I’m currently cooking roast vegetables, grilled lamb chops, gravy and mint sauce for tea.

We don’t have lamb very often, so this is a treat. It’s too expensive, and it’s easy enough to go for a roast chicken or roast beef dinner instead where the leftovers come in useful later in the week.

There’s another reason we don’t have lamb often, which I’ve only just remembered.

The smell of lamb cooking makes me heave.

Oops.

I’m long over due for having a recipe entry. For those that haven’t seen my recipes before, they’re not meant to be haute cuisine – just stuff I’ve cobbled together for an easy, hassle free dinner. If you’re already an excellent chef who knows how to experiment, then they probably aren’t going to be useful to you.

Anyway, we’ve been having the occasional frozen chicken pie for when I can’t be bothered to do much cooking, but the quality seems to be degrading everytime I buy them – this is my attempt at recreating them while having more control over the quality of meat that goes in ‘em.

Chicken and Mushroom Pie

Ingredients

295g can of condensed mushroom soup
½ of the above emptied can full of milk
3 chicken breasts, diced
150g closed cup mushrooms, quartered
1 tbsp olive oil
a sheet of ready rolled puff pastry
a bit more milk to brush on the top

Method

1. Preheat oven to 220°C (425°F Gas Mark 7)

2. Fry the diced chicken in a pan with the olive oil for around 5 minutes then add the mushrooms and fry for 5 minutes more.

3. Add the soup and the milk, stir in well and heat for a couple of minutes.

4. Pour contents into a 1.2L (2 pint) pie dish.

5. Stick pastry on top, cut around edges so that it matches the shape of the pie dish and either chuck away the spare or use it to create pretty patterns on the top if you’re feeling flush with time and creativity. Put a little hole in the top, press edges with a fork to seal and brush with milk.

5. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes.

6. Serve with new or mashed potatoes and lots of veg.

Serves: 4.

I’m no stranger to “interesting” product substitutions when purchasing weekly groceries via the Internet. I’ve had swaps ranging from nappies at three sizes larger than required, to a tiny vegetarian ready meal instead of the beef roasting joint we’d intended to feed three people on Sunday with and still have some leftovers for shepherds pie. All those pale into insignificance after last night’s Sainsbury’s delivery, however.

Along with the rest of my shopping, I’d ordered a jar of Uncle Ben’s Sweet and Sour sauce with extra pineapple for our lazy meal of the week. Obviously, a lot of people had been overcome with desire for a sweet & sour stirfry recently, as Sainsburys had none in stock. So they subbed it with …

… wait for it…

… a whole fresh pineapple.

Marvellous. Took me and the delivery drivers a good five minutes before we could stop laughing…

Cooking when you’re feeling less than 100% is never really an enjoyable experience, is it?

Today’s plan was to make a chicken casserole. Dead easy, I thought… chuck everything in the slow cooker first thing in the morning – hassle free and yummy meal by the evening. Except getting out of bed with this cold in the head wasn’t particularly appealing so this morning was more than a tad rushed.

Plan B. Chucking all the ingredients into a casserole dish and cooking it in the oven for an hour and a half instead. Great! Except that was picking up from school time and then it slipped out of my mind.

Plan C. No worries, we can still have a healthy meal. I’ll just ignore my primal fear of explosions and dig out the pressure cooker from the bottom of the cupboard – once that’s up to pressure, a delicious meal is ready in mere minutes!

I defrosted the chicken, chopped all the veg, got the stock and the wine ready. Next job was to fry the onions and give the chicken a bit of colour… then chuck everything in, on goes the lid and…

… ooooookay. Where has the safety valve gone and why isn’t it still in the lid? I turf out everything in the cupboard, all the kitchen drawers … nada. I have a sinking feeling that the last time I used the pressure cooker was before the new kitchen went in around February – in which case the valve could be anywhere by now.

