Lasagne

Lasagne is one of the most satisfying meals you can make at home. It fills you up, is really easy, has very few ingredients, and you can chop and change it to create different flavours. The only problem is that it takes a bit of planning and time.

It is pretty much two things mixed together: spaghetti bolognaise and white sauce. Baked. So if you can make those two things, and have an oven, you can make lasagne.

So you need these things (clockwise from left): a bottle of passata (tomato puree), a 400g can of roma tomatoes (you can get chopped ones, or you can chop them up yourself, or you could, horror of horrors, use actual tomatoes), a small tin of tomato paste, grated cheese (a pizza cheese mix is good, gives lots of flavours, or you can use plain cheddar), two or so packets of lasagne sheets (you might have spares), 400g or so of beef mince, some butter, two cloves of garlic, and an onion. You'll also need olive oil (not pictured).

Chop the onion into thin pieces, as small as you can get, and crush the onion. Melt the butter in the oil (a couple of table spoons) and start cooking the onion and garlic until it goes nice and golden.

Then chuck in the meat and break it up into little pieces and cook until it browns all over. Then tip in the tomatoes - the paste, the passata and the tinned tomatoes. Stir this around until it is all mixed in well. Bring it up to a boil - it will start to plop and spit little volcanoes of red sauce at you and start making a mess. Put a lid on it, lower the heat as far as it will go. The amazing thing about this part is that you can leave this sauce for as long as three or four hours, just simmering, and it will get richer and richer and richer. But you don't really need to do that for the lasagne, only for bolognaise (and even then you have to be really keen). It will look like this:While this is simmering, you can make the white sauce (see last post). Below is a picture of the various elements of the lasagne up until this point:From the left, clockwise, is the bolognaise sauce, the white sauce, the cheese, the lasagne sheets and the dish. I hope you have a dish ready. At a pinch you could make it in a pyrex bowl.

So now you need to construct the lasagne. First, lay a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the pan. This will cook the bottom lasagne sheets. Now lay the sheets on top of this. You can either go all out and cover every square centimetre of the pan with the sheets (which is hard, because lasagne sheets don't split easily or neatly), or just lay three or so overlapping slightly. Next, pour some of the white sauce over the lasagne sheets, and spread it all the way to the edges. Then sprinkle some cheese over that:
So you keep making these layers until you run out of sheets. After you lay your last lasagne sheets, pour the rest of your sauce over, then the rest of your white sauce, then the last of your cheese. If this layer is nice and thick, so much the better. Pour some more parmesan and pepper over the top if you have it, and put it in the oven (which you have of course preheated to 180C) for around an hour, or until it starts to brown on top. It will look a lot like this:So that's that. Cut it up, serve it, and enjoy. It will make around eight slices. One is probably enough per person.

Result
My wife says this was delicious, and I would have to agree. Lasagne is really impressive, and is really difficult to wreck - just don't burn it. The top will be really nice and crispy, and the insides really soft and delicious. All the flavours will mingle together, the white sauce will melt into the cheese (or is it the other way around). You can freeze the remainder happily, or it will make lunch for a few days.

For the ultimate lasagne meal, make a tiramisu for dessert. But you'll have to wait for that recipe, it is for special occasions only. Enjoy!

White sauce

This is a component of the lasagne I cooked later on this evening. I thought I would separate them because white sauce is an important thing to know how to cook. You can add extra ingredients to it to make different sauces without too much trouble, and it is great on its own with vegetables like cauliflower or with corned beef.

You need but three ingredients: 60g butter, 60g flour, and 500ml of milk. Heat up the milk in the microwave or on the stove until it is just short of boiling. Melt the butter in a large pot (you'll need room to stir). Make sure it is bigger than this one. I had to switch pots later. Once melted, turn the heat down a bit and add the flower. Stir it in completely. It will turn into a dough that looks a little oily and shiny. Now you have to cook it for around 3 minutes or so over low heat. Stir it constantly to avoid burning it. Once it starts going, you'll get a nice biscuity smell out of it.

Once the three minutes are up, and the mixture ("roux") has become a little powdery and is starting to whiten, add your milk. Do it little by little, and stir it in each time before adding more. Do this over a very low heat. As you add more milk, the roux will thicken and thicken and thicken, until eventually you are left with a nice, creamy white sauce. You can refrigerate it happily, though a skin will form on top which you can peel off. You might find you need to add a bit more milk to thin it, depending on how you want to use it, and heat it up if you have put it in the refrigerator.

Unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries in the middle of the process but you get the idea. Just make sure that a) you don't burn the roux; b) you heat the milk up; and c) you add it slowly and stir it right in each time. You'll be fine.

To make some other sauces, you can add parmesan or cheddar to make a nice cheese sauce, add peppercorns or cracked pepper to make a nice pepper sauce (add this before you start adding milk, and cook it a while with all the milk in it). You can also make bechamel sauce by cooking in the milk a peeled onion with cloves stuck all over it. You'd have to do this on the stove.

Turkish Lamb, Fetta and Spinach Melts

Tonight was something of a home-made take away. It was really simple, with very few ingredients, and nothing too tough. Only thing is that you need a sandwich press for it to work properly. I have tried to make Turkish food before, and it was completely bland. But this was something special.

So, you need (clockwise from left): three pieces of lebanese flat bread, 400g of lamb mince (I used 250g of lamb and 150g of beef, because I didn't have enough lamb), two tablespoons of olive oil, two tablespoons of tomato paste, two teaspoons of cumin seeds (not ground), one tablespoons of currants, 3/4 cup of water, 60g of baby spinach or regular spinach, an onion chopped finely, two crushed cloves of garlic, and 100g of fetta.Warm up the oil over low heat, and cook the onion for about 8 minutes or until golden. Then add the garlic and the cumin seeds, and cook for a couple of minutes.Add the meat, turn up the heat, and cook until browned (about 4 or 5 minutes). Then add the tomato paste and water and stir all together. Bring it to the boil, then reduce to a simmer, and leave it for twenty minutes. Once all the water has boiled off, and you are left with a meaty, oily, delicious remainder, stir in the currants, take it off the heat and add some salt and pepper.Arrange the flat breads on the bench, pile on some of the meat on each:Then the fetta:Then the spinach.
Finally, fold them in half to make a sandwich, and put them in the sandwich press and squish them flat, and cook on a highish heat for a few minutes until they have nice brown toasted lines on them. Don't even think about wiping off the oil between each sandwich.

Result
This meal was really, really tasty. Something about cheese melted into tasty meat just renders me helpless. The spinach lent some great colour and a bit of crunch, and the fetta gave a bit of bite.

One great thing was that with each successive toasting, the bottom of the sandwich became a little bit fried in the oil from the previous sandwich, and ended up being unbelievably crunchy and delicious.

The cumin is what makes it 'turkish'. This is the spice that forms the basis for that smell of turkish food, like kebabs and so forth. You can't really leave it out, but you could probably enhance it with some different spices, like some cinnamon (which would go well with the currants) or some oregano or thyme (which would add a layer of complexity without overpowering it).

The currants are worth mentioning - while a very minor part, occasionally you'd get a little burst of sweetness.

Roast chicken with garlic, sage, lemon and sweet potato

Sunday night is traditionally a roast night. I suppose because, in a perfect world, you have a whole day to get things ready and think about it. Roast, I find, needs a fair bit of head space for some reason. I think because I associate it with family dinners and the like, back when I was a kid. Funny thing is, roast chicken is probably the easiest and cheapest roast to make, and it is very hard to ruin. It boils down to a) the quality of the chicken, b) what you put in and on it, and c) how long you cook it for. It is very easy to find good chicken marinades and bastes for roast, and chicken can take a wide variety of flavours very happily, from subtle flavours like lemon and sage, to rich ones like prosciutto and butter. This particular kind roast tends on the subtle side, where the flavour of the chicken is lifted up and supported by the activity of the marinade and the stuffing, rather than the other way around (which is fine, by the way!).

So, you take a chicken, a lemon (you can also use an orange, that is really nice - much sweeter), four cloves of garlic, and four heads of garlic (for four people, use one garlic head per person) some sea salt, olive oil and sage. The original recipe called for thyme, but I couldn't find any at the shops and the one we had in the garden had died. Preheat the oven to 190/200C. Then, clean the chicken. Depending on how it was when you got it, this could involve simply washing it inside and out with water, then pat drying, to a full gutting. I've never done that so I can't help you there. But good luck.

