Spanish Fish and Chickpea Stew

Fish stews of various description seem to be a big hit around here. I'm trying to serve fish once a week, but the budget doesn't run to serving a fillet on a plate each. So I've been trying various recipes to stretch out around 500g of fish and half that of prawns between seven people. This one was really, really yummy. I was originally planning to add either chorizo or diced bacon, but I forgot, and it was very nice without it. I also forgot to add the lemon juice and parsley of the original recipe I adapted.

These quantities provided four adult servings, four child servings, and enough for all the kids to get some for lunch tomorrow.

Spanish Fish and Chickpea Stew

olive oil and butter
3 onions, finely diced
1 chorizo sausage, finely diced or a handful of diced bacon
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tsp chilli spice mix (or to taste)
1 tsp turmeric
2 large carrots, diced
2 celery sticks, diced
1 green capsicum, diced
250g green beans, sliced
bay leaves
2 x 400g can chopped tomatoes
500g cooked chickpeas
stock
250g cooked cocktail prawns
500g skinless fish fillets (I used barramundi)
handful flat-leaf parsley leaves, chopped
1 tbsp lemon juice

Saute the onion in the oil and butter til translucent. Add garlic, chorizo or bacon (if using) and spices and cook for a minute or two. Stir through the vegetables and let them brown for a little while. Then add tomatoes, bay leaves, chickpeas, and enough stock to cover. Bring to the boil and simmer gently until the carrots are cooked. Lay the fish on top, cover the pan, and simmer for five minutes or so until the fish flakes. Add the prawns for the last minute or two to warm through. If you are less forgetful than me and actually check the recipe at this point, stir through the lemon juice and parsley before serving. Nom!

Goan Fish Curry

This was gorgeous, and the fussiest person in the house devoured his serve and asked for more. Will definitely make this again!

Dylan cooked tonight, and she adjusted the recipe a little to use red chilli paste instead of the dried red chillies, and doubled the onion, tomatoes (two tins) and coconut milk and cream (1 tin each) and used 1kg of basa fillets. The carbivores had theirs with rice, but Dylan (who is going off carbs for a while too) and I had ours like soup with extra sauce and it was heaven in a spoon...

Chicken Jambalaya

Based on this low-carb recipe. My quantities made two substantial roasting trays full of food, which was handy, because with two trays I could customise the sauce for our various cauliflower-hating peeps. So one tray was made with rice, as usual, and the other was low-carb, with the rice replaced by grated cauliflower as per the linked recipe.

4 large chicken Maryland portions

250g Spanish chorizo sausages

250g diced ham

2 onions, diced
2 huge cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 large green capsicum, diced
2 celery stalks (I didn't have any so I subbed the rest of the green beans in the fridge)
1/2 medium cauliflower
1 cup rice
2 tins tomatoes
2-3 tsp Cajun seasoning
water

Trim all the manky bits off the chicken portions. If you are a clever person, you will already know that chicken Maryland means "chop the back half of a chook into half again, and leave spine and gristle and horrible squishy bits cunningly hidden at the bottom of the nice tidy packaging to surprise the unwary", and you will have a cleaver ready. If you are not, you will try and do this with kitchen scissors and an inadequate knife, and It Will Not Be Pretty. But when you have finally tidied everything up, remove the skin, brown the chicken in a frying pan and then transfer to the two roasting trays. Chop the chorizo and scatter the sausage chunks and ham all around the chicken portions. Then you should probably refrigerate the trays until the sauce is ready, although I didn't.

Saute all the veges in olive oil and butter until tender (do not do what I did and use the really hot burner and burn the crap out of the onions, okay?). While they are cooking, chop the cauliflower into florets and whizz them in a food processor until they are about as grainy as rice. Don't over-fill the food processor or it will probably turn into mush with lumps in it. I did it in two batches, added the first one to the pan, then realised that Certain People in my house have an irreconcilable hatred of cauliflower. So at that point, I decided to make two different sauces.

