Cavolo Nero

When I sat down to start writing this blog, I'd just finished cooking this really simple dish.  As it was exam time, I didn't give it the attention it deserves, but it was truly delicious.  It definitely needs some work, but with a few more attempts it really could be something perfect.

Ingredients

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

Olive oil

3 Tomatoes, de-seeded and chopped

2 small red peppers

4 or 5 spring onions

Prawns (I used two packets from Sainsbury's, which comes to about 500g)

Cavolo Nero (Black Cabbage) with the stalks removed and cut into strips.

Italian White Wine

Paprika

Salt & Black Pepper

Pasta

1. Coat the prawns in Paprika (to taste) and leave to marinade.
2. In a frying pan, on a medium-low heat, throw in a generous glug of olive oil, and 2 finely chopped cloves of garlic
3. Once that's done, add the cavolo nero.  Coat all the leaves in the garlic oil, and add more olive oil if necessary.  Cover it with a lid and leave it quietly cook for 30 minutes or so, stirring occasionally.  Once it's done, pull it from the heat, but keep the lid on to keep it warm.
4. Meanwhile, for the sauce, put into a medium-hot pan; the spring onions, roughly chopped; the tomatoes; and the red peppers, chopped nice and finely.
5. Once this starts to break down, add in the white wine - about the amount of a large glass of wine. Turn up the heat and stir together.
6. Once it's reduced by half add the prawns, and season with salt and pepper.  The prawns don't need much time at all, just until they turn a nice pink colour.  If you're prawns are already cooked - pink in the packet, rather than grey, bare in mind that you're just warming them through.  The last thing you want is tough prawns.
7. To serve, place a bed of cavolo nero at the bottom, of a dish, then the pasta, before finally topping it with a generous amount of prawns and sauce.  

I loved this dish, and it didn't take long to prepare at all.  It's hardly festive, I admit, but it's worth a go. Maybe worth considering as a starter, minus the pasta?  Let me know what you think.

Curry Night

I love experimenting, buying new foods, or at least when I can afford to, and cooking for my flatmates to see what they think.  I'm no vegetarian, but tonight was curry night, and whilst having a load of lentils in the cupboard, and an ongoing healthy-eating initiative, I thought I'd make a red lentil and sweet potato curry.

Having never done this before I had a look around for different recipes, and there are a few out there, but none of them really took my fancy, so, in combining a couple of them, and adding my own experience, I came up with a pretty decent curry, and was dead pleased with it.  Seeing as it stood up to my fussy housemates also, I thought I'd share it with others.  As with all recipes, please read through this one carefully, there's likely to be something that you may want to rethink.

Red Lentil and Sweet Potato Curry

Ingredients


450ml of Tamarind Water - 
6 garlic cloves
Ginger - about the size of your thumb
Spices for the paste - Cinnamon stick, Cumin Seeds, Coriander Seeds, Chilli flakes, Paprika.
2 dessert spoons of Tomato Purée
Chillies - mine were grown by a friend of mine, I have no idea what they were, but they did have a kick.  Play around with the chillies depending on your own preferences.
2 onions
Turmeric
Cayenne Chilli Powder
200g of Red Lentils
600ml of hot water
2 or 3 Sweet Potatoes, diced
Dwarf beans
1 Carrot, diced
6 Tomatoes
Salt
Fresh corriander
Olive oil




For the paste

1. Chop the onions, and put most of them aside, keep half an onion or so for the paste. 
2. Chop the garlic and ginger, and blend in a food processor with a splash oil and tomato purée. 
3. Chop the chilli, I added two to my paste, but I recommend using three if they are a medium strength chilli, commonly found in the super market.  Add this to the food processor also, and blend.
4. Roast all the spices together in a medium-hot, dry, frying pan.  After a few minutes, transfer the spices to a pestle and mortar, and break them right down before blending them with garlic and ginger.  
5. Add the tamarind water - there are a few ways of doing this, but mixing paste and water seems to do the job just fine.  (If I get a hold of tamarind pulp, I'll let you know how it goes).  Add the water in stages, so as not to flood the paste.
6. Finally, add the onion set aside for this part of the recipe, and blend until reasonably smooth.

Down to business

1. Using the same pan that was used to roast the spices, fry the onions on a medium-high heat with a little oil.  Any spices that were left in the pan (paprika is likely) will flavour the onions wonderfully.
2. Chop 3 tomatoes in half  and add these to the pan.  Occasionally toss the contents of the pan, until the onions have browned.
3. Add the paste to pan, and mix well, allowing to cook for a couple of minutes.
4. Now add the lentils, and, mixing the hot water with turmeric and chilli powder, pour this over the the lentils, and stir once more.  Don't worry if it looks watery at the stage.  If you want more or less lentils, I find that keeping to the 1:3 ratio works well.  The lentils should take about 20-25 mins to cook through nicely.
5. Following this, add the sweet potato; carrot; dwarf beans; and the rest of the tomatoes, chopped.  Add a couple of whole chillies too if you like it a bit hotter.  Prick each one a few times to share the flavour about the food.
6. Add a good pinch of salt and stir together, leaving to simmer until the veg is cooked through.  If it looks too dry, add water sparingly to get the right consistency. 
7. Add fresh, chopped, coriander to serve.

