Thursday, August 14, 2014

Cheap Bone Stew in a Pressure Cooker

This is a rather low effort, quick recipe and the ingredients are cheap. You can get the meaty flavour without buying actual meat. Hooray for resourcefulness and for a good effort-to-tastiness ratio!

Ingredients:
2 tbsp oil
1 tspn butter
1kg bones
1 onion
2 big stalks of celery
5 carrots, chopped
2 potatoes, chopped
5 turnips, peeled & chopped
1 big head of broccoli, chopped
1/2 cup brown lentils, cooked (without salt)
1 medium aubergine, chopped and lightly fried

Method:
Brown the bones with some oil and melted butter in a hot pot or pressure cooker. 
Take the browned bones out and then start to brown the onions. 
Add the chopped carrots and celery at this stage to make a mirepoix.
Once those look nicely fried, add the bones back in and then also the rest of the roots (potatoes and turnips). 
Add enough water to almost cover the vegetables. We used a pressure cooker, so these ingredients only took 20 minutes to get cooked. A stove might take one to two hours.
Once the pressure is released from the cooker, take out the bones and discard them.
Add the broccoli, cooked lentils and fried aubergines.
Put the pressure cooker on for one minute (it takes a few minutes to get up to pressure as well). Don't over do the broccoli or else it will turn into green mush.

Enjoy this hearty meal with a piece of buttered, crusty fresh bread or with grated Parmesan on top.


Monday, August 11, 2014

Spongy Lentil Cake

Part of trying new things means that occasionally you'll find something that you don't quite enjoy. Case in point is this fluffy lentil sponge cake from Anjum's New Indian cook book. It was made with chickpea flour, tumeric, mustard and ginger and other spices. Maybe the chickpea and ginger flavours are what combined to make a really strange taste. Perhaps I need to develop my palate. But I wont be making this again for a while.