What can I do with..... a tin of tomatoes?

Regular readers will know that I'm a staunch supporter of making the most of things. If there's even a small amount of food (and sometimes other things) leftover I will find something tasty to do with it. Sometimes though, you don't have leftovers, and you have to raid your store cupboard for inspiration. But the contents of your cupboard might not always be inspiring. Not to worry. Here's some ideas for using the humble tinned tomato.

• Italian sauce base. It's the absolute essential ingredient for any kind of pasta sauce, from a simple pomodoro to puttanesca. You can add almost anything to it, but you must have garlic, black pepper and herbs (basil, oregano, thyme) as a minimum. Then you can put in whatever else you fancy.
• Pizza topping. If you drain the tomatoes first you can make a much thicker 'sauce' that's perfect for a pizza. Remember to keep the juice because it has lots of uses itself.
• Salsa. Drain the tomatoes and reserve the juice for another dish. Add chilli flakes or finely chopped fresh chilli, a squeeze of lime juice, chopped leaf coriander, and crushed garlic.
• Nacho sauce. Make some salsa. Tip a pack of nacho chips into a heat-proof bowl. Pour the salsa over them and top with grated cheese. Grill until the cheese melts. Enjoy!
• Vegetable pie. Drain the tomatoes and reserve the juice for another dish. Roughly chop the tomatoes and add mixed cooked vegetables. Whatever you have. Pile the lot into an oven-proof dish and sprinkle breadcrumbs and grated cheese over the top. Bake for about 20 minutes at 200C, until the top turns brown and crunchy.
• On toast. It's a simple but tasty, easy-to-prepare meal. If you add grated cheese it's even nicer!
• Pizza toasts. Use the pizza topping, as above, but don't bother with the hassle of making bases. Use thick toast or French bread.

Stuff to do with the juice

• Drink it. Some people like tomato juice as a drink. It's full of vitamins and very good for you. Spice it up with celery salt, black pepper, a splash of tabasco.
• Bloody Mary. That's tomato juice with added vodka!
• Soup. You can make great tomato-based soups by simmering the juice with some vegetables and herbs, then thickening the resultant mixture with some cornflour and cold water.
• Vegetable stew. Make a nice thick soup and add pasta shapes about 10-15 minutes before you thicken it. Chunks of potato work too!
• As an ingredient. Add to any meat-based casserole for added depth of flavour.
• For cleaning. Honestly. You can clean copper with it - but not too often or you'll dissolve your copper away. Tomato juice is very acidic and cleans the grot off copper and brass quite easily if you apply it with a cloth. Try a small area of the item first though, preferably where it doesn't show.
• To deal with skunk spray. Apparently it's a myth. The tomato smell disguises the skunk smell but doesn't actually remove it.

Cheap, cheerful and easy potato dish

Happy New Year one and all. I hope Santa brought you all you wanted (or at least what you needed.) I thought you might like to share in something we ate on New Year's Eve at Chez Tante Anne.  I did pheasant casserole with cider and cream, but I won't try to get you to do that until you're feeling a bit more adventurous with your cooking. (It was the first time I ever cooked it so I've been wary of it for a long time.)

However, I did these very simple and yummy spuds alongside the meal and they are just so easy you'll kick yourself for not cooking them before.

Heat your oven to about 180C (that's fan temperature. a little higher for standard ovens, though it's not critical). While it's warming up, grease an ovenproof dish. I like using the one in the photo because you can see how things are progressing while it cooks, but that isn't essential. A lid is though. (If you don't have a lidded dish, use foil.)

Peel some potatoes. Any kind, although larger ones look nice when you're done, and cut them into thin slices.  Do the same with a couple of onions. If you like garlic, peel and squish a couple of cloves of that too.

Now layer the whole lot into the dish. Start with onions and end with potatoes. Every couple of layers dot the spuds with s bit of butter or a smear of oil. Not too much! And add a sprinkling of salt (JUST a sprinkling - we're not breeding heart attacks here) and a hefty grind of black pepper.

