As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m struggling to be bothered to cook much at the moment.

As a way of tackling that, I thought I’d write up some of the recipes of the things I do like to cook.

2×2 Lasagne is a meal plan for two people over two days. Lasagne is a total faff to cook, and mucks up pretty much every pan in the kitchen. If you’re cooking for only two, it seems barely worth the effort But spread out over two days, it’s much more manageable. The secret is to do two mince based dishes, only one of which is actually lasagne. Then, the second day, you don’t have much more to do than to preheat the oven and make a cheese sauce.

This isn’t really fast food. Mince benefits from long slow cooking – and will taste even better the following night from having spent a day resting.

One final point – I make no claim to authenticity with this. I don’t know how real Italians make lasagne, and the one time we visited Italy, we didn’t eat much pasta. My mince is no substitute for a real ragù.

Day 1 – the mince

1lb beef mince
1 large onion
1 clove garlic (or more if you and your +1 like it, and aren’t susceptible to heartburn)
1 carrot
1 can tomatoes
handful mushrooms
Tomato purée
Bacon
Oxo cube
herbs to taste
glass good red wine
red wine vinegar

Dice the onion and carrot together and soften in olive oil in a large saucepan with the optional finly sliced bacon.

When the onion is transparent, add the finely chopped garlic and the mince, and cook until the mince is completely grey and nasty with no red bits left. (Mince goes through a horrid phase when you cook it but recovers when you flavour it and cook it.)

If you are being health conscious you could drain the fat off at this stage.

When the mince is fully cooked, add the tin of tomatoes and reserve the tin.

Make up the oxo cube to halfway up the tin and add the herbs and a generous helping of tomato purée. (The tom puree is absolutely essential to the recipe. Tomato sauce is no substitute. The oxo cube also adds tasty tasty MSG) Stir well. Add the red wine to the tin to fill it up and pour over the mince and veggies.

The pan should now be a little too wet. Finely slice the mushrooms (I usually run them through the slice side of a box grater) into the mix, stir well, bring to the boil and reduce the heat.

Simmer for ages. Stir regularly. At least 40 minutes, better an hour. You should end up with a tasty sauce with not too much spare liquid. Use the time to clean the kitchen. Never leave a pan on the stove unattended as unattended cooking pots are a major source of house fires – the single biggest source for non-smoking households.

Reserve half of the mince for tomorrow, the lasagne phase. Cover it and let it cool it quickly to room temperature and put it in the fridge.

The first night, you could use half the mince on its own with rice, with chillis and kidney beans as chilli con carne, in cottage pie, with spaghetti as spag bol or spooned over a baked potato.

Day 2 – the main attraction

So, come night two, you are ready to make the lasagne. You already have your ersatz-ragù, so all you have to do is make a cheese sauce, layer it in a suitable oven dish with sheet pasta, and bake it until it’s brown and lovely.

Cheese sauce

Half a pint milk
Half an onion
bay leaf
cloves
black peppercorns
butter
dessert spoon of flour
Cheese – strong cheddar. No, more cheese than that. Add in some parmesan too.
half a spoon of mustard
Even more cheese to top lasagne

Take the peeled half onion and stud it with the cloves. Put the studded onion with the bay leaf, peppercorns and milk in a pan and bring to the boil. Once at the boil, turn off the heat and allow to steep for a good few minutes, then discard all but the milk. The extra ingredients give a real savoury depth of flavour to the milk.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

In another pan, melt the butter and sprinkle over the flour. Mix well. Add the milk a little at a time, whisking vigorously all the time to guard against lumps. This is a basic white sauce – add a pile of breadcrumbs to make bread sauce, or in our case, add the cheese and mustard to make full flavoured cheese sauce. Continue to whisk.

To make the lasagne, spoon yesterday’s mince into the bottom of an oven proof rectangular dish of just the right size. Add a layer of ready lasagne sheets, and a little of the cheese sauce. Continue in layers until you have run out of ingredients and the dish is full (this is how you know whether the dish is the right size or not. Practice makes perfect.) Make sure you finish with a cheese sauce layer, and that the cheese sauce is all you can see when you’re done – no pasta or meat sauce poking out of the edges. You need a good seal all around the edge or the pasta will not cook. Sprinkle more grated cheese – a mix of parmesan and cheddar – on top.

Bake in the oven until the sauce is piping hot and the cheese topping has nicely browned. A good few minutes ought to do it.

Serve.

Eat.

Get minion to wash up.

For much of this year, I’ve been having a terrible relationship with cooking.

