Best Porridge Ever

This is how I make porridge. 

It is the Best Porridge Ever. 

You will never eat better porridge than this.

Ingredients:

1 cup traditional oats
1 and a bit cups water
1 and a bit cups milk
one apple
handful of sultanas
brown sugar
nutmeg
cinnamon



Method:

Put the oats, water and milk in the saucepan. It works best if you have a heavy-bottomed saucepan, so you can cook it slowly over low heat.  (When I say slowly, it still only takes about ten minutes. No need for quick oats).

Peel and grate an apple; add the grated apple to the saucepan.

Chuck in a handful of sultanas, unless you have kids who get mad when you include sultanas, in which case only include this step about a quarter of the time, when you really want sultanas.

Add a sprinkle each of cinnamon and nutmeg.

Stir with a wooden spoon over a low heat, until porridge is cooked, thickish and bubbly. This should take a few minutes, but not too fast - enough time to cook the apple and nicely absorb most of the liquid but still leave the porridge a good, liquidy consistency.

(I trust you have separate wooden spoons in your drawer for sweet and for savoury? You should. Do NOT use the same wooden spoon you have used to stir spaghetti sauce or curry).


Pour the porridge into bowls, add a splash of cold milk and a sprinkle of brown sugar to each bowl,and eat.

At our house the dog gets to lick the kids' bowls afterwards. 

There's never anything left to lick in mine.

With thanks to my long-lost university friend Katherine, who taught me how to add apple and cinnamon to porridge. I bought that pretty blue and white bowl then. I was in my second year of uni and living in a uni flat with Katherine and two others. It was decreed that we each needed a lovely bowl for our porridge.

My Former Life and My Current Life: Greek Avgolemono Soup

Back in 1994 I was 24 and working as a cook in a restaurant on Santorini, in Greece. I am not a chef or even a cook, and this was not work I enjoyed on the whole. Restaurant kitchens are hard work - I cannot watch Masterchef as I find it too stressful!

But this man made this job as enjoyable as it could possibly be. I was very lucky to get a job working with Mike Roussos. Mike had lived in Chicago for 20 years and had just relocated his family back to Greece. He was finding it a little difficult to adjust, being on the one hand used to the amenities of the US and on the other finding the Greece of his youth had disappeared.

Mike is a wonderful guy and he taught me everything he did in the kitchen. He was very generous with his time and knowledge and we worked well together, as it was just the two of us in the large kitchen of probably the most popular tourist restaurant on the island at that time.

Me and Mike on a rare break

Mike Roussos in the kitchen

I kept an exercise book of recipes Mike taught me, and as I was trying to learn Greek some are in bits of earnest, erroneous Greek or use Greek words or brand names for ingredients I wasn't sure of. It's not only a great souvenir but a truly useful cookbook - I use these recipes often.

My cookbook with Mike's recipes

My favourite of all is avgolemono - Egg and Lemon Soup.
It is absolutely delicious - imagine chicken soup with a zesty tang and that's what it is.

I don't believe Mike would mind me sharing this recipe.


Mike Roussos' Egg and Lemon Soup


Boil a chicken in water until very well done. Remove meat, discard bones and waste.
To the water add salt, pepper and white arborio rice (about a cup), and simmer to cook the rice; once rice has cooked turn off heat and let the stock cool a bit as you do the next part.
Squeeze juice from some lemons - at least 4.
In a bowl whisk 7 egg whites until frothy, gradually adding half the lemon juice.
Add the yolks, whisk well and add more lemon juice to taste. Test it by dipping in a finger - it should taste quite lemony, so quite a bit of juice is needed.


Here is the tricky bit. While whisking, spoon 4 or 5 ladles of broth (without any rice) and pour slowly into the egg and lemon mixture. Take your time doing this, as this will prevent the soup curdling. It is easier with two people.  When the broth and egg and lemon are mixed, slowly pour the whole of the egg and lemon mix into the pot of broth.


Test again and add lemon to taste. If the soup is too eggy or thick, thin with water. 


Add the meat before serving.



Mike, wherever you are - and I hope you're well - thank you.

Kali orexi  (bon appetit)!

Egg and Lemon Soup

My Favorite Recipe Books

I once read that the average recipe book is used for two recipes. I think that's right.
When I read that I took a good look through the shelf of recipe books I had collected over the years and gave away all the ones that I did not use, or that I only used for one recipe (I copied the recipe first).

The others I have kept, and it is now a small but honest collection.

Here are the recipe books I use the most:


Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen
If you ignore the kind of annoying perfect-family pictures throughout, the recipes are fantastic. Good wholesome family food with lots of stews, pies, soups, sandwiches and sweets.

buy

You also have to ignore the title of the chapter "Cooking From the Cupboard" which is supposedly about using ingredients already in your pantry, because the Ramsay family clearly have a very different pantry to mine. Theirs is apparently always stocked with things like creme fraiche, pancetta, and fresh flat leaf parsley (rather than, say, tinned tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce and a packet of spaghetti).

My favourite recipes:

• tinned sardines with avocado on toast
• stew
• fish pie

Healthy Cooking: a Commonsense Guide

buy

A brilliant reference containing loads of information on nutrition plus kilojoule, carb, fat and fibre count tables. It also has general cooking tips and how-to guides at the start of each chapter.
Many recipes are classic favorites modified to be less fattening or more healthy (you can always modify them back!).

My favorite recipes:

• roasting - introductory section with lots of tips and info
• wholemeal banana bread
• fudge brownies

Elliniki Kouzina (Greek Cooking)
This is a book produced in Greece and available at all good tourist shops in the Greek Islands.  I bought it because I was learning Greek as well as to have a reference for Greek dishes. I still use it a lot.