Add enough chicken stock to come about a third of the way up the side of the dish. PLEASE don't use a whole stock cube if you have those nasty, salty commercial ones. A VERY tiny amount will be sufficient.

Now put it in the oven, on the bottom shelf will do, and ignore it for about 40 - 45 minutes. (The first time you cook it you might like to check after half an hour, just in case it's drying out.) If it looks a bit dry, add a small amount of water. (This is where the glass sides come in handy.) After 45 minutes it ought to be browning on top. You CAN leave it for up to an hour and a half, depending on how crunchy you like the top layer, but I find an hour is about right.

It goes with practically any roasted meat. Maybe some fish. If you want, you can even top it with grated cheese about 15-20 minutes before it's done and eat it by itself. Perhaps some sliced tomatoes with the cheese. Brown sauce goes well with it. If you can bear to leave any, it's pretty good cold on the following day too!

Leftovers cooked meat pie



Looks better after you brown it in the oven



You are all very aware that Auntie Anne likes to save money wherever possible - well here's a tasty way to use up some leftovers and nobody would ever know that you didn't plan it.

If you've followed the advice in other parts of this site you almost certainly have bits of leftover cooked meat in your freezer (pickings from a chicken, the tail-end of a bit of boiling bacon, a couple of chunks of any old roast meats really.) You should also have herbs in your store cupboard and a couple of veggies somewhere in your fridge. And you must have some potatoes somewhere. Maybe you even have leftovers from last night's dinner.

You will need:
Some cooked meat.
A herb that suits it (sage with beef, tarragon with chicken etc.)
Some veg.  Such as mushrooms, tomatoes, frozen peas, tin of sweetcorn, cooked carrot etc.
At least one onion.
A couple of garlic cloves (or dried if you don't have fresh)
Half a pint of milk
A bit of cornflour (a heaped teaspoon or two will do it)
A few potatoes, or some leftover mash.

Chop your onion roughly and put it into a pan with the milk. Peel and chop the garlic and add that. Simmer it for about 10 minutes until the onion softens. Mix your cornflour with a small amount of cold water and add it to the pan. Bring the whole lot back to the boil, stirring, until teh mixture thickens.  Put it to one side.

In an oven-proof dish place your chunks of meat and intersperse them with the vegetables. Mushrooms and tomatoes can go in raw; small frozen veg ditto. Hardier veg such as carrots, parsnips, sprouts and such like will need a bit of a boil first to soften them. Sprinkle the whole lot with your chopped herbs. (Dried are fine!)

Then pour the onion and milk mixture over the top. Set aside.

Peel and boil some potatoes and mash them with a splash of milk. Add nutmeg if you like. It tastes good in spuds. Now spoon the mashed spuds onto the top of the dish and rough up the surface with a fork.

Stick the whole lot into a hot oven for about 15 minutes until it browns on top.  Serve with another veg that doesn't appear inside the pie.

Those pesky Blogger changes

Seems like a few of you are still having trouble navigating around the new Blogger interface.  I agree, it's not as user friendly as the old one, but we have to put up with it now it's been forced on us.

I'm going to start with a simple lesson that I hope will be useful to those of you still suffering.

Let's start by finding the dashboard.
They've removed the thing that takes you directly to it - so if you haven't got it bookmarked, go to someone else's blog, and there will be a link in the top right hand corner. (next to sign out)
Double click on that and you'll get to the Dashboard.

If (unlike me) you only have one blog, it will be relatively simple to find your way around.
The title of your blog will be at the top of the page and, to the right, you'll find an orange oblong with a square on it, a picture of two sheets of paper with a little triangle next to them, and another square that says View Blog.

Let's do the easy bit first.  View Blog will let you do that exactly. If you click on it, you'll get the front page of your blog.

The orange oblong is your "new post" link. If you want to write a new post, click that.

