Coriander and coconut carrot soup

Sometimes a few simple ingredients fall together under one's fingertips and a magical type of gathering occurs. I had carrots, the homegrown-flavoured almost musky sort. A colleague had a while ago mentioned making coriander and carrot soup. What pricked my culinary ears was the realisation that I also had a bit of coconut milk in the fridge. Oh my.

Olive oil
1/2 small onion, minced
1" piece of ginger, peeled and minced
2 - 3 fine slices of red chilli, minced
4 - 5 medium sized carrots, peeled and sliced
1 tsp paprika
1/8th cup coconut milk
1/8th of a lemon
3 - 4 cups good vegetable stock
Bundle of coriander leaves, chopped

Heat up the olive oil in a pan over a gentle heat. Add in the onion, ginger and chilli, stir, and leave to softly sizzle. Cover pan with lid.

Once the onion has turned a little translucent, add the carrot. Sauté gently for a bit, then add the paprika and leave for a minute or two. (This spice works really quite well here.)

The carrot should now be a little softened. Pour in the vegetable stock (reserve some if you're not sure how thin you may want the soup to be), and bring to a simmer. Gently cook for a few more minutes, taking care not to overcook the carrot to mush.

Pour in coconut milk, and add a squeeze of lemon juice. Stir in fresh coriander.

Now remove the pan from the heat, let cool a bit, and then whip out your handy immersion blender. Purée the contents of the pan to soup, adding more vegetable stock if required to desired consistency and carrottyness.

Adjust lemon juice to taste now that everything's been mixed up together. This should be offsetting the sweetness of the carrot and onion rather nicely, and giving the dish a hint of Thai flavour.

Serve up with a little drizzle of coconut milk and a few coriander leaves to make it pretty. Or forget, and just tuck in and enjoy.

Garlic beef, mushrooms and peppers

It seems that no matter the effort put into using a wok on a flat electric hotplate, it is outdone by the feeblest of efforts over a gas flame. (Admittedly my preferred wok has had a concavedly curved base for years, which didn't help matters.) To gas, and the deliciousness it can so easily bring about!

There was some beef remaining, and my stir frying seemed almost a half-forgotten skill. I remembered red pepper, and pulled out the rest of the still perfectly silken mushrooms. Garlic and oyster sauce, I thought, and then the rest sort of fell together.

Grapeseed oil

1 small onion, sliced into 1/16ths

2" piece red chilli, finely sliced

4 - 5 chestnut mushrooms, quartered

Half a red pepper, diced

1 piece of tender steak, thinly sliced

1 clove garlic, thinly sliced

Dozen or so chives, chopped

2 - 3 tsp oyster sauce

1 - 2 tsp shaosin rice wine

1 - 2 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp cornflour made to a thin paste with cold water

Beni shoga (salty pickled ginger - the fluorescent red strands)

Jasmine rice

Rinse and drain the rice (repeating 'til clear.) Bring equal parts rice and water to the boil, then cover with a lid and set onto the lowest heat possible to cook and steam.

Heat up some grapeseed oil in the wok, and on medium-high heat stir fry onion until it colours to your liking. (2 - 3 mins gives a bit of char.)

Add chilli, blacken a bit before stirring in red pepper. Soften for 30 seconds or so, then add in the mushrooms. Cook for a minute.

Stir in the garlic for 10 seconds or so to heat it through, and then add the steak. Cook meat until it's taken on a little colour.

Splash in the rice wine, and let the alcohol evaporate. Turn the heat to medium-low and then add chives, oyster sauce, and soy sauce. Stir through, then add a few teaspoons of the cornflour mixture to thicken. Ensure this is heated through to a simmer and that all ingredients are cooked to your liking.

Serve up a heap of steaming jasmine rice, pile on the beef, onion, mushroom and pepper, and top with a little beni shoga if you wish for it. Enjoy! And realise your sad fate - you'll never quite enjoy the local Chinese takeaway ever again.

Stroganoff of a sort

Despite a few technical hitches, cooking continued. Now on with the recording of such.

I've been trying out "vegetable boxes", whereby a box of delicious, locally farmed organic produce is dropped off on one's doorstep upon request. So far I'm rather liking it, and an abundance of an ingredient or three seems to make for the better sort of cooking inspiration. Chestnut mushrooms, silky-skinned and plump, reminded me of stroganoff. Fixings were duly acquired. As I'm not fond of stewed meat I came up with a somewhat speedier variation. It also uses a white wine and coconut milk trick for the sauce base, and I'd picked up some fresh thyme which seemed like a good thing to add in.

Grapeseed oil, for frying

1 small onion, thinly sliced

1 piece of good steak

6 - 7 chestnut mushrooms, quartered

2 tsp fresh thyme leaves

1 clove garlic, minced

1/8th cup white wine

1/8th cup coconut milk

Salt (Herbamare is good seasoning)

Black pepper

Heat up the oil in a saucepan, and add the onion. Cover and saute gently until softened.

Push onion to one side of the pan, up the heat a little and sear either side of steak. Remove meat to a separate bowl.

Add mushrooms, garlic and thyme to the onions and mix it all up. Cook for a minute or two on medium heat.

When mushrooms have softened a little, add in the splash of white wine. Let alcohol boil off, and then stir in coconut milk. Let this heat through to a simmer.

Meanwhile thinly slice the steak, and reserve any juices. Mix in to the pan, and turn off the heat. The meat should retain some pinkness - if too pink for your liking, cook it a little more in the sauce.

When ready, serve up over some sautéd potatoes and spinach. Marvel at the concoction that is now quite a long way from the stroganoff most would recognise.