I separated the sauteed vegetables into two, leaving as much of the cauliflower as I could in the pan, and put the other half into a pot to wait. Then I added tomatoes and Cajun seasoning to the pan, and about half a cup of water, brought it to the boil, and poured it over one of the trays of chicken. Then I returned the second batch to the pan, added tomatoes and seasonings, about a cup of rice (it may have been more - put in as much as you think will fill up your roasting tray when it's cooked, and add more water if necessary), and two cups of water. When it was hot, I poured it over the second tray and put both into the oven at 180C.

Check the rice after about half an hour and add more water if it needs it. If the rice on the top is going crunchy, stir it around a bit. I baked mine for about an hour, but it's ready whenever the rice is cooked. I served out the rice or cauliflower mixture, then we hacked the chicken off the bones and shared that out. This made enough for three adults, four kids, and one lunch-worth of leftovers. And everyone ate it, or at least some of it, which makes it successful enough to be worth a blog entry.

Crockpot Baked Beans

A different recipe this time; I've never used Worcestershire sauce before. I made this last night and so far the verdict from all the kids in the house (plus a ring-in) is that it's at least edible. So here's the recipe, so I don't forget what I changed. Adapted from here. (ETA: I've adjusted my original recipe again to reflect my standardised quantities. I now put this in the crockpot every Saturday night).

About 500g (dry weight) navy beans, soaked and pre-cooked (for about half an hour)
2 tins of tomatoes
1 tub of tomato paste (optional)
3 tbsp each Worcestershire sauce and golden syrup or honey
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 very large onions, finely diced
handful of diced bacon (use more if you have it, or leave it out)
2 heaping teaspoons (none of these anaemic measuring spoons, just splodge it in) of wholegrain mustard
3 heaping teaspoons or 4-5 cloves of finely chopped garlic
1 tsp each cumin and coriander
1 tbsp paprika
4-5 bay leaves
water

Combine beans, tomatoes and paste, and liquid ingredients in the crockpot. Saute onions in butter and olive oil until soft, then add the other measured ingredients and stir over heat until fragrant. Add to bean mixture and stir thoroughly, deglaze the pan with some water and add to the crockpot. Finally, add enough water to cover the beans by about 2cms. I put my crockpot onto Auto (in case I forgot to turn it down) until I went to bed, when I turned it down to Low, and we woke up to an extremely fragrant kitchen. Nom.

Hearty Chicken and Bean Casserole

We now have housemates, so I'm adjusting to cooking for seven. Fortunately they have similar carb Isshews, so we're not trying to cater to too many competing eating styles. Although now the Elder Daughter is a confirmed vegetarian it does make for some extra cooking when she is here - of course it is entirely consonant with her nature that she would be determinedly omnivorous for the years I was trying to feed my family vegetarian food and as soon as we go back to being omnivorous she switches to being vegetarian.

Anyway, last night I made this hearty chicken and bean casserole, modifying it a bit. I bought drumsticks instead of thigh fillets, left out the carrots, substituted one can of kidney beans and one of cannelini beans since that was what was in the cupboard, and left out the celery when I discovered that the new bunch I bought that morning turned out to be manky (damned greengrocer's green lights which disguise that yellowy tinge just long enough to fool you when you're in a hurry). So I ended up subbing a couple of red and green capsicums for the celery and carrots, and upping the amount of onion. I was hoping that I would get some leftovers for Mr Bat's work lunches, but nope, it all evaporated very quickly!

oil for sauteing
10 chicken drumsticks, skinned *
2 chorizo sausages, cut into bite-size pieces
4 medium onions diced
2 small red capsicums, diced
1 medium green capsicum, diced
1/4 small cabbage, finely shredded
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 800mL tin diced tomatoes, undrained

1 can kidney beans, drained and rinsed

1 can cannelini beans, drained and rinsed

Brown the chicken drumsticks in the oil, then lay in two roasting trays and scatter with chorizo slices (I used one small and one large tray, since my original pan wasn't deep enough for all the bean mixture). Saute the onion in the pan drippings for a few minutes, then add capsicum, cabbage, and finally garlic. Turn oven onto about 180C. When veges are starting to brown, add beans and tomatoes and heat through. Pour sauce over the chicken and sausages and put the trays in the oven for about half an hour. Serve with sour cream for those wot likes it, and watch it disappear.

