I regret to inform you of the return of Archived Ingredients. Ingredients we bought in 2020, especially imprudent random stuff when it was shopping-once-a-week-tops time, are now pretty elderly. Cupboards that were turned out in first lockdown have now become unturned. I'm sorry, but it's true. Time has passed while we've been sitting still.
This did however provide the answer to a "I want to cook this but I hate blue cheese" conundrum this week. It's an amalgam from Crave, steamed leeks with a blue cheese sauce and chorizo, which uses up sausage from my pre-Christmas 2021 stock-up on sausages just in case I got marooned in the flat... and also uses up a really terrifying Cheddar I'm fairly certain is a relic of Christmas 2020 shopping-to-cheer-amidst-awfulness. It may even have been intended as a present, before that got cancelled. And now it's open, so I'm going to have to finish it.
This is all stuff to do in parallel: steam some leeks (10 mins or so is how I like them)
Make a white sauce with milk (and garlic and thyme and bay), and cook it out for quite a while, as you're using it now rather than putting it in the oven.
Add some crumbled cheese. Stiltonish if you like Stilton. If not, terrifying truffled Cheddar might hit the spot. Thank goodness for wax coverings.
Stir that into your white sauce. And cook some chorizo till it's nice and sizzly.
Merge, and eat.
It's fine wintry messy gloop. you could vegetable it without the chorizo of course, but I think you'd want something to compensate - a lemon crumb, or half-dried tomatoes. It needs a bit of snap.
I'm still waiting for my usual winter lust for citrus to kick in. Stef says there are Seville oranges in Waitrose. But I'm still mainly comfort eating. (I did make the avocado-lime-houmous toasts of post-Christmas ritual today though. So some things are on schedule.)
End of last week was *especially* comfort eating: batata vada pav from New Kitchen Basics. Deep fried potato burgers... except not deep fried in my case. Still, pretty impressive.
It's a great recipe though. One of those where you make a thing (a green chutney of chilli, coriander, garam and garlic and lemon) and use it two ways (mixed into cooling mashed spud, with ginger and salt; and as a chutney).
You shape your mash into burgerish shapes.
Dip it into gram flour mixed with water and turmeric and a bit of garam. And then you fry.
Serve inna buttered bun, with the second half of your chutney, and ketchup. And quick-pickled onion if you wanted to make it, but I failed. I did cut up one (1) tomato though, so it's practically healthy.
No, it's shameless. But it's very nice indeed, should your January be feeling rather cheerless. Not for perfectionists. Pffft, as if.
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