Improvised version of Potatoes Florentine

I was tired of the same old potatoes and decided to improvise a dish by adding creamed spinach and tomatoes to see what happened. Of course, the dishes containing spinach acquire the posh "Florentine" title, which helps awaken the taste buds...

Ingredients

2 or 3 medium potatoes per person
Enough creamed spinach for a generous layer
Fresh cream
2 or 3 tomatoes, again to make a layer
Grated cheese (I used Emmenthal, but Cheddar works just as well)
Salt & pepper to taste

Preparation

Wash and/or peel the potatoes. Parboil them, slice them and reserve (at this point, I drizzled them with olive oil and kept them in the pan where they were cooked). Chop the spinach, season with salt & pepper and a pich of nutmeg, then add some fresh cream. Slice the tomatoes and grate the cheese. In an ovenproof dish, put a layer of creamed spinach on the bottom, a layer of tomatoes, a layer of grated cheese and finish with a layer of potatoes. Place in a pre-heated oven until the potatoes are golden. I cheated on the spinach and used frozen épinards à la crème. I was improvising, after all... I regret not using some garlic (that was very out of character!) and I think it would make the dish a lot better.

You may wish to alter the order of the layers (but not the potato layer) or add some grated cheese on top of the potatoes for the last ten minutes or so. Introduce any variations according to your own tastes and see where it takes you. The idea is to make potatoes more interesting...

Pumpkin, carrot and beetroot soup

Pumpkins are plentiful at this time of the year so I made a soup that will give you a bumper dose of the important anti-oxidant beta carotene. It was delicious!

Ingredients

Pumpkin, diced
Carrots
Beetroots
Trimmed leeks
A couple of potatoes
Dry white wine
Paprika
Chicken bouillon
Onion and garlic
A small amount of grated ginger
Salt & pepper to taste.

Preparation

Dice onions, chop garlic, cut all vegetables into chunks. I didn't give exact amounts of anything, you can vary according to taste and how much soup you're making. In a large pan, fry the onions until golden. Add the veggies, mix well, add the garlic, paprika, ginger, white wine and enough bouillon for the amount of vegetables. Adjust seasoning. Simmer for about 1 hour. Check that everything is cooked, whizz the lot in a blender, re-heat gently, taste and adjust seasoning and serve.

The colour of this soup is something to behold! I forgot to take a photo of my own soup, but the one in the photo above looks quite similar to what we enjoyed the other evening.

A sweet taste from my childhood

This a very simple sweet treat, ideal for birthday parties. In Brazil, no birthday party for children is complete without it. When we went to Brazil in 1994, our children were little and our elder son, who was around 10 years old, couldn't have enough of them. They are called "Brigadeiro."

More recently, I introduced the guests to Peter's birthday lunch party to these delights and I must say, they didn't last very long...

Ingredients

1 can of sweetened condensed milk (400g/14oz)
4 soupspoons of cocoa. (I used half a 200g/8oz bar of dark chocolate, i.e. 100g/4oz).
1 tablespoon of unsalted butter
Chocolated strands/ granulated chocolate

Preparation

Pour the condensed milk into a pan, mix the chocolate (straight if powder, melted in the microwave or bain marie if using the other option), add the butter. Cook it on low heat, mixing all the time until it comes off the bottom of the pan.

Spread the mix onto a plate and wait for it to be cool enough to be handled. Rub some butter onto hands, get a small portion of the mix with a teaspoon, roll into a ball, roll it into the chocolate strands and place it in a small paper cup. Do it until the mixture is finished. A more "grown-up" alternative is to roll the little balls into some cocoa instead of the chocolate strands.

You may have to wash your hands a few times during the rolling because your hands will become sticky and it will be difficult to roll the little balls properly.

Unless you're not a fan of chocolate, it's impossible to have only one of these...

I found a youtube demo, but the children use sweetened chocolate powder. I prefer it a bit less sweet...

Potato, leek and watercress soup

The chill in the weather has inspired me to make soups! This one turned out incredibly delicious although the ingredients are very simple.

Ingredients

8 medium potatoes
3 medium leeks, trimmed
A generous handful of watercress
1 large onion
2 cloves of garlic
Some parsley
Chicken bouillon (I used a very nice bouillon they sell in cubes over here)
Salt & pepper to taste

Preparation

Scrub and chop the potatoes into chunks, slice the leeks, dice the onions, chop the garlic. Fry the onions in a large pan with some olive oil. Add potatoes and leeks, mix well, add garlic, mix and add the bouillon. Add more water to nearly fill the pan. Season with salt & pepper to taste, reduce to a moderate simmer and cook for about 45 minutes. Add the watercress and parsley, just long enough to wilt, then put the lot into a blender (I had to do it in two batches), whizz it well, return to the pan to reheat it a little bit, taste and adjust seasoning and serve with crackers or French bread.

We had seven bowls of soup between the two of us (not all at once!).

Nutrition tip

Watercress is very good for cleansing the lungs and it's a rich source of vitamin C, calcium, folic acid, potassium and beta-carotene.

Leeks are rich in minerals: iron, potassium, magnesium, copper and calcium. They are low in calories and also contain a lot of different vitamins: A, B1, B2, B3, B9 (folic acid) and C.

Potatoes are rich in potassium (concentrated in the skin), vitamins A, B and flavonoids (good antioxidants). Without lashings of butter, potatoes are not fattening, as they are 70/80% water.