* This was for two adults and four children under 6 - I don't eat drumsticks cuz I'm fussy like that. Adjust for your own family's preferences. Next time I will probably add another sausage and another two or three drumsticks, and then we might have enough for a lunch for Mr Bat!

Bratwurst with Beans and Silverbeet

A simple, easy one-pot dish which was a big hit with my whole family after a long, tiring weekend.

3 medium onions, cut into rings

5 turkey bratwursts, cut into chunks
3 rashers bacon, diced
4 cloves garlic, finely diced or crushed
1/8th green cabbage, shredded
1 bunch silverbeet, shredded
1 x tin cannelini beans, rinsed *
1 tsp balsamic vinegar (or use red wine vinegar to be really strict on carbs)
1/2 sachet PureVia (equivalent to 1 tsp sugar)

In a large frying pan, start gently sauteing onions. When they start to soften, add the meats and continue to fry, stirring frequently. When bratwurst is almost done, add cabbage and cook for 5-10 minutes, until tender. Finally, add the garlic, silverbeet and cannelini beans, sprinkle with the vinegar and sweetener, and stir continuously until the silverbeet is wilted and the beans are warmed through. Devour.

* According to the information on the can, the cannelini beans contained 15g carbs per 100g, and 7g protein. I estimate that a serve of this was probably about 75g of beans per person (4 serves).

Menu Plans

Hmm, I have a couple of menu plans to post, in case anyone is finding them handy.


This Week
Monday: Kangaroo Spag Bol
Tuesday: Sausages, Roasted Vegetables
Wednesday: Roast Vegetable Fritatta
Thursday: Tomato Soup with Tiny Turkey Meatballs
Friday: Slowcooker Silverside
Saturday: Lentil burgers
Sunday: Almond Crusted Fish with Sweet Potato and Leek

Last Week
Monday: Creamy Chicken Pasta (or cauliflower)
Tuesday: Enchiladas with salad
Wednesday: Silverbeet and onion quiche/mini fritattas
Thursday: Lamb Koftas
Friday: Laksa*
Saturday: Burritos*
Sunday: takeaway**

* We went away for the weekend so meals had to be planned and ingredients bought in advance.
** Planned as takeaway so I wouldn't have to cook after a long drive home.

Black Bean Stroganoff with Braised Cabbage

One of my signature dishes which inexplicably I have never blogged before. I usually serve this over creamy mashed potato, but obviously that's out for me at the moment, so I had it with braised cabbage. And since I forgot to ask Mr Bat to buy potatoes, everyone else had it over rice.

Black Bean Stroganoff

4 small onions, diced
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
5c sliced mushrooms
2c cooked black beans
3 tbsp ground almonds (or plain flour)
2c stock
1c sour cream
slug of mushroom soy sauce and/or balsamic vinegar
black pepper
paprika to serve

Saute the onions and garlic, then add the mushrooms and soften them. Sprinkle over about a tablespoon of soy sauce and/or balsamic vinegar. Stir in the almonds (or flour) and thicken the juices, cook for a minute or two. Slowly stir in the stock, add the rest of the ingredients except the sour cream, and bring to the boil. Cook off some of the liquid, then lower the heat and stir in the sour cream and simmer gently for five or ten minutes to let the sauce thicken and the flavours combine.

Braised cabbage (1 large serve)

About 1 1/2 cups shredded cabbage
1 tsp butter
1/2 tsp chicken stock powder
pinch each fennel seeds and dried garlic (or use fresh)
1 tsp lemon juice
black pepper

Melt the butter, then gently cook the cabbage and other seasonings until soft (about 20 minutes or so). Add a little water from time to time if it sticks, but it should not be wet.

