Moroccan(ish) Veggie Stew

Leftovers!

Since I started watching Jamie Oliver's Money Saving Meals, I really have been getting ideas above my station. I've got it into my head that I can experiment with all kinds of things. This month I'm economically challenged, but I haven't wanted that to stop my social life. So rather than go to the pub and drink tap water in the corner, I've been inviting people round.

Yesterday, I opened my cupboards and thought - veggie stew...with dumplings. Perfect for a lovely autumn evening. I looked up the recipe for the dumplings and of course, I had to muck about with it. It seems I am incapable of following instructions. Like that's news to you, Ladies and Gentlemen. There was some interest expressed last night on Facebook, so people here it is:

Moroccan(ish) Veggie Stew with Dumplings

You will need:

Spices:
1 tsp paprika (heaped)
1 tsp turmeric (heaped)
1 tsp ground coriander (heaped)
celery salt
garlic
ginger
quarter of preserved lemon*
chilli oil**

Veggies:
1 red onion
1 red pepper
2 carrots
2 small sweet potatoes
1 tin green lentils
1 tin haricot beans
handful apricots
1 carton chopped tomatoes
tomato paste

Dumplings:
250g self-raising flour
125g butter
1 tsp dried mustard
pinch of salt
1 handful grated parmesan
cold water

I chopped everything up, drained the tinned pulses. I got a heavy casserole dish and sweated the onion, pepper and carrots until soft, I then threw in the dried spices to toast for a bit and then added some water to stop it sticking to the pan. In went the chopped tomatoes and everything else including the garlic, ginger and preserved lemon. I brought it to the boil, and topped with boiling water so the veggies were covered. It was then left to simmer uncovered, while I did the dumplings.

Easey peasey. Measure your ingredients. Jamie suggests grating cold butter into the flour. Ain't nobody got time for that. I used a fork to mix flour, butter and dried mustard together until it looked like fine breadcrumbs, added in the cheese and then dribbled iced water in until the mixture formed a dough. I squished it around for a bit and then made little balls of dough. I did not play with it. Once it was done, I stirred the stew made sure there was enough liquid in it (the dumplings are thirsty), popped the little balls onto the top with some space for them to spread out and then put the lid on and left the stew on simmer for about 35 minutes.

I served in bowls with garlic bread and it was damned tasty.

* I had some homemade preserved lemon and I've found you don't need very much at all. I know you can get them ready made, but they are expensive.

** Chilli oil was also homemade. I filled a clean jar with dried bird's eye chillies, covered them with oil and left them to soak for a few weeks. I just dip a teaspoon in every now and then to warm up a dish. 

The garlic and ginger are frozen. Another tip from Jamie. You can get frozen herbs in little plastic trays from Sainsbury's. Just squeeze out however much you want: a cube = a clove of garlic or a tsp of fresh ginger. I don't know whether there's the equivalent in other supermarkets. If you aren't like me, use fresh. I just got fed up of desiccated ginger and squidgy garlic in the bottom of my fridge.

I used tinned pulses that were in my cupboard. They are quick and easy. I have no patience anymore for boiling the hell out of things any more. Been there, done that.

If you do have a go, let me know what you think. 

Getting Adventurous...

...in my old age. It's the only thing I can put down to my new found focus on food. Now, don't get me wrong, I've always enjoyed food. But more in the eating, rather than the preparation thereof. Dinner parties round mine are always a bit haphazard. Guests arriving in the middle of potato peeling, wine being poured, guests doing dishes... It can't have been that awful, people still turn up again when invited and no one's been hospitalised with food poisoning; yet. 

But recently, I've been flexing my culinary muscles. You may remember these at the beginning of this year? Whilst, we were perhaps a touch over enthusiastic and made too many, I've been enjoying popping the odd slice into a dish or two. I'm told they'll be good for awhile yet. 

Last week, I had a dear friend over for dinner. I sorted out the mains and then scratched my head for the dessert. The next minute I'm throwing the fruit in my bowl into a pan with a good slosh of sherry and then suddenly, there's a crumble! 

WTF?! Me? Made a dessert? From scratch!

I know. Who is this person in the Pink Fluffy Dressing Gown? I'm not sure I know her anymore. 

I'm a bit perplexed at this. But I'm going with it. It feels quite fun really. The cooking part of it, if I'm honest, is made a lot easier by my new shiny toy - my dishwasher. This was a housewarming present by Dave (you see why I adore him so?). It's fantastic. I love it. It's like a magical cupboard - you putting dirty stuff in it and Hey Presto! they're clean! I knew how much I hated doing the dishes, but man, I never realised how much that hatred informed my cooking!