Satsuma chickpea curry

Or "chana dahl," which I'm fairly sure means a chickpea curry of sorts. This was a bit of a "Oh my, what is hiding out in the fridge?" adventure. Spicy and fragrant hint-of-coconut rice and a cucumber and mint raita accompany this hot and slightly fruity curry.

For the rice:

Basmati rice

3 cardamom pods

1/4 tsp very coarsely ground black pepper

2 - 3 tbsp coconut milk

Rinse and drain the rice before setting it over a high heat with 1:1.25 ratio of rice to water. Add cardamom and black pepper to the pan, bring to the boil, and then cover and move to lowest heat to steam. Stir in coconut milk just before serving.

For the raita:

4" piece cucumber

7 or so leaves of fresh mint, finely chopped

3 dsp Greek yoghurt

Black pepper

Seasalt

Cut the cucumber into small cubes, peeling and/or discarding seeded part if you prefer. In a bowl mix up the yoghurt, mint and seasoning. Stir in the cucumber, and adjust dressing to taste.

For the chickpea curry:

1/3 onion, finely chopped

1/2 red chilli, roughly chopped

1/2" piece of ginger, minced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp coriander seeds, toasted and ground

1/2 tsp cumin seeds, toasted and ground

1/2 tsp ground turmeric

3 whole cloves

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

1 small green pepper, diced

1/2 head of cauliflower, broken into small florets and steamed

1/2 can chickpeas

Pieces of leftover beef, vegetable (optional)

1 - 2 cups hot water

1/2 satsuma, all pith and segment skin removed

1 dsp sultanas

1 tbsp mango chutney

1/2 tbsp tomato purée

2 - 3 tbsp pumpkin purée

1/4 cup thin coconut milk

2 tbsp Greek yoghurt

1 - 2 tsp potato starch, mixed with a little cold water

Heat some oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the spices, and stir to release oils.

Add onion, chilli, ginger and garlic to the pan, and sauté until onion has softened.

Stir in green pepper. Then add cauliflower, chickpeas and any additional leftovers (e.g. beef.) Heat through.

Add hot water to just cover contents of pan - a lovely bright orange yellow and fragrant sauce should now be simmering. Add the pieces of satsuma and the sultanas. Stir in the mango chutney, tomato and pumpkin purées. Leave to simmer until vegetables are just cooked.

Shortly before serving, add the coconut milk. Thicken the sauce a little with the potato starch slurry (taking care as it is far more powerful than cornflour, and quite viscous in quantity.) Stir in the yoghurt, and serve up over the fragrant rice and with a good helping of raita. Leftover chickpea latkes and flatbread make good accompaniments, too.

Flatbread

I'm still working on breads, although I think I almost have a good custom wheat-free flour mix figured out. The problem is when I forget to use it, and go a bit too heavily on the starches. My multi-flour mix was simply turned into a dough with flour, warm water and flaxseed meal (mixed with a little water as a binder.) Some was fried into the wedges in the photo, creating a chewy dense and nutty flavoured bread. (That would be the millet and sorghum flours and the potato starch, I think.) Some was grilled as flat thin discs on some oiled foil. They turned out quite pleasantly crispy, and so a supper of flatbread, Port Salut and some sweet paprika spiced salami was had.

Pumpkin seeds

I bought a pumpkin. A little one, for a cake I forgot to photograph. It is the first pumpkin I have ever bought, and in messing around with the innards I found all these seeds. "Ah ha!" went the lightbulb, "Roast them!"

Take the seeds from one pumpkin. Rinse and clean them, removing as much of the slipperiness as you can. Pat dry. Spend 5 mins removing the seeds deftly stuck to the paper towel you tried to use to pat them dry. Resort to putting them in oven for a bit to dry off.

Arrange seeds in a baking tray so that they're mostly in a single layer. Mix with a little olive oil (and a tiny bit goes a long way - the above result features far too much), and more seasalt than you consider necessary.

Bake seeds until golden brown and crispy, some 15mins or so at 160C. Check regularly and adjust oven if they're scorching or nothing's happening.

Mix with some whole skin-on almonds and toasted sesame seeds for a mid-morning snack!

Sesame seared beef salad

This was essentially a simple little meal, of rice and seared steak and some vegetables and salad. It's one of my favourite sorts, though.

1 piece steak

3 portobello mushrooms, stalks removed

1/3 red pepper, thinly sliced

Spinach, baby leaf

Cucumber, sliced

Olive oil

Soy sauce

Sesame seed oil

Rice vinegar

Sesame seeds

Jasmine rice

Take the steak and marinate in a small bowl with a little soy sauce and sesame seed oil. Set the rice a-cooking and leave to steam.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan, and when medium-hot sear the steak to preferred cookedness. Remove to one side.

In the steak juice laden pan, add a little more oil if required and then add in the red pepper and mushrooms. Sauté until a little coloured but not too softened. Set to one side.

In a dry frying pan, toast some sesame seeds over a medium heat. Check for a nutty flavour (all "greenness" should be gone) and remove to a small dish.

Mix a teaspoon or two of olive oil with a little (1/2 tsp) sesame seed oil, 1/2 tsp soy sauce and 1/2 tsp rice vinegar for a dressing. Rinse and drain spinach.

To serve place a small heap of rice and the spinach and cucumber on a plate. Drizzle some of the dressing across the salad. Then arrange red peppers and mushrooms, and top with the steak (sliced for eating with chopsticks.) Sprinkle on some toasted sesame seeds, and enjoy!