Menu Plan

After a lot of faffing, I finally have my first week's menu plan. It took a lot longer than usual because I had to plan for lunches and breakfasts as well, instead of assuming that I was just going to have toast (I don't like having to think too early in the morning). Here are the dinners, at least - I was impressed that I managed to keep the majority vegetarian. It's not a perfect low-carb menu, but it's a damn sight better than I was managing before!

Monday: Pork Sausage and Bean Casserole
Tuesday: Black Bean Stroganoff (served with braised cabbage for me)
Wednesday: Frittata and Salad
Thursday: Moussaka with Greek Salad
Friday: Pita Bread Pizzas
Saturday: Slow-cooker Butter Chicken (served with cauliflower for me)
Sunday: Zucchini Slice with Fetta

Looking at the kinds of substitutions for pasta or mashed spud usually recommended by low-carb websites, it's lucky I love cabbage and cauliflower as much as I do, really...

Pork Sausage and Bean Casserole

I came up with this recipe last night to use up the pork and fennel sausages in the freezer. When I bought them a while ago I had a beany casserole in mind, but last night I had to figure out how to make it without potato, my casserole standby! This recipe was absolutely gorgeous, although next time I'll use more lemon juice, since the apple and cabbage gave it a natural earthy sweetness which could have been better balanced.

4 pork and fennel sausages

1 tin borlotti beans, rinsed

1 tin tomatoes

3 small onions, diced

1 clove garlic, chopped

2-3 sticks celery, diced [optional]

1 red apple, diced

1/8 red cabbage, shredded

400mL chicken stock

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp thyme and ½ tsp fennel seeds

Saute onions, add garlic. Parboil sausages, cool and dice. Add tomatoes, beans, celery (if using), apple and red cabbage, stock, lemon juice, thyme and fennel seeds. Cook til sauce is reduced.

Changes

I've been instituting some changes lately in my eating, with the realisation that I really do not cope well with the level of carbs we have been eating. Making the initial attempt at having the occasional low-carb meal, and trying to stop relying on bread for breakfast and bread for lunch, had such an obvious effect that it's encouraged me to move towards a broader implementation. Since I don't do dietary extremism, my current personal take on "low carb" is not enormously rigorous, with a focus instead on cutting out most processed flour and sugar, as well as potatoes, pasta and rice. I refuse to cut out bread completely (been there done that when I developed a yeast intolerance years ago, and it was a hellish 6 months I have no wish to repeat), but I have switched to eating much less of the low-GI Burgen version, which seems to work for me.

It does mean that we're now eating more meat, because even though I have no intention of cutting out legumes, I'm finding it hard to find vego recipes which don't have a noticeable effect on my blood sugar. I'm hoping that after a while I can tolerate more of it, but for at least a while I expect this blog will be rather less vegetarian-friendly than it has been - sorry!

Zucchini and Feta Muffins - quick hit

I made this recipe today, but what I really wanted to make was this one. Must try the latter when I have leftover rice.

I added about a tbsp of grated parmesan and a slosh of balsamic vinegar to the first recipe, and the muffins came out gorgeously moist and cheesy. Best eaten warm.

Easy Roast Vegetables and Couscous

An honourable mention must go to today's lunch. Since I'm trying to up our vegetable intake and stop relying so much on bread products, I'm now aiming to cook lunch at least three times a week. Today, I roasted a couple of pans full of sweet potato, potato, carrot, onion and cauliflower, all tossed in olive oil. I served it over couscous made with a knob of butter, and 1/4 tsp each of cumin and coriander just to warm the flavour up a bit, and the leftover pickled red cabbage from the other night. I originally contemplated making gravy, since my family used to do the full sit-down roast beast, gravy and veges every Sunday lunch and I had a hankering for it, but in the end decided to go with half a jar of tomato chutney which nobody liked very much on sandwiches, heated up with a handful of sultanas and a tablespoon or two of water to make it more of a sauce. Oh my, was it good, and beautifully simple to prepare, too - just what I want from a lunch!