My favorite recipes:

• stuffed green peppers and tomatoes
• stuffed zucchini with white sauce

My Greek Recipe Journal
For one eventful summer in my twenties, I worked as a cook in a restaurant in Santorini. I was lucky enough to work with a man named Mike Roussos who was not only a wonderful guy but a really good cook. He had lived for the past 20 years in Chicago and had just returned to Greece with his American family, and was adjusting to life back in his homeland. He taught me loads of dishes, including some clever shortcuts for cooking dishes in bulk and fast.
I kept this journal throughout, in a tatty exercise book spattered with oils and sauces, which I still use all the time.

My favorite recipes (thank you Mike!):

• Avgolemono (chicken egg and lemon soup)
• tomato keftedes (tomato, cheese and zucchini pancakes)
• Madeira cake
• spaghetti carbonara 
• spetsofai (spicy sausage casserole)
• moussaka

My Recipe Book
My own collection of hand-written recipes which I started in my early teens and finished in my early twenties when I first moved out of home and started cooking for real.
It has all the best of my mum's cooking, many of which are the same recipes still passed between women which turn up under different women's names in the "reader recipe" sections in women's magazines (and which probably ultimately came from some early Women's Weekly feature or the old PWMU cookbook).
It has recipes which are solidly of the 1970s like chop suey and "curry" (lamb, sultanas and curry powder). It has recipes from the years we lived in the US when I was a kid, like Club 21 Chicken Hash, Kathryn Hepburn's Brownies, Hamburger Helper, Pumpkin Pie and Pecan Pie. And it has recipes I got from flatmates and friends in my uni days, which evoke great memories of cooking back when cooking was new and fun.


My favorite recipes:

• honey orange chicken
• curry chicken 
• Club 21 Chicken Hash
• tuna casserole (with potato chips)
• chocolate fruit slice
• Devil's Chocolate Cake
• Flat Five Mince and Chickpea Curry
• Kate's apple crumble
• Jacob's sweet and sour pork
• Anatoly's chicken

Busy Woman's Quick and Easy Recipes: Make 'em Happy, Fix it Fast!

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I bought this recently at the supermarket. It has approximately one million and sixty chicken recipes, most of which use some dodgy but convenient base like French Onion Soup Mix, apricot jam or mayonnaise. All the recipes are indeed very quick and very easy. Some of them sound too weird to try (Cola Chicken), but I have had a few successes.

My favorite recipes:

• honey baked chicken
• chicken quesadillas
• deluxe dinner nachos

Australian Women's Weekly Fresh Food for Babies and Toddlers

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Brilliant during the transition to solids and toddler finger food. Still my go-to for simple plain foods friendly to fussy taste buds

My favorite recipes:

• custard
• mini beef rissoles
• broccoli and cheese frittata
• honey and soy drumsticks
• basic birthday cake recipe

What are your favorite recipe books?

The Secret to Good Cooking

I have spent the last few years experimenting with dinners. From experimental gourmet meals for grown-ups to different kinds of mash for toddlers, to family meals: quick & easy, slow-cooked, recipes from different countries, low-fat healthy meals, recipes torn from the pages of women's magazines, recipes scrawled down watching episodes of Nigella, Jamie, Gordon Ramsay and others, recipes from my mother's collection from the 1970s and 80s, recipes from my own first cookbooks bought in the 80s and recipes from flatmates in my university days.  I have made up my own recipes and adapted others, to make them fit what small children will eat, make them healthier or yummier, or suit what I had in my cupboard at the time. I have made meals from pre-made sauces and bases and added a pinch of this or that or tossed in a handful of greens so I could feel like I cooked.

And from this wealth of variously loving, despairing, fun, boring and desperate experience, I have found the secret to delicious, successful family meals. Meals that the whole family will eat.

I don't mean to imply that everyone eats and loves my food every night - far from it!

Also, I don't cook every night. We have a baked beans or scrambled eggs night and a "picnic dinner" night every week, and we get take-out sometimes.


But for successful cooked meals I now know what works, and it is this:

Method:

• taking time (enough time - but not hours)
• taking care
• being relaxed (music helps)

Ingredients:
One or more of the following, in very generous quantities:

• salt
• oil
• butter 
• cream

!!!

Cooking: do you love it or loathe it?

What works for you?

Creamy Honey Mustard Chicken. Serve with greens and rice.
Bribe children with a small dessert to eat some greens. Yes,
I know you're not meant to do this. Don't care.

It's Saturday and it's winter - load up the slow cooker

Mmmmm, winter casserole. Not made in a LeCreuset, but I didn't take a picture of dinner before we gobbled it up and my Kambrook slow-cooker is not as charming to photograph as this little beauty:

Photo by WordRidden at Flickr Creative Commons

Anyway, here is a delicious and easy meal suitable for a winter weekend - no skill required.

The Working Through It Spag Bol

I was very impressed with myself today so have decided to share with the lucky internet my delicious recipe for a sort of spaghetti bolognaise, invented and ingested today.
Inspiration: We are only a couple of days back from a short break away, and there is not a lot of fresh veg in the fridge, but there were 2 tomatoes and an eggplant sitting there which were about to turn.

I made this this afternoon while working from home and it passed all my just-invented busy-working-mum tests: it used enough fresh ingredients to make me feel virtuous, used all ready-at-hand ingredients to make me feel economical and clever, was easy to make, incorporated a good serve of veg, and was liked by 3 out