A friend of mine was visiting relatives recently when he found himself sitting in front of TV with a distant cousin he had hardly seen since she was a child. She was watching a cookery programme, not sure which one, but she was spellbound, unavailable for conversation and completely absorbed.

When the programme ended he asked her if she enjoyed these kind of shows.

“I absolutely love them, I watch them all.”
“So, you must be a pretty good cook then?” he commented.
“Oh no, I hate cooking, I never cook at all” was her extraordinary reply.

I wonder how unusual she is? I know I am just as addicted to food on TV as she is – my current obsession is Masterchef, The Professionals and everyone knows not to even try speaking to me if Heston Blumenthal appears – but in truth I very rarely replicate precisely what I see on the screen.

I do pick up ideas though, and take away some tips, from these shows, but often adapt recipes to what’s readily available and also what’s low carb.

A few weeks ago on Saturday Kitchen on BBC, made Beef Koftas with Halloumi and Fig Salad, which looked just yum. So I had a go at something similar yesterday, but instead of fig (not low carb) and halloumi (couldn’t find it) tried an avocado and fried mozzarella salad instead. I also changed the beef recipe a bit.

So what I ended up with was Beef Koftas with Mozzarella and Avocado Salad and Cucumber Dressing – maybe not the same, but I’d never have made it if I hadn’t watched that programme.

There are quite a few potentially expensive ingredients making up this dish – but since the beef, avocado, mozzarella and yoghurt are all Lidl’s it ends up fairly frugal. In fact everything except the cumin and coriander came from Lidl.

First the Koftas. Here’s what I used to serve 2 people:

• 1/2 lb minced beef
• 2 cloves garlic, very finely chopped
• 1/2 small onion, very finely chopped
• 1/2 red chili, very finely chopped
• Very generous pinch coriander powder
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• Salt and black pepper

Mix everything together well, divide into four and then form each portion into sort of sausages on skewers. I probably should have made them less fat than I did.

Fry these on a griddle pan or grill them under a hot grill.

Meanwhile make the dressing. This makes what looks like too much dressing, and I thought we’d have left overs. Not so, it was really tasty and we ate the lot:

• 1 tub Lidl Organic full fat yoghurt
• 5 inches of Cucumber
• 1/2 red chili
• 1 bulb Chinese garlic (this sort, which has a mild shallot-like garlic that is good raw)
• 1 scallion

Peel the cucumber and scrape out most of the seeds (they make the dressing too sloppy). Chop the cucumber into fine dice. Chop the scallion, garlic and chili finely, and everything with the yoghurt. Leave in the fridge to chill.

Make the salad at the last minute, because you want the mozzarella still hot:

• 1 pack Lidl (or any) Mozzarella, sliced
• 1 avocado
• Mixed leaves
• Lemon
• Olive oil

Peel and slice the avocado, squeeze over a little lemon juice and toss in a teaspoon of olive oil. Add a small amount of oil to a pan and heat until it starts to smoke. Add the mozzarella two or three slices at a time, don’t overcrowd the pan or it will cool down and the cheese will melt instead of frying. It cooks very quickly. Turn over after about 30 seconds. Repeat until all slices are cooked.

Toss the cheese and avocado together and serve on a bed of leaves alongside the Koftas with the cucumber dressing on the side.

Let me tell you now that the revelation here was the salad, which was wonderful, and I’ve never even thought of frying mozzarella before. It’s gorgeous, went very well with the Koftas and the hot mozzarella with the cool avocado and dressing was a great combination. I’ll be doing that again.

Tags: Avocado, Beef, Mozzarella, Recipes, TV food
Posted in Recipes, TV | 4 Comments »

In spite of the best laid plans we never made it to Waterford and the Terra Madre events yesterday – sometimes life just happens. Oh well. But I am going to make it to Cork tonight for the Geek Girl Dinner, come hell or high water. Yeah!

My son thinks this is hilarious – that his Mum is actually happy to be called a ‘geek’. I haven’t explained to him that it’s really the ‘girl’ bit that is making me smile.

But I had planned to be away yesterday and so also planned to put something in the oven before we left that would be ready and waiting on our return. This chili can be happily left cooking slowly on a low heat for hours, in fact it’s almost a case of the longer the better.

It’s a hearty and warming dinner I’d normally consider most suitable for the depths of Winter, so that basically covers the months of September-August in Ireland.

1 lb round steak or stewing steak, cut into cubes
1/2 a Lidl Chorizo
2 onions
4 cloves garlic
2 chili peppers, as hot as you like ‘em!
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons chili powder
2 teaspoons dark unsweetened cocoa powder
A few basil leaves
1 parsnip
Piece of turnip about the size of an apple
Olive oil
1/2 pint Beef stock *

* If you don’t have homemade beef stock and cannot find either very low salt or, preferably, no salt stock cubes, leave this out and just use water instead. Otherwise, because of the chorizo, the chili will end up way too salty.