Pickled Red Cabbage

Another one of my winter comfort foods. Tonight I served it with sausages and mashed potatoes for a quick meal, but it's delicious with quiche or cottage pie or lots of other vegetarian options.



Pickled Red Cabbage

1 tbsp butter
1 onion, sliced
1/4 smallish red cabbage
1 red apple, diced
2 tsp caster sugar
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Melt the butter and saute the onion. When it's tender, add the cabbage and saute gently til it starts to soften. Chuck in the apple, then stir through the vinegars and sugar. Cover and simmer gently for about 10-15 minutes, or until the cabbage and apple are tender - but not limp - and the onions and apple have taken on a rich purple colour.

Hunza Pie

Tonight's dinner was so magnificent I have to write down the particular variation on the recipe so I can hopefully recreate it. Hunza Pie is one of my mother's old standbys, and one of my favourite winter comfort foods. I've seen a number of variations using potatoes in the filling or pastry above or below, but my mother's was always a quiche-like combination of brown rice, silverbeet, cheese and eggs in a pastry shell, topped with sliced tomatoes and more grated cheese. Nom.

Today's effort at recreating it achieved an amazing flavour by gently cooking down the shredded silverbeet in melted butter and olive oil, together with onion and garlic, and with a slug of balsamic vinegar added. The pastry was dead easy, done in the food processor and crisp despite not bothering with blind-baking - in fact, if you have a food processor you can do a lot of the prep in it and save washing up. I served the pie with baked potatoes for a perfect winter meal.


Hunza Pie

1c uncooked brown rice
1c wholemeal plain flour
3/4c plain flour
125g butter, chilled and diced
3-4 tbsp cold water
1 bunch silverbeet
3-4 small onions
2-3 cloves garlic, finely diced
~1tbsp butter
~1-2 tsp olive oil
~1-2 tsp balsamic vinegar
~1 tsp oregano
freshly ground black pepper
4 eggs
~1c grated cheese
2 tomatoes, sliced

Cook the rice in two cups of water in a covered saucepan. While it's burbling gently away, put the flours and butter in the food processor and pulse until it looks like breadcrumbs. With motor running, add tablespoons of water down the tube until the pastry comes together. Give it to your daughter so she can roll it into a ball and stash it in the freezer to cool (you can stick it in the fridge, but we don't have one, hence the freezer).

After the pastry has rested a bit, flour a work surface and roll it out to fit a large deep pie dish*. Meanwhile, ask your offspring to rip up the silverbeet and cram it into the food processor. Add a couple of roughly chopped onions, and whizz briefly (don't pulverise it). Melt a hunk o' butter (depending on how nervous you feel about the amount of butter in the pastry) in a big frypan, and add enough olive oil to stop it from burning. Gently fry the garlic for a minute or two, then add the silverbeet and onion and cook til the silverbeet reduces a bit. Slosh in some balsamic vinegar and add the oregano and pepper. When the silverbeet is starting to darken and wilt, add the rice and stir to combine, then quickly toss through half of the cheese and turn into the pastry case. Whizz up the eggs in the food processor and pour over, then top the pie with tomato slices and the rest of the cheese. Cook for around 35-45 minutes.

 * Mine was 25cms across and 4cms deep - if yours is smaller reduce the amount of filling, and you'll have some leftovers from the pastry unless you reserve a third of it for topping the pie, as in the original recipe I adapted this from.

More Soup, and Scone Pinwheels

I've been feeling a craving for soup made with rich meaty stock lately. I made soup from lamb shanks the other night, cooking the bones for two hours on the stove with lots of veges and barley and lentils, then after I'd cut most of the meat off, chucked the bones into the slow cooker with another couple of soup bones, onions, carrots, celery, bay leaves, and a slug of vinegar (to help release the calcium from the bones, according to Sally Fallon) and simmered it for about 24 hours. I took some of it out halfway through and refilled the crockpot with more water, and ended up with one litre of thick, gelatinous stock, and two litres of thinner, but still tasty broth in the freezer.

