Delicious Kake Food

Things I cook at home. More Kake

[kake-food]

Saturday dinner: Duck, leeks, rice

Photo © bob walker, used under Creative Commons by-sa.

Roasted duck legs. Seasoned, skin pricked with a needle, 25 minutes at Gas Mark 8 (230˚C/450˚F), 25 minutes at Gas Mark 3 (160˚C/325˚F), 15 minutes resting under foil.

Leek risotto. Wash and slice leeks into 1cm-thick rounds, wash again, then sauté in olive oil along with some chopped garlic until soft. Add white wine and boil it off. Add risotto rice and chicken (or vegetable) stock, and season with soy sauce. Mix some miso with water to form a smooth paste, and add that too. Cook until done, then add sliced spring onions and chopped parsley.

(I make my risotto in a frying pan, as suggested by Serious Eats, since it helps it cook more evenly.)

[kake-food]

Tuesday dinner: Beef, beancurd skin, noodles, greens

Spicy beef and tofu skin noodle soup. From a recipe on Viet World Kitchen, adapted from one by Fuchsia Dunlop.

[kake-food]

Tuesday dinner: Seabass, tomatoes, lemons, bread

Fish stew with tomatoes and lemons. I followed Su-Lin’s recipe but with four seabass fillets instead of two whole seabass, and so I reduced the cooking time to 25 minutes, which was just about right. The whole procedure was really easy, and the stew was tasty (though bob thought it was too sharp).

Served with sourdough bread.

[kake-food]

Friday dinner: Pasta, sausagemeat, peppers, spinach, tomatoes

Skillet pasta with sausagemeat and vegetables. I make this quite a lot, following the Serious Eats method of cooking the pasta directly in its sauce rather than boiling it in water and then draining and combining it with the sauce afterwards.

I make it even easier by preparing enough sausagemeat and vegetables for two meals at once, and freezing half. This does mean you need to do things in a slightly different order than the Serious Eats recipe states, but it still works fine.

I use frozen spinach (usually quite a bit more than appears in the photo above — I was running out), sausagemeat bought as sausagemeat (though you can also do it by buying sausages and taking the skins off), and orange datterino tomatoes that come in a jar — I find the flavour is sweeter and less aggressive than that of plum tomatoes in cans.

[kake-food]

Tuesday dinner: Sesame seeds, spinach, chicken, yam

Sesame seed and spinach stew with chicken. Very very roughly based on a couple of recipes for Nigerian beniseed (sesame) soup; one from 1Q Food Platter and one from Fruitful Kitchen. I fried some ata lilo in palm oil for about 10 minutes, then added sesame seeds that I'd previously toasted and ground, and continued to cook it until it stopped clumping up. Then added ground crayfish, maggi cubes, ground uziza seed (black pepper would have worked), a spoonful of shito (Ghanaian pepper sauce), and some water, simmered it for 5 minutes, then added lots of frozen whole-leaf spinach and cooked it until the spinach was defrosted. Finally I added some pre-roasted chicken, taken off the bone and broken into pieces. I added the chicken skin too.

Pounded yam. Made in the microwave. The proportions that work for me are 1 part yam flour to 2.2 parts cold water (by weight), e.g. 135g yam flour, 300g water. Mix together well, microwave for 5 minutes (no stirring), then mix and mash with a wooden spoon until smooth.

[kake-food]

Tuesday dinner: Courgettes, aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, polenta, egg

Ratatouille. Made following the Serious Eats method.

Served with polenta and a fried egg.

[kake-food]

Saturday dinner: Mushrooms, rice

Mushroom risotto with dill gremolata. Olive oil, onion, garlic, chestnut mushrooms, soaked dried ceps, soaked dried shiitake, rice, miso, soy sauce, mushroom vinegar, mushroom-soaking water, rice-washing water.

I made this in a frying pan, putting all the liquid in at once, as advised by Serious Eats.

The mushroom vinegar was left over from making mushroom antipasto. The rice-washing water was water left over from washing rice — it has plenty of rice starch in it, which helps thicken the risotto. (Don't wash rice for risotto, though.)

The dill gremolata was just chopped dill mixed with olive oil and lemon juice. If I'd known when I juiced the lemons a couple of days earlier that I'd be making gremolata, I'd have saved some of the rind, but I didn't, so I didn't.

I think next time I'll leave out the dried shiitakes, as their texture was a bit distracting. I've made this before with fresh shiitakes, though, and those were fine.

[kake-food]

Tuesday lunch: Eggs, tomatillos, squash, bread

Scrambled eggs with tomatillos and patty pan squash. Based on a recipe from Simply Recipes. Sauté chopped onion, roughly-chopped tomatillos, and roughly-chopped patty pan squash in some olive oil for about 5 minutes until the onions are soft but the tomatillos haven’t yet disintegrated. Add a couple of eggs and scramble.