Normally, I like cooking. But for months, I’ve been in a perpetual state of can’t-be-botheredness. I’ve been eating far too many takeaways and semi-instant meals, and doing next to no cooking. The knock-on effect is poor nutrition – nowhere near my 5-1-day – and an empty fridge most of the time.

I’ve never really been one for a properly organised kitchen, with a meal plan and fridge full of the right ingredients. And I have nothing but respect for organised homemakers who can feed a family when I struggle to feed two of us. But it is a little bit complicated. I don’t work standard hours, and often have evening meetings. And ‘im indoors really prefers to eat at lunchtime and often uses his work canteen.

I’m trying to get back into the habit of cooking and shopping regularly and trying a leetle bit of planning. I’ve restarted using the 1click2cook website – which you populate with preferences, then it chooses five recipes for your evening meals next week and generates an automatic shopping list. Just this last week, I’ve also signed up for online shopping, to see how I get on. One immediate advantage is no illicit trips to the remaindered bakery section and stuffing my face with stale cake in the car park before driving home.

Pros and cons of 1click2cook –

Pros

Membership is really cheap and very good value for money. It’s got me cooking all sorts of odd and interesting things, and the weeks we use it we eat tasty food that on balance is masses healthier than takeaway weeks, and also much healthier than what I plan on my own.

A salutary lesson from taking a 1click2cook shopping list to the supermarket is just the amount of fresh veg it makes me buy. It’s only guiding me through one meal for most of the days, but still makes me get far more than I would anyway – before even I add in the apples, clementines and bananas that I’m supposed to eat for my lunch to bump up the numbers.

If your eatwell plate suggests you should be eating 1/3rd of your food as fruit and veg, I suppose your eatwell conveyor belt in the supermarket ought also to be 1/3rd vegetables.

You can also set it to provide different types of meals – I have it doing 3 meat, 1 fish, 1 vegetarian, but you can vary the numbers. I’m not very comfortable cooking with fish, and I don’t always like the results of the recipes. In fact I often find myself rejecting unfairly any sort of recipe with an unfamiliar fish, so more often than not, the fish meal ends up being tinned tuna.

Cons

Like with the veg box for the short while I did it, there’s no way of saying “we still have this ingredient left over – what can I do with it this week?” Week 2’s recipes are often completely different from Week 1s, so that sometimes you’re left with things you don’t have uses for. (It’s for that reason that I only ask for 5 recipes a week not 7 – I’ll almost certainly have nights off, and I will also know that I have enough ingredients left over to make other meals.)

There is a setting for how much you want to buy and how much make – so you can say, either I will make a tomato pasta sauce or I will buy one in a jar and use it as part of a recipe. But the website still assumes that some basic things come from ready made jars or bottles. Lemon juice and salad dressing are two examples. In my kitchen, lemon juice comes from lemons, and salad dressing is made from a selection of ingredients shaken together in an old jam jar. My selection includes 2 types of oil, dijon and wholegrain mustard, cider, balsamic and wine vinegars, some of which are home made, and other seasonal ingredients including elderflower cordial for the brief months it’s available. Back on the pro side – we eat far more salad on the 1c2c diet than we do ordinarily, so we can forgive them this!

Their system is complete random, so sometimes you get slightly odd combinations. This week has had three pasta dishes (including chilli con carne with penne?! – chilli should be with rice, so I did that anyway) two of which were pasta bakes! You can weed that out manually by making substitutions – potatoes and rice instead of pasta, normally, both of which are slightly healthier.

If you follow their list to the letter, you sometimes find yourself coming home with more fresh food, both veg and meat, than you can eat before it goes off. Common sense needed here, and more frozen meat than fresh some weeks.

Their system cleverly adapts quantities to your household, so it knows how much you need to feed the people you have to hand. I’m not sure what their base is for normal recipes, but reduced to 2 you sometimes get odd quantities of things suggested, like 60ml stock. It’s never yet asked me for 1/3rd of an egg, but it’s only a matter of time 🙂

They do have a refer a friend scheme, but they don’t have any way of creating specific urls. For blogging cooks, that would be a helpful thing. Instead, if any of you start using 1c2c as a result of my recommendation, please say alex.foster@zetnet.co.uk sent you!

We’ve been noticing the elderflower tree at the bottom of the garden flowering again.  Last year, we didn’t get around to doing anything about it until it was too late, which is a massive shame because the year before, we made our own elderflower cordial and it was fantastic.

The main part of the tree is unfortunately too high or too far from our garden to get at the flowers, but I’ve picked well over 20 flower heads off the tree and barely touched what’s there.  We’ve run out of sugar long before we’ve run out of flowers, so must get to the shops and get ready to make even more.

