Food by Mary McCartney – week 2

This was my menu planning before we went on holiday, I had hoped to continue cooking from Food after we came back from holiday but the incentive hasn’t been there (although after 5 days of camping the joy of being able to eat hot food from an oven is immense - first thing I did after I got off the train at Paddington was go into M&S Food and buy some filled jacket potatoes and onion rings to throw into the oven as soon as we got in through the door). Plus my copy of Bill Granger’s new book Easy arrived today and looks delish, so sorry Mary, your cheesy vegetarian food has lost its appeal, not that I will probably be cooking much over the next week, I’m having a wisdom tooth out later on today (and it’s apparently going to involve stitches this time, eek), so if it’s anything like last time I had a wisdom tooth out, I’m not going to be up to eating much, let along cooking it. Anyway, what did I make from Mary McCartney’s Food?

16th August

 

 

I used the white spaghetti sauce recipe to make a sort of carbonara (adding spanish panceta, nope that’s not a spelling mistake, it’s like italian pancetta, except without the extra t and in my opinion it doesn’t taste as nice). It was basically just a creme fraiche sauce, something I’ve made from various cookbooks quite a lot but for some reason this, although edible, just wasn’t that nice, it may have been the addition of the panceta though.

17th August

A quinoa salad, it was ok, I didn’t add the tomatoes as although I am teaching myself to like raw tomato I’m still not keen (I thought it was about time at the grand old age of 37 and I will now eat raw tomato if it’s heavily flavoured, like in a chunky salsa or a thai wrap, but without that much flavouring, nope not yet) and I forgot to add the spring onion, so it was a little bland. It was edible but I couldn’t help but think, eating it, that I’ve had nicer quinoa salads.

18th August

 

Oh my goodness this was absolutely gorgeous; buttered courgette and cheesy polenta, yep this was ‘unhealthy’ vegetarian food again but it was the sort of food that makes me want to curl up in a cosy spot somewhere with a big bowl of it. Although it’s a bit of a bizarre recipe, in that I cooked this on one of the hottest days of the year and all that carb and fat with the polenta and the cheese was like adding extra fuel to the furnace and I was literally sweating by the end of it, so it felt like more of a cold day dish but yet with the addition of the courgette, that makes it a summer dish if you’re going to eat seasonally (although if you were going to eat seasonally based on what I’ve successfully grown from my allotment this year you’d be starving, as even my courgettes have not done well this year, I had five plants, two died, one didn’t flower at all, one flowered but no fruit and the other flowered but produced tiny anaemic looking courgettes that even as far as eating baby courgettes go, looked totally inedible, the weather this year for growing has been appalling). But back to the seasonality of this dish, I guess you could swap the frozen courgette for frozen mixed Mediterranean veg (I don’t use that much frozen veg but I do always have a bag of mixed Med veg in the freezer) to extend it into the winter. Either way I will be making this again, just not too often, my poor waistline.

So, in summary, I don’t think I’ve sold anyone this book have I? If you want a good vegetarian cook book I’d thoroughly recommend Hugh FWs vegetarian book, now that’s brilliant, however there are some good recipes in Food and I’m sure that I probably will discover some more from the book in time but at the moment . . . I think this book was probably worth the cover price for the jalapeno tostados  (which I have cooked so many times now) and the buttered courgette recipe alone, but only just.

 

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• Food by Mary McCartney – week 1 (lacer.wordpress.com)

Food by Mary McCartney – week 1

Mary McCartney has a cookbook out and being from a certain famous vegetarian family, of course it’s vegetarian (although note: really not vegan, there’s a lot of cheese featured). Also as Mary is a photographer, there is also a lot of photographs, almost as many photographs as there is cheese.

Anyway I like vegetarian cooking and buying vegetarian cookery books; I don’t eat that much meat, I find veggie cooking is often cheaper and with my terrible menu planning I don’t have to worry quite so much about the aubergine going out of date as opposed to pack of mince (and also as I don’t eat fish at all, no buying recipe books where there’s a whole chapter I can’t use). So how did I get on?

13th August

I made the jalapeno tostado, which is basically flat bread / tortilla, with cheese and jalapenoes, I also made two for the kids minus the jalapenoes and they were gorgeous. I did manage to burn them though (trying to grill three at once was probably too much), so I couldn’t eat some of mine but what I did eat didn’t even make it onto a plate, they were eaten by me dancing round the kitchen making “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm” noises, as I dished up the kids. They were just the perfect balance between cheese and bread product and the jalapeno was a nice kick across the cheesiness. You know how cheese on toast (I sold this to the kids as ‘mexican cheese on toast’) doesn’t really work if the bread is too door stoppy, well this is like the opposite, this is perfection. (Can imagine it’d work well with dips to).

I also made banana muffins from the book, they were okay, a little bit dense and floury but I think there is just something about banana muffins that is a bit fundamentally wrong, whereas conversely banana bread is so right, I think like cheese of toast, it’s all to do with proportion.

14th August

I thought I’d treat the kids to a nice breakfast, homemade smoothies and American pancakes. The smoothie did not go down well; pineapple, orange juice, coconut milk and omega oils, the kids didn’t appreciate the not completely blitzed to non-existence pineapple or the fact that I dared to put coconut milk in it. I have to admit, I wasn’t a big fan either (whereas the American pancakes, also in the book, went down extremely well).

15th August

I made the granola bars today, no photo, it’s a bit embarrassing, as basically I made deconstructed granola bars, i.e. granola. The granola just did not stick together properly when it came to cutting it. As granola though, I thought it was really nice, I’m not a big fan of granola, there’s always something in it I don’t like, but the oats, cornflakes, apricots, almonds, seeds and agave syrup was very scrummy and all the flavours went together well, shame about the actual bars.