MaW’s Blog

Some people might think this is a post about being nice to redheads. It isn’t, although I suppose I could write something about the ridiculousness of that particular much-perpetuated image.

No, this is about drink!

Non-alcoholic, before you get too excited. It’s quite simple really. It goes like this:

1. take a decently-sized piece of fresh ginger
2. peel it
3. slice it thinly
4. tip it into a small saucepan with some water and a generous amount of sugar
5. heat it gently, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar to form a syrup
6. continue to cook gently until it tastes quite strongly gingery
7. add more sugar if it doesn’t seem syrupy enough
8. strain
9. allow to cool a bit, then place into a jar, bottle or other suitable lidded storage vessel

When you want to drink it, dilute some down with water. For strength, you’re aiming for something like commercial ‘high juice’ squashes. You could make it weaker, but then you just need a bigger helping in each glassful.

I have no idea how long this keeps, but if you make the syrup really sugary it should keep until you drink it, because it’ll get drunk fast, sugar’s a preservative and ginger’s antibacterial.

I wandered into the Co-op after my recorder lesson last night looking vaguely for something to have for dinner, as I’d not really made any plans and dislike doing rapid defrosts in the microwave of things which I forgot to get out earlier. The Chinese takeaway is closed on Tuesdays, so I was saved from that particular vice at least.

Now the Co-op have a reasonably-sized chiller cabinet full of ready meals, and another one that’s usually pretty devoid of uncooked meat and fish products, because their selection is typically terrible. Imagine my surprise when I found there some very nice-looking packs of sirloin steak (British, too) for a slight reduction in price. Okay so it’s still not cheap, but I’ve not had steak for ages…

Five minutes later the steak was mine (and an 8 for 6 pack of cans of Coca-Cola, a weakness I should probably do something about). Ten minutes after that I was home, and spent the next forty-five minutes or so battling with the SNS connection, which has switched to a new billing system and thus needed complete re-registration, required the installation of anti-virus and anti-spyware software and generally made itself a pain. I should’ve registered from Linux, it might have given me less hassle that way.

So eventually I made it into the kitchen, put one of the two steaks in the pack in the freezer for another day, and stuck the other one in my wonderful frying pan, which had been heated until rather hot. No oil necessary. Just put it in and leave it for a number of minutes, turn it over, leave it for another number of minutes, then remove it to a warm place to rest. The number of minutes of course depends on how bleeding you like your steaks (please don’t think I’m trying to tell you how to cook a steak, no doubt all my readers already know. I’m just telling you how I did it for the purposes of documentation). I was aiming for slightly pink, which is my usual preference, but by the time I’d finished cooking some onions in the pan (exploiting the juices which leaked out of the steak after it had rested for a little for extra flavour) and toasting a couple of rolls drizzled with olive oil, the steak was rather less pink than intended. Not steak and chips I know, but I don’t have a deep fat fryer. Or any potatoes, for that matter.

And there I had it. The steak had gone just past pink and was the very very earliest stage of being brown all the way through, but it was still surprisingly tender and generally extremely fantastic. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the other piece, but I suspect it might be something similar, although it may also involve the creation of a sauce. I’m quite keen on expanding my sauce-making skills.

Does anybody know any good sauces to have with steak that don’t involve cream? I’m not a huge fan of creamy sauces, but the real reason to avoid it is that it’s a pain to get cream and keep it in the fridge, which has these days virtually no space for me at all.

Speaking of that, does anybody know how much little fridges are?

I think I’m going to post more about what I cook and eat. So here’s another recipe for something you probably all know how to make already anyway. All quantities are approximate as I just guess, and chilli doesn’t depend too much on exactly quantities anyway — at least, not how I make it.

Serves 5-7 depending on how hungry you are

500g beef mince
2 tins peeled tomatoes
2 tins red kidney beans
1 large pepper (green is best I find, but I had to use red as it was the only colour I had)
1 large white or red onion
1 tablespoon of chilli puree
1 tablespoon of whole cumin seeds
2 beef Oxo cubes (or alternative beef stock powder)
1 tablespoon caster or granulated sugar
2 tablespoons tomato puree
Olive oil, for frying

Heat a large saucepan. When it’s hot, toast the cumin seeds for a couple of minutes (obviously stop if they start smoking), then tip them into a pestle and mortar and grind to a powder. If you’re feeling lazy, cumin powder would probably do, but I find the powder loses its potency incredibly rapidly so cumin seeds are better for storage.

Chop the onion into pieces about 8mm by 20mm. Fry gently in the olive oil for a few minutes, then add the beef mince and stir occasionally to allow the mince to brown.

Tip the beans into a seive and rinse under the tap, then add them to the pan. If you’ve got tins of chopped tomatoes, tip them straight into the pan, but if you have whole ones, pour the juice into the pan and chop the tomatoes before adding them too.

Add the chilli puree, tomato puree, sugar and cumin. Crumble the Oxo cubes into the pan and give everything a good stir, then lower the heat to a gentle simmer and allow to cook for about an hour.

Then eat it. It’s good served with rice, or garlic bread, or pitta bread, or anything else you fancy. Particularly with a nice green salad.

It also freezes superbly, and once reheated it tastes even better. Honest!

Otherwise known as dinner.

We tried guinea fowl for the first time today. The recipe was semi-made-up and worked very nicely. Here we go:

Take one guinea fowl. Plucked, gutted and prepared for eating, preferably.

Put it in a roasting tin which has a cover, breast up. Lay some rashers of bacon over it, and brush it with some olive oil.

Take two red onions. Peel and chop into largeish chunks. Place these around the guinea fowl in the roasting tin.

Put the tin in the oven at 200 degrees centigrade for twenty minutes. Then reduce the heat to 160 until the bird is cooked.

While that’s cooking, prepare some potatoes and put them in a tin with some olive oil. Once the heat is reduced, put them in the oven to roast.

When the bird is done, put it on a carving board to rest. Take the roasting tin and put it on the hob. Add a few handfuls of chopped dried apricots, chopped prunes, raisins and chopped mushrooms. Take the bacon from the bird’s breast and cut it up. Place that in the tin too, and fry off the mushrooms.

Add some water and some jam or jelly of some sort — we used some blackcurrant jelly, and the remains of some rather nice raspberry jam which was nearly all gone. Let it boil a bit, and add some cornflower paste to thicken, and a bit of balsamic vinegar. Let the flour cook out.

When the sauce is done, carve up the bird, pour the sauce over it and serve with the potatoes and any vegetables you fancy. We used green beans picked fresh from the garden.

Anyway, guinea fowl is nice. I strongly recommend it.