Not Cordon Bleu

Regina & Peter, still slim after all these years

If anybody thinks I'm some cordon-bleu chef, let me dispel the misconception. All the recipes that I describe as having cooked myself were borrowed from friends and family, collected from magazines or invented over 30-odd years of trial and error.

When I got married to my first husband in 1977, we were on a very tight budget (story of my life!) and we took in a lodger, who happened to be one of his old schoolmates doing a PhD in organic chemistry at University College London. Geoff paid for full board and arrived from UCL very hungry, eager for some culinary delights. Poor thing... After a few weeks of suffering in silence, he gave me a lovely present, which I still have to this day: a basic cookery book! Martin the husband had very numb tastebuds (his mother was a lousy cook), or else he chose to suffer in silence forever.

The improved cooking skills, sponsored by good old Geoff, didn't save that marriage, but at least Peter managed to marry a person capable of much more than boiling an egg. That book Geoff gave me is the only proper cookery book I own, apart from a recent one I was given at our local supermarket, a notebook where I write things down and put magazine cuttings, and a fundraising recipe booklet from our sons' school.


The recipes on this blog are simple, everyday fare. Blog is short for weblog. Well, since I started it, I've been photographing everything as it happens, what an appropriate term!

I found out that a limited budget can work wonders for the imagination. When I married Peter in 1984, money was extremely limited. We used to buy very economical cuts of meat, heaps of vegetables and I would invent all sorts of variations with the ingredients available. Nothing was wasted and what wasn't eaten on one occasion would be turned into soup. The years when we were a bit more affluent were the worst in terms of eating a balanced diet and I was less adventurous in the kitchen.

As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention."

Strange looking banana dessert

I promised the recipe for the gross looking banana dessert. It's quick, simple and very yummy. I thought it would be better to have the main photo of "before" bananas, as the "after" doesn't look terribly appealing...

Ingredients

1 1/2 ripe bananas per person
Sugar
Cinnamon
Fortified wine or liqueur (marsala, madeira, port, sherry, etc)

Preparation

The bananas have to be spotty. Bananas that are not ripe enough give very disappointing results. The starch turns into sugar as the bananas ripen and starchy bananas would have a "wooly" consistencyas opposed to soft and smooth. The taste is not that great either.

Cut the bananas in half, then halve again lengthwise. Place the pieces in a frying pan, sprinkle generously with sugar and a bit less generously with cinnamon. Add a bit of water and cook it on medium heat until the sugar has caramelized. Turn the bananas carefully to keep the pieces intact. When the whole thing looks brown, splash it with your preferred booze, sprinkle some more cinnamon over it, cover for a couple of minutes and serve.

I used something called Mandorla, which is Marsala wine flavoured with almonds, because it was all I had in the cupboard.

If you arrange the bananas carefully on a plate, they'll look far less disgusting than mine. A scoop of vanilla ice cream or a bit of cream would also help the appearance...

Thrifty chicken soup

The weather decided to cool down considerably, which calls for... soup!

When I cooked Caroline's Chicken about 10 days ago, I ended up with 12 thigh bones, still with some meat attached to them, so into the freezer they went, waiting for last night. Peter loves soup and was a happy bunny when offered a large bowl (or two) of turbo-charged chicken soup.

I used the veggies I had in the fridge. If I had more, I would have used them too. Leeks spring to mind...

Ingredients

Chicken bones (I used the 12 I saved, but you can use a lot less or it can be a saved chicken carcass from the Sunday roast, for example. You may also use a couple of thighs, not just the bones)
2 medium potatoes
2 carrots
2 medium turnips
1 large onion
2 small beetroots
Some tomato juice or purée (not much, just enough to add some tang and colour)
2 cloves of garlic
A generous dash of Worcestershire sauce
1 or 2 glasses of dry wine, white or rosé ( I used rosé because that's what I had in the fridge)
Herbs: I chose tarragon, but you may prefer parsley, oregano, basil, whatever tickles your tastebuds.
A sprinkling of ground cinnamon
Some sweet paprika
Salt & pepper to taste

1 cup of rice (more or less, depending on how much soup you're making. You want the grains swimming in the liquid, not a mushy mess)

Preparation

Chop the garlic and dice the onion. Dice all the vegetables. Fry the onions in some olive oil in a large pan until golden. Add the chicken and mix well. Add the garlic, the herbs, spices, salt, the Worcestershire sauce, stir some more. Add the wine to deglaze, add sufficient water, bring to the boil then reduce to a simmer. Taste, adjust and cook for around 1 hour.

Take the bones out, saving as much meat as possible. Discard the bones, then put everything in the blender, whizz very well and return to the pan (if you blender is powerful, don't worry about leaving some cartilage, it all disappears and it's good for you). Bring the soup back to a gentle boil, add the rice. Wait for a bit, reduce to a simmer and make sure there's no rice stuck to the bottom of the pan. It's a good idea to stir it occasionaly, so the rice doesn't stick to the bottom. When the rice is cooked, taste again, adjust seasoning and serve with French bread or crackers. You may use those tiny pasta shapes for soups as a variation.

The strange looking thing in the small bowl may look disgusting, but it's a very tasty banana dessert. I'll post the recipe later.

As I had all those bones, I ended up making a large pan of soup, but Peter had two large bowls last night (I had the one you see in the skewy photo above, not filled to the brim like Peter's) and we had the rest for lunch today, with crispy bacon, rye bread and some St Agur cheese on the side.

(One day I'll learn to photograph food like they do in the recipe books... but they cheat and spray all sorts of things on the food to make it look good.)