Cawl - it's Welsh for soup

Yummy soup

Auntie Anne has been to Wales and tasted some very yummy soup called lobscows, but it's also sometimes known as cawl.  (pronounced 'cowl')

A nice bit of brisket

Basically it's a thickened vegetable stock with pieces of meat, usually lamb or beef. You can either start with a piece of meat, such as neck of lamb, or a bit of brisket, and boil it with vegetables to make a stock; or you can make a basic veg soup and add bits of meat to it afterwards. 

Cut out the fatty bits from the meat

It's a great way to use up leftover meat and to make sure you don't waste tail-ends of vegetables in your cupboard.

Salad does not have to be boring...

Or how to get your family to eat vegetables without complaining.

Now you might be lucky and your family might be happy to tuck into their five-a-day without objecting, but veggie lovers like Morris (see left) are few and far between. So here's some ideas of how to increase their consumption wthout a battle.

Interesting dressings

The other night Uncle K decided to be helpful and bring home pizza for dinner. 'Nice', you're thinking. But it was a chicken tikka pizza. So to stay in keeping with the flavours I made a couple of Indian themed salads:

Coronation lettuce

Shred up whatever lettuce you have - I used a little gem. Mix some low-fat mayo with a little curry powder and lemon juice. Dress the lettuce with the mayo.

Raita

Chop up some cucumber. Chop up some fresh mint or coriander (or both - that works too) Chop up a garlic clove very finely. Mix them all together and smother in some plain yoghurt.  (This is almost the same as the stuff you dip your poppadoms in at the Indian restaurant).

Chinese dressing

Mix equal amounts of sesame oil and soy sauce. Add some sesame seeds if you have them and a few chilli flakes. Serve over cold cooked veg such as mange tout peas or baby sweetcorn (like you'd get in Thai or Chinese food)

Disguising vegetables

You think they always notice?  No they don't.

Chilli 

(Scroll down to the bottom of this page for a simple recipe for basic chilli.)
Serve it with side dishes to increase the veggie goodness.
(DIY wraps. Put everything in bowls on the table and let them help themselves)

Mango salsa

Chop up some fresh mango and add chopped fresh chilli, lime juice and fresh coriander. This also works well with tomatoes, pineapple, nectarines or practically any fleshy fruit.

Guacamole

Squash up a ripe avocado. Add crushed garlic, finely chopped chilli and lime juice. You can also add finely chopped onion if you like and some finely chopped tomato (take out the seeds before you chop the flesh) Dress with shredded coriander leaves.

Flash-fried peppers

Slice up some green or red bell peppers very thinly and a small onion into similar shaped pieces. Get some oil VERY hot in a wide frying pan (not too much) and fry the strips very quicky, just long enough to make them go a bit floppy and start to brown on the edges.

Stir fries

You can add any kind of veg to a stir fry and if you make the meaty/fishy bits big enough it all goes down together. Onions and mushrooms are a good bet. They seem to be less offensive to most people (except those with allergies). Tinned sweetcorn is good too. They don't seem to see that. 

Soups

Make soup with vegetables and a good chicken stock. Blend it to a uniform colour then add meaty bits. (leftover chicken, bacon strips etc) They won't notice that the base is vegetarian!

 

How to make a basic chilli

Serves 4
Start with 250-300g minced turkey (low fat and much healthier and cheaper than beef)
Two large onions
One or two green chilies (chopped. leave out the seeds if you don't like it too spicy)
Two garlic cloves (chopped)
Tin of tomatoes
Squirt of tomato purée (optional) 
Tin of cooked pulses (red kidney beans is traditional but any old beans will do. Even baked beans make a good chilli)
Chicken stock or water
Salt and pepper
Cooking oil
Seasonings - any or all of: worcester sauce, tabasco, chilli powder, nam pla (fish sauce), more pepper

Chop your onions finely. Throw about a tablespoonful of oil in a pan and fry the onions till they start to go transparent. Add the chopped chillies and garlic. Stir it round a couple of ties then add the mince. Fry until the mince starts to brown. Season with salt and pepper. Add the tin of tomatoes and the tomato purée if you're using it. (It helps the colour)  Stir it in and then add stock or water to bring the liquid level up just to cover the meat. Put a lid on the pan, turn the heat down low and let the mixture bubble gently for 20 minutes or so.

By now it should be looking sort of like chilli. If not, check there's enough liquid in the pan and adjust accordingly, give it another stir and put the lid back on and leave it bubbling for another 10 minutes.

Add the tin of beans. If you're using kidney beans or similar, rinse them first. If it's baked beans just chuck the sauce in as well. Stir and taste. At this stage you can add any or all of the seasonings so that it tastes how you want it to.  Just keep adding stuff and tasting till it's how you want.

And voilá.  The finished product contains a good portion or portion and a half of vegetables each and I promise they won't realise as they tuck in. With side dishes it becomes three or four of the five-a-day in a single meal!

Don't be afraid to experiment

 

This is a 'before cooking' view of a dish of sage and onion parsnips. We were heading off on holiday a couple of days after this was taken and I didn't want to have to buy anything new that might go to waste because we didn't have time to use it. 

I'd planned chicken and chips. It was a couple of leg portions of chicken that I'd frozen earlier (when I cooked a chicken a couple of weeks earlier). I defrosted them and gathered the remains of some spuds out of the cupboard. Then I had a gather up of what was in the fridge - two parsnips, half an onion and three tomatoes that had seen better days.