I served this on a paratha (bought as frozen dough, cooked in a frying pan). Tomatillos are very expensive in the UK, but my sister grew some in her garden and gave them to me. She grew the squash, too.

[kake-food]

Saturday dinner: Pork, tofu, cucumber, rice

Oh look, I resurrected this blog and then didn’t cook anything new for a month!

Pork and tofu with black bean sauce. Based on a recipe by Celia Kusinera.

Cut pork belly into serving-sized pieces and brown in a bit of oil. Remove pork from pan and reserve. Use remaining fat/oil to brown some pressed, cubed tofu on at least two sides per cube (preferably all).

Return pork to pan along with minced ginger and garlic, roughly chopped fermented black beans, and just enough water to almost cover the pork and tofu. Bring to the boil, reduce heat, and simmer until the pork is tender (around 1.5 hours). Thicken the sauce with cornflour mixed with Chinese cooking wine.

Served with garlic cucumber (as previously described) and rice.

[kake-food]

Friday dinner: Cashew butter, smoked mackerel, greens, tomatoes, peppers, pasta

Nigerian macaroni cheese. I used to call this “macaroni in cashew nut cream”, but I seem to just call it Nigerian macaroni cheese now. It’s not a traditional Nigerian dish, and it actually has no cheese in it. However, it’s based on a recipe by Nigerian cook 1Q Food Platter, who says she was inspired by macaroni cheese. It certainly fills that niche for me. This iteration included smoked mackerel rather than prawns or chicken. I always use cashew butter in a jar rather than making my own, and I pre-make the ata lilo (tomato/pepper/onion mix) in large batches and keep it in the freezer. The other change I made was to add some finely-chopped greens which I bought in a local Ghanaian shop a while back, cooked, and froze. I don’t know what type of greens they actually were — I asked for ewedu and this is what I was given, but when I cooked them up I realised they weren’t ewedu at all. Tasty though.

[kake-food]

Wednesday dinner: Tuna, peas, yam

Tuna steak. Cooked in a griddle pan, leaving it raw in the centre. Garlic mashed yam. Roughly following Nma Okpara’s recipe. I included butter and spring onions, but left out the ginger and used squeezy garlic instead of grating fresh, and I used a bit of the water from boiling instead of milk. I also used uziza (Piper guineense) instead of black pepper (Piper nigrum) or Cameroon pepper (partly because I’m not sure what Cameroon pepper actually is). Oh, and I left out the cheese. I made this yesterday and reheated it today; it was better fresh, but still fine reheated. Peas. Frozen ones, put into boiling water just long enough for the water to come up to the boil again.

[kake-food]

Tuesday dinner: Smoked mackerel, aubergine, yam

Aubergine and smoked mackerel sauce. Roughly following Dobby’s recipe. I cut down quite a lot on the oil. I used smoked mackerel from the supermarket, which doesn’t need to be cooked long to soften it, so I just added it at the end. Boiled yam. Peeled, cubed, boiled for about 15 minutes.

[kake-food]

I suppose I should start posting here again

Gosh, it’s ages since I posted anything here. I'm going to start doing so again! First off, the backlog since the start of this month. I’ve backdated it all so it’ll show up on the days I actually did it.

[kake-food]

Saturday dinner: Chorizo, black beans, peppers, polenta

Black bean and chorizo stew. Also including onions, carrots, and celery. Peperonata. Following the Serious Eats recipe except using the end of a jar of pasta sauce instead of the pureed tomatoes. Cooked it covered (which the recipe didn’t specify). Polenta. The instant stuff, cooked for just a minute.

[kake-food]

Friday dinner: Tofu, tahini, mushrooms, rice

Tofu and mushroom stew. Saute chopped onions until nice and soft, then add portobello and shiitake mushrooms, cut in fairly large chunks. Cook until the liquid comes out of the mushrooms, then add in some tofu cubes which you have previously fried on all sides in some sunflower oil, just enough to make a golden-brown crust. Now add squeezy garlic puree, soy sauce, and a fairly generous quantity of tahini. Pour in enough water to half-cover the ingredients, and simmer it all for a while. Season with black pepper. About 5-6 minutes before you're going to stop simmering it, add some oyster mushrooms which you have broken into large pieces.

Jasmine rice. Done in the rice cooker.

[kake-food]

Tuesday dinner: Squid, prawns, crab, noodles

Seafood pasta salad. Following the Serious Eats recipe. I quite liked it as-is; bob didn’t like the mint and wanted there to be fish sauce in it.

[kake-food]

Monday dinner: Chicken, eggs, tomatoes, macaroni

Thai stir-fried macaroni with chicken. Basically following the U Can Cook Thai recipe. I used thigh meat for the chicken and it turned out very well.