Slow cooked oxtail stew in rich gravy with roasted vegetables.
Slow cooked oxtail stew in rich gravy with roasted vegetables.
We have a weekly delivery of box of organic vegetables. It’s a self imposed challenge to use up whatever they send. I’ve got 3 choices for ‘do not send’ – these are currently occupied by beetroot (beets you Americans), Brussell sprouts and avocado. It’s not just organic – they work hard on reducing the travel miles on the vegetables. Hence, the humble swede appears frequently in the box.
Why is it called rutabaga in America? And what is a turnip if its not a baby swede? Who knows, the weird and wonderful names of vegetables are beyond my expertise.
When a boring root vegetable appears – soup is the answer. Oven roasting does wonders for root vegetables going into soup, really adds a layer of taste. It’s worth the extra prep time and clean up. I like to really scorch the swede just to the edge of burnt. I did it by accident – oh the dangers of multi tasking a well known recipe – and now it’s required by the Davinator.
Handy tools for this recipe: parchment paper for roasting, a mandolin for slicing in the vegetables, a stick blender to puree the soup at the end. Or a good sized blender. Can also be done in a food processor but both of those alternatives add messy clean up steps.
I add croutons and sautéed chorizo to make the soup a meal. If you’re feeling a need for more vegetables, a green salad on the side would be lovely.
Make this recipe vegan by omitting the butter and avoiding cream or chorizo.
Let’s get cooking.
The recipe proportions are for 450 grams of swede. Adjust if your swede is larger or smaller. Usually larger, in my experience.
Thank you for reading and sharing the blog and the recipes. Tag me on Twitter or Instagram @mamadolson if you post a photo.
Red cabbage is a favourite of the Davinator and is always on our table at Christmas and Thanksgiving. It’s the perfect dish for holiday entertaining; easy to make, can be made in the days ahead, stores easily. It’s purple red colour looks festive and it is very low fat and high in fibre – a nice contrast with much of the rest of traditional holiday menus.
I make this on Christmas Eve or the day before and refrigerate it in the pot you cooked it in. If it’s cold enough, I leave it in the Davinator’s unheated workshop. It freezes well and makes a fantastic addition to a turkey sandwich on Boxing Day.
Useful equipment for this recipe: a substantial oven ready pot with a lid (le Creuset or similar), a hand held mandoline and an apple corer. I’m not an advocate of giving drawer space to single use gadgets but an apple corer is one of few exceptions – speeds up the preparation of the apples considerably.
Cabbages vary in size so the main ingredients are expressed in relation to the weight of the cabbage. The recipe is flexible and forgiving so feel free to omit or substitute the fruit, pears are also very nice.
Let’s get cooking.
1 red cabbage, approximately 1 kilo or 2 pounds, shredded with a knife
Onions or shallots; by weight 50% of the cabbage
Apples or pears; by weight 50% of the cabbage, cored and chopped small
1 clove of garlic, chopped small or forced through a garlic press
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
45 grams (3 tablespoons) brown sugar
50 mls (3 tablespoons) red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon of butter
Salt and pepper to taste
Enjoy! Thank you for reading the blog and cooking the recipes. Share photos on Instagram or X (Twitter) tagging @mamadolson.
Five ingredient omelette.
I have a friend who loves food and hates to cook. By special request, I’m going to establish a special category of recipes on the website – known as the Love Food Hate Cooking recipes. Scrambled eggs on toast was the traditional default dinner of a busy single woman. My omelette recipe takes only a bit more time and effort but is extremely versatile.
The trick to the easy perfect omelette is to start it on the stove top, finish it under the grill and never ever flip it. All you need is butter, eggs, filling(s) and an oven proof skillet. The omelette above is made using crab, parmesan cheese and chives. It is infinitely flexible on ingredients and combination – any kind of cheese, protein that’s precooked (ham, smoked, salmon, thinly sliced sausage, cooked chicken, etc), vegetables that have been properly prepared. Both the recipe and method are straightforward.
I use a le Creuset skillet – they are expensive but stand the test of time. My youngest son is 25 years old and I have le Creuset cookware that predates him. There are other brands of enamelled cast iron cookware that will work well – the heavy bottom pan makes a difference.
Let’s get cooking.
Butter, plenty of it
4 eggs
Tablespoon of dairy – milk, yogurt, cream – any unsweetened dairy (optional)
150 grams of crab meat
40 grams of finely grated parmesan cheese
Handful of chives
The omelette just before it goes under the grill.
Thank you for reading the blog and cooking the recipes. Let me know how it goes and send requests.
