March 2019 – Apricots In Manchester

Eighties Cooking: The Wholefood Cookery course

March 31, 2019February 4, 2024Apricots in Manchester3 Comments

Cookbook Challenge Week 5

See my **previous post** for more about this book

Today in the UK it’s Mother’s Day, so my dinner is being cooked for me while I sit on the sofa eating chocolates and writing about what I cooked last night. This was the least successful meal so far, and to be honest I think my family would prefer me to stay on the sofa and not make anything else from this book!

The book contains several menus and the one I picked included wholemeal vegetable pancakes with sweet and sour sauce, followed by apricot mousse. It also suggested making wholemeal melba toast with houmous, but I could not see the point of making a lovely fresh loaf just to slice it up and make dry toast, and anyway it seemed like quite enough high fibre food for one meal. Each menu includes a basic timeplan and is followed by nutritional notes. I was surprised to learn that even if I had made the full menu it would still not quite meet the recommended daily fibre allowance and most people are not eating anywhere near the guideline amounts.

I made the mousse earlier in the day as I needed to cook and puree the apricots (which had been soaked overnight), and having learnt from my mango ice cream experience I wanted to allow time for it to cool and set.

The apricot puree – pretty colour isn’t it? My dried apricots contained sulphur dioxide to keep the colour. Organic ones would be brown, but those are the ones to use if you are worried about allergies or sensitivities.

The recipe includes two stiffly beaten egg whites which are folded in at the end. Now, this book predates the UK ‘salmonella in eggs’ scandal of 1988, in which the Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie stated that most British eggs were contaminated with salmonella. This caused a huge scandal, a 60% reduction in egg sales and led to her resignation. Even though the statement was not actually quite correct, for years afterwards recipes warned that children, the elderly and pregnant women should not eat raw or lightly cooked eggs. Fortunately chicken farming has improved since then and in 2017 the Food Standards Agency advice was updated to say that raw eggs with the Lion mark are safe again for most people.

Here is the Lion mark on the egg box and stamped on the egg so we know it’s safe.

The vegetable stir fry included a large amount of veg (which I shredded in my food processor) but no seasoning apart from one optional clove of garlic. The sweet and sour sauce did contain salt from the shoyu, but I knew a big pile of plain vegetables was not going to go down well, so I cooked them in flavoured oil and also added a green chilli, a pinch of salt and some 5 Spice seasoning. The vegetables were fine, but the main problem with this recipe was that I really can’t make pancakes! I admit that is a problem with the cook rather than the recipe itself, but I had to make two batches before I had enough that were whole enough to wrap around the filling.

If you’ve read previous cookbook challenge posts, you may have noticed that I like to try and pair some wine with the recipes. This time it was a Gewurztraminer from the Alsace region – slightly sweet with some tropical fruit notes and often paired with spicy food and desserts including dried fruit. It was probably the best part of this meal!

Wholemeal vegetable pancakes with sweet and sour sauce
Apricot Mousse
Gewurztraminer

I can’t say I really enjoyed cooking this. It was extremely hot work to cook all the pancakes and them keep them warm while I cooked the stir fry and the whole thing generated a lot of washing up.

The food was not bad, but not particularly good either. My sons thought the stir fry was OK, but did not think it went well with pancakes – even though they like pancakes they would have preferred rice or noodles with this. Son two also found the sauce far too acidic even though I added extra sugar. The mousse had a good apricot flavour but was a bit intense – my eldest son ate it but didn’t ask for any more and the younger one did not like it at all.

On reflection, I don’t think I’ll be revisiting this book. It seems very much of its time, whereas now Instagram is full of posts showing far more appealing and tasty looking dishes. Healthy cooking has definitely moved on and that’s for the best. Which healthy recipe books do you recommend?

Eighties Cooking

March 30, 2019February 4, 2024Apricots in Manchester1 Comment

Cookbook challenge week 5: The Wholefood Cookery Course

This week I tried out some eighties cooking, so we’re going back in time to 1983 – can you tell by the cover? As you can see, this book aims to teach its readers how to cook with wholefoods. Although this was the decade of Nouvelle Cuisine, most food at home was fairly basic and the very popular Chicken Kiev was considered quite exotic (as well as risky; it was easy to squirt yourself with hot butter as you cut into it). Vegetarianism was becoming more popular, and since the 1970s there had been more interest in healthy food and more anxiety about what we ate and what it was doing to us.

