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Cheesey cornbread and guacamole

~ Kate ~ Leave a comment

cornbread

Basically, chili con carne sides.

Bert has chickenpox. We’re on day two of being confined inside with a very spotty toddler who feels perfectly well and has his normal levels of lunacy energy.

I’m spending £20 a day on Amazon Prime dinosaur jigsaws.

For the bread:

300g polenta

2 teaspoons of baking powder

1 teaspoon sea salt

200g cheddar, grated

150ml plain yoghurt

8 tablespoons warm water

For the guacamole:

1 ripe avocado, peeled and stoned, roughly chopped and crushed with the back of a fork

Juice of half a lime

1 medium sized tomato, roughly chopped

1 spring onion, roughly chopped

Salt to taste

Drizzle of olive oil

For the bread: combine the polenta, salt, baking powder and grated cheese in a bowl, then stir through the yoghurt and water to make a dough. Press into a baking tray to about 2-3 cm deep and bake at 180 (bottom rungs of the Aga roasting oven) for 20 to 25 minutes or till golden brown.

Combine all the guacomole ingredients. Do not expect your toddler to respond with anything but ‘bleurgh’.

Arlo the Good Dinosaur ate quite a lot, but Bert just ate rice and cheese.

Honey and soy salmon stir fry

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salmon stirfry

About two months ago I made Bert a story book from scratch. I did all the illustrations, including pictures of his favourite things, like his blue car and some flowers he’d picked for his dad. I wrote the story based on one of the ones I tell him every night at bed time after lights out – all adventures with Bert as the hero and all to do with our every day life. I rewrote and rewrote it till it rhymed and scanned. I redrew some of the illustrations till I was happy with them. I got it self-published as a hard back book with a slip cover – on the front was a picture of Bert and his blue car. In the inside cover it read, ‘for Bert’.

Whenever I get it out he says ‘no Bert book’.

This week I made this totally toddler-friendly meal from scratch. Bert ate all the plain noodles, carefully separated from the veg and salmon to avoid cross contamination, and, when I suggested he try some honey marinated salmon, he cried.

You win some…

Serves 3

3 salmon fillets

1 inch of fresh ginger, grated

2 garlic cloves, crushed

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons soy sauce

Splash of sunflower or veg oil

3 carrots, peeled and cut into batons

1 courgette, cut into batons

1 red onion, sliced

3 nests dried egg noodles

1 tablespoon sesame oil

To serve:

1 table spoon soy sauce

1 dessert spoon sesame seeds, toasted in a dry pan first if you can be bothered

Combine the soy, honey, garlic and ginger in a shallow bowl and add the whole salmon fillets to the mixture, turning so both sides are covered in the marinade. Cover and chill in the fridge for about an hour.

Take the salmon fillets out of their marinade, put on a baking sheet and cook at 220 degrees for about 12-15 minutes. (That’s two rungs up in the roasting oven for our Aga – in our oven they’re done after 12 minutes.)

Cook the noodles in boiling water according to packet instructions. Heat the oil in a wok till very hot, add the onion and cook for a minute, add the carrot and cook for two minutes, add the courgette and cook for another minute. The veg should be cooked through but still firm. Add the marinade from the salmon and heat through. Then add the cooked noodles and sesame oil, and combine the lot, stirring through the extra soy and sprinkling on the sesame seeds. (I separated Bert’s noodles and veg first due to the toddler cross-contamination terror.) Serve with the whole pieces of cooked salmon on the side.

 

 

 

Easy sorbet

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sorbet

Quick, stealth photo plus photo-bomber.

Serves 3

1 mango, peeled, stoned, roughly chopped

2 handfuls of frozen raspberries

I was cutting a mango up for pudding and realised that since it wouldn’t pass the slime test it was a completely pointless pursuit. I made this instead.

Put the mango and frozen raspberries into a blender or Nutribullet, and whizz up as quickly as possible, before popping into the freezer for five minutes or so. Because the raspberries are frozen, you get a sorbet like consistency straight away.

You could add honey or brown sugar when you blend it, but Bert ate it without so why bother? The photo-bomber winced a bit, though.

