Weekly Food Challenge

I was seriously hampered by a lack of onions, but I came up with this, and it's quite tasty.

Ingredients
2 small potatoes
1 head broccoli
1/2 red pepper
a little oil
3 eggs
a little milk
salt and pepper
4 slices 'sandwich brie' (this is like any other sort of brie, but comes in a cuboid shape rather than a disc)

Equipment
Frying pan with a handle that won't melt
Spatula
Microwave
Microwaveable dish
Grill
Sharp knife
Chopping board
Peeler
Bowl

Method
Peel the potatoes and cut into slices about 1/4cm thick. Place in microwaveable dish with about a tablespoon of water, cover and microwave for five minutes. Cut the broccoli into small florets and the pepper into small pieces. Cook in a little oil in the frying pan for about five minutes, keeping an eye on it to make sure the broccoli doesn't burn.

Meanwhile, break the eggs into a bowl. Add a dribble of milk and a smidge of salt and pepper.

Add the cooked potato slices to the vegetables in the frying pan, bashing them with the spatula to break them up if they've stuck together, and stir until you have a good balance of the various ingredients across the pan. Pour the egg mixture in over the top. Cook for another five minutes or so. While it's doing that, arrange the brie on top.

Cook under the grill for 10 minutes or until the top is browned.

This was freely adapted from this Riverford recipe - which is very nice in its own right, but I didn't have any courgettes. As you'll see, you can play around it a lot and still end up with something edible. My measurements here are very approximate - if your 'make up the usual quantity of white sauce' method looks different from mine, by all means do that instead.


Ingredients

1/2 head swiss chard
1 red pepper
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp oil

1 bag spinach
1 tub quark cheese

25g butter
25g plain flour
350g milk
75g cheddar
nutmeg

3 sheets lasagne


Equipment

2 or 3 saucepans (depends on whether or not you mind doubling up)
colander
sharp knife
chopping board
wooden spoon
mixing bowl
cheese grater
baking dish
hob
oven


Method

Preheat the oven to 200degC or so.


Wash the chard. Separate into stalk bits and leaf bits. Set the leaf bits aside. Chop the ends off the stalk bits and then chop them up into pieces about 1 square centimetre in area. Deseed and chop the pepper. Chop the garlic finely.

Cook all that very gently in the oil in a covered saucepan for 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile -


Wash and trim the spinach. Boil a pan of water. Cook the spinach and the leaf bits of the chard for about a minute in boiling water. Drain and then rinse with cold water. Chop up small. In a mixing bowl, mix the spinach, chard and quark together.


Grate the cheddar. Make a white sauce - melt the butter, mix in the flour, and add the milk little by little, stirring between each addition. When it's got to a proper sauce consistency, add most of the cheese and a little nutmeg.


Layer as follows in the baking dish, starting from the bottom:
pepper and chard stalks mix
half the lasagne sheets, broken up to fit in as a single layer
half the white sauce
quark and spinach mix
the other half of the lasagne sheets, broken up to fit in as a single layer
the other half of the white sauce

Sprinkle the remaining cheese on the top. Bake for half an hour or so.

Which was meant to be a Croque Madame, but went a bit pan-European when there wasn't any gruyère in the shop, and even more so when I got home to find the sliced bread was all gone.

Ingredients (very approximate - I did this all by eye)

One ciabatta roll
2 slices smoked ham (German, in this case)
Butter
1 oz plain flour
1/4 pint milk
2 oz cheddar cheese
1 egg
Mustard (we had some rather nice German mustard with Calvados, which worked beautifully)


Equipment

Bread knife
Frying pan
Cheese grater
Saucepan
Wooden spoon
Fish slice
Plate


Method

Grate the cheese.

Slice the ciabatta roll open, all the way, and fry gently on both sides in a little of the butter.

Meanwhile, make up the white sauce: melt approx 1 oz of butter, stir in the flour, and then add the milk, stirring in a little at a time and letting it thicken into a sauce-like consistency. Stir in about half the cheese.

Melt a little more butter in the frying pan and start frying the egg.

Assemble the sandwich (on a plate) as follows: bottom half of ciabatta - spread with cheese sauce - lay the sliced ham on top - spread with mustard - add the remaining cheese - spread any remaining cheese sauce on the top half of the bread - and add the top of the bread.

Move the whole lot back to the frying pan to warm through again. When the egg is done, plonk it on top.

Almost ten years ago, I was an au pair for my aunt and her family in a village near Frankfurt am Main in Germany. On one occasion we went to a fair and picked up a bottle or two of Federweisser - very, very young wine. And my aunt made Zwiebelkuchen to go with it. Because that's what you do.

'Every family,' says my aunt, 'has its own recipe.' Hers is a lovely tangly oniony mess on a bread base.

The following recipe is not really Zwiebelkuchen. In fact, the book I got it out of calls it Farmhouse Potato Pie, but to me it's much more about the onions. It's in no way authentic, but I find that it's very evocative. It's a hassle, so I don't make it often, but it's gorgeous, so I do make it sometimes. It's the right sort of hassle (for me, at least): you can do a bit at a time, and go and have a bath while the base is chilling, etc, and the washing up isn't too bad if you do it as you go along.

I usually have it in the autumn, with cider, but it's worked very nicely in May, with a Spanish red wine. So there you go.

( Recipe under the cut )