weekly_food_challenge | Entries tagged with fruit: citrus: lemon

Mood: hungry

So glad I've been able to join in with the challenge this week - I kept planning to every time a new challenge was posted, but things have been busy and I've not got round to it. But, yes, it's December, the theme is PIES, so obviously I made mince pies.

I've been making these every year for about 8 or 9 years. I make both the mince meat and the pastry myself and both recipes are pretty simple. Boozy mincemeat recipe is here, and unbelievably easy mince pies (pastry) recipe is here. I can recommend being liberal with the booze in the mincemeat recipe. For the pastry recipe, I pretty much make it as per the recipe - lots of people in the comments seem to add some water/an egg/some milk to the pastry so they can roll it out. Yes, it is a little bit faffy to press the pastry into the tins, but I would venture no more faffy than rolling out and cutting pastry, then lining each hole of the tin. Plus it is worth it for very buttery, short pastry. The thing that I do slightly differently is that I use a muffin tin and make 12 large deep-filled mince pies, rather than 18 smaller ones. I also don't weigh out the mincemeat, I just fill each pie up with as much filling as possible.

Icing sugar is also optional. I've found that friends and family actually like the 'rustic' look of these mince pies. They're not going to win any awards for presentation, but they taste damn good.

norfolkian

Mood: tired

The cookbook I hadn't used yet was one I got for Christmas: Jack Monroe's A Year in 120 Recipes. I like Jack Monroe's recipes because they use easy to source ingredients and are often quite simple to make but tasty. For whatever reason, I just hadn't got round to cooking any recipes from it yet.

I ended up making quite a few changes, partly to do with availability of ingredients (e.g., the fresh tomatoes I bought annoyingly had started to go mouldy even though I only got them at the weekend) and partly because it was after work and I was tired (e.g., the recipe says to roast the aubergine in the oven then add the flesh to the sauce at the end, but I just chopped it up and did it all in the same pot).

So, this is based on Smoky aubergine, tomato and red lentil pasta sauce from the above book, but with my changes included. It was filling and pretty tasty.

Serves 2

Ingredients
1 tsp olive oil
1 onion, peeled and diced
1 small green pepper, deseed and diced
1 small aubergine, diced into 2cm cubes
2 large garlic cloves, chopped or crushed
a couple of pinches of dried chilli flakes
1 tsp dried mixed herbs
75g dried red lentils
400g tin chopped tomatoes
zest and juice of half a lemon
salt and pepper

Method
1. Heat the oil in a saucepan and add the onion. Cook gently for 5 - 10 minutes until starting to soften. Add the green pepper and aubergine and cook for a few minutes. Then add the garlic, chilli flakes and mixed herbs and cook for another minute or two.
2. Wash the lentils and then add to the pan. Stir, then add the chopped tomatoes, the lemon and about 200ml water.
3. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 25-30 minutes until the lentils are soft and the liquid has reduced into a thick sauce (add more water if it starts to dry out).
4. Season with salt and pepper and serve with the pasta of your choice.

Some grated cheese would be lovely on this too, but I didn't have any cheese in the fridge. Booooo.

pseudomonas

This is a dish I class as comfort food, and it's one from my mum. My mother doesn't just make soup, she believes in it. It's one of those things she checks up on — "have you been making any soup lately?". This soup is a bit of a departure from the vegetable-based norm.

Chop half an onion finely; sweat in a little oil until translucent. Add a handful of basmati rice, and keep frying until the rice is turning translucent too.
Add vegetable stock to the pan, and simmer until the rice is cooked.
Meanwhile, beat the juice of half a lemon with an egg.
When the rice is cooked, turn off the heat, and once the soup has come off the boil, gently stir the egg-and-lemon mixture in. It should thicken the soup; there might be a few strands of omelette formed, and that's OK too.

Serves one fairly greedy

pseudomonas. Don't try to make extra, it won't keep.

el_staplador

The book calls this 'summer lemon cake', but it's January and I'm in the Northern hemisphere, so...

Ingredients

3 eggs
90g/3oz caster sugar
60g/2oz plain flour
30g/1oz cornflour
30g/1oz butter
grated rind of one lemon

Equipment

round cake tin, 20cm/8"
greaseproof paper
saucepan or two
heatproof mixing bowl (I just about got away with a pudding basin. Just about.) that will fit over the saucepan in such a manner that you can remove it easily when it's hot.
whisk (essential - I used a rotary whisk, which was just about manageable. We don't have an electric whisk. I wouldn't have liked to try it with a balloon whisk or anything less technologically advanced)
sieve
spatula
wire rack
oven
hob

Method

Preheat the oven to 180degC/350degF/gas 4. Grease and line the cake tin.

Heat water in the saucepan. When it boils, turn it down to simmer. Add the eggs and sugar to the mixing bowl and put it over the pan of simmering water. Whisk until thick and pale.

Remove from the heat and keep whisking. Meanwhile, melt the butter (I did this by tipping out the water from the saucepan and using the residual heat, though had I been making this for company I might have used a second pan). When the egg mixture gets thick enough that the whisk leaves a trail when you take it out of the mixture, sift the flour and cornflour over the surface and add the butter and lemon rind. Fold in with the spatula (I found that the flour all sank to the bottom so I had to fold in quite thoroughly), pour the mixture into the prepared tin, and bake for 35-40 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

After all that whisking I couldn't face making the icing as instructed ('beat 5oz butter until fluffy' was the least of it) so just made up some glacé icing with the lemon juice, but a more buttery icing would have worked better. It definitely needs something to keep it moist.

davegodfrey

Take a lump of dead bird. It doesn't particularly matter what kind of dead bird. Chicken generally works best, as its available in small enough lumps, and doesn't have a particularly delicate flavour that would be overwhelmed by what's about to happen to it. The only thing that is essential is that you have the skin still on it.

Get a roasting dish that's big enough for your chicken lumps, and plonk them in, skin side up. Squeeze an appropriate number of lemons or limes and add the juice to the pan. If cooking more than two you'll probably need more than one (and you'll almost certainly need more than one lime). You'll want a reasonable quantity sloshing around the dish. Sprinkle some salt over the skins (it helps them crisp up) and liberally dust with seasonings of your choice- paprika, chilli powder, etc. (This is exactly the right time for the Dave Lister chilli dosing technique). Roast in the oven for about 25 minutes or so (exact times will vary depending on size and type of poultry lump, and you may have to twiddle with the heat to get the skin to be properly crispy (although the salt helps in that respect).

Serve with a baked potato, and seasonal vegetables, and if you add as much chilli powder as I do, I'd suggest either an IPA or a good quality lager (Budvar, Peroni, etc) to cool you down afterwards.

At this point we face a dilemma. You can either discard the juices from the pan. Or you can use them to make really sour gravy that basically tastes of lemon juice and brown. If anyone has any ideas about how to solve this last problem I'd really like to hear it, because it ought to be a good base for a sauce.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Weekly Food Challenge

A challenge for cooks every Wednesday

Entries tagged with fruit: citrus: lemon

Challenge 63: PIES! - Mince Pies

Challenge 46: Unused cookbook - Aubergine, tomato and red lentil pasta sauce

Challenge #31: Egg and lemon soup

Challenge 28: lemon cake

Lemon Roasted Poultry

Subscribe

Expand Folds

Links

Most Popular Tags

December 2018

Style Credit