Bollywood Pizza

A hot recipe for a very quick Bollywood Pizza for 2 people.

My children love pizza and they love Naan bread so putting them together for a very quick supper is very popular.

• Turn oven on at about 200 C
• Open the packet and put the naan breads on to a baking try
• Open 2 tins of tomatoes and spoon them onto the Naan breads trying not to use too much of the juice or things will get very soggy
• Add slices of whatever you have in the cupboard or fridge which seems like it might go on a pizza. I have used variously:

frozen peas / sweetcorn, sliced ham or salami or cold chicken,slices of onion, tinned tuna,olives, chillis, anchovies,thinly sliced peppers / mushrooms / courgettes /spring onions/ cherry tomatoes,left over cooked brocoli, feta cheese cubes, mozzarella balls, herbs, fresh spinach .

• Cover with grated cheese (cheddar or similar)
• Drizzle with olive oil and add salt and paper if you want to
• Pput in the oven for about 10 mins
• Check if it's done by looking to see if the cheese has melted and if it looks good
• Eat it!

Variations if you have a little more time include: 

Making 'tomato splodge' for the pizza sauce - this tastes much better that just tomatoes straight from the tin
 
Chop up an onion and a few cloves of garlic,
Saute them in olive oil until transluscent,
Adding 2 tins of tomatoes and a little sugar (2 tsp), a pinch of salt, and a slug of  red wine and some oregano if you have them
Cook for 15 mins or more until is becomes a rich sauce

Use this to cover the naan bread before you put the toppings on.  Tomato splodge is very useful and it's worth while making double and keeping half in the fridge for another dish another day or just to make Bollywood pizzas again tomorrow.  More on Tomato Splodge in another post.

Making smiley face pizzas

This is great if you are cooking for a certain kind of crowd and is a good choice for when young friends come for tea as they can design their own pizza. As a result they don't have to put anything on it that they don't like to eat (but might be encouraged to try a mushroom on it to make a really cool nose) and you then dont tend to have the situation where they have to pick off toppings to eat the pizza (or refuse point blank to eat it) if they are fussy eaters.

suggestions for the faces could include:
use olives for eyes
use mushrooms for the nose
use pepper slices for hair
cherry tomatoes for lips
sweetcorn for freckles
tuna for stubble...?!?!

Pitta Pizzas 

Finally if you want to lose the Bollywood thing or have no Naan bread to hand you can always do these pizzas on pitta bread but you are likely to need to grill them rather than bake them in the oven so you might want to limit the toppings a little to stop the top getting burnt and the bottom staying cold.

Tarka Daal

As mentioned in my previous post, the 'Tarka' bit is the spices cooked in a different pan and added to the cooked lentils later.  It always makes me think of the daft joke about the man who was ordering curry who asked the waiter what a 'Chicken Tarka' was; and who got the reply that "it's like an Chicken Tikka but just a little 'otter" ........Sorry.......if you 'get it' then feel free to groan, if you don't get it then feel free to feel bewildered.

My version of Tarka Daal is a kind of mixed up amalgamation of recipes and what I find works for me.  It's fairly quick to make and doesn't involve much chopping up of different ingredients, but you will need a large-ish saucepan and a frying pan.  As usual I find it hard to give quantities for this recipe but will have try, I usually make a Huge Saucepan Full of Daal and freeze some of it.... incidentally I am starting to notice that 'A Huge Saucepan Full' is a fairly common unit of cooking for me.

I'm sure the recipe and method below are not authentic but it works for me as a wonderful comfort food which is relatively healthy and actually quite good for you - which unfortunately you cannot really cannot say about a bowl full of chocolate.

Lovely Lentils

.....and other dried legumes

I'm a really recent convert to the sheer wonderfulness of lentils.

Lentils are a very very ancient world food - the Romans ate them, Indian cooking is full of them and cultures and civilisations all over the globe throughout the history of man have valued them. The word 'Lens' comes from the shape of a lentil. They are a wonderful source of carbohydrate and protein ..... and I used to HATE them.  I used to avoid them like the plague, not eating soup or any other dish if it had lentils in it - let's face it Lentil Stew was a byword for the worst sort of taste-less sloppy hippy food from the 1970's which I as a child of the 70's would do anything to avoid in favour of Fish Fingers, Crinkle Cut Oven Chips and Angel Delight.

Plus, Lentils, like dried beans (chick peas, aduki beans, kidney beans etc) have a kind of mysterious thing about soaking them for the correct amount of time overnight and then making sure you boil them hard and then cook them at a certain heat for a specified time - all to avoid serious galloping gut rot.  In my view you had to really plan ahead if you wanted to use them to include 8 hours of soaking and then there was all that worry over whether you were going to poison someone with them by cooking them wrong.  Sheer hassle and worry! So me + lentils just wasn't happening.

I was converted suddenly to the culinary lentil world a few years ago when I ate a wonderful meal at a friend's house while we were staying with her and her husband and family for the weekend (thanks, Kate!).