Cut the lemon in half. Juice half in a bowl. Add a teaspoon of salt, two and a half table spoons of olive oil, the crushed four cloves of garlic, and add a bit of pepper to season. This is the baste (right). Place the chicken on a roasting rack in a baking tray, and liberally smear the baste all over the chicken, inside and out.

Next, stuff it. Open it up a bit, and jam the other (non-juiced) half into the cavity, and then the sage leaves. You can rip them up a bit if you like but I don't think it matters. Now close up the cavity. There is a complicated way of tying up chickens with string, but all I did was 'sew' it up with a bamboo skewer.

Once this is done, arrange the chicken non-breast side down (right). Or breast side up, whichever you prefer. Drizzle a bit more olive oil over it, and salt and pepper to season. Pop it in the oven for fifteen minutes.

While it is cooking, cut up some sweet potato into centimetre-wide slices. Put them in a bowl, pour some olive oil over them and make sure they are all covered. Grab the garlic heads, and cut the tops (where the stalk would come out) off, taking with it the tips of as many cloves as you can. Once the chicken has finished its first 15, take it out, and slip the sweet potato slices under the roasting rack into the chicken baste at the bottom. Turn the chicken over. Put the garlic heads onto the rack next to the chicken, and drizzle some oil over them. Put the chicken back into the over for another 45 minutes, or until the juices run clear. To test this, poke the chicken deeply in different places with a skewer, then push the meat next to the hole to squeeze out the juices. Make sure you test in the joint between the drumstick and the body, because down there is where it won't be cooked thoroughly.

When it is done, it will look something like this:
The chicken should be nicely golden, the garlic squishy, and the potato slightly caramelised around the edges. Leave the whole thing to rest for 10 minutes. This is important, because it lets the muscle fibres in the flesh to 'relax' back and soak the juices up. If you cut the meat just as it is out of the oven in the first place it will be too hot, and in the second all the juice will run out with the knife, into the pan, and not stay in the meat where it is useful.

Result
This was a really, really nice chicken. It was fully cooked all the way through, really tender, and it was chicken out front, and baste behind. It probably could have been cooked for longer to let the skin crisp up a bit, but that is a minor quibble. The garlic was really interesting - very sweet, almost translucent, and it just melted. It was possible to just spread it over bread like jam. For the breath-conscious, don't worry - roasted garlic does not stay on your breath like fresh garlic. It is a completely different flavour and expereience. For me, though, the best part was the sweet potato. This had just soaked up all the lovely flavours of the chicken, the baste, and the garlicky oil, and were ever so slightly crispy. My wife made some packet gravy for it, which was a really nice addition, but you could probably skip it if you wanted to or didn't have the fixings. Plus, there was enough left over for lunches tomorrow.

One disappointment was that I couldn't taste the sage at all. I think it suffered from being in the cavity. I had expected it to mingle with the lemon juice but it just didn't. My wife said it was there though, so I have to blame my lack of subtlety for that.

The good oil on the worst. oil. ever.

When I was making the laksa a couple of nights ago, I used a particular brand of peanut oil that shall remain nameless. Here is a picture. It's not my fault if their branding makes the bottle easily recognisable. At least I taped over the actual logo.

It's hard to see in the picture, but under 'Peanut Oil' is the outrageous claim 'subtle nutty flavour'. Shenanigans. It has a subtle oil flavour, nothing more. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it was just canola oil or sunflower oil in the wrong bottle. At least it has a heart foundation tick, and is guaranteed to raise your level of monounsaturates.

See, the great thing about peanut oil (not this peanut oil, mind), is that when it starts to heat up, it releases the most wonderful peanutty aroma that permeates the food that is cooking in it. This is why it is used, Crisco nameless oil.

Unfortunately, I have pretty much a full bottle to use up now, so I am gong to start brushing it on the barbecue and lubricating fishing line with it so I can get back to using actual peanut oil.

Pumpkin Soup

Yeah, two soups in two nights.

This pumpkin soup is a recipe that I think I made up myself many years ago (like 6). It is the easiest thing in the world, is really cheap, and kinda healthy.