So, a couple of weeks ago I was in a large chain supermarket. It's a place I prefer not to go. I had to go for work purposes. While I was there, I noticed purple potatoes. Now, I like red-skinned potatoes like Desiree, best of all. I love the flavour and texture to the point where I don't peel said spuds. Granted, some of that is down to laziness. But given most of the nutrition in a spud is under the skin and I don't have enough roughage in my diet, I think there is a bit of sense there.

Anyway,  yesterday, I worked up the courage to give these bad boys a go. It turns out they are indeed purple all the way through. With purple juice. I made wedges. Roasting them was interesting, it's hard to tell by just looking at them when dark purple goes crispy and isn't burning. To be honest, the eating of them wasn't that much to write home about. For all their purpleness, they tasted like normal spuds, but with the wrong colour. 

I think they just mess with your head. They're purple, but don't taste purple. Or taste more...anything. It's just like a boring white potato...but purple. Dave poked the couple I left and refused to even try them. When I said that to him, he made an excellent point: we are programmed not to eat blue and purple food. Historically, they are a sign of foods that have become inedible or are poisonous.

I like blue berries and they're purple, so it's not that I can't or won't eat purple. Those spuds just didn't do it for me. Well, I tried them. But I won't be repeating the exercise any time soon. 

Adventures with Lemons

I first had preserved lemons in the deli up the road called 103 (sadly now, no more). They had been finely chopped with spring onions, tomatoes, chick peas, tossed with olive oil, served under grilled snapper. Simple food made delicious. I recreated the recipe at home, but could not find preserved lemons and it didn't taste the same. 

Time passed.

My favourite foodie across the pond, La Diva blogged about preserving lemons soon after I saw Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Feast. He was in Morocco and pretty much all of the dishes had preserved lemons. I remembered 103's dish and a bee settled in my bonnet.

I am fortunate to spend time with a man who isn't at all phased by bees in bonnets, Lawrence seems to think it's completely normal. So when I said to him that I wanted to find preserved lemons, he didn't blink. He did however, walk me all over Norwich through every flippin ethnic food shop we could think of, to see if we could find preserved lemons. To no avail. 

*sigh*

We talked about making it ourselves. 

I did this 'sure, let's' noise and focused on other things. It was Lawrence who researched recipes for preserving lemons. There are many ways to skin that cat. He found this recipe and as it was from the man himself, and it looked fairly straightforward, we went with that one. 

We bought a Kilner jar and a couple of nets full of unwaxed lemons. Oh yeah, and a fuck load of salt. Yes, we really did end up spending about 10 minutes debating the kind of salt to buy. This is the side-effect of dating someone who is a Details Person*. 

Lawrence then spent the journey home thinking about sterilising the jar. As a food scientist, he has slightly different ideas about hygiene than me. Also, he was concerned about the comment in the blog where he found the recipe; a guy called Dave complained that his lemons went mouldy in the first week of the process. 

In the end, we boiled the bejeezus out of the jar (the rubber seal we did separately), with Lawrence checking the temperature of the boiling water with his handy-dandy thermometer. Doesn't everyone walk around with a digital food thermometer? He measured out the salt, adjusting for the fact we were doing 10 lemons instead of 6. I quartered them, but not fully; just enough to open them up and pack the salt into them. We stuffed them into the jar, and sealed it all up. It then went into my kitchen cupboard. It's where I store my booze. It's cool and dark, apparently perfect for preserving lemons.

There they sat, undisturbed for a week. Until Sunday. The salt had drawn the juice and filled half the jar already. I bought a couple of nets of cheap lemons which I juiced and poured in to cover them. Lawrence had been concerned that we'd put too much salt. My argument was we didn't want them to go mouldy, and was there really such a thing as too much salt when preserving? I couldn't figure out why I couldn't cover the lemons fully. I had to add cooled boiled water and those suckers kept bobbing up. Afterwards, my favourite food scientist said that much salt changed the gravity of the juice - hence they kept trying to float. In the end, I threw in a couple of sprigs of rosemary from my garden and three dried chillies and added olive oil to cover everything by a couple of centimetres. I sealed it all up, and back into the cupboard it went.

And now we wait. The longer we wait, the better the flavour. 

*sigh*

But here's a picture of our hard work:

It's going to be awhile until we get to the middle of February. Oh boy.

*Details Person. The title my brother gives to people, like our father, who love the details involved in any given task. They have OCD tendencies when following recipes, instructions, putting together flat-pack furniture. Not a character trait he and I inherited - we're more liassez-faire in our approach.