Just in case the recipe I use isn’t permanently on the internet, and my records last longer, the recipe is:

• 20 elderflower heads
• 1.8kg sugar
• 1.2l water
• 75g citric acid
• 2 lemons

Shake the flowers to get the insects out. Boil the water and dissolve the sugar and acid in it.  Use a vegetable peeler to take wide strips of peel off the lemons, remove the ends, slice finely and add the peel and slices to the flowers in a bowl. Pour over the flowers, cover with a tea towel and allow to steep for 24 hours before filtering through a muslin-lined sieve into a bottle.

Yesterday we noted that I, along with four-fifths of the residents of the fair city of Nottingham, don’t eat enough fruit and veg. Five portions of fruit and veg is the recommended minimum amount to eat, as agreed by the our government, the NHS, and the food standards agency (who also have the “Eatwell Plate” which suggests a healthy main meal should be 1/3rd vegetables, 1/3rd carbs like potatoes, pasta, rice, and the remaining third divided between meat, dairy and a very thin slice of fatty and sugary foods and drinks).

So, yesterday, I scared myself into eating more fruit and veg for one day only.  Today proved harder – there was an Unexpected Buffet at the end of an interview panel for a new Council director.  It was a very tasty buffet, with no fruit and veg.  So, lunchtime, wasted opportunity.  Teatime was benefitting from the Co-op’s BOGOF on pepperoni pizza, so we had half each, and P had broccoli and I, erm, didn’t. An apple for supper out of desperation and – oh, yes, OJ with breakfast – and that’s it.

Will have to try harder tomorrow. But to help keep me on the straight and narrow – here’s a technological solution! FoodFeed, twitter and a hashtag! What could possibly go wrong?

Extraordinary story in today’s Evening Post which says

THE number of Nottingham people eating enough fruit and vegetables has dropped to just 20%, new figures have revealed.

Only 1 in 5 people in the city are eating enough fruit and veg – and I’m in the four fifths.

I’m also amongst the 47,000 obese people and many of my friends are amongst the 84,000 are “only” overweight. I know the damages being obese can do, since a few weeks ago we discovered I’m now twice as likely to die.

I only eat five a day if I make a special effort – and the days I do are the days when I cook properly. When I started using “OneClicktoCook” I was amazed by how much fruit and veg it got me to buy for just one week’s worth of evening meals. The sad truth is that although that website supplies me with 6 evening meal ideas and a shopping list of all I have to buy, too often, those 6 evening meals last two or three weeks. I’ve had to stop buying fresh meat and fish with the recipes because I just don’t get around to cooking it in time.

Eddie Izzard was right:

So it’s all those fruits there, and there’s South African fruit we can have now, without going, “Oh, the guilt!” And star fruit, which are from Mars! So it’s great, you’ve got all these fruits, and you get a selection, you take it home, you arrange it in a bowl… and then you watch it rot! You never eat it, really… Occasionally, you go up to it, and go… “Ah… I don’t think I will. Ooh, a Mars bar, there we go!” (mimes eating bar) “Oh, I’m full-up now!” And they all rot from the bottom up, you go… (disgusted noises)

My brother texted earlier this evening:

Have I got to part bake a pastry case to make pie? How long for?

I responded:

Depends a bit on whether filling is cooked or not and whether you’re just doing a crust or sides and base as well?

All around proper pie! Apple and rhubarb – will prestew the fruit

If all ingredients are basically cooked already need to blindbake the base and sides to about half the time to cook pastry. Line the dish, prick with fork all over, cover in greaseproof, weigh down with eg dry pasta, cook 10-15 mins at 200, remove pasta and paper, put in hot filling, put crust on top, use eggcup to support middle, make hole to let out steam, cook til crust is ready.

Eggcup IN pie?!

Yes, assuming you don’t have purpose based cereamic thing to do the job, or you’re only making small pie. Upside-down eggcup working as pylon in middle of crust. Also assuming eggcup made of something that can withstand heat.

No eggcup – shot glass? Gonna be fairly small pie anyway.

Small pie might not need.

It almost sounds like I know what I’m doing, eh? Despite the fact I’ve never made a full pie, just pies with crusts in pie dishes, or blind-baked tarts with chilled or fruit fillings.

Hope it turns out OK!

To make cauliflower cheese, you need to get at least four cooking receptacles, a sieve and a chopping board dirty – if not more. Here’s how, cauli cheese for 2:

Chop up one cauliflower and discard the tough bits and outer leaves

Take the first pan (medium) and boil the cauliflower from cold – approx 12 minutes.

Meanwhile, take a milk pan and half an onion studded with cloves. Add 300ml milk and bring to the boil.

