One of the real joys of spring and early summer for me is Asparagus. We get it in our veg box, and we also sneak over to a farm in Sand Hutton that sells it fresh cut that morning - its wonderful! This week there was a bundle of the delicious green stuff in my veg box from Riverford (who I cannot recommend highly enough by the way, evey week they deliver me a box full of culinary potential and its a real treat to get to cook with such lovely ingredients) and I wanted to use it as fresh as possible, so tonight I went looking for an asparagus pasta recipe. What I found was the simply titled Pasta with Asparagus at allrecipes.com.
I adapted the recipe a little, of course, by using rice pasta spirals rather than angel hair pasta but also in the cooking directions. I cut the tips off the asparagus and put them to one side, fried the rest with some onion and the mushrooms before adding vegetable stock, the tips and finally a handful of frozen petis pois. Because I added a little too much liquid I thickened it with some cornflour. The result was a really tasty, low fat meal that had a good strong asparagus flavour. It went down well with the whole family and will definitely be one I add to my repertoire. For the carnivores amongst you, you might find it goes well with some nice streaky bacon bits or pancetta thrown in.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Monday, 30 March 2009
Peppered Mackerel and potato bake
With the cupboard looking a little bare, I googled for a recipe idea for smoked mackerel and potatoes and came across this Peppered Mackerel and Potato Bake at BBC Good Food.
This was a quick and easy supper dish, and I made it dairy free by substituting rice milk and a beaten egg for the cream. Simplicity itself, par boiled potatoes are sliced and fried with some onion then layered around flaked mackerel before the cream is added and the whole is baked for getting on for an hour. It smells great when its baking!
The serving suggestion of a green salad didn't appeal to my family, so we went with an accompaniement of petis pois and courgettes fried in olive oil and deglazed with a little lime juice. It was declared "Quite splendid" and not a scrap remained on plates!
This was a quick and easy supper dish, and I made it dairy free by substituting rice milk and a beaten egg for the cream. Simplicity itself, par boiled potatoes are sliced and fried with some onion then layered around flaked mackerel before the cream is added and the whole is baked for getting on for an hour. It smells great when its baking!
The serving suggestion of a green salad didn't appeal to my family, so we went with an accompaniement of petis pois and courgettes fried in olive oil and deglazed with a little lime juice. It was declared "Quite splendid" and not a scrap remained on plates!
Monday, 16 March 2009
Aubergine and Potato Bake
Tonight's culinary adventure needed to involve aubergines and potatos, and google was kind enough to provide a link to a recipe for Aubergine and Potato bake at cookitsimply.com.
This was basically a moussaka/lasagne type dish and made vegetarian by leaving out the garlic sausage also omitting the cheese would make it vegan easily enough. The cheese did add to the flavours but I think it would have been tasty without it. It was quite time consuming to prepare, taking me an hour to get all the potato and aubergine slices prepared and the tomato sauce made, but I could have done this quicker if I'd used two pans; I was just being economical as my dishwasher is broken at the moment! Once it was layered up I baked it for 15 minutes without the cheese, then added it and baked for the remaining 15 before finishing it under the grill to get it nice and brown.
It was a very tasty dish with some nice flavours, filling and comforting, and would have been accompanied well by a salad and some nice foccacia or similar. I would cut the potato into thinner slices if I made it again, they were about 1cm thick this time and that made them a bit chunky.
This was basically a moussaka/lasagne type dish and made vegetarian by leaving out the garlic sausage also omitting the cheese would make it vegan easily enough. The cheese did add to the flavours but I think it would have been tasty without it. It was quite time consuming to prepare, taking me an hour to get all the potato and aubergine slices prepared and the tomato sauce made, but I could have done this quicker if I'd used two pans; I was just being economical as my dishwasher is broken at the moment! Once it was layered up I baked it for 15 minutes without the cheese, then added it and baked for the remaining 15 before finishing it under the grill to get it nice and brown.
It was a very tasty dish with some nice flavours, filling and comforting, and would have been accompanied well by a salad and some nice foccacia or similar. I would cut the potato into thinner slices if I made it again, they were about 1cm thick this time and that made them a bit chunky.
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