Monday salad and stirfry

It's been a healthy day today but god I could do with an unhealthy snack RIGHT NOW. After I'd been to the gym (yes, for the first time in 2007 - it was horrible) I had a slice of toast with wholenut peanut butter, then for lunch I made a salad with the rest of the spinach, watercress and rocket and some Sainsbury's mixed salad (I like the cabbage crunch), cherry tomatoes and carrots, a raw mushroom (haven't had one of those for ages), some of the obligatory pumpkin seeds (they'll be obligatory until I finish the packet and it's a big one) and a John West tuna with a twist, (the lime and black pepper version). It was nice.

But at about 5.00 I had to have two slices of toast with peanut butter - I was starving and cold, and I fancied comfort food, but a cup of tea hadn't helped.

I had quite a late supper of tuna steak, marinated with soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic and ginger on stirfried veg with a dash of soy sauce and a dash of sherry vinegar in it to give it some flavour. It was tasty and I tried to make it more rare than I have before but to be honest I didn't really notice much difference apart from what it looked like. I think I prefer the lime and chilli marinade I've used on previous occasions, but it was worth trying. Bloody hell I'm starving. Can somebody find me a big chocolate cake please?

Sunday supper of beef and ale casserole

A casserole on a chilly day seems like proper home cooking. I think I've blogged about this one before too - it's a really nice recipe from the Waitrose website, with a bottle of Timothy Taylor's ale and balsamic vinegar. I add mushrooms, sometimes use whole shallots instead of onions and thicken the sauce with some extra flour if I feel like it. Last time I made it I used the gloriously thick Belazu balsamic vinegar (the food of the Gods - it's expensive but worth every penny - it's just sublime drizzled over a tomato salad) and it didn't work as well as before, when I used a cheap one, so I specifically bought a horrible, thin Balsamic vinegar from Sainsbury's purely for cooking purposes. This seemed to give a better result.

I left the casserole doing its stuff in the oven for a good 2 hours, and served it with lightly mashed new potatoes with garlic and olive oil, carrots and broccoli. It was lovely, and we ate less than half of it so there's loads in a pot in the freezer for another day. I was pleased - I'd bought Sainsbury's be good to yourself casserole steak with a little trepidation (I made a spag bol with their BGTY mince once and it was horrible, grisly and flavourless) but it was beautifully tender and tasty.

Tamarind king prawns

I love this meal. I know it's not very food-sluttish of me, but I'm making a concerted effort to eat more healthily this month after the gluttony of Christmas. And this meal feels and looks healthy.

While I was cooking some brown rice, I marinated a pack of king prawns in a big bowl with lots of freshly grated ginger, 3 cloves of finely chopped garlic, the juice of a lemon (lime's even better), a jar of Bart's tamarind paste (sometimes I just use half but today I thought 'sod it, I'll put it all in'), a pinch of crushed chilies and some black pepper. This meal is good with a mixture of veg, but today I added finely chopped red pepper, carrot and red onion to the bowl. Then I fished the prawns out of the marinade/veg mix. I simmered the veg and most of its marinade in the sauce, adding the prawns to warm through at the end. It's great served on top of some brown rice (for the nutty flavour and texture - white rice would be rubbish) with a wedge of lime.

Strange pheasant meal

This funny-looking meal was another last-minute concoction. We were about to go away for the weekend and only had carrots and parsnips in the fridge. My boyfriend was walking past Waitrose and went in to buy us some protein for supper - and decided to give us a bit of a treat with these pheasant breasts wrapped with bacon, with a strange, fruity sauce. I boiled and then roughly mashed the carrots and parsnips together and served the pheasant with its odd, sweet fruity sauce with a fried onion mixed with sweetcorn - a bit of a strange meal, but it was really nice to have pheasant for a change and it used up the food we had. Could have done with some greens for colour, I think!

Beefy pasta supper

I have eaten meals that aren't based on beef this week - honestly. I had stirfried prawns in a tamarind sauce with rice the other night, and a mackeral salad last night (healthy guilt-food after a few glasses of wine - come on, you know you've done that at least once). And I had a panini with mozzarella and roasted peppers for lunch today - lovely and filling.

But tonight we finished the beef. We had brown pasta with a sauce made of mushrooms, red onions, a carrot, garlic, the end of the joint of beef with its juices, a bit of red wine and a Sacla sundried tomato and garlic stir-in sauce - I couldn't be bothered to make my own tonight as we wanted fast, warming food and I was feeling lazy. I added parmesan shavings (after this photo was taken) for a bit of extra oomph.