I was nervous about jam and jelly until a friend said these immortal words ‘if it doesn’t set, pour it back in the pot and boil it some more’. That and a new sugar thermometer and I was off. We’ve had a great strawberry season in the UK – at one point strawberries were £2 per kilo ($1.15 per pound weight for los Americanos). I found sugar at a good price and I have made a lot of jam.
Don’t worry the Davinator will not be at risk from strawberry jam poisoning. The same friend doesn’t make strawberry jam or jelly so we have an exchange programme – I’ll trade strawberry jam and crab apple jelly for whisky marmalade and damson jam. Plus I take away her crab apples and make jelly with those. Crab apple jelly (recipe here) is the best combo with peanut butter.
Strawberry jam is traditionally ‘macerated’ overnight. Maceration means you cut up the strawberries, combine them with sugar and pectin and leave them to do their thing. Next morning they are floating in strawberry juice and ready to cook and jar up.
If you’re new to preserving, do your homework first. Youtube is full of ‘jam for beginners’ videos and there is a legion of blogs. My recommendation is to identify your ‘method’ and stick to it. I was making jam, jelly and preserves from a young age – my sisters and I were mom’s kitchen slaves. So I come to this with a fair amount of experience. Your first jam experience may well leave your kitchen looking like a bomb went off but every time after that it improves.
Gadgets do help with jam. Below left is my 2 bowl scale for weighing sugar and pectin separately and below right is a gadget that takes the stem and slightly fibrous centre out of the strawberries in one smooth movement. See the short video I made here.
The other gadget I highly recommend is a proper sugar thermometer – old school analogue that clips to the side of the pan. This is my new KitchenCraft. (other brands are available). It’s predecessor was so old that the numbers were unreadable. Why analogue? You will stand there waiting for your jam to hit 105C and you don’t want to be dipping your high tech digital gadget every 10 seconds. And there’s no annoying tiny battery that is always dead just because it is and it’s not a size you have. Trust me on this one.
Let’s get on to the recipe. My instructions assume some experience but not a jam maestro level.
1 kilo of strawberries
750 grams sugar
Pectin
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Jars and lids for approximately 1,000 mls of jam.
Don’t be tempted to double batch the recipe. It will be difficult to reach the correct temperature without scorching the jam. I tend to have two batches ‘working’ at the same time. One coming up to the boil and the other on a gentle simmer to dissolve the sugar.
Thank you for reading the blog – sorry its been so intermittent, it’s been a busy social and sporting summer here in England. Let me know if you try the recipes and have any feedback – I did leave out a crucial step in herby courgette bread until someone pointed out that at no point did it tell you to add the grated courgettes 😳.
This recipe makes beautiful slow cooked stew to serve over noodles or potatoes or even better filling for beef pies. I’ve taken my classic slow cooked beef stew recipe and added a Julia Child twist to it. One thing that makes Julia’s recipes taste fantastic is the separate cooking of key elements that are then combined at the end for maximum flavour. The recipe has 3 key processes: cook the beef, cook the onions and cook the mushrooms. These 3 elements are combined to make either fab stew or even better pie filling. I used my slow cooker for the beef but you could easily put it in the oven on a low heat. I do it in this in order: beef, onions, mushrooms.
Let’s get straight to the cooking.
Brown braised onions
18-24 miniature onions
30 – 50 grams of butter, a shot of olive oil
125 mls of beef stock and red wine
A bouquet garni
250 grams of quality small mushrooms (double this recipe if you have mushrooms lovers in your house)
30-40 grams of butter
Splash of olive oil
2 tablespoons of finely chopped shallots (optional)
Thank you for reading the blog and cooking the recipes. Please subscribe and share. Comments and questions welcome.
Yet another courgette (zucchini) recipe! Why, you ask? It’s too early for garden glut. I have signed up for a veg box delivery service to help us eat more vegetables in the winter. There’s a couple of purple cabbage recipes on the way as well. Guess what there’s a lot of in the veg box – oh yes, courgettes.
This is a quick bread recipe, so raised with baking powder and baking soda, not yeast. I used buttermilk (full fat obvs) for my recipe but any fermented milk product will probably do the trick; Greek yoghurt, creme fraiche, sour cream. There’s no butter or oil in the recipe so it does need the fat from the dairy products to achieve a good texture. Keep an eye on consistency, I found this batter relatively dry. If yours is too dry to spread in the pans, thin it out with milk.
You can also be flexible with the herbs: I used dried basil and dried chives because that’s what I had in the cupboard. You can also try some garlic or add in a handful of finely chopped spring onions.
