Still on the greens

 Good news #1 - my mum got her first covid vaccine yesterday. Amazing, amazing news. (I wish Dad was as high a priority, but still. Good.)

Good news #2 - only 3 days left at work, the flood of emails has suddenly turned to a trickle as other people go off, and I logged out before the start of Pointless for basically the first time this year.

Good news #3 - I've finally cooked enough green stuff from my fridge that I've located the Lost Passion Fruit (that is a passion fruit that was lost, not the fruit of lost passion; I think that would be bigger) from last Confined Cocktails, and since they are basically indestructible I'm going to use my homemade grenadine for the purpose it was originally intended (an Avenue cocktail, apparently). 

Dangerous news: in the pursuit of greenery, I've found the winter equivalent* of the miso mustard mayo of spring, and it is no less addictive and no more healthy. More on this, later.

I'm fairly chirpy today, but yesterday less so. Luckily, dinner was a simple and tasty one with an edge of healthy - the kind of thing you can just about be bothered with, when everything is getting you down. 

Greens, noodles, egg

3 components here: cooked down winter greens, first. I had some chard and some fennel, and some dill dying at the back of the fridge, which is very much not the cavolo nero plus spring greens the recipe asks for. But anything you can separate into stalk and leaf, cook the former for a few minutes and add the latter to wilt would work fine. If you're frying, do it in sesame oil, at least a smidge.

Although this is easy, it does use a fair few pans

 

Cook enough portions of noodles for the number of people you're cooking for. i.e. for me, always: one. I used buckwheat, absolutely anything on the thinner end of the noodle spectrum would be fine. Mix them with a sauce made of 1:1:1 hoisin:chilli:soy. I used shiny new hoisin, some rank sweet chilli from the back of the cupboard, and the end of the rather too strong cheap soy bottle, which has at least cleared some space, and couldn'y go too wrong here. The direction was about a tsp each for one serving, but I might go back and do slightly more next time. 

Fry an egg. In sesame oil again. Obviously other egg options are available, you could scramble some into the veg or poach one. But the frizzly crispy edges of this egg, an egg I broke extremely ineptly and assumed would be a disaster? Were perfect. Dunno if it's special sesame oil properties or dumb luck, but it was fab.

 Sesame seeds if you have them (I think they are meant to be black sesame, as here, but I'm not sure it makes a difference.) Not at all photogenic. Tasty and splendid, though. 

Okay. Let's get onto the mustard miso mess. This one goes with jacket potatoes, and leeks, and loads of butter. Another Home Cookery Year joy.

Leek and miso potatoes

Specifically, mix 2 tbsps of white miso into as much butter as your conscience will stand. (Recipe is 150g for 4 spuds. I used a lot less, but there's no point in sof-pedalling the miso unless yours is super salty.)

Take a chunk of the miso butter and use it as the base for sweating off a sliced leek for about 10 minutes till soft. Except I did three leeks because they are almost as bad as spinach for collapsing into nothing - that's plenty for two servings. That's probably why the extra miso worked tbh.

The rest of the miso butter gets mixed with a big glob of Dijon mustard and some snipped chives.

 

Meanwhile, you have been baking jacket potatoes. You did notice that bit, right? It's very forgiving, of course - you can keep the butter for days, and the leeks will sit quietly for hours or overnight. Pile it up, mix together, put some watercress on the side to pretend this is a healthy green dish. 

I may have accidentally roasted some whole garlic bulbs for company too. That is not in the recipe, but it's definitely not unfriendly.

 Seriously addictive stuff.  I don't know why mustard plus miso is so perfectly moreish, but it is so.

*I mean, I am definitely prepared to do the mayo version of this in winter too.