lunch

Borscht

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borscht

Bert was up all night, tossing and turning. Weren’t we all? He came into our bed at 4am, and was wriggling around busily all night. I woke up to find that he’d carefully arranged Ray the mini dog, Teddy, Didda Ra the dinosaur and Bert Ted (narcissistic, Bert?) along the end of the bed in a straight line.

Here’s a European soup for a sad day. As a friend of mine commented on Facebook, laugh now – tomorrow there will be no salami!

Serves 4

Glug olive oil

2 large cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped

A small onion, peeled and chopped

5 fresh beetroot, peeled and chopped

4 small pototoes, peeled and chopped

1 chicken stock cube

Water from the kettle

Salt and pepper to taste

Good glug double cream – about 50ml

1 dessert spoon creamed horseradish

1 small bunch coriander – chopped

Sweat the onion and garlic in the oil, then add the veg and cook for another couple of minutes. Cover with hot water from the kettle, season and crumble in the stock cube. Cook for around 20 minutes, till tender. The beetroot takes longer to cook than the potato, so cut it smaller.

Blend and stir through the cream and horseradish and then sprinkle on the chopped coriander. Serve with bread and cheese.

 

 

Hot and sour soup

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hot and sour

Another one for the menotbert section. This soup is basically medicine.

Serves 2

Glug of flavourless oil, like walnut or groundnut oil

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1/2 teaspoon dried chili flakes

6 mushrooms, sliced

A handful of veg to go with the mushrooms, sliced – spring greens, carrots, chinese leaf…

3 tablespoons soy sauce

4 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

1 teaspoon honey

500ml chicken stock

3 nests egg noodles, or a packet of fresh ones

Fry the veg, garlic and chil in the oil till softened, then add the soy, vinegar and honey. Cook for a few seconds and add the stock and noodles and cook till the noodles are soft.

I do think you need home made chicken stock for this since it’s so much about the broth. This soup just feels like it’s doing you good.

We assume that Bert’s eating fish fingers with his mates at nursery as we eat this, but who knows, maybe he’s slurping up spicy noodle soup.

 

Fish stew

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fish stew

Grumpy face. Got even grumpier in the few seconds after this photo was taken.

I looked at the fish pie mix in the fridge, thought about yet another fish pie and felt uninspired. This is a simplified version of a bouillabaisse.

Serves 3

1 glug olive oil

1 dessert spoon butter

1 onion, chopped

2 big garlic cloves, crushed

A few tarragon leaves, chopped (or some dried tarragon)

1 yellow pepper, roughly chopped

2 carrots, roughly chopped

1 can chopped tomatoes

1 dessert spoon tomato puree

1 pinch saffron

Salt and pepper

1 fish pie mix (salmon, cod, smoked fish)

Squeeze of the juice of half a lemon (another good reason to have a G&T later)

1 dessert spoon of butter

Melt the butter and oil and then cook the onion and garlic gently till transparent, then add the tarragon, veg, saffron, seasoning, tomato puree and tinned tomatoes (and half a can of water from the tap). Bring to the boil and then either simmer for 40 minutes or so, or slow cook (I put my in the Aga slow cooker for 3 hours). At that point, puree it, add the lemon juice and extra butter and tip in the fish, cooking till it’s tender – about 10-15 minutes.

We had ours with bread and butter.

Avocado, mint and courgette soup

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av soup

This is another one for the ‘me not Bert’ section.

Serves 2 (but if Tony doesn’t get into the kitchen in the next five minutes, I’m going back in to finish it off)

2 courgettes, roughly chopped

500ml chicken stock

Pinch of salt

1 avocado, halved and flesh scooped out

1/2 lemon, juice of (use the other half for a G&T when the sun’s past the yard arm) (what  that expression means, beyond ‘reach for the alcohol as soon as is decently possible’, I have no idea)

Leaves from a couple of stalks of mint

Good splash of double cream

This is so easy. Stick the chopped courgette in a pan with the stock and salt, and simmer till tender. Take it off the heat, add the avocado, mint, lemon juice and cream and blend.

 

Spring greens and beans

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spring greens

I don’t normally blog Bert-less meals, but this soup was so delicious…

Serves 2

Tablespoon butter

1 small onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 courgette, roughly chopped

A couple of heads of spring greens – about 130g

1/2 teaspoon chili flakes

1 teaspoon seasalt

300ml chicken stock

1 x 265g can of flagolet beans

Melt the butter and fry the onion and garlic, allowing the butter to brown slightly to get a bit of a nutty flavour. Add the chopped veg, chili, stock and salt, and simmer for 5 minutes till tender. Very roughly blend, so there’s still good chunks of veg, then stir through the beans.

Eaten without the backdrop of a toddler’s obsessive Lion King (‘Didda Raaa!’) musings.