One ‘must’ with this recipe – use small (1 pound) loaf pans and line them with parchment or purchased paper liners. Otherwise – a sticky mess and possibly new pans in your future. Also, try disposable miniature loaf pans for single portions, reduce the cooking time. My recipe made 3 modest small loaves, you could possibly cram the batter into 2 small pans.
Let’s get cooking.
450 grams of courgettes (2 medium)
1 tsp sea salt
125 grams of plain white flour
125 grams of whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)
1/2 tsp sea salt
2 tablespoons dried chives
2 tablespoons dried basil
150 grams cheddar cheese
3 large eggs
170 grams buttermilk (3/4 cup)
Thank you for reading the blog and trying the recipes. Let me know how it went in the comments below or on social media @mamadolson on Twitter and Instagram.
This recipe is adapted from Julia Child’s classic recipe in ‘Master the Art of French Cooking’. You might want to read this blog also: The 10 Commandments of Coq au Vin but not until after you’ve made the recipe(s) below. There are three: the main coq au vin, the onions and the mushrooms. There is no ‘one pot’ short cuts here. Settle in and cook.
4. ounces unsmoked bacon lardons
Butter
3 pounds of jointed chicken – legs & thighs with the bone in are best
Salt & pepper
½ cup of cognac
2 cups of decent red wine
2 cups of chicken stock (approximate)
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 clove of mashed garlic
1 bay leaf, 1 sprig of thyme
1 ounce of flour
1 ounce of very soft butter
18-24 miniature onions
2-4 tablespoons of butter, a shot of olive oil
½ cup of chicken stock or red wine (or a combination of the two
A bouquet garni
½ pound of quality small mushrooms (double this recipe if you have mushrooms lovers in your house)
2 tablespoons of butter
Splash of olive oil
2 tablespoons of finely chopped shallots (optional)
Autumn has well and truly arrived; 3C here this morning. Time to get out the slow cooker and make some hearty food. I have a great butcher, Hatto & Son, specialising in meat from British farms. Some times I go with a list and some times I go in and see what looks interesting. One day there was goat meat, prepped for stewing. Of course I bought it. Oh happy accident that has resulted in one of our favourite recipes; slow cooked goat curry Jamaican style. If you can’t get goat or mutton, then stewing lamb is a good substitute.
The Davinator accompanied me on a business trip to Jamaica and we stayed in a quirky little place. The evening menu was soup, plus a choice of three main dishes. If there was goat curry, the Davinator chose it every time. There was a great cook in that kitchen – cooking her authentic heart out every night. This is my homage to her great cooking.
I put mine in the slow cooker but you can also use an oven proof stock pot and put it in a low oven. I make this recipe for 8 people and start it about 10 am for dinner at 6 pm. Let’s get cooking.
I serve with flatbread and rice; it’s tasty and rich. If you’ve gone a little overboard with the chilli, serve with a big scoop of Greek yoghurt to cool it down.
Thank you for reading the blog. Let me know if you’re cooking the recipes, publish photos and tag me @mamadolson on Instagram and Twitter.
I love buffalo wings. I remember eating buffalo wings so hot it burned our lips and made us cry in the snack bar overlooking the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. If food had no consequences for weight or health I’m pretty sure I could live on buffalo wings, chocolate ice cream, deep fried zucchini and champagne. Sadly, this is not the case. I’ve had to seek out an alternative to buffalo wings. And inspired by the buffalo cauliflower (discontinued!) at Smith & Wollensky London, I’ve been trying out various methods for oven baked buffalo cauliflower. I do have a deep fat fryer but I’m afraid to try a deep fried version – it might be irresistible. So baked it must be.
Good news and bad news. Baked buffalo cauliflower tastes fabulous = good news. I cannot make it crunchy = bad news. My recipe below makes it less soggy and less messy but crunchy it is not. Still a great way to make cauliflower interesting (without cheese sauce and macaroni) and it’s relatively healthy.
There is a bit of ‘in and out’ of the oven with this recipe. And some tips to decrease the soggy quotient but it’s fairly simple. I started with a recipe from Cookie&Kate and adapted it for European ingredients, methods, measurements and eliminating garlic.
I use Frank’s Red Hot Sauce in my wings, feel free to use your favourite. Here’s a great article on hot sauce from Spruce Eats. Make it vegan by using your favourite butter substitute.
Four things can help with this recipe – it’s all about more crisp and less soggy.
Thank you for reading the blog and cooking the recipes. Tag me @mamadolson on Instagram or Twitter if you’ve got photos. Leave your comments and ask your questions below.