Heavenly home-made pate

Home-made stuff is just so much nicer... even when we're insanely busy, we don't buy ready-made food and either cook meals from raw ingredients or eat out (roughly twice a week at the moment due to a lot of weekend travel to train and look at race routes).

Anyway, I was in Morrison yesterday, getting some lettuce for salad, and saw some nice looking kippered mackerel fillets for £2.  So I got some for my lunches and roasted them.

I decided to make pate as I fancied pate on toast, so... break up the roasted fillets, add cream cheese, a grind or two of black pepper.

And blend until the desired consistency is reached.

Smear on hot toast and serve with a nice bowl of salad.

Gorgeous!

90g mackerel fillet (including skin)
50g cream cheese (I used Philadelphia Light)
Freshly ground black pepper

[237kcals, 19.6g protein, 2.5g carbs, 16.1g fat]

Lamb Madras

It was Christmas Eve, I had some lamb neck fillet and a hankering for curry...

(serves 4 - chills and freezes well)

Slice onions (2x medium), chop tomatoes (3x large) into small cubes.  Blend tamarind with warm water (4 tbsp water or so to 1tbsp tamarind).

Toast coriander seeds (1.5tsp), cumin seeds (1.5tsp), peel garlic (1/2 bulb), cut tops off chillies (2-3 large reds), peel ginger (2-3cm cube), measure curry leaves (4 fresh or 1/2 tsp dried) and salt (1/2 tsp) and add all of that into a blender with measure oil (10ml) then blend into a paste.

Toast fennel seeds (1tsp) and keep to one side.

Cube the lamb (500-600g) and toss in turmeric (1.5tsp).

Add oil (another 10ml) into a large non-stick pan.  Add sliced onions and heat until softened.

Add the curry paste and cook for a minute.

Add cubed lamb and brown.

Pour in 2/3 tin coconut milk.

Bring to a bubble and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, cracked cardamom pods (x4), toasted fennel seeds, the rest of the tin of coconut milk and a cracked cinnamon stick.

Bring to a boil, partially cover and simmer for 1.5 hours until the lamb is tender.  Add a little water if it dries out too much.

Add Garam Masala (1.5tsp) and the tamarind paste and cook for another 5 minutes until the sauce thickens.

Remove the cardamom pods and cinnamon stick before serving with brown rice or naan.

Cooking up batches

Even without masses of training, there's often not a lot of time to cook on a work day and it just gets stressy and mentally tricky when you come home and need to think about making a meal.  And given that I prioritise home made meals (mostly because I can control the ingredients and proportions of things to my needs and tastes) I don't want to be buying ready meals, no matter how well-balanced and carefully sourced they are.  So I do try to cook up batches of meals at the weekend and chill or freeze them for re-heating.  The easiest things are chilli, stew, soup, curry, casserole etc. and you can cook up bases of things to add other ingredients when re-heating.  A couple of hours of preparation work at the weekend avoids a lot more during the week and really reduces the stress levels.

However, at the weekend, this can result in quite some chaos in our tiny kitchen...

 

That was ingredients and preparation for three meals; beef and ale casserole (with braising beef, pearl barley, chioggia beetroot, red carrots, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, red onion and Guinness)

 

Lamb Rogan Josh (lamb neck fillet, home made rogan josh paste (Jamie Oliver recipe), onion, chilli peppers and tinned tomatoes)

And butternut and chick pea curry (courgette, butternut squash, chilli pepper, chard, chick peas, onion and home made curry paste (my own recipe))

The kitchen smells incredible when curry is on the go, so it can be quite hungry work.  But worth it for 16 individual meals ready for heating and eating.

You do need a lot of plastic tubs and freezer space (that's my current limitation).  And a better labelling system than post it notes as they tend to fall off in the freezer!

So, on an average week, our evening meals would look a bit like this:-

Monday - grilled salmon fillets with cous cous, sweetcorn and peas (prep 2 mins, cooking time 6-7 mins)
Tuesday - re-heated lamb curry, wholegrain rice (25 mins rice cooking time)
Wednesday - re-heated chilli, cous cous, sweetcorn and peas (prep 5-6 mins)
Thursday - frittata (prep 5 mins, cooking time 30mins)
Friday - re-heated vegetable curry with added chicken breast, wholegrain rice (prep 5-6 mins)
Saturday - fillet steak, new potatoes, salad (prep 15 mins, cooking time 5 mins)
Sunday - roast chicken, roasted sweet potato wedges, peas, cauliflower, gravy (prep 15 mins, cooking time 70mins)

TOTAL Greek Yoghurt Masterclass

What a fabulous day!

Met loads of great people, had some fun making some yoghurty recipes and learned how to toss a pan properly - you know, the way the chefs do it on the telly...

Not being one much for desserts I was pleasantly surprised by my efforts with the Tiramisu Rapide and Millefeuille:-

Sooo pleased how that turned out!