Red pepper humous

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humous

No idea whether Bert will eat this since it doesn’t look like a banana or a bowl of shreddies (what will his excuse be when that final molar peeks through?), but hey, this is me and Bert and I liked it. And Bert – it’s the sort of thing that toddlers whose mothers post their meals on Instagram eat all the time, okay?

1 red pepper

1 can chickpeas, drained

1 peeled clove garlic

2 tablespoons peanut butter

3 tablespoons lemon juice

30 ml olive oil

Sea salt

Put the pepper directly on to the hob or Aga hot plate and char till the skin is black and wrinkly. Put it straight into a sealed plastic bag. When it’s cool, peel the skin off, de-seed and put everything in a blender to puree. Add a little more lemon juice and oil if it seems too thick.

Bert was naked on his hands and knees with a hand towel last night after his bath, scrubbing away at a tiny spot of wee on the carpet. He’s either ready for potty training or terrified of me and my Victorian workhouse regime.

Alphabet soup

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alphabet

This is a version of a Jamie Oliver recipe. Bert spurned it, but I put that down to teething (teething which had miraculously disappeared by the time he was offered his first chocolate milkshake later). Not sure how we’ll justify his evil behaviour when those last two molars have come through.

Serves 3 generously

Selection of veg to roast (I used a carrot, 3 sticks of celery and a red pepper, but you could just use a couple of those, or substitute leek for the celery), roughly chopped

1/2 a punnet of cherry tomatoes

4 or 5 garlic cloves, whole and unpeeled

1-2 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

2 tins chopped tomatoes

1/2 tin of water

2 or 3 handfuls of alphabet pasta (or spaghetti broken up into pieces)

Spoonfuls of pesto and grated cheese to serve

Drizzle the veg, cherry tomatoes and garlic with olive oil and roast in a hot oven (220 degrees or the top of the Aga roasting oven) for about 40 minutes, till soft.

Set aside the garlic and tip the veg and juices into a pan, squeezing the soft garlic out of its papery cases into the veg. Add the tinned tomatoes and water and blitz with a blender to a nearly smooth onsistency. Stir the pasta through and bring the lot to a simmer on the hob, cooking till the pasta’s soft (about 7 to 10 minutes).

Serve with a blob of pesto and a sprinkling of grated cheese.

This did not get the dramatic ‘mmmm’s that the chocolate milkshake did. At least, not from Bert.

 

 

Spicy lentil soup

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IMG_4897

This is more a daddy-soup than a Bertie-soup. Bert would eat it though, with the smaller amount of chili.

Serves two cold, greedy people

1 onion, diced

1 carrot, diced

1 stick of celery, diced

1 red pepper, diced

Splash olive oil

1/4-1/2 teaspoon chili flakes

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

100g red lentils

1 tin chopped tomatoes and the tin full of tap water

Salt to taste

Fry the veg and spices in the olive oil, then stir through the lentils, tomatoes, water and seasoning. Simmer for 20 minutes then roughly puree. Eat with buttered bread and slabs of cheese.

 

Crab cakes

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FullSizeRender copy

Makes 10 crab cakes

1 cup plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 eggs

1 x 170g crab meat, drained

About 200g drained sweetcorn

A pinch of chilli flakes

Chopped parsley

A pinch of salt

Mix all the ingredients together and then fry spoonfuls in a hot, oiled pan for about 2 minutes on each side – till they’re golden and firm.

A green salad would be nice with this, if you weren’t aged one. We had ours with roast garlic tomatoes (okay, and ketchup). Bert kept clawing his hands like a crab for seconds and thirds. A little insensitive to the crab who died in the making of this, but they were delicious.

 

Alphabetti Spaghetti

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alphabetti

I had seconds of this. And Bert’s leftovers.

I hope that this is in the same category as home made baked beans – wholesome and tasty, and not in the same category as home made custard creams – insane. I have made my own custard creams, but that was in a pre-child fit of whimsy.

Serves four, or two for lunch and leftovers for lunch tomorrow

200ml passata

50ml water and a bit of pasta water

Salt to taste

1 teaspoon brown sugar

2 carrots, grated

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushed

A lot of olive oil

A couple of handfuls of alphabet pasta

Fry the onion and garlic in the olive oil then add the carrots. You want enough oil for the carrots to be melting into it after a few minutes. Cook for around five minutes, till the carrots really soft, then add the passata and 50ml of water. Season to taste with salt and add the sugar. Cook for around five minutes again. Meanwhile put the alphabet pasta on to cook (mine takes 7 minutes).

Then puree the sauce, add maybe half a ladle full of the water the pasta was cooked in – enough to get it to a thick but runny consistency – and serve on hot, buttered toast.