Showing posts with label vinegar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vinegar. Show all posts

Saturday, 26 May 2012

Beanless Chilli

There is a well-known cultural divide across the Atlantic, between the British and the Americans. As a result, there tends to be differences in just about everywhere, from speech (try asking an American and a Briton what suspenders are, for instance), to table etiquette (while Brits tend to cut steak up as they go along, the Americans will cut it all up first), to cuisine.

While people Stateside don't think of jacket potatoes as anything more than a baked potato with butter, perhaps at most sour cream, chives and bacon bits, served as a side to go with steak, over here in the UK people tend to have it as a meal on its own, using a wide variety of toppings - tuna mayonnaise, coronation chicken, and chilli con carne, just to name a few. And while the British don't think of chilli con carne as much more than just a bolognese sauce with chilli and kidney beans, in the States, there's a mind-boggling variety of chilli types, debates over the inclusion of beans that can border on the religious, and closely guarded spice mix recipes.

Amongst the more unusual things I have encountered while reading up on American chilli include the use of beer and coffee, and even the norm in Cincinnati, Ohio of serving chilli with spaghetti and grated cheddar. With about one serving to go in my pack of Basics minced beef, and plenty of odds and ends from the Basics range in my kitchen, I decided to try incorporating some of my discoveries in a beanless chilli.


Fry some Sainsbury's Basics mince together with some Basics garlic. Season with Basics black pepper and herb mix, and a dash of Basics vinegar.


Start adding in Basics beer (lager or bitter is fine), in quantities of about a mouth at a time. At some point stir in some Basics instant coffee as well.


Add Sainsbury's Basics chopped tomatoes and leave to simmer. Meanwhile, soak some Basics spaghetti so as to remove it of its starch. Add to the pan and simmer everything together until the spaghetti is done. Sprinkle with grated Basics cheddar (or Basics grated hard cheese, if you don't have cheddar), spike with your chilli of choice, and serve.



This turned out well, generally speaking. It was difficult getting the balance between the beer and coffee right,  but they lend an unusual, if bitter, edge to the final result. Certainly an interesting way to use your bolognese ingredients, and not too difficult to whip up if you already know how to do spag bol.

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Mee Hoon Kueh


Growing up at home, Mee Hoon Kueh (面粉馃), literally "Flour Cake" in Hokkien, was something I ordered regularly when my family ate out, and is still something I would readily order when I fly home to visit family and friends. It is a simple hand-made noodle soup with various ingredients, commonly minced pork, leafy vegetables, a poached egg, shitake mushrooms, all topped with fried ikan bilis, or small anchovies.

Prior to my arrival in the UK as an university student, the local government gave us a pamphlet listing recipes contributed by various students who have been or are currently there, that we could make use of should we start to miss the food back home. Amongst them was one for mee hoon kueh. I did not give much thought to it, and soon forgot about it all. When I started this blog however, this was one of the things that I realised I could try doing, given the relatively simple list of ingredients and preparation. Again however, I forgot, until last evening, when a conversation with a friend back home led me to try this at home, limiting myself to Sainsbury's Basics ingredients, where possible.

It turns out that mee hoon kueh is surprisingly easy to make. There are numerous recipes out there on the Internet, but the one that I was drawn to the most was at Soy and Pepper, a food blog written by an overseas Singaporean. As the Sainsbury's Basics range is lacking in both ikan bilis (small anchovies), and even dark green leafy vegetables, I had to leave out some of the ingredients where I can.


Prepare some Sainsbury's Basics Minced Beef by seasoning with Basics pepper and a little Basics vinegar. Wrap and leave in the fridge.


Combine water and Sainsbury's Basics flour in the proportions suggested by Soy and Pepper so that you have a simple dough. Cover and set aside for 30 minutes to an hour.


Prepare your vegetables - I used choi sum bought from Chinatown here. Break the flour ball up into golf balls and flatten each one out as shown. Use extra flour to prevent sticking.


Prepare some stock using Sainsbury's Basics chicken stock cubes.


Add the mince once the stock is boiling. Skim off any scum and unwanted fat that appears.


Pinch off bite-size pieces of dough and add to the pot. They should cook within 10-20 seconds.


Finally, add your vegetables, and an egg to either beat into the soup or to poach.

