Posts Tagged ‘recipe’

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with soups a little. Nothing too exciting, but I have decided that rather than working from recipes, I’m just going to throw stuff into a pan and see if I can do it off-script. This recipe worked out well, so I thought I would share.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• Carrot
• Fennel
• Garlic clove
• 1 tsp crushed chillis
• Sweet potato
• 1 litre chicken stock
• 100g sweetcorn
• 300ml double cream
• Flat-leaf parsley
• Chicken breasts

Instructions

Cook the chicken breasts in the oven according to packet instructions: usually around 30-35 minutes at 180-200 degrees C will do it. Put some bowls in a plate warmer.

Meanwhile, heat a large pan with some vegetable oil it in. Finely slice the carrot, fennel and garlic and combine it with the crushed chillis. Season with salt and pepper and cook it for a few minutes.

Peel and dice the sweet potato into any size chunks you like. Throw this in and continue to cook for a few more minutes. Add the chicken stock and sweetcorn and bring to a boil. Leave to simmer until the chicken is two minutes away from done.

When the chicken is almost ready, take a stick blender to the pan and destroy everything until there are no lumps. Add the double cream and stir to heat through. You can take the pan off the heat.

Take the chicken out of the oven and slice. Fill your bowls with some soup, then dump the sliced chicken in the middle. Chop some parsley and sprinkle that around the edges.

Have you ever thought to yourself “I wish I could eat more kale, which genuinely is a super food, but it just tastes so boring”? If so, never fear. I have found a solution that will have you eating kale until it comes out of your ears.

The solution: combine it with a second super food. In this case, bacon.

Everyone knows bacon is a super food, of course. It cures hangovers. It comes from a magical animal, one that produces chops, ribs, gammon and much, much more. Best of all is the unmistakable smell that comes down the corridor as soon as someone starts frying it.

I used pancetta, but any type of bacon will do. Start by cutting it up into small pieces. Next, fry it in a pan until crispy. While you are doing this, steam the kale. When they are both cooked, toss to mix.

Or, if you want to get more of the bacon flavour into the kale, cook the bacon first and then toss it with the kale. If you have the bacon crispy before it goes in, it should not go soggy during steaming.

This is based on a recipe from The River Cottage Fish Book.

Flat fish are fairly easy to clean. They have all their guts in a little pocket at the front below the face. This is the only preparation I did for the flat fish. It was roasted hole with the skin on.

I replaced half of the original cherry tomatoes with sweet potato. Elina is not a tomato fan, but loves sweet potato. I cut it into chunks and boiled it for 15 minutes before adding it to the tray with the tomatoes. This produced a slightly mushy result, but with a firmed-up skin. I also rubbed olive oil and stashed a bit of butter around the fish.

Finally it all went into the oven for 15 minutes before being served on the tray.