Cawl...My Way

Cawl my way

My sister told me yesterday that she is making Cawl in her slow cooker for the first time ever this weekend at the request of her husband. It's nearly St David's Day which is when my son insists we have to eat Cawl to be a proper Welsh family so maybe it's not that surprising that both us London girls are turning to the same simple, warming winter Welsh dish this week.

Essentially, as I understand it, Cawl means soup in Welsh but the dish 'Cawl' is a very specific sort of soup made with cubes of lamb (or mutton), swede, potato and leeks in a broth.  Sorry if I have this wrong or have offended your old family recipe for authentic Cawl!  There are a zillion different recipes and descriptions and photos if Cawl on the web of this dish and each family (Mam) has their own way of making it.

The traditional approach as I understand it is to use stewing lamb (or mutton) and to cook it slowly and for a long while.  My wonderful M-I-L, AKA the Queen of Traditional Welsh Cooking in our house, remembers her mother explaining how important the tiny  'spangles' of rich golden lamb fat globules floating on top of the soup were.  In harder times, when people worked their bodies hard, every scrap of energy giving fat and goodness from the inexpensive stewing meat and common winter vegetables was precious.  I'm all for fat, it gives flavour and texture, I love vegetarian food but as a non veggie I can say I do really appreciate the taste of meat and it's fat when I have it.

 

Anyway, back to Cawl - I had THE MOST AMAZING bowl of Cawl in a fish and chip shop in Laugharne (Castleview Chip Shop, Laugharne, Carmarthen SA33 4ST), about 5 years ago, it was quite simply fantastic and I have been trying to recreate it myself ever since with varying results. I asked the staff at the Castleview how they had made it at the time and they told me that they had marinated the lamb in honey and had not used stewing lamb but lamb steaks.My version of this has not yet quite achieved the sheer perfection of the original, but I am going to keep trying til I get there!

Non Traditional Recipe for Cawl My Way - makes a vat full!

• use x 2/3 lamb steaks (the sort meant for frying fast in a pan or grilling)  and cut up into small chunks about 2 cm across
• pair the fat off the lamb (usually around the steak) and set aside
• put the lamb cubes into a bowl and add a few squeezes of runny honey and stir around until each has a light honey coating
• put the lamb fat in a hot v large saucepan and fry it until it releases the fat in liquid form
• then throw in the lamb cubes and fry them hard and hot until they are golden and v slightly brown - try not to let them burn badly (where the honey 'catches' they might get quite brown), then set aside in a clean bowl and cover with foil - keep the pan and the fat!
• peel and cube a swede into v small pieces - ideally 1 cm across (swede takes ages to cook!)
• peel and cube 2/3 large potatoes into slightly larger cubes about 2cm across
• peel and cube  4-5 large carrots (or 7-8 small ones) into cubes a little larger than the swede
• wash and slice 4-5 leeks into 1 cm rounds
• add a little olive oil to the large pan which you cooked the lamb in which should have the lamb fat still in it and the juices and colour from the cooked meat
• and add the chopped swede to the pan and cook for 8 or so minutes, stirring around
• then add the carrots and stir around for a further 5 or so minutes
• then add the potatoes and stir around over the heat for a further 5 minutes
• then add MOST of the leeks to the pan (keep some of the greener leek slices aside - put them in the set aside bowl with the lamb if you wish) 
• stir the whole lot around in the lamb juice and fat until the leeks are softened and then add 2 pints of chicken stock and bring up to the boil
• add more stock or water if necessary
• cook until the swede finally feels like to might be cooked, maybe 45-50 minutes - try hard not to crush the potatoes when you stir the Cawl if they are looking crumbly 
• once the swede is cooked add the cooked lamb cubes and raw green leeks slices you set aside earlier
• cook for a further 5 minutes until the green leek slices are just cooked
• and serve with bread to dip and, if you wish, cheese crumbled on top of each bowl

Blasus Iawn! Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus i chi!

Saturday night gravy

Good gravy, for me, makes the dish, if it's one of those meat and 3 veg type meals.   Bad gravy constitutes a criminal act, no gravy with certain dishes is just wrong and at a push you can just melt a large knob of butter on something hot and call it gravy when it melts!  As I once overheard someone in Leamington Spa say at a wedding (while asking for extra gravy) "I can't stand a dry dinner".  Wise words indeed.

 Sausages, Mash and PSB with red wine gravy

One of the more personally revealing things about being unable to cook for so many weeks while recovering from a big operation, is that it seems that I cook in such a way that it is really hard to tell someone else how to do it 'my way'. When pressed by my other half to explain how I made 'non-Bisto' gravy it was pretty difficult to exactly work out what I actually do to make gravy - especially with any firm idea of measured amounts and timings.

Despite this the resulting red wine gravy he made following my 'made up on the hoof recipe instructions' was great (I would have added more liquid to make it less thick if I had made it but that wasn't in the recipe). 

Tonight I made the delicious white wine gravy below for our meal of fennel chicken, mashed potato & celeriac and with spring greens....