Here's how

Turn the oven on to 200 C to warm up. Put the chicken portions in a heatproof dish. Slice the spuds into chunks, place in a roasting tin and sprinkle a bit of cooking oil over them. Add some seasoning if you fancy it. Celery salt's good. Smoked paprika is too - though it might not go with the parsnips. Just a bit of salt and pepper would be good if you like. 

Cut the parsnips into chunky bits, slice the onion, chop the tomatoes. Put everything into an ovenproof dish and sprinkle it with a very small amount of oil. Add ground black pepper and some sage. (Sage and onion is perfect to go with chicken.)

When the oven reaches temperature, put the chips in and set a timer for 10 minutes. When the timer goes off, put the parsnips in and set the timer for another 10 minutes. When that one goes off put the chicken in and set the timer for 20 minutes. 

When that goes off stab the parsnips to see if they're cooked. If not, give it another five minutes and check again. Keep an eye on the chips to make sure they aren't burning. And there's your dinner.

I made this mixture because those were the ingredients I had. You can mix more or less any selection of veg and pick a different herb as you fancy.

Enjoy!

I make a good soup



Introducing Potato Pete. He was a character from WWII who was designed to help people make more of the food that was available to them. Back then it was because enemy action prevented boats from bringing in supplies of foreign foods. These days it's useful to know because money's tight and getting tighter by the hour.

Luckily spuds are still cheap and plentiful and the weather's still cold enough to appreciate a bowl of soup. Soup's easy and even if you don't use potatoes as the main ingredient you can still use them to thicken other types.

BASIC SOUP RECIPE (serves 2)

1 onion, peeled and chopped

2 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped

1 pint of stock (any kind)

1 tablespoon of flour

Glug of cooking oil

Salt and pepper

A few dried herbs (any you like)

Heat the oil in a heavy based saucepan and add the onions and potato. Fry gently for a few minutes until the onions start to soften. Add the flour and continue cooking for another minute or so. Stir well with a wooden spoon while you are doing that. 

Now add a splash of the stock and keep stirring until it blends in. Keep adding the stock a little at a time until it's all in the pan. If you don't add it a bit at a time and you don't stir well it will all go lumpy.

Sprinkle in the dried herbs and add salt and pepper.

Cover the pan and simmer the whole thing for about 20-30 minutes until the potatoes are soft. Allow to cool slightly then put it through a blender. Serve with a swirl of yoghurt or a sprinkling of grated cheese and a good chunk of bread.

VARIATIONS

* You can add any kind of vegetables you like at the frying stage. Leeks work well in place of the onion. Carrots give an interesting colour. Celery is good. Sprouts are great - add a few chopped walnuts at the end and see how that tastes.

* If you don't like the finished soup colour, put it back in the pan, add a squeeze of tomato puree and cook it for another couple of minutes.

* If you've used a meat stock you can add chopped meat after the blender stage. Heat the soup thoroughly before eating. Chicken is good. Use sage as your flavouring herb and you'll have a hearty bowlful!

* You can also add chopped cooked vegetables after the blender stage. Cooked pulses go well at this stage too. Small tin of chick peas or similar.

* Add some tomato puree to the blended soup and simmer for a couple of minutes then throw in some cooked pasta shapes. Small ones work best.

Weekend soup

Yesterday morning we went shopping and when we came back from the supermarket we put everything away, as usual. Of course, as always happens, we had to move out the old bits to make way for fresh food.

As usual I turned the leftovers into soup for lunch. It's quick, easy and, if you were planning on throwing the old food out, free!

You can make weekend soup out of any old raw and cooked vegetables but this one consisted of:

Half a head of chinese leaf (it was Chinese New Year during the week and it didn't fit in the stir fry)
The tail end of a swede
An onion

I chopped it all up then threw it into a saucepan with a tablespoon of oil and a couple of cloves of garlic. (Start with raw vegetables only. If you're including cooked ones they go in later.)

First thing to do is sweat it all down until the veg starts to wilt and the onions start to go translucent.
 
 When you've done it right it will look sort of like this: (That dark green stuff is lemon thyme that I happened to have around.)

Then you need to add some thickening.  If your leftover vegetables included potatoes you won't need to do this bit because the starch in the spuds will do it for you. If not, add some flour and then cook it for a couple of minutes longer, stirring it all the time so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan.

Once it starts to look thick and sticky you need to add liquid. You can add either water or stock. Add the cooked veg at this stage if you're using them. Add enough liquid to cover the veg. Bring the whole thing to the boil and then turn down the heat to a simmer. Let it cook for about 10 to 15 minutes then taste it. If it's short on flavour add something to make it tastier.  This one was a bit thin so I added a sprinkling of Chinese five spice powder and a good splash of soy sauce. (But you can add chilli, curry powder, herbs, Worcester sauce, leftover meat, tomato puree, celery salt, anything you like.)

Once you're happy you can blast it through a blender. You might find you need to cool it down before you do, then heat it up again before you eat it. Pour it into bowls and if you want to be really swank you can swirl in some cream or yoghurt and sprinkle it with a few fresh herbs (like in the top picture).

You see - there IS such a thing as a free lunch!