag up and shake - and shake, and shake. I think Nigella suggests three shakes, but again, she's taken the leisurely approach to party popcorn here because if you want to ensure that as many of the popped kernels as possible are covered, then you need to shake x about 10. And then get dressed for the party.