If only I had discovered this sooner. This proved to be a filling, warm and hearty meal, which, given the recent drop in temperature in the UK, was welcome. The preparation, while not very involved, will involve some waiting time, so perhaps this is best done on weekends, or prepared in advance. The flavour can certainly be worked upon; I have noticed that some other recipes call for the use of shitake mushrooms in addition to ikan bilis to make the stock. Given that the Sainsbury's Basics range has neither of these, perhaps one way to achieve a similar effect is to boil and concentrate stock from Sainsbury's Basics mushrooms and Basics canned tuna.


Monday, 9 April 2012

Welsh Rarebit (or Rabbit)

Welsh rarebit is probably one of those things you wished you knew about in university, to add variety to your diet while using up your endless supply of bread, grated cheese and beer that you have access to. I had originally planned to make this after doing the post on Beer Cheese Soup, but never got round to doing so. Now that the opportunity has presented itself again, I shall do so. I shall also keep in mind that cheese and beer are good pairings in cooking.

Welsh rarebit is essentially a heavy cheese sauce enhanced with Worcestershire sauce and mustard, and on occasion, eggs, served on hot toast. Approaches to preparation vary widely. The origin of the term is uncertain, but is largely attributed to the Welsh traditionally being poor, so much so that cheese to them is a form of meat.

The recipe I will use today is derived from the one I found on the BBC. The brew I will use is Sainsbury's Basics Bitter. As I am not much of an ale drinker myself, I will just leave a couple of photos showing the ale.




 Make a roux by melting Basics grated cheese and adding flour. Add the beer gradually until a thick sauce is formed.



Add Basics mustard and black pepper, and Basics vinegar, in lieu of Worcestershire sauce.

Spread on toast and grill.


On the whole, the toast tastes good, and offers away to stretch grated cheese with a couple of other ingredients that should be cheaply available to any student. A 1.5kg Basics flour is easily available for just over 50p, and leftover beer is usually available after most student gatherings. This could even be used for the breakfast on the morning after drinking parties, using whatever beer has not already been drunk.

DescriptionPrice per UnitNo. of servingsTrade-up PremiumTrade-up Benefits
Bitter£0.994x440ml+£1.96Better tasting ale

Sunday, 11 September 2011

Bacon Jam


The Internet is obsessed with bacon. From a Wikipedia project to improve the quality of articles regarding bacon, to YouTube sensation EpicMealTime's permanent feature of bacon in every show they make, it is difficult to deny its pervasiveness in the culture that has built up from a decade or so of the Information Superhighway. About a year or so ago, a colleague of mine mentioned in passing about trying home-made Bacon Jam. Further enquiries revealed that the recipe was taken off the Internet (where else?).

As it turns out, Bacon Jam was created a couple of years ago by Skillet Street Food, a Seattle-based company burger chain which caters to consumers via burger vans. Needless to say, it captured the imagination of the Internet, and the foodie blogger community made various attempts to recreate it from their own kitchens. A Google search places Not Quite Nigella's recipe as its first result, which took inspiration from an earlier recipe by Homesick Texan. Months of procrastination prevented me from following in their footsteps, until two things happened - I acquired a food processor, and Sainsbury's dropped the price of their Basics cooking bacon to £1 for 670g.

There are two problems with buying and using the cooking bacon. One is the packs containing either rashers, or whole hunks of bacon which have not been sliced into rashers. This is easily avoidable by inspecting the packs before buying. The other is that the rashers are clumped together rather than nicely packed like the other bacon products that Sainsbury's has, making them finicky when teasing the rashers apart to put in sandwiches. We can solve this latter problem by making the whole pack into bacon jam.

The process is relatively straightforward and rather fun, and lists amongst its ingredients maple syrup, vinegar, coffee and of course, bacon. People who have completed the recipe have lauded it for its potpourri of flavours, the sweet, sour, bitter, and salty flavours all melding together and boosted by a chilli kick. Excited, I got together the ingredients, including the coffee.

The last time we did a review on the Basics Ground Coffee we went with a rather poor attempt of making a cold brew, so since we had another opportunity to try it, we brewed ourselves a cup. The coffee was pretty smooth and had a nice amount of kick to it, being made from Robusta beans, which have a higher caffeine content compared to the Arabica beans found in most blends. Surprisingly, it was not bitter, which would have been characteristic of Robusta, so Sainsbury's must have adjusted the roasting process to compensate, which kind of shows the amount of detail they put into even Basics products.