So what was the healthy nutritious meal we had to nurse us all back to health? McDonalds! Oh well, cooking the casserole in the oven now, I shall fridge it overnight then reheat for tomorrow’s dinner – pretending I’m a domestic goddess for having pre-prepared the meal so far in advance…

For those of you who are experts at throwing things together and getting something edible, this recipe will probably be a “well, duh!” one for you. If like me, though, you need to check the book for timings whenever you want to have a soft-boiled egg and are always short of ideas for quick and easy children’s lunches, this is what I came up with today…

Sticky savoury chicken rice

Ingredients

100g long grain rice
1 chicken stock cube
½ onion
15g butter or 1tbs olive oil to fry the onion
50g frozen peas
100g cooked chicken breast, minced (a quick zap in the baby blender is perfect)

Method

1. Dissolve the stock cube in ¾ pint boiling water, place in a saucepan with the rice and simmer for 10 mins. Meanwhile, gently fry the onion until softened (about 3 mins)

2. Give the rice a good stir, add in the fried onion and the frozen peas. Cook for 5 mins – the water should be getting nicely absorbed now, so will probably need the occasional stir to stop it sticking on the bottom.

3. Turn off the heat and stir in the minced cooked chicken really well. Should make a nice sticky mixture!

Serves: 1 adult & 2 small children.

You know you’re going a bit overboard with foodiness when:

• you have more gruyere cheese in the fridge than cheddar

• you have the following exchange with your child.
  AKRA JR: Have we had this before?
  ME (beaming at the thought he noticed): Yes, yes we have.
  AKRA JR: So…. why are we having it again, then?
  (oops, maybe we’ve been having a little too much variety recently)

• you go ahead and cook a roast dinner when it’s 31 degrees celcius outside…
• when it takes a couple of hours and every cookbook you own to plan the food shopping for the week.
• when not only does no supermarket and no local shop stock the VITAL ingredient you need, everyone looks blank when you ask if they stock it. (mirin – it isn’t *that* rare, is it?!)

You know, one of the things I worried about when drastically cutting down on our processed food intake was all the extra time it would take for preparation and cooking. And you know what? I was right! (*gasp* – bet you thought I was going to tell you it was all rosy and didn’t take any extra time at all, didn’t you?).

But I’m going with the flow. Have just “budgeted” the extra time into the day – and as my expectations of the time needed has changed, I no longer feel rushed or stressed about it. The kids cope fine with me starting dinner a little earlier (well, they get more TV time out of the deal, don’t they *grin*), and I’m actually starting to enjoy cooking again.

Look at the benefits. I get completely guilt-free “me” time while preparing the evening meal. I can daydream, plan, review the day with the kids safely blocked out of the kitchen with a stairgate (so within hearing range, but pretty much out from under my feet). I get to really appreciate the food that I’m cooking – I’m getting better at understanding how “food” works and my smell and taste senses are getting a proper workout. Mostly it’s not stuff you can leave (although some is), so I don’t feel like I have to go out and rejoin the kids, so I clear up as I go instead – empty the dishwasher ready, put all the cooking utensils straight in there when I’ve used them, have the table laid ready, all so there’s more time for me later. I can even throw open the backdoor and have a quick wander outside if I like. If I’m really lucky, I can get quite a large chunk of a book read in between chopping, stirring, waiting for things to simmer. Today I even planned this blog post.

And best of all, I can make double quantities and freeze for when I feel like a “convenience” day again…

Am I the only one that has to resist temptation to set up a game of Pick Up Sticks whenever I get the dried spaghetti out for cooking? Ah, that’d be just me then, eh?

Just a quickie…

… is a recipe with oyster sauce in it suitable for a one year old?

Letters to the Editor

April 19, 2005

School dinners
From Mr Gareth Rowan

Sir, A letter from my daughter’s primary school in Essex reads:

Change to the School Menu
In response to recent publicity, “Turkey Twizzlers” have been taken off the school menu and replaced by “Chicken Teddies”.