I start off with the following: half a butternut pumpkin, an onion, two cloves of garlic, a litre of vegetable stock, a little bit of butter, and some olive oil (those two brown lumps in the picture are stock cubes).
I chop the onion fine, the pumpkin into nice sized chunks, and crush the garlic. In a big saucepan (which is a pressure cooker with a missing lid) I melt the olive oil (about two tables spoons, it depends on how rich you want it) with the butter, and start sauteeing the onion and the garlic.
I keep cooking the onion and garlic until bits of brown start to stick to the pan on the bottom and sides. I deglaze the pan with some of the stock (deglazing is just pouring a small amount of liquid into the pan to get the gunk flavour off the bottom). Once the liquid boils off, the brown will be back on the onion and garlic. This has the effect of caramelising the onion slightly, which is where the real flavour of this soup comes from.It is hard to see in the picture above, but it is slightly brown. I then stir in the pumpkin a bit to cover it in the onion/garlic mixture, and then pour over the stock.I bring this to the boil and then simmer it until the pumpkin is nice and soft. Once this magical point has been achieved (about ten minutes of good simmering), I pour off some of the stock, and use a stick mixer to puree the pumpkin, onion, garlic and a little bit of the stock. Keep adding stock until the right consistency is achieved. I find stick mixers are great because they are a bit random, and you get little lumps here and there. This recipe makes about two big bowls. Serve it with some nice bread. You can mix cheese in if you like.

Result
As always, beautiful. This time it was particularly orange for some reason, which I guess depends on the pumpkin. This one was from Woolworths so that's probably why. The soup was really sweet, and the pumpkin was really out the front. Underneath that was the tang of the garlic and the caramelised onion. In the past I have found that the more you caramelise the onion, the more the garlic comes out, and you can get a really nutty roast garlic flavour. You can also deglaze with white wine, which adds an extra layer of flavour, but can be too rich. My wife sometimes has it with cheese, I generally don't as it is rich enough in my opinion.

We're out to dinner tomorrow for my best man's birthday, so I might do something on the garden. Happy eating!

Laksa

Every Sunday morning, or sometimes Saturday, I sit down with a bunch of cook books and work out what we're going to eat for the week. I can pretty much choose whatever I want - we decided a few weeks ago that we were both heartily sick of being unable to decide what to have for dinner over the week. So we did as we all do when democracy fails, and turned to the loving embrace of dictatorship. So now it is all (mostly) up to me. I only have a few guidelines - nothing too spicy hot, must be low in fat, low in cost, and very little seafood.

Because of rule no. 3, we eat a lot of chicken. Thus I present the first Kitchen Dad adventure: low fat chicken laksa.

With most of my meals, I normally take a base recipe from a book or magazine, and make little changes to it to suit us. In this case, the recipe base was for a salmon laksa. I changed the salmon to chicken (thigh fillets - breast would have been better but see rule no. 3 above), added shiitake mushrooms (left over from earlier in the week), and removed bean sprouts (because I forgot to buy them). It started off looking like this:

On the left is the broccolli, on the right is four thigh fillets (about 450 grams) sliced into slivers, and three shiitake mushrooms also chopped into thin strips.

As I was doing this, on the stove I was simmering one quarter cup of laksa paste (which I had fried in some peanut oil), 270 ml of light coconut milk (apparently they sell it in cans that size, I could only find 400 ml cans) and a litre of chicken stock. It looked like that, there (on the right). What I love about laksa is the way the ingredients don't come together until the very end, and you get these lovely scarlet blobs all through it. Oh, and there is a bit of bruised lemon grass in there too.

After 10 minutes of simmering that, I tipped in the chicken, and cooked it for five minutes, and in the last two minutes added the mushrooms and broccoli (right).

So that cooked for a couple of minutes together. I put the noodles (which I had prepared earlier - I should do this in the proper order) in the two bowls, and poured the soup over the top, and added some lime juice and torn mint for garnish (and flavour, it turned out). The final result was quite impressive.

Results
It turned out really well. I made laksa from a different recipe a few weeks ago (without using bought paste) and it was really not pleasant. It was far too hot, and the ground onion was all mealy.

But this laksa was brilliant. The chicken was tender and tasty, the broth really sweet with a hint of spice, and the broccolli heads had soaked up all the little laksa oil bubble thingies and were just delicious. This one is definitely going in the recipe book.

Until tomorrow, then.