Thai crab cakes

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Gratuitously cute picture of a sleepy Bert watching The Fox and the Child with his fox, because taking photos at the dinner table at the moment is like dangling a bag of chocolate buttons in front of him, snatching it away then expecting not to get a tantrum out of it.

crab cake

Makes about 12 little crab cakes

2cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated

1/4 teaspoon dried chilli flakes, crushed in a pestle and mortar

100g white crabmeat

1/2 small bunch fresh coriander, finely chopped

1 small can (165g or so) sweetcorn, drained

2 eggs (saving 1 for crumb coating)

8 tablespoons breadcrumbs (saving 2 for crumb coating)

plain flour, for dusting

Good glug of olive oil

Combine the ginger, chilli, crabmeat, coriander, sweetcorn, one egg and six tablespoons of breadcrumbs. Chill for at least 20 minutes then mould into ball shapes (less likely to fall apart than patties). For some reason the chilling makes them more biddable than if you do it straight away, so you’re less likely to end up swearing at sweetcorn. The longer the chill, the more biddable the mixture – a couple of hours is even better. If I don’t finely chop the coriander I’ll spend all of dinner removing strands of it before Bert gets bored and decides that eating in general is a bad idea.

Beat the remaining egg and dip your patties first into flour, then egg, the breadcrumbs. Fry in a hot pan for two or three minutes on each side, till crisp and golden, then transfer to the oven at 200 degrees (or the middle of the Aga roasting oven) for five to ten minutes.

Leftover roast beef stir fry

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beef stir fry

Terrible photo of a dubious looking Bert, but it was actually delicious. I have to take the photos by stealth these days or much fury follows at the sight of a phone he’s not allowed to play with at the table. (Naughty, hypocritical mummy.)

Serves 3

1 tbsp  vegetable oil

Leftover beef cut into thin strips

1 green pepper, cut into thin rings, deseeded

1.5 leeks, sliced

5 or 6 white mushrooms, sliced

For the sauce:

30g  dry roasted cashews

1 shallot, peeled and chopped

1/2 teaspoon chili flakes

1 clove garlic, peeled

1 inch fresh ginger, grated

2 tablespoons soft brown sugar

3 tablespoons Thai fish sauce

3 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

Juice of one lime (or 1 tablespoon lime juice)

Stalks of bunch of fresh corander, roughly chopped

Blend all the ingredients for the sauce until smooth. Fry the veg for 2-3 minutes, then add the sauce and beef and cook for another minute or two. Garnish with more roughly chopped nuts and the chopped leaves of the coriander, if this won’t infuriate your child.

I made the mistake of cooking the veg too long so they failed to pass the very stringent toddler slime test. Next time I’ll make sure they were crunchy. I’m getting enough finger wags and ‘naughty mummy’s at the moment as it is.

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.

 

 

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.

 

Thai green curry

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thai curry

New haircut!

Serves 3

4 chicken breasts, sliced into thin strips

1 tablespoon of vegetable oil

150g button chestnut mushrooms

150g green beans, topped and tailed

1 tin coconut milk

4 kaffir lime leaves

For the curry paste:

2 cloves garlic

1 small onion

1… thumb sized piece of ginger (of course!)

1 lemongrass stalk

1/2 teaspoon chili flakes

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 bunch coriander

1/2 bunch basil

3 dessert spoons fish sauce

To make the curry paste, bung all those ingredients in a food processor and pulse till it’s a paste.

Fry the chicken breast in a hot pan in the sunflower oil till it’s white all over (about five minutes), then add the veg and curry paste and fry for another couple of minutes – you want the onion and garlic to cook through. Then add the coconut milk and lime leaves and simmer for about another ten minutes.

Bert ate the lot, mushrooms and all.

 

Crab chowder pasta

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FullSizeRender(1)

Bert demolished this. I was obviously more restrained.

Serves 2-2.5

1 garlic clove, crushed

A little olive oil

100ml sour cream

Pinch of saffron

Good pinch of paprika

200g sweetcorn

100g crab meat

Handful grated parmesan and more to serve

Salt and pepper

Pasta to your appetite

Put your pasta on to boil.

Fry the crushed garlic very briefly in the oil till it’s soft but not coloured, then add the cream, paprika and saffron, cooking very very gently so the saffron can infuse the cream. When the pasta’s cooked, stir the sweetcorn, crab, cheese and seasoning through the cream and stir it all through the hot pasta.

Sprinkle more parmesan on at the table.

Bert: [blowing dramatically on pasta] ‘Hot, hot, hot!’

Me: ‘Is it hot?’

Bert: [extremely patiently] ‘No, not hot.’

Okay…

 

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.