I really enjoyed this meal, and it goes really well a simple pilau rice and naan bread.  If you have any, I recommend stirring a spoonful of ghee in for the last couple of minutes, it rounds it off pretty nicely.  I'd love to know if anybody found this at all helpful, and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Birthdays

Yesterday, I turned the grand old age of 22.  This is not cool.  


I loved being 21; I had the year of my life.  To kick start it, I spent a long weekend in Lille and Brussels, following my favourite band through two countries with one of my oldest friends.  We've both been huge Muse for such a long time; they were the first live gig we ever went to see, and that was at a meagre £16 back in the day.  At the age of 21, I must have spent in excess of £400 on going to see them perform: twice in Europe, once in the old Millennium Dome a couple of weeks after my Birthday, and then once more in Wembley a few weeks back.  Not a penny was wasted either.

21 was was so much fun for so many more reasons though - I really got to grips with university life, and really fell in love with it.  Following a fairly lonely first year in university after a long, arduous and rather messy break-up, my second year was so much fun.  Having turned 21, I found myself gaining friends, and thus gaining confidence, and really enjoying, not only my education, but the environment in which I was living.  I found a great house, and some wonderful house-mates, with whom I am so happy to still be living.  I have found a wonderful new home here.  I suppose 22 is just an age; just a number in fact.  I am still the same person I was on the 29th.  Alas, it is the idea of getting older that is so haunting.

With that said, 21 had two excellent bookends, as a Eurotrip started it brilliantly, it ended with an amazing house party.  An outdoor fire-place is definitely the way forward, and even with the cold October weather, the back yard was a pleasant place to sit.  The company was wonderful, and it truly epitomised the year that had just past.  On one level, I may be worried that the near future won't live up to that which has just gone by, but at the same time, I don't think it needs to.  I'll always have these memories, and I'm really looking forward to having a different year this year.

It's important with whatever comes to pass now, I really make the most of it.  Your're only as old as you feel, and to be honest, at my age(!), I can't complain, and pah! - Even if I am 22, I still get ID'd at the bar.

Tuesday

Having spent my (long) weekend working in a coffee shop, I get to wait until today before my lectures and seminars begin.  What better way to begin the week than looking at maps of 16th century London?  Reading early, and often conflicting, histories of the city and its development, and juxtaposing these with the views of cartographers and artists alike, has allowed me to gain an insight into both the potential seen in the city, as well as the sense of nostalgia for the older city, rather than the newly developing one, that's prominent John Stow's work.  Seeing (in the maps) the city spill outside of its walls, and grow into the hub that we have today is actually pretty astounding.  To be honest, looking at it clinically, it's pretty obvious to say that the capitol's expanse was anything but slow.  

However, the point I'm making here has little to do with London.  I myself have little to do with the city, other than an undying love for Chelsea football club and the Underground.  What it got me thinking about was change.  Despite revolutions, great fires, and world wars, the core of the city is still there, with many a landmark making it visible, but so much has changed around it, grown around it, that the centre itself must have changed too?  My initial question is whether or not London has maintained its identity despite everything it must have endured.  I suppose to say it's 'endured', is giving the answer, but I can hardly speak from experience; I would say there aren't too many who can.

The real point here though, is how do we change, adapt, or hold fast against that which changes around us?  Now speaking from experience, I would say I'm not the same person I was a few years ago when finishing school, or even a year later when starting university; and for this I am thankful.  But with images of England's capitol in mind, am I still at heart the same person I was, perhaps with just the outer layers changing?  Or even, is the real me lost beneath a skin of ever changing layers?

To me it's obvious that these thoughts are not coincidental.  I have, for years now, been lost as to who I am, and more confusingly, who I want to be.  Hitting the grand old age of 22 in a couple of weeks, I wonder (constantly) what I should be doing and where I should be going.  What's more, I wonder whether or not I should be thinking about 'should' or 'want' or 'could'.  

At the moment I'm still very much living within my own present time, and using these words in a passive sense or past tense is something that's still in my future, or with a little luck, isn't.  What I'd like to know is how other people define themselves, whether or not they use their choices as a means of finding meaning, or if their choices reflect who they really are.  I'm starting to ramble now, and my own frustration is shining through.  Maybe I should stick to making coffee.