Life is not made of sweet potato dip. (Still got some left, mind.) Nor is it made of cold noodles. (Handy though they are for one-handed lunches.) So it's time for a more effortful dinner. Still veganish, and still sadly orange. But it's another brilliant recipe from Clair Thompson (Home Cookery Year this time, after Kate posted earlier from New Kitchen Basics, also fab). This one is koshari rice.
On the one hand, it's very familiar: cut up a butternut and roast it. Recipe says peel and quarter it and cook it for half an hour on 200degC. Spoiler: it won't cook in that time. But I did big slices, unpeeled, for closer to an hour. Under foil for the first half hour, with oil, salt, 1tsp cumin, 1tsp coriander, then unveiled to get it a bit toasted round the edges. It's very nice. But you knew that, assuming you are pro-squash, and if you're not you absolutely shouldn't make this recipe.
I also had a bunch of old crispy onion, no longer crispy, which I chucked in for the last 5 minutes, and that has turned out Most Satisfactory.
On the other hand... look, I'm frying some wholewheat pasta, and just hoping the recipe isn't as mad as it sounds. Chopped onion fried till semi-transparent, then add some broken wholemeal spaghetti and stir it around a bit.
A perfect way to get rid of random part-packets of gloopy wholemeal pasta you didn't really want to have around in pretend virtue. Another time I would fully ignore the recipe telling me to make it 5cm long and go with my instinct to turn it into tiny fragments. Much easier to stir.
After you've hooshed them about for a while, add basmati and stir it again. Plus a couple of bay leaves and a cinnamon stick. Then add water or stock - I did this by eye, but you presumably want about double the rice volume and a splash to cope with the pasta. You're going to simmer it for about 15-20 mins on very low, so this is not an al dente combination.
Good and beige. But it's an excellent support for the squash, which is full of flavours. Splodge some yoghurt with a crushed garlic clove on the side, and you've got the sour-hot addition that this mix needs. Very good stuff. And I've got enough squash to upholster a sofa now. Friday lunch is usually a bit of a scratch affair but it's going to be leftoverstastic tomorrow.
This is partly pre-Christmas virtue, partly veganish week, and partly just a mood of not really wanting challenge. I'm very, very tired (hoping this is because I just had a covid-related test that showed I am dangerously low on vitamin D, and some sweet sweet free tablets are in the post to me now - perhaps I will be Abruptly Sprightly any week now), and family news is not good. This has been such an awful year for families losing loved ones abruptly and at a distance. But losing them slowly to brains that crumble in on themselves is also pretty bloody awful, and seeing it happen in real time isn't wildly helpful. I can feel that next year is also going to be one where I can't plan anything, for a whole new set of reasons. I'm glad this week's cooking has been comfortingly orange and supportive at least. A decent basis. Even the fried pasta.
I remember watching my grandmother's brain crumbling a while back; it is not a nice thing, so much sympathy.
ReplyDeleteThank you. It's not been great, and there's a long way to go - appreciate the sympathy.
DeleteI have no specific experience of that particular illness, but yes, watching a loved one's body betray them is almost beyond words. Huge virtual hugs to you, lovely.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, in the grey of winter, orange food is strangely heartening, fried pasta and all!
Thank you. It's a bit shit, is what it is so far. But we're still in the stages of realising how bad.
DeleteWill keep going with orange stuff (and green stuff this coming week, I think). Am thinking January might be back to basics - it's all very nice doing new recipes, but I've not done a shepherd's pie or a macaroni cheese this winter, and that's a sad omission.