Sunday Roast Beef

Wow, I'm stuffed. And I think I might pop into our local butcher's on Monday morning to give Tom the Butcher a kiss - the joint of beef (Scotch topside) he sold me yesterday morning was simply incredible. It even looked so perfect when it was cooking that I took a photo of it in the pan (see below).

I dabbed it with a mixture of grainy mustard and butter, roasted it at 220 degrees centigrade for half an hour, then sloshed a glass or so of red wine over it and turned the oven down to 200 for about an hour. I left it to rest for a good twenty minutes while I simmered the carrots and beans and made the red wine gravy. As you can see from the steamy photo on the left, we had roasted salad potatoes (I had lots in the cupboard and when roasted they're lovely and sweet), roasted parsnips and boiled carrots and beans. And we opened a bottle of beaujolais - roast beef just wouldn't be the same without a glass of red wine.

Somehow, everything worked perfectly - the meat was rare and beautifully tender, just how I like it, the potatoes were crispy on the outside and fluffy in the middle and everything else turned out really well. I was really pleased as I haven't cooked a roast for ages and last time I overdid the potatoes (even I admitted they were a little too charred, and I love crunchy roast potato) so I wasn't expecting too much from this one. And I even had a bit of gravy on the meat - as its main ingredient was red wine.

And yes, of course we had seconds. But fortunately I bought such a large joint there's loads left for the rest of the week. Cold roast beef butties - I can't wait!

Sweet chilli prawn salad

After consuming much more pâté than we had intended - it was just so moreish - we needed something fresh and zesty for our Sunday supper, and we had some big prawns in the fridge which we fancied eating. So I made this quick and easy salad with baby spinach leaves, halved cherry tomatoes, thinly sliced organic carrots, sliced yellow pepper and the prawns scattered artistically, I hoped, over the top. I made a tangy sweet chilli dressing (about 2 teaspoons of Blue Dragon sweet chilli dipping sauce, a couple of dessert spoons of sherry vinegar, about 4 dessert spoons of olive oil and some seasoning), poured it over and got stuck in. Lovely.

Weekend food

This picture sums up our weekend's food - local, Kentish produce.

We had a delicious venison casserole last night with jacket potatoes and green beans. The venison and potatoes were from my parents' local farmers' market, the tomatoes used in the casserole were from their garden - I doubt the beans or red wine were local though. It was delicious - a lovely November meal - warming, filling, rich-tasting, and with beautifully tender meat. I'm afraid I haven't got a photo of the plate - I was too hungry to find my camera.


For pudding we had a quick version of tiramisu in individual pots. Sadly, again, I gobbled mine up before taking a photo, but it looked delicious, covered in freshly grated chocolate shavings.

And today is Sunday - so it's a big roast lunch for us, upping the red meat stakes in our diet a little further. I should really confess that the meal you see next to this was not actually my meal... I usually avoid gravy (it depends on what it's made of - red wine = good, bisto or boring flour and potato water = bad. Actually, it's mainly because I can't abide soggy potatoes, and if the meat's good and tender enough it's beautiful without gravy, which can often mask rather than enhance the flavour). I put up a photo of one of my family's meals because I know that with gravy it looks like a better meal - even I can see my plate looks like there's something missing.

We had wonderfully succulent roast beef from the village butcher with all the trimmings (crispy roasted potatoes and parsnips with carrots and cabbage), followed by pudding which, if we discount the sugar in the crumble, had virtually no food miles involved in its transport from plant to table.

The same can't be said for the wine, which was once kept on a boat and probably travelled most of the way around the world several times before reaching our table - I won't go into the story of why we were able to drink it, but safe to say we were privileged today to drink one of the best clarets in the world - a Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1970 Bordeaux - probably a rarer find in homes like ours than the pears we had for dessert.

They were from a tree planted against a wall in my mum and dad's garden. They estimate it was planted in about 1890 - the area was once an enormous fruit garden - and despite how the plant has been ignored for the past hundred years or so, it still produces the most amazing fruit. They are actually cooking pears - very unusual these days. We had the pears poached with quinces from a garden down the road (see photo of the fruits looking pretty in a basket at the top of this post) and quince and apple (from down the road too) crumble, with a bit of vanilla ice-cream. See my half-eaten pudding on the left too.

And now, in my usual Sunday afternoon fashion, I think I'm going to go for a nap - weekend naps cannot be beaten, especially after such a filling meal.