kitchenkill.

Just thought I’d share a tip I heard a while ago, and a resultant lightbulb moment.

When chopping vegetables, save the offcuts and peelings in a plastic bag in the freezer for future stock-making. It saves you using fresh new veg just for boiling, and reduces the amount of chopping you have to do. Sure, the compost heap suffers a bit, but as we can’t get into ours anyway I’m willing to take that hit.

Just the other day I used my bag of frozen offcuts and a chicken carcass to make some awesome stock. Now this was good, and I felt thrifty enough, until I suddenly thought hey, I have stock simmering, why not make risotto the way they always tell you to.

BING.

I have never seen a recipe suggesting this before. Recipes for risotto often say ‘have a pot of stock simmering’ but no recipe for stock ever says ‘Making stock? Why not use some of it as it’s simmering to make risotto for that evening’s dinner.’ Outrageous.

For each cup of stock I removed, I added one of water back in. Because it was still simmering, it continued to take up flavour from the kitchenkill and so I still had enough left for an entire ice-cube-bag of stock for future use. Not only that, but because the carcass was from a whole chicken I’d jointed myself, there was loads of meat left on it to shred back into the risotto. In fact, there was not a single item of non-waste-food used – the bacon was on its last legs and even the rice was a bag of pudding rice that had been sitting in the back of a cupboard for a year and given one last chance to prove itself useful.

I can’t say I had as much fun the other day, having cold polenta and chilli for breakfast. But the layer of thrifty smugness (and bacon) definitely made it and my day more palatable.

Italian-Style Potato & Bean Soup

Don’t cook the spinach too long or it tastes good but looks like a sort of manky camouflage colour. Ask me how I know.

Italian-Style Potato & Bean Soup
Serves 2-3

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
40g baby new potatoes
3/4 pint vegetable stock
1 tbsp tomato purée
1 tsp dried sage
splash white wine vinegar
150g spinach, defrosted if frozen
1 can red kidney beans, drained

Sauté the onion and garlic in a little oil until softened. Drop in the potatoes, stock, purée, vinegar and sage. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 mins or until the potatoes are cooked. Add the spinach and kidney beans and warm through. Season well and serve with crusty bread.

Paprika Mushrooms

I love paprika. Absolutely adore the stuff. Back when the folks lived in Cambridge, I would always buy my paprika in 75g bags from the Daily Bread co-op across the road, buying them two at a time because I went through it so quickly. Yum. This recipe is the veggie equivalent of my favourite way of cooking chicken, and is brilliant with a huge jacket potato with loads of butter. I’ve just eaten it and I could have another one right now. Yum.

Incidentally, and this is more a note for me than anything else, they run an online store from the Northampton store… www.ecofair.co.uk. Might have to get me a 500g bag of paprika.

Paprika Mushrooms
Serves 2

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
150g mushrooms, sliced
a splash of vegetable stock
1 tbsp paprika
dash of dried chillies
4tbsp plain yoghurt

Sauté the onion and garlic in a little oil until soft; add the mushrooms and sauté until they’re just short of how you like them. Add the stock, paprika and chilli, and bubble for a bit. Remove from the heat for a minute or so and stir in the yoghurt (if the pan’s too hot when you put it in, the yoghurt will separate. Doesn’t taste any different but looks a bit icky.). Ta-daa!

Courgette & Cumin Soup

I’m achingly close to finishing the scarf. Four more rows of the main pattern and then 8 of ribbing. This is a good thing, as it has been becoming increasingly more obvious to me that my knitting method is completely and utterly wrong. Sure, it all comes out as knitting in the end, but I don’t think my backwards-one-hand-contorted-style that I developed age 8 and have never bothered to sort out will stand up to projects any more demanding than a scarf. And since eBay has just made me buy a set of circular needles, I may as well do them some justice by using them properly.

Apart from that, I have a cold. So soup was inevitable.

Courgette & Cumin Soup
Serves 1 sniffly female

1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 courgette, sliced
couple of potatoes, diced
1 green chilli, diced
300ml vegetable stock

Sauté onion, garlic & cumin in a little oil until soft. Shove everything else in, cover and simmer 15 mins. I had mine chunky but you could zuzz it if you so wished (and if you want to drink icky green goo, I don’t think the colour’d be quite right). I left a good number of chilli seeds in there, in the hopes of burning out the little bastard cold germs with which I am riddled. I don’t think I left enough in, so I’m hoping the the garlic will follow it up with a delayed reaction.

I’m a firm believer in the old adage ‘feed a fever, feed a cold’. It forms part of my general guidelines for life:

Ill? Sad? Angry? Confused? Drink through it!
If you can’t drink through it, eat through it.
If you can’t eat through it, sleep through it.

After that point the emergency services should probably be called. Such a serious situation should be left to the professionals.