Put some olive oil into a large pan over a hot ring. Brown the beef in two batches, removing them to a deep ovenproof dish with a lid once they are done.

Peel the casing off the chorizo – which is a fiddly job, but nessessary. Cut into slices about 1/2-3/4 inches thick. Add some more oil to the pan and toss the chorizo and the chopped onion in this until the onion is soft. Towards the end add the chopped garlic and chopped chilis. Add to the beef.

Add the tomatoes, chili powder, coriander, cumin, chili powder and cocoa to the beef/chorizo and stir well. Chop the basil (I used about 10 leaves) and stir it in. Finely grate the parsnip and turnip and mix through. These may look strange, but they completely dissolve into the sauce with slow cooking and make it thick and unctuous and add a really nice mild sweetness.

Add the half pint of stock or water. Cover and put into an oven pre-heated to 180° C. Immediately reduce the oven temperature to 120° C. Leave it there for 4-5 hours. You can stir it now and then if you are around, but it’s not strictly necessary.

The result will be a dark chili, with meltingly tender meat and a rich sauce that has lots of heat and flavour. Perfect to come home to after a day away.

We had this with cheesy spinach and spicy roast turnip, with some grated cheese and sour cream on top of the chili.

Tags: Beef, Chorizo, Recipes
Posted in Low carb, Recipes | 5 Comments »

Well, so far so good! Our total bill for food today was a modest €6.01, we ate very well indeed and there are leftovers.

Breakfast was boiled egg with sunflower bread toast – one slice for him, a half slice for me, but they are large and filling slices.

Lunch was a salad, made with one third of the Chorizo (about 4 inches each), radishes, a slice of red pepper and of onion, one third of the cos lettuce and a tomato each, plus a slice of seseme crispbread. We had a handful of peanuts each to follow, which I actually ate as a snack in the afternoon.

Dinner was beef stuffed cabbage rolls with tomato sauce, accompanied by stir fried sugar snap peas.

This was both delicious and very filling, so filling that there are two little parcels left over and I’ll be very happy to have them for lunch tomorrow.

It’s a bit time consuming to prepare, not in the making as much as in the cooking, as most of the time it’s just sitting in the oven. Here’s how it’s made.

4 large savoy cabbage leaves (the outside ones most people discard)
1 portion of precooked beef mix, thawed
1 cup precooked tomato soup, thawed
1 raw egg, lightly beaten
2 baby new potatoes
3/4 onion
I teaspoon Worcester sauce (optional)
1/2 pack mozzarella
1.5 oz mature cheddar
A little olive oil
Seasoning of your choice

Sugar Snap Peas
1/4 Onion
A few sesame seeds, if you have them

1. Blanch the Cabbage
Drop the cabbage leaves into a saucepan of boiling salted water and boil for 3-4 minutes. Remove and immediately plunge into a bowl of cold water, then drain.

2. Prepare the Filling

Cut off 1/4 of the onion and leave aside for later, then finely chop the rest. Peel and chop the potato into small dice. Put some olive oil in a pan and gently fry the onion and potato dice until the potato is just begining to soften.

Meanwhile, put the beef mix into a bowl, season with salt, pepper and whatever else you like, I used paprika and a little garlic powder, then mix though the egg. When the onion and potato are done, allow them to cool a little then mix into the beef.

3. Stuff the Cabbage
Place the cabbage leaves flat. I ended up with 6 pieces of cabbage because two of the leaves were truly huge, so I split them.

Divide the beef mix between the leaves, then roll the leaves up so that they fully, and fairly tightly, contain their stuffing. Secure each roll with a toothpick if they are inclined to unravel, but mine didn’t.

Aside: I got a present of the wooden board in the picture on the left, which has a depression just the right size for sitting the cabbage leaves in while stuffing them – which made me ridiculously happy in a cook-loves-gadgets kind of a way.

4. Cook the Rolls
Pour the thawed tomato soup and the Worcester sauce, if you are using it, into an oven proof dish just big enough to fit all the cabbage rolls.

Arrange the rolls in the dish in a single layer. If your dish has a lid, put it on, otherwise cover the dish with tinfoil. Place in a moderate oven (175 C) for 40 mins. Then remove the lid/tinfoil and return to the oven uncovered for another 15 mins.

While the cabbage rolls are finishing, break up the mozzarella roughly and grate the cheddar. Sprinkle the cheese both over the top of the cabbage rolls and return to the oven for about 5 mins, or until the cheese is bubbling.

5. Serve and Eat
The last five minutes is time enough to prepare the veg. I sliced the sugar-snap peas lengthways and stir-fried them with the remaining 1/4 onion, very thinly sliced. They only need about 2-3 mins of cooking, you want them still crisp. If you have some sesame seeds, throw them in for the last minute or so. I completely forgot to photograph these – we were hungry!