Aerobics classes and fitness videos were taking off, along with colourful lycra outfits to wear while you took part. Fat reduction and plenty of fibre were the key points of the healthy eating advice of the time.

I can’t remember how or when I got this book and I have definitely never cooked from it before. It’s going to be interesting to see what the family think of this – do you think it’s going to appeal to 2019 tastes?

Read this post next to see how I got on

Cookbook Challenge Part 4: Nigella Express

March 24, 2019Apricots in ManchesterLeave a comment

This Saturday we were busy visiting the University of Bolton. It’s hard to believe my eldest son is looking at universities already! We didn’t get home until 5pm, so I had already planned a quick menu.

I decided to make “Curry in a Hurry” which certainly sounded appropriate. I actually wanted to make a prawn and mango curry – I’ve had it before and it’s delicious, however my sons have an irrational dislike of sweet potato and butternut squash which are key ingredients in that recipe, so I tried this one instead.

This is a Thai green curry and is supposed to use chicken. I don’t eat chicken, so I replaced some of it with Quorn chunks, which are OK and at least everyone in the family will eat them. I also used another meat replacement: jackfruit – often used as a vegan alternative to pulled pork. You can’t buy it fresh here, it comes in a tin like this:

I used forks to shred the pieces of fruit and it did vaguely resemble shredded chicken. It doesn’t taste meaty at all, just slightly acidic and salty from the brine it’s canned in, but it soaks up flavours from whatever sauce it’s cooked in.

Apart from the extra task of shredding jackfruit that I gave myself, this recipe is really easy as it uses bought curry paste and frozen vegetables. It’s more of a suggestion than a recipe in fact, but it is still useful to have reminders of shortcuts like using chopped spring onions instead of peeling and chopping a big onion and using wok oil to add extra flavour with no effort.

It was very tasty and the coconut milk made it rich and filling. It went down well and the jackfruit was quite successful with no complaints about the unusual bits in the curry.

Curry in a hurry served with basmati rice

And Riesling which is supposed to pair well with Thai food

Dessert was a cherry clafoutis. I’ve had clafoutis before in restaurants, but never made it myself. It usually takes quite a long time to cook, but this is a shortcut version with a short ingredients list and short cooking time.

All I had to do was mix up a quick batter in the Kenwood Chef and stir in some ready prepared cherries. I added Kirsch as suggested, mainly because I’ve never used it before. Let me know if you have any suggestions for using up the rest of the bottle! It was worth using though, it soaked into the cherries and made the whole dessert taste a bit more luxurious,

I overbaked this a bit. I keep forgetting that I should reduce the temperature for my fan oven and I forgot to check on it while I was cooking the curry. Still, you live and learn, which was one of the aims of this challenge and it tasted good anyway. We had it with single cream, although actually I think creme fraiche would have been better.

(Update: we had the cold leftovers with cream the next day and that tasted even better.)

Not a bad meal at all considering it only took about an hour to make.

Nigella Express

March 22, 2019Apricots in Manchester2 Comments

Not the best photo as the cover is quite battered!

This weekend we’ll be busy, so I’m turning to an old favourite from Nigella Lawson. Nigella will feature several times in this challenge, but this seems like the right time for Nigella Express.

The book was published in 2007 when I had two small children and a fairly demanding job, so anything with the subtitle “Good Food Fast” was always going to be appealing. There was a TV series too of course, with Nigella dashing home and showing us all kinds of short cuts to host a quick dinner party on a Wednesday night. I’m sure there was an episode which involved her doing some meal preparation with her coat on because she couldn’t even be bothered to take it off. That may sound silly, but I really have come home after working and picking up the children and by the time I’d got them inside, helped them get their coats and shoes off and got them a drink or whatever, then actually taking off my own coat and hanging it up really did seem a step too far. Anyway, I loved watching this on TV, especially the section at the end which involved Nigella coming down to the fridge in her dressing gown to finish up some leftovers.

I don’t think I ever did host a Wednesday night dinner party, but I know there were several recipes in here that saved us from yet another dish of stir fry or pasta in sauce. I’m looking forward to revisiting this.