January Journal: Favourite recipes

[liv]

ceb asked for my favourite recipes. I've ended up having to travel across country at short notice for a funeral, so I'm not sure whether I will have internet access to post this today, though I will try to squeeze in the post before midnight. I also don't have access to any of my recipe books or notes or links to online recipes, and I tend to feel more confident cooking with recipes written out rather than from memory. So I'll talk a bit about the category of favourite recipes, and perhaps come back and add the detailed instructions later.

I am a competent but not a great cook. I have a small number of things I know how to make well, and I occasionally add a new dish to the repertoire. Mostly one-pot savoury dishes, pasta sauces, stews, risottos, curries and the like, and sometimes oven bakes like moussaka or lasagne for when I'm cooking for a group of people for a special occasion. I'm vegetarian, and I prefer food that's meant to be made out of vegetables over substituting pretend meat into meat dishes. So a lot of my protein comes from either cheese or pulses. I'm fairly confident with anglicized versions of Indian cooking and Mediterranean cooking, less so with East Asian, New World or Northern European cuisines though I do some stuff that approximates those cateogories. My favourite cookbook is Rose Elliot's The Bean Book, partly because my mother cooked quite a lot from that and gave me a copy, partly because Elliot uses combinations of flavours that I like and recipes of a degree of technical complexity that seems reasonable to me.

Probably my favourite recipe if I had to pick one is a red lentil and tomato pasta sauce. You can put more or less any vegetables in it that you would put in a stew or pasta sauce, and it keeps well so I usually end up making a week's worth. I got it from Mum and I don't know where she got it from; we used to have it for Friday night dinner quite often. The general idea is that you saute onions with garlic and cinnamon, then add red lentils and coat them with the oil, and turn that into sauce with tins of chopped tomatoes and water. You cook the lentils until they are soft and have absorbed most of the liquid, along with roughly chopped vegetables (I often use mushrooms, green peppers, celery and carrots, but lots of combinations work) and herbs. I made it for nou's feast last year and it went over pretty well.

Other things I cook often: chickpea and tomato curry, mushroom risotto, chilli sin carne with red kidney beans and sometimes pretend mince, a Lebanese lentils-and-rice dish which I can't remember how to spell, mudjara or something like that, a Thai curry which is mostly based on cooking vegetables with Mae Ploy brand yellow curry paste and coconut milk. Very simple soups, the kind where you cook a vegetable with onions and stock and a particular flavouring, parsnip + cumin, carrot + coriander or orange, mushrooms + sherry or tarragon, lentils with a vaguely Indian style spice mix I call dal though it probably isn't very authentic, tomato and ginger. I have some salads too, though that seems more like assembling than cooking. Potato with vinaigrette which I got from darcydodo and like better than the mayonnaise-y potato salads more typical of European cuisines. Green lentils with goats cheese and beetroot from my sister. Pasta salad which is "Italian" in the sense that it's the colours of the Italian flag, white pasta, green celery and orange carrots, with olive oil and masses of garlic; I doubt any actual Italians would recognize it. I do a pretty good tabbouleh.

I basically don't bake, though I have an ongoing project to learn how. I do have a few desserts as well as savouries in my repertoire, but they feel more like techniques than recipes. One thing I managed to learn from Mum was fruit crumble with real custard, but simply listing the ingredients (flour, sugar and butter for the topping, eggs and milk for the custard) doesn't really help you to make the dish, you really have to know the techniques. I'm quite proud of my rice pudding, when I can be bothered to cook it as slow as rice pudding needs.

OK, have wifi in the B&B where I'm staying and half an hour before I have to go out for prayers, so I'll post this as is to be able to keep up with my daily prompts.

[January Journal masterlist; there's still quite a few spaces so do feel free to add some more prompts even if you didn't get to it in December! Or indeed to make a second request if you're already in the list.]

Comments

[kaberett]

Ooh, I would love to have you show me how to make real custard at some point - I haven't yet succeeded in getting the texture right without cornflour, and I would really like to be able to. (Also, I really like custard.)

I hope the funeral goes as well as these things can.