: Go to
blog home : Go to
M-Space home
I tend to find that I enjoy cooking more, and have more inspiration to cook, in winter than in summer, although I enjoy eating all year round. Probably the major reason for that is that many of my favourite foods to cook, such as stews and soups, seem to me to be better suited to cold, dark winter evenings than warm summer ones.
Many of the things I cook follow the same basic pattern - chop an onion and start to fry it in a large saucepan (usually with some chopped garlic), add meat and other vegetables and fry for a bit longer, add liquid and seasonings, bring to boil then let simmer for quite a while. Depending on the liquid to solid ratio you can turn that into a soup or a stew, and by varying the ingredients and seasoning you can get anything from chile con carne to a tasty if not necessarily very authentic curry.
In years gone by, I've tended mostly towards the stew/curry end of the spectrum, but over the last couple of years I've been developing my chile (having discovered that cumin is one of the key spices for it) and more recently I've been doing quite a lot with soups. This afternoon I finished off a very nice pea and ham soup that I started on Friday, using some ham stock and a few bits of diced (cooked) ham left over from a joint I did several months ago, frozen peas, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, some water and not a lot else (except a bit of black pepper and a few bay leaves). Very simple and easy to prepare and then leave to simmer for about an hour while I got on with other things. The end result was a very tasty dinner, with plenty left over to do dinner on Saturday and lunch today as well.
Most of these kinds of foods tend to benefit from the accompaniment of some good fresh bread, so my cooking exploits are often joined by a round of baking. Yesterday (having finished my previous loaf on Friday night) I made some wholemeal poppy seed star rolls, using a recipe I first tried while I was visiting my family over Christmas. Since I had the oven on for those, I also made up a quick batch of shortcrust pastry and made a mince pie (just one, but in a large pie dish) to finish up some leftover mincemeat. As I started to measure the flour into the bowl, I realised I'd picked up the wholemeal instead of the white plain flour. Rather than putting it all back, I decided to leave a bit of wholemeal in with the white flour (roughly 1 part to 5) in order to give the pastry a bit more character and to be able to pretend to myself that I was being healthy (quite a challenge when eating a king-size mince pie - albeit not all at once!).
: Go to
blog home : Go to
M-Space home