Today was definitely a soup day, so I defrosted a litre of the broth and added half a cup of soup mix (the packet stuff from the supermarket, or just use whatever combo of barley and legumes you prefer), a sauteed onion, and a couple of cups of diced root vegetables. I ended up adding probably close to a litre of water as the soup simmered away for an hour while the lentils and barley cooked, but just keep an eye on it and make sure the water level never gets too low. Then just before serving I added some diced zucchini and Brussels sprouts. We ate it with grated cheese on top, and warm cheese and chutney pinwheels on the side.

Cheese and Chutney Pinwheels
(recipe adapted slightly from Alison Holst's Dollars and Sense Cookbook)

2c flour (I used 1/2c wholemeal and 1 1/2c plain)
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
25g olive oil
1/2c milk
1/4-1/2c cold water
~1/3c chutney
~1/2c grated cheese

Stir the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Pour in the olive oil, milk and 1/4c of the water, and stir. Add a little more water if necessary until the dough comes together. Roll it out on a floured bench - or, if you're like me and your children have stolen the rolling pin - pat it into a rectangle shape about the size of your average baking tray. Spread it with chutney and sprinkle with grated cheese, leaving a 2cm clear edge on the long side which is furthest away from you. Moisten the clear edge with water or milk to help it stick, then loosen the dough with a palette knife or spatula and roll it up from the long side which is closest to you. Cut it into 2cm thick slices with a sharp knife, and lie the slices flat on a greased baking tray, leaving room to spread. Cook at 220C for 10-12 mins or so, until the pinwheels are golden on top and cooked through. Makes about 15.

Quick Bean and Pasta Soup

I'm trying to make soup for lunch when we're home during the day, because gawd knows we could do with upping our vegetable intake a bit, and toast for breakfast followed by toast for lunch isn't cutting it. But I'm a lazy tart at heart and toast is easy. So I've bestirred myself a couple of times this week and started cooking the soup around 11:30 when people are starting to get grumpy from lack of protein, and we've had some nice warming meals. It is definitely soup weather!

The bean and pasta soup I made yesterday was a definite hit. I wasn't happy with the balance of flavours in the previous soup, which I'd made using stock powder, so I made up a rich vege stock the night before. A carrot, handful of celery sticks and leaves, two onions, some bayleaves, peppercorns and a clove of garlic, cooked down to a gorgeous brown broth, probably about 4 or 6 cups full (who notices that sort of thing).

I didn't bother browning anything the next day because I had my beautiful stock, but you can if you want. I also used dried garlic, because I have heaps, and it kept the emphasis on speed of preparation, but if that strikes you dead in your foodie heart then by all means use the real stuff. Ditto the beans.


Ingredients
stock, glorious stock
1 can five bean mix
2 sticks celery, with leaves, diced
1 carrot, diced
2 potatoes, diced
~1 tsp dried garlic
1/3 cup risoni
1 tsp dried basil
1 slug mushroom soy sauce (optional, but it adds a bit of oomph to the broth)
salt and pepper to taste

Combine everything except the risoni, bring to the boil, and simmer until the potato is nearly tender. Check the seasonings, then add the pasta and simmer for about 8 minutes, or until tender. If you like a thicker soup, mash roughly so that some of the potato is broken up.

We served it with grated cheese on top, and the smalls insisted on toast, since apparently toast is an essential part of the Authentic Soup Experience, but it really doesn't need it. Very filling!

New (old) cookbook!

I was unable to resist adding a new recipe book to my collection this week - The Findhorn Family Cookbook. Down to earth, sensible, tasty, easy vegetarian recipes which aren't unnecessarily penitential about butter and salt and sugar, plus commentary about being at one with our vegetable brethren - how could I leave it on the shelf? I haven't cooked anything out of it yet, but I promise to report back.

The Couldn't Be Arseds

I had an attack tonight. I think it's the first one since we got here, and given how much I've been cooking, it was probably overdue. And we ate all the leftovers for lunch, and I've stopped buying Things In Jars for these moments, so there was only one solution: breakfast for dinner!