The recipe for bacon jam that I used can be found at Not Quite Nigella through the link I have above, so I shall restrict my commentary to the tweaks and other little things I did while making this. For adaptability reasons I have substituted Basics vinegar and honey for cider vinegar and maple syrup respectively. I also added a dried chilli from a pack my flatmate bought in Chinatown to add an extra kick.


The packet of Basics cooking bacon will have to be fried in two stages. If you want to you can also trim the fat off some of the rashers to form a starter batch, which would be rendered of fat in the pan for easier frying of the main bacon batches.


If you do use the starter batch, have it at the side of the pan while frying the bacon so that they can continue to render and become nice and crispy in the process. It is a lot of effort to tease out the bacon rashers before chopping them up, but if you are not planning on using a food processor to grind up the resulting jam later on, you might want to consider doing this if you want a finer-textured jam.



1 hour later, it turns out that I had the heat on too low, so I decided not to add any water at all and crank up the heat to mid so that I can simmer the water away more quickly. Unfortunately, 2 hours from the time I started simmering,  I am nowhere near the nice dark colour that Not Quite Nigella managed to get.


On the 3rd hour however...


Satisfied with progress, I turned off the heat on the stove to let it cool slowly. After that, a brief spin in the food processor, and the bacon jam was ready to be spread on Sainsbury's Basics Baguette.




This was a resounding success. The bacon jam, effectively a pate, tastes great, if perhaps a little too sweet and oily, and will go well with anything that usually calls for bacon. Already I'm thinking of not just spreading this on my bread, but taking up the suggestions floating around on the Net and putting it into pastas, serving it with poached eggs, and perhaps even with asparagus, if it happens to be cheap. I might have to work out a way to not make it feel so oily, perhaps by leaving out some of the liquid from the cooking, or patting the bacon dry with kitchen towels before transferring to the pot. This recipe will nonetheless be a godsend to anybody in university who might love bacon, but want to have it cheaply, and without the fuss of carefully peeling apart randomly mashed rashers at 8.30 in the morning, half an hour before the first lecture of the day.

Saturday, 14 May 2011

Green Beans and Prawn Stir-Fry

Originally this post was to be about experimenting with the remaining Basics feta-like cheese as an omelette filling. Sadly, the storage instructions to "consume within 3 days" once opened were to be taken seriously, and so I had no choice but to throw it out. This however freed me up to have a look at the Sainsbury's Basics Green Beans that I first came across about a couple of years ago.


I remember disliking eating green beans as a child, but grew to like them, especially when stir-fried with sambal belacan, a paste-like sauce made from chillis and prawns. Coming over here, I noticed that most vegetables in British cooking are almost always baked or boiled, but with the exception of mushrooms, never fried. Green beans are most commonly boiled in the UK, which makes for pretty bland eating.

The green beans that are available in Sainsbury's are mostly fine beans, which are thinner and firmer in texture. The Basics green beans are a bit mushier, but most people would be fine with this, particularly since when eating out back where I come from restaurants and other eateries would use this, being cheaper than fine beans.


While defrosting the prawns, prepare the beans by snipping off the ends and halving them, and mince 2-3 cloves of garlic.


Fry the garlic under medium heat, before tossing in the green beans, followed by the prawns. Season with vinegar, and optionally, some chilli or sambal that you can probably find at your nearest oriental supermarket.


With a decent amount of rice this could be eaten on its own, however most of the time this would be shared amongst 2-3 people along with a meat-based dish. As my flatmates are usually adverse to me serving them Sainsbury's Basics ingredients I would probably have to substitute products in their own-brand line if I ever cook this for them.

DescriptionPrice per UnitNo. of servingsTrade-up PremiumTrade-up Benefits
Green Beans£1200g+£0.50Trimmed fine beans, or Fairtrade fine beans.

Monday, 21 March 2011

Cheese-infused Beef Ragu


It's been brought to my attention that the price of beef has gone up at Sainsbury's over the weekend. Sadly, the Sainsbury's Basics range was not spared, and so, a packet of diced beef now retails for £2.75, a 25p (10%) increase. I thought I should mark the occasion by making a beef ragu, using some interesting information I picked up a couple of weeks ago.

The Toasted Salami Sandwiches that I did the last time left me with the rind of the Basics Italian Hard Cheese. I was about to throw it away when I read on the web that many enterprising chefs would use the rind of hard cheeses in soups and stews, adding a rich flavour to whatever it infused. Armed with this knowledge and a sense of curiosity, I set upon making my own cheese-infused pasta sauce.


