Family Feasts: Beans, Bangers & Cornbread

Some nights the pressures of a day at work make the prospects of a involved and intricate dinner rather unappealing, and something quick, easy and tasty is the order of the evening. I'm loathe to eat most things "right out of the box, and even when recovering from a crushing day, I still need to do "something" to my meals to save me from "meat and three veg" boiled pap.

I put the oven on, as there was still a chill in the air, and looked in the shelves. cans of baked and "four bean mix" beans stared up at me. Taking one of each, and grabbing the brown sugar, Keens curry powder, and some smoked paprika from the Oasis Bakery, I quickly tossed these together, in a casserole dish, and popped them into the oven.

With Thanksgiving coming up fast, I wanted to try out a variation of corn bread I had thought up whilst relabeling our dry-goods jars and stumbling upon our Spanish corn-flour (made with actual corn, rather than wheeten corn-flour. I quickly whipped up a batch of batter, substituting half the regular flour for corn-flour and plopped it into these cupcake moulds. Throwing this into the oven as well, I looked at the meat portion of the meal, and whilst this was cooking, set to defrosting something from Hoth, our chest freezer.

The addition of the corn-flour added a very new flavour to the muffins, much more reminiscent of tortilla taco-shells than the more familiar, sweet gritty cornbreads I've made with just polenta.

 So, thin supermarket sausages. Not the most appealing of gourmet options, but entirely salvageable with just a few easy additions. I first heated the pan, and ducked out to the veggie patch, and harvested a handful of rosemary sprigs. After a quick rinse, and a dollop of beef-lard in the pan, I sprinkled on the stripped rosemary leaves, and laid the sausages on top. A substantial sloshing of balsamic vinegar, and throwing the lid back on, I reduced the heat and left them to sit, shaking them about from time to time to avoid sticking and to cook them evenly.

When the beans and cornbread were ready, I gave the sausages a burst of heat, and a second slosh of balsamic vinegar, and deglazed the pan to get all the sticky reduction onto them.

All in all a tasty meal, from humble ingredients.

Family Feasts: Lamb with Mougrabieh (Big Couscous)

Here's something I put together the other night that turned out very tasty - Lamb and Mougrabieh (Big Couscous). Couscous is a family favourite, I always pick it up at a bulk foods store in every size they sell it - I love how the texture changes as it gets bigger. The big stuff like this is almost gnocchi-like - a pleasantly chewy texture that makes any meal hearty. 

I remembered to take photos while I was cooking! 

I started by searing the lamb - these are lamb chump chops (one of the cheapest cuts of lamb you can get, I think!), these were pre-marinaded in garlic and lemon. The brand is Campbells - no idea where we got this from, I just fished it out of our chest freezer!

 Then, I looked at what veggies we had on hand - broccoli, leek, carrots and potato as it turned out, so I coarsely chopped these (wanted them to be big chunky bites and not disintegrate, as I intended to let the lamb simmer).

In a second saucepan, I put the couscous on - following the instructions on the packet, I salted the water and let it come to the boil before putting the couscous in. We got this from the Oasis Bakery - so much more than a bakery, I'll talk more about this amazing place in a post soon.


 Then, I added water, stock cubes (Oxo brand) and left it to simmer until the lamb was falling off the bones.

 Just before serving, I strained and added the couscous to the dish, which soaked up all the delicious stock and changed it from a soup to a stew instantly.

This was well received by the hungry hordes, a tasty and filling meal for a cold night.

Family Feasts: Indian Style

For my first post here, I thought I would begin with a home-cooked meal I made for my family: my partners Omega, (my co-author here, and author of Fashion Adjacent) and Anastasia, Mz Anime (Omega's 15y/o daughter) and Tactical Baby (Omega and my 17m/o baby girl). Tactical Baby gets her name from my other blog, Apocalypse Equipped, check it out of that takes your fancy. We have a large household, with two housemates, and one night a week my other daughter, Triceratops Girl (4y/o) so between them, and frequent other visitors (like Anastasia) I like to have a variety of ingredients I can put a meal together out of and tailor for taste and number of mouths, on the fly. This is one such meal:


This is a red lentil dahhl that I put together by simply simmering dry lentils in a pan with water, adding more as it cooked, with a dash of a mixed Indian spice packet a colleague gifted me (it's in Hindi, so I can;t really tell you much about it, but I added it "to-taste" and kept it at the mild end of flavorsome. Once it was mostly cooked, I added dollops of "Smashed Cheese" dip we had gotten from the Oasis Bakery. I let it simmer further, till the cheese heated up, and served it sizzling in the pan.





The second dish was roughly chopped broccoli (stalks included, because I think they are quite tasty, and always try to use all available components of food). I braised this in a pan with rendered bacon fat, and once mostly cooked through, topped with the remains of the fabulous bacon-jam that friends of ours gifted us a while back, and we had been rationing. Tossing the broccoli through the jam coated it, and following deglazing the pan, I returned the brownings to the bowl for added crunchy flavours.

 The purple rice comes in a mix which included regular long-grain rice, split peas and "purple sticky rice" which I treat like wild rice, and generally cook in the microwave, at a 1 cup rice-mix to 3 cups of water ratio. It is a delightful, hearty, sticky dish, slightly sweet, and subtly flavoured. Perfect accompaniment for this meal, I thought.

Lastly, was the pre-marinated Tandoori mix butterflied chicken, (from Safeway), which I grilled. Before grilling, I also re-spiced this with a dry Tandoor spice mix that my same colleague had gifted me, to add to the flavour, and vary it from simply a "store-bought" meal. Butterflying the chicken makes it much easier to cook, I find, especially when getting a bunch of components together at once, whilst not wanting to run the oven. I also like grilling, because of the slight charring you can get to the edges and skin, which harkens back to the authenticity of cooking in a tandoor oven.

We had a lovely meal, no complaints from fussy teenager, and Tactical Baby ate with gusto.