The Kitchen @ Bury St

(Check out previous blog post for a little rambly story about this recipe)

Gumbo is one of those incredible cultural dishes that require love and time to prepare. You need a bouillabaisse, sausage, shrimp, okra; a large pot, at least 3 hours of simmering time.

When I get home from work, I don’t want to wait 3 hours. I want gumbo straight away.

The obvious solution is to make a huge batch and eat it gradually or freeze it. But I have poor impulse control, especially when it comes to delicious stew sitting in my fridge, waiting for me.

So I experimented with a couple versions of the original basic gumbo recipe from New Orleans, made with ingredients from Aldi. Authentic, eh?

Luckily, it is a stew which you can throw literally anything into, and as long as you have the same base, it is going to be delicious

Serves 2 hungry people, perfect for after a long day or when you’re ill

• Cajun spice mix (essential for the flavour and spice)
• Tinned tomatoes
• Jug of stock (I prefer chicken stock for this recipe)
• Butter, or flavourless oil
• 1 onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 stick of celery
• 1 red pepper
• A couple corn on the cobs (NOT tinned corn, you will see why)
• Anything else you fancy; I’ve had prawns, courgettes, sausage, quorn pieces, pineapple, etc etc

1. All you need for this recipe is one big frying pan or a wok – its a one pan miracle. Start by dicing the onions and garlic, and frying them until translucent in your oil of choice (butter is lovely and rich alongside the stock)
2. Add in sliced celery and sliced red peppers (and any other similar vegetables) and fry for 3-5 minutes on a medium to high heat
3. Once all the veggies are cooked slightly, add in the tinned chopped tomatoes and the stock. It should look too watery to be a stew – it will reduce over time.
4. Simmer for 10 minutes and then add cajun spice, and taste – add in more spice, or salt/stock if the flavour is weak and watery, add some sugar if it is too salty and overpoweringly spicy
5. Now – as the stew is simmering but still relatively liquidy, slice up the corn on the cob into wheels (just slice width ways however thin you want – when it’s just me, I just dump the whole cob in) and add them to the stew
6. Make sure the corn is as submerged as possible and shift it around every so often to allow it to soak up the stew
7. After roughly 15 minutes or when you can easily pierce the corn, it is ready to eat!

Can be served over rice, couscous, with bread or on its own as a stew!

Slurp up the stew and save the gorgeous corn on the cobs till the end; they will have soaked up the spicy juices of the stew and the ingredients (absolutely lovely when using prawns and pineapple).

I now understand why people have a “moving day”, rather than a moving month.

For the last 3 weeks, I have been slowly packing and moving boxes between houses, waiting for that sweet day that me and all my boxes will have a home for the year.

And let me tell you, this does not allow the joy of cooking.

Not only did I pack up most of my dry herbs and spices a week ago in naive belief that I didn’t need them, but most of my pans, plates, cutlery and baking trays are dormant in my parents’ loft.

Because of my impatient and poorly organised moving plans, my cooking has become very limited – or maybe minimalist? That sounds cooler. Yeah, minimalist.

So, in my new found zen kitchen (which has definitely not experienced tears of frustration whilst trying to cook stew in a frying pan), I possess:

• One large frying pan
• A small saucepan
• A smoothie maker/blender thingymabobby
• One plate
• One bowl
• A fistful of assorted cutlery
• A kettle
• A chopping board
• One knife
• A rice cooker

And from this, some delicious and some not so delicious experiments have occured.

I also decided to eat my way through the mixture of random food left in my cupboards and freezer, so some nights have been mad concoctions of half frozen veg, half pesto pasta with a bean burger plonked on top. Other nights have been simply a hash of random veggies wilting in my fridge drawers on top of the last of the couscous I bought in November.

However…

I managed to find the perfect moving, I mean, minimalist meal. Healthy, tasty, cheap, and looks like it takes more effort than it does. I have made it 3 times in one week and still can’t get enough.