So I start by frying some an onion and garlic on high heat, before tossing the beef in. Seal the beef, you want it to be pink on the inside while seared on the outside. This will hopefully allow the beef to remain tender with the beefy flavours sealed in while the sauce is stewing.


Add the Basics herb mix and ground black pepper for seasoning, and then a splash of vinegar, before putting in one packet of Basics chopped tomatoes. At this point, drop the cheese rind in and mix everything thoroughly. Leave to stew until half the liquid evaporates.






The rind did lift the flavour subtly although it did not provide much more than that. I attribute it to the type of cheese used: had I used a strong quality Parmigiano-Reggiano it's likely to have made the sauce more cheesy. Still, it's a good way to make use of your cheese rinds.

DescriptionPrice per UnitNo. of servingsTrade-up PremiumTrade-up Benefits
Diced Beef£2.75440g+£0.74Leaner cuts.

Monday, 15 November 2010

Instant Bak Chor Mee

Over the weekend, I had to run a few tasks in addition to my regular routine, and so had less time than usual for meals. As a result, I had to resort to preparing something quick. Given that I had a fair bit of cooked turkey mince left over from the previous post, it wasn't long before I decided to resort to cooking instant noodles and microwaving the mince to go with it.


While I was at it though, a thought came to mind that I could prepare the instant noodles without the soup. I will still use the soup base to cook the noodles, but then I would remove them from the soup and add a few additional seasonings to it, namely Basics vinegar and some sesame oil. I would have added soya sauce as well, but figured that the noodles will already be slightly salty from the soup base.




The result is a weak analogue to the bak chor mee that I enjoy back home. If I had greater flexibility about the number of non-Basics ingredients I could add to a recipe, it would probably come quite close. Still, it's worth knowing that the Basics turkey mince can indeed be used in this way, and that the Basics instant noodles are just as good when they are served dry as when they are served in soup.

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

Sausage and Bacon Pasta

I bought a packet of Basics Smoked Back Bacon for my regular cooking about a week ago. Before Sainsbury's introduced their Cooking Bacon, this was the cheapest form of pork rashers that was available, and it saw me through the better part of my university life. Everybody loves bacon for its taste, and some also for its relative longevity in the fridge, and so Sainsbury's Basics Smoked Back Bacon was a source of comfort despite my austere lifestyle as a student.

This would originally have been a post about Penne Amatriciana, except that I lacked chilli and cheese, the former not available on the Basics line, and wanted to add a sausage to my meal to run down my inventory. Thinking about it, if Sainsbury's were to really introduce Basics chillies, they might be able to get the attention of students from cultures where the vegetable is regularly used.
In an effort to minimise the amount of fat I would consume in this meal, I trimmed the fat from the bacon, and grilled both sausage and bacon to let out more fat.

While waiting for the meat to cook, a thought occurred to me that I could attempt to cook the Basics pasta in the sauce. The motivation is two-fold: I could skip on having to cook the pasta separately, and at the same time, get it to absorb the excess liquid and hence, some flavour, from the peeled tomatoes. The only problem is that adding the pasta directly would result in the excess starch getting into the sauce, an unwanted effect. To get around this, I borrowed an idea from the Chinese, who would wash their rice with water several times before cooking. I treated the pasta in a similar manner, stopping when the water was no longer cloudy as it was the first time.
In a heated wok, add the meat hot off the grill, and the garlic, and fry until garlic is fragrant.
Add 1 tablespoon of Basics vinegar and pepper and Basics herb mix to taste.
Add in the pasta and Basics peeled tomatoes. Add a bit of water as well, such that the pasta is covered. Leave to cook until pasta is done, or a little longer if you want more of the liquid to evaporate.
The experiment with the pasta was a success. The sauce was definitely worth doing again, and even the sausage was pleasant. A comment made on the MoneySavingExpert forums that the latter can be a bit sagey is accurate. However, I'm not sure my friends would be warm to the idea of me cooking pasta in this manner, so this would be a cooking technique I would only subject myself to.
DescriptionPrice per UnitNo. of servingsTrade-up PremiumTrade-up Benefits
Smoked Back Bacon£1.20300g+£1.04More regular shapes, fewer but thicker slices
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...