Cost: Mince mix €1.26; tomato soup 25c; egg 14c; onion 10c; potatoes 5c; peas 83c; cabbage: 33c; mozzarella: 37c; cheddar: 38c
Total: €3.71

Tags: Beef, Cabbage, Chorizo, Recipes, €50 Challenge
Posted in Recipes, €50 Challenge | 6 Comments »

It kind of goes without saying that eating on a tight budget requires at least some degree of planning. It also helps if you can do at least some cooking in advance, if only to avoid the temptation, after a hard day’s work, to blow the budget in the interests of getting food fast and with minimal effort.

So I spent a couple of hours on Sunday getting myself organised.

Some of this involved very minor chores:

1. Separate the turkey into 2 bags of 2 portions each and freeze.
2. Cut the 400g of cheddar into 8 equal(ish) parts.
3. Remove (but don’t discard) the outside leaves of the cabbage. Cut out (but don’t discard) the thick stems from these leaves, then store the remaining leaves in the fridge.
4. Sliced up the rest of the cabbage finely and store in a sealed container in the fridge.
5. Remove (but don’t discard) the stalks of the broccoli, divide into florets and store in the fridge. Sliced broccoli stalks are great in a stir fry and also make an excellent soup ingredient.

Most of the preparation time involved cooking the minced beef, which will form the basis for 3 dinners this week, and making some soup for the freezer. The two extremely cheap recipes below are, I hope, the main things that will keep me on track this week.

Beef & Tomato Base

This isn’t a recipe for a finished dish, so if it looks as though it’s lacking something in the picture below, that’s because it is! What you end up with is a basic cooked beef mix that can then be used as a base for other recipes and which freezes very well.

800g minced beef
1 large onion
2 stick celery
1/4 red pepper
Garlic to taste (I used 3 bulbs of Chinese Garlic)
1 tin plum tomatoes
Salt and black pepper

1. Prepare the Beef
Fry the beef until it is well browned. I did this in three batches, otherwise there is too much meat in the pan for it to brown properly. As each batch is cooked remove to a dish and set aside.

2. Prepare the Veg
While the beef is browning, chop the onion, pepper, celery and garlic into small pieces. When the beef is done, add all except the garlic into the pan, with a little olive oil, and cook gently till the onion is just transparent. Then add the garlic and the tin of tomato. Season with salt and pepper.

3. Cook the Sauce
Put everything into a large oven proof dish with a well fitting lid. Mix very well. Cover and put into a low oven (140 C) then forget all about it for 3 hours. You can stir periodically if you like, but it isn’t strictly necessary.

This results in a rich meaty sauce, which smells wonderful. Allow it to cool completely, then divide into three equal portions. Freeze two, keep one in the fridge for tomorrow.

Cost Beef €2.89; Onion 10c; Pepper 22c; Celery 20c; Garlic 13c; Tomatoes 25c.
Total: €3.79, or about €1.26 per portion.

Note: I’ll be honest, I don’t usually buy Lidl mince, it is a little fatty. But it tasted very good when it was done and it was extremely cheap.

Spicy Tomato & Veg Soup

This is where I used up all the bits of the veg that I trimmed off but didn’t discard earlier.

1 Onion
5 baby new potatoes, peeled
1/2 Red Pepper
2 stick celery
Stalks of 2 heads of broccoli
Stems of cabbage
1 carrot
Garlic to taste (2 bulbs in my case)
All the above should be chopped roughly
1 tin plum tomatoes
1 tablespoon red pesto
1.5 pints chicken stock
Salt, pepper, paprika and chili powder to taste
Olive oil or butter

Note: Carrot wasn’t on my shopping list, but there was one rather tired looking one in the fridge so I chucked it in. I always have concentrated homemade chicken stock frozen in ice cube bags, but you can use a cube.

1. Prepare veg
Put a little olive oil or butter in a pan and gently fry the chopped onion, potato, carrot, pepper, celery, cabbage stalks and broccoli stems until the onion is just transparent. Keep the hear low – you don’t want the veg to brown. Add the garlic for the last minute or so.

2. Cook Soup
Put the prepared veg along with the tin of tomatoes and the stock into a saucepan, bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer gently for 20-30 minutes. Use the broccoli bits as to decide when it’s done – they should squash easily when pressed with the back of a spoon.

3. Zap It
When it’s done, remove from the heat and blend everything. I use a stick blender, but you could just as easily throw the lot into a food processor or blender and zap.

4. Season
Return the blended soup to the saucepan, add the pesto and the seasoning to taste, then simmer for about 5 minutes more. Allow to cool.

5. Freeze
I freeze this in plastic cups covered in clingfilm, which makes it easy to defrost in portion sizes. I got 8 cups, each a little over 1/3rd pint, of good thick soup from the above recipe – actually I had a half cup over, which I just chucked into the beef mix above.

To defrost, squeeze from the cups into a saucepan and heat.

Cost: I’m not going to break it all down – it’s kinda hard to put a price on broccoli and cabbage stalks! – but it comes to under €2.00 for the lot, or about 25c per portion.

Tags: Beef, Recipes, Soup, Tomato, €50 Challenge
Posted in Recipes, €50 Challenge | 13 Comments »