Cajun-inspired stew, a quick version of the Creole classic; Gumbo.

I am currenty writing up the recipe for this life-saving meal, so check it out on the blog!

So, I may end up eating this for every meal until I move out. Won’t hurt, will it?

Japanese cooking always gives off an air of superiority.

Sushi, donburi, tempura. They all sound so laborious, with hours of sourcing ingredients and marinating to produce the final meal.

Some Japanese recipes are certainly ones for when you have a few spare hours in the evening, or are cooking to impress.

But katsu is the lovely little exception.

The ultimate comfort food. Almost falling into the flavours of chipshop curry sauce, but rising out with slight sweetness and a tad more finesse than that. Perfect with rice, but also delicious enough to simply stand and dip bread into by the stovetop.

This curry is thicker, sweeter and less spicy than its Indian or Thai counterparts, so is perfect for an easy meal to impress guests who may not be able to handle the fire of a Thai Red curry!

This serves 2 people with an appetite!

To make, you will need:

• Basmati rice
• 2 tbsp of plain flour, mixed with water to make a thick paste
• Roughly 50g of panko breadcrumbs (can be bought online or in specialist Asian supermarkets)
• 1 small onion
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 tbsp of curry powder
• 1 tbsp of clear honey (could be substituted for agave for vegans)
• Most of a can of coconut milk (full-fat is always preferential)
• Your choice of ‘tonkatsu’ – chicken is the usual option, but I prefer this with aubergine or tofu. You could use any vegetable really, and even Quorn chicken pieces.

1. Prepare your rice; I swear by rice cookers, they make the rice fluffy without burning it, but you can boil the rice on the hob if you don’t own one.
2. While the rice is cooking, coat your choice of meat/vegetable (I will be using aubergine ‘steaks’ in this recipe) in the flour paste and roll in panko until as covered as possible – hold onto the rest of the flour paste, you’ll need it later. If you’ve used it all, make a little more.
3. Heat vegetable oil in a large pan, and fry the aubergine slices on both sides until browned. Fry them in batches and drain on kitchen towel.
4. Once all of the slices are fried, place them all in the oven at 180c for 15 minutes to crisp up, while you make the curry.
5. Wipe the pan clean of any burnt bits, and add a little more oil.
6. Dice the onions and fry them until translucent, before adding the crushed garlic and curry powder to fry for an extra minute
7. Add the remaining flour paste and honey. Stir for about 30 seconds, or until combined.
8. Add half a tin of coconut milk, and then keep adding it to taste, along with any additional curry powder or honey (add more powder for more flavour and heat, honey for more sweetness, more coconut milk for less intense flavours)
9. Simmer for a few minutes, and keep tasting!

Serve up with the rice, the baked ‘tonkatsu’ and you could even add some japanese pickles or some cucumber on the side.

Quick, delicious and looks like you put in far more effort than you actually did.

Perfect family dinner or hangover cure.

This is probably the 30th blog I’ve started.

And this is probably the same way I have started 28 of those blogs; with a long introduction about how I never stuck to the blogs that came before. But that this one — this one would be different.

With each failed blog, each empty homepage and the half-arsed attempts at photography, humour and even poetry in one instance, I have single-handedly taken up half of the valid wordpress URLs. Sorry for that.

So how can I convince myself that this one is going to be different?

After spending my first and second years of uni filling a tattered notebook with recipes that actually tasted decent, I began thinking about how to make them look prettier. I could maybe put them in a nicer book, you know, class it up a bit. I could type them into a document to make sure I never lose them or spill tomato soup over the ingredient list.

I never want to create an online presence; the pressure of that onto my fragile introverted soul would be too much, so perhaps a blog feels like a bizarrely public option.

To see a combination of my recipes, tried, tested, tasted, on a pretty little website is a beautiful thought.

So if you’ve stumbled upon this — hi!

And enjoy the little kitchen at Bury St.