When the milk has boiled turn the gas off and leave to sit infusing the flavours from the onion and cloves until the cauliflower is only slightly crunchy.

Meanwhile grate approx 200gr strongly flavoured cheese – I used half parmesan and half mature cheddar.

In a third pan, melt a knob of butter and stir in a big spoon of flour. Stir vigorously until mixed, then slowly pour in the milk through a sieve to trap the flavourings, whisking all the while.

Whisk until no lumps remain, then add the cheese and whisk until it has melted, then add a spoonful of Dijon mustard and mix some more.

Butter a fourth pan, the dish it will go into the oven in, put the cooked, drained cauliflower in, then pour over the completed sauce.

Scatter a little more cheese across the top and put under a grill for 5-10 minutes until the mix is browned.

Voilà – one cauliflower cheese, four dirty pans.

The following was found on a forum somewhere enlightened on the internet, and DAYAM, THE WORL’ NEEDS TO BE TOLE!

Put 4 tablespoons of plain flour, 4 tablespoons of sugar and 2 tablespoons of cocoa in a mug and mix thoroughly.

Add 1 egg, and mix well.

Add 3 tablespoons of milk and 3 tablespoons of oil – mix again until well combined.

If desired, add chocolate chips and a splash of vanilla.

Microwave the mug for 3 minutes at 1000 watts or 4 minutes at 700 watts (the cake will rise above the top of the mug but don’t panic!)

Allow to cool, turn out onto a plate if you like.

Apparently margarine tastes better than oil – but you have to add this before the egg and milk instead of after.

This is absolutely perfect for those occasions at the end of a meal when you think, “I just fancy some pudding now.”  I’ve been making microwave steamed pudding for ages, but always have to faff around looking for recipes and quantities, but now mad cow memory be damned, even I can remember the stuff with the tablespoons!

Last year there was an episode of Dave Gorman’s Genius where one of the contestants launched a manifesto for in effect The Campaign for Hot Puddings.  He  needs to know about mug cake, fo’ shure!

This handy recipe can easily be adapted.  Take out the cocoa and substitute a handful of raisins, and, egad, ersatz Spotted Dick!  A bit of jam, and you have what I think used to be called Dead Baby when it was part of school dinners (although googling ‘dead baby’ has not turned up anything particularly germane).  Desecrated coconut would be a nice addition. Add mixed spice and a bit of grated carrot, and you even have a form of carrot cake!

Tonight’s variation: add a dessertspoonful of instant coffee and a handful of walnuts. And cook it in a bowl, where mixing is much easier.

Might work better if the coffee was fully dissolved in hot milk first, as there were distinct coffee flavoured granules extant in the final cake.

(and I wouldn’t like to give the impression of being the sort of person who gives instant coffee house space, but I have two jars knocking about – one in the camping crate and one in the “Lib Dem meetings” kit)

It could easily be vegan, if you replaced the egg and the butter with, erm, soya margarine and, erm, tofu?

It could even be lo-cal if you used low fat margarine and some sort of sugar substitute.

So spread the word. Everyone needs to know about mug cake.

Manda, (who has now returned to France) suggested in a veggie place on the internet a recipe for a type of Turkish soup based on lentils and bulghar wheat. Her initial inspiration was this site; I have put her version of it here on nibblous. It involved quite a lot of mint, which I didn’t have in stock, so first I had to find the mint; but eventually I had all the ingredients and made a version yesterday.

It didn’t taste of much to me. I think I have jaded tastebuds, and some vegan recipes which rely on the simplicity of veggie ingredients just don’t do much to me. P quite liked it. I think adding more stock and/or salt will probably make it more toothsome. It’s certainly nice and healthy and very filling.

But I think my favourite thing to do with bulghar wheat remains this pilaff recipe – also vegan, so long as you choose your stock carefully.

We had a video day with some friends last week, and I made two cakes.

Chocolate Victoria Sponge, with a buttercream and blackcurrant jam filling

And a Coconut-lime drizzle cake. I wanted to make lemon drizzle cake, but couldn’t buy lemons for love nor money on a bank holiday, so got limes and grapefruit and wasn’t sure which would work better. Grapefruit drizzle cake? Lime drizzle cake? Anyway, I googled for recipes, which gave me the idea of adding coconut too. It’s basically a creaming method sponge, with some of the self-raising flour replaced with desecrated coconut, with a syrup of lime juice and sugar poured over it once it’s cooked and cooled.

Both cakes were well received. We got half of one of them back at the end of the day and left the other half with our hosts. The remainder cake at this end didn’t last too long at all.