Proper report and some recipes when the weekend's race and Wedding anniversary stuff is finished.

It's pretty much the kitchen sink

...er, without actually being a kitchen sink.  Though the removable parts are easy to clean ;o)

I'm talking about this here new toy I have - the JML Star Chef Deluxe.

As it says on the Weight World web site "The JML Star Chef is a 5-in-1 cooker that allows you to steam, boil, slow-cook, fry or bake. The large capacity, non-stick bowl gives you enough space to cook up a large meal for the whole family.".  And it really is very versatile.

The first thing I cooked in it was some salmon fillets.  I was initially worried that they'd not be crispy, given that the lid of the cooker is closed during cooking which I thought would result in a build up of steam, stopping the fillets from getting crunchy.  That just didn't happen though.  The salmon came out really nice, flavour nicely kept in and steam let out without stinking up the house and setting off the smoke alarm.  You see, I love pan fried salmon fillets, but whenever we cook them, the house reeks of smoked salmon for days afterwards and during cooking our extremely over-sensitive smoke alarms -will- go off if the kitchen door is opened even a crack during cooking.  You only have to think about using the toaster and the bloody things go nuts!  So it was a much less stressful experience pan frying this way.

The next try-out was a test of the timer and slow-cook facility - a casserole of sausages.  And I got it wrong.  I didn't read the manual and assumed the Star Chef wasn't as clever as it really is.  Wanting dinner to be cooked by about 7pm and the casserole to be cooked for 4.5 hours, I set the cooking time to 4.5 hours, the "preset" to 06:00 and pressed "start".  When I got home... it hadn't done any cooking.  The display still read "06:00".  Hm.  Checking the manual educated me that the preset is the actual clock time you want the food to be finished cooking.  Argh!  So it would finish at 6am the next day!  I got it right the next day and we had a really tasty sausage casserole.  Even better, I had mine around 8pm and left half in the Star Chef on its "keep warm" mode for Mr TOTKat when he got home.  Nicely hot sausage casserole for him two hours after I'd had mine.

So, the manual.  The manual is quite sketchy, to be honest.  I think that's maybe why I didn't bother checking it with respect to the "preset" setting.  It tells you how to set the clock and gives a few examples of how to use the menus, but isn't detailed and doesn't explain each setting at all.  I think that could result in people using it incorrectly and not getting the best out of it, but maybe I'm not crediting most people with as much common sense as I think it needs to operate it without a more comprehensive manual.  Perhaps there was a good amount of user acceptance testing, but it doesn't feel that way.  Apart from messing up with the preset once so far, I don't seem to have gone far wrong and given how versatile the menus and functions are, I'm sure that there is plenty of scope to make a right pig's ear of it.

Anyway.  I then tried rice.  And got the amount of water wrong when I scaled the recipe down from a huge amount of rice to a manageable amount for two.  So I got rice that was crunchy on the bottom, a bit dry and a layer of thin, crispy starch on the base.  Rice needs another go then.

Stew time!

Beef stew for four healthy appetities (or two and freeze some, in this case).  The handy bit on this one was that I browned the beef using the frying option and didn't have to dirty any more pans to do that part before whacking everything else in to stew.  I certainly wouldn't use the frying option to fry/sear/brown any meat without making sure that the bowl was hot -before- putting the meat in as the gradual heating up does result in the meat boiling in its own juices rather than frying as the juices start to run out before the heat has had a chance to sear the outsides.  That's the same as doing it in a pan/hot plate on the hob but it's easy to forget that when you have to set the machine to fry for a certain length of time.  Easily remedied by setting the fry option for longer than you need to allow for heating up first and then just hit "stop" when you're done.

5 hours of cooking the stew with the odd sneaky peek and noms arrived.  No splattering over the hob or oven or drying out.

And finally, I got around to trying it to steam stuff.  I've never steamed anything before, so it was a totally new experience for me.  And it wasn't hard.  I ended up with slightly al dente, tasty broccoli.  I did need to look up how long broccoli needs to steam, but that was the only "difficult" part.

The only actually annoying drawback that's cropping up so far is when you come to serve the food.  Obviously the bowl is very hot and when it comes to serving the last couple of inches of food from the bottom, having it still in the Star Chef makes it hard to do that part.  So, I have worked around that thus far by serving the majority of the food, then using a tea towel to pick up the bowl and serve the rest.  Not perfect, but perfectly fine.

As for cleaning it, most of the removable parts can go in the dishwasher or wash nicely in the sink by hand with little fuss.  I've not had anything result in food bits that I couldn't get off easily with a scrubber sponge and hot, soapy water.