Since we don't have a microwave down here, it resulted in a lot of washing up, but it was very delicious. We had scrambled eggs (just eggs scrambled in butter, since I had no cream), fried onion rings, fried tomatoes, a scattering of bacon pieces, and baked beans, on toast. And now that we've digested a while, Mr Bat is making pancakes (the big fat fluffy American hotcakes), to be served with maple syrup or lemon juice and sugar. Nom.

What do you do if you're having an attack of the Couldn't Be Arseds? Does someone else cook, or do you have simple standbys?

O Dumplings, glorious dumplings!

Time to revive this blog from its hibernation. After our epic holiday and 3000km drive to our new home (during which our camera met an Unfortunate End, so alas this blog will be returning to bland monochrome for the foreseeable future), we've settled in happily over the last week. Part of the process of making a house into a home for me always involves cooking, putting my the skill of my hands and heart into filling the house with familiar scents and energy. I've been experimenting with perfecting a bread recipe, kneaded in the bread machine to spare my RSI but baked in the oven, baking muffins and cakes, and taking advantage of the glorious bounty of fresh fruit and vegetables on every roadside farmstand.

While I might be waking the blog from a hibernation, the weather is definitely encouraging the reverse. Since we arrived in the Huon Valley, the weather has been rainy and autumnal, blessing us with sunshine, fogs and a multitude of rainbows, but over the last two days we've had a real taste of winter's blast on our hilltop. So tonight was definitely a night for a rich, warming winter soup of grains and root vegetables, topped with the glorious fluffy clouds of dumplings.

I love dumplings. They are not, as they are for my Beloved, a childhood comfort food - indeed I don't recall my mother ever making them when I was a kid - but I discovered them a few years ago in Sara Lewis' cookbook, Veggie Food For Kids. Since then, I've made them innumerable times and this particular recipe has never failed me. Tonight, however, I absentmindedly mixed up two recipes I had been reading, and made the dumplings with different proportions and added an egg. The dumplings attained gigantic, saucepan-dominating proportions with the larger quantities, and the addition of the egg seemed to make no particular difference, so I'm giving my usual recipe here instead.


Barley and Lentil Vegetable Soup with Dumplings

Soup
2 onions
2 cloves garlic
2 potatoes, diced (I used Dutch Cream, grown ten minutes up the road from here, and they were superb)
1 carrot, diced
1/2 sweet potato, diced
2 tbsp pearl barley
2 tbsp red lentils
2 tbsp Puy lentils
lots o' stock, or 2tsp stock powder and water
1/2 tsp each cumin and coriander
2 bay leaves
black pepper
1c frozen peas

Saute the onion until tender, add chopped garlic and fry until fragrant. Brown the root vegetables for five minutes or so for deeper flavour. Cover the vegetables generously with water or stock and add stock powder (if using) and other seasonings. Toss in the barley and legumes of your choice (I like the way that the red lentils cook down and thicken the soup and Puy lentils are just divine, but use whatever you have or prefer), bring to the boil, and simmer, covered, until vegetables are almost tender. Add the peas just before you're ready for the dumplings, but make sure the water comes back up to the boil before you add them.

Dumplings
200g plain flour (I use a mix of wholemeal and white, but it works with all wholemeal too)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground parmesan or 1/2c grated cheese
50g butter, diced
enough cold water to form a soft dough

In a food processor, whizz the flour, baking powder and cheese to make sure it is evenly mixed, then add the butter and process until it forms coarse crumbs (don't overprocess). Gradually add water and knead gently until it comes together into a sticky dough; try not to handle it too much or the butter melts and the whole thing goes horribly squoogey. Quickly form into a log, and cut into 12 equal pieces. Let your kids practise their ninja playdough rolling skills and make them into rough balls, then drop them into the gently boiling stew, evenly spaced out. Put the lid on and simmer for fifteen minutes or until light and fluffy - don't take the lid off if you can avoid it. They should double in size into gorgeous fluffy pillows of carbolicious goodness. Devour!