Editing a post
Which leaves us with the middle bit with the pages on it.
Click once on the little triangle to the right. That opens a pull down menu.
The bit you need to know for now is Posts.
Click once on Posts.
That will present you with a list of the posts you have written so far.
To Edit a post:
Find the title, click on the little square to the left. That will put a little tick into the square and open up four choices below the title: Edit View Share Delete
Click once on Edit.  Hey presto!  Your post is there, ready to edit.
Make your changes.   
To add labels, click on labels at the right hand side. Remember to separate them with commas. And click the oblong Done button when you're finished.
Now click the Update button (orange one at the top), and you're back to the list.
Tick the box, click View, and there's your updated post.

If this was useful, let me know. I'll sort out lesson two later.

Photo posting in blogs

A lot of people have trouble with Blogger because after a relatively short while it will ask you to pay for the option to post more photos. There are easy ways round this, particularly if you already pay for a photo hosting system such as Flickr.

So, for example: If you go to one of your photos on Flickr (not your stream - an individual picture) you will find just above it , a pull-down menu called 'share'. Pull down the little pointer on the right and it will offer you a number of options including 'grab the html/bbcode'. Copy the code (right click, copy) all the way from <a to /a> and return to your Blogger post.  Make sure you are in 'Edit HTML' and not 'Compose' and just paste the gobbledegook-looking stuff into the text box.  Now switch back to 'Compose' and you should have a photo. You can resize it or move it right, left or centre, just the way you normally can.

That's how I did this:


You'll find it links back to a Flickr site called HistoryAnorak. I have permission to use HA photos but you can only use them if you ask nicely!

Now suppose you've found a photo somewhere else. Is it free to use or is it copyrighted?  Have a look here. Pick a photo from the list that says "random free use photos" and click on it. Now right click on the enlarged version and click on the bit at the bottom of the menu that says 'properties'. That will give you another box that has 'address/url' somewhere near the middle. Copy that URL all the way from http: to .jpg (or however it ends) and click 'OK'.

Come back to your post and click the little picture icon to insert a photo. It will offer you a number of options, the bottom one being 'from a URL'. Click on that and paste the url into the box that appears.  And you should get this:

Monkey by Monica Galante

If you chose the cute monkey. Otherwise you'll get whatever you chose.   Happy photo pasting!

Borsch - an East European treat

Beetroot is plentiful right now and you can pick up huge bunches of it quite cheaply. This traditional East European soup is a lovely way to use it.

You will need:
Beetroot
Potato
Carrot (or swede)
Onion (or a couple of shallots)
Dill
Chicken stock
Lemon zest and juice
Plenty of black pepper
About a teaspoon of oil
Sour cream (or yoghurt) for serving

 

Peel the vegetables and chop them (quite chunky will do). You'll need to be careful with the beetroot because it'll stain your hands. Wash your hands straight away in plenty of cold water.

Put the oil in a pan and heat it, add the vegetables and sweat* them for a couple of minutes. Everything will go beetroot colour - don't worry. Add the chicken stock, black pepper, lemon juice and zest and the dill and PUT A LID ON THE PAN! Bring to the boil. As soon as it boils, reduce the heat and let it simmer for an hour or so. Check from time to time to make sure it isn't reducing too far. 

When it looks like the second picture and the veg are very soft, allow it to cool and put it through a food processor or liquidiser. Test for seasoning and adjust as necessary. Warm it up and serve it with a swirl of soured cream or yoghurt.

*Sweating vegetables just means cooking them for a few minutes in oil, over quite a high heat, until they start to look shiny.

Something healthy

It isn't always easy to get enthusiastic about eating healthily but we all need to make a bit more effort about it. So one way to improve the attraction is by making your meals look attractive. We eat with all our senses - not just taste. The look, smell and feel are important. Even sound can contribute - think sizzling dishes in your favourite Chinese or Indian restaurant.

What you have here is the ingredients of a cottage cheese salad. Lettuce, tomato and cottage cheese. But the cheese has been tarted up slightly with some herbs, black pepper and a dollop of low-fat yoghurt. All it takes is a bit of time.