Overall, had I known that one of these combination appliances existed and was as easy to use (despite the lack of detailed manual) and clean as this has been so far, I'm pretty sure that I would have bought one.  I'm pretty mean and stingey when it comes to buying things for the home (though usually prefer to buy decent quality products than something cheaper that may not be as well made, usable or last as long) and I am nothing if not honest when asked my opinion of things (which has been known to make life a bit difficult sometimes as I don't like upsetting people almost as much as I don't like giving praise where it is undeserved).  So.  It's a proper thumbs up for the JML Star Chef from me and you can be sure there will be more slow-cooking and steaming recipes to come as I try them.

It was to be expected really

So... cooking carbs for two is sometimes too small an amount to do properly.  I tried brown rice in the Star Chef this evening and, well, it didn't turn out quite right.  And the reason was pretty much that there wasn't enough to cook.  100g rice and 130ml water is barely enough to cover the base of the pot, so it was never going to work very well.  But I tried it anyway.  However, it wasn't a disaster either :o)

I think the failure was mostly in the estimation of how much water is required for 100g rice.  The recipe for rice that came with the Star Chef was for 300g rice with 400ml water.  So for 100g rice, I thought 130ishml water would be fine.  The rice turned out quite crunchy. Evidently not enough water.  But. They key point was that it was perfectly cooked for the amount of water.  Not too al dente in the way that undercooked rice can be and not a squishy mush the way overcooked rice can be.  It was perfectly cooked, but just with not enough water, so it went a bit crispy with the starch on the bottom.

The pan was easy to clean up (it's proper non-stick, so if you treat it like you treat any other non-stick pans, it does what it is supposed to) and the rice was completely fine once I added a bit more water, stirred it about a bit and then mixed it in with the re-heated chilli.

So.  Not a horrible mistake and next time I'll either add more water or I'll make more rice, but it's a hell of an improvement over cooking it in a pan - no gelatinous mush if I forget there's rice on, no icky-looking foam on top, no over-boiling pan to fiddle with.  It's just perfect for an inattentive cook like me.  Some things I really don't have the attention span to stand over; a pan of boiling/simmering rice/potatoes/pasta for example.  So the Star Chef is a bloody god-send for avoiding that.  I'm cure I'll work out what rice cook settings equivalent works for pasta and couscous (though that's far less faff anyway).

I know I was given this kitchen toy and I didn't spend any of my own money on it, but it's hugely appealing to how I like to do things in the kitchen.  I'm awful with patience around things like rice and having the oven on for hours heating up far more space than it needs to etc.  This solves those problems and more and to be brutally honest, based on what I've tried so far I'd be happy to spend the money on it if I'd known about it before now.  Can't wait for the Ocado delivery tomorrow so I can do a beef stew!

Another hungry day

It wasn't so bad this morning, but throughout the afternoon I've just been hungry all of the time. Lack of exercise (I did iron 5 shirts, 2 dresses, 2 jumpers, and two very complicated cardigans though and that has to count for -something- right?) means less food than on an exercisey day, and even though I'm over the number of calories I'd like to have had today, I'm still under maintenance levels. Then again... I'm still hungry. I won't even start cooking dinner for an hour yet as well.

That said, we've cooked up big batches of lamb biryani (with brown rice this time) and beef chilli, so there's been a smell of cooking food in the house all afternoon which probably hasn't helped.

I'm definitely feeling mentally fatigued around food and exercise both at the moment, which is a bugger 'cause I still want to shift that last 2lbs. I almost moved 1 last week, but as keeps happening, there are meals out, fancy meals with lots of wine in etc. Always some excuse to go a little bit OTT. Having bought lunch only twice since 1st January, making lunches is getting a touch frazzling and I'm bored of all of the evening meals I keep cooking. Some are a bit too time-consuming to do on a week night (chicken in black bean sauce, vindaloo, tikka masala etc.) and just end up with me feeling too tired afterwards. I need some re-vamping in the meals and to cook a bit less often; so weekend batch cooking is really helpful there.

I'd like to just go on maintenance for a while and stop trying to lose those 2lbs, but if I do that, I'll end up gaining, given all of the weekly excesses that keep happening. They are only once a week, and I am doing weights 3x a week and cardio once or twice and I am staying reasonably to well under maintenance on most days and definitely not going over maintenance on all days bar one each week.

So mentally fatigued with it all at the moment. For sure. But what to do to fix that?

Today went like this:-

B - greek yogurt with 1 scoop and some Dorset Cereals muesli
L - ham, lettuce and Philadelphia Extra Light on toasted granary bread
S - celery and houmous
S - a lunchies bar
D - pasta with salmon fillets, peas, broccoli and low-fat cream cheese stirred through

Calories (kcal) [kcals to maintain weight (inc. exercise)	1661 1793]
Protein (g)	122.1 (30.2%)
Carbohydrate (g)	172.9 (40%)
Fat (g)	53.6 (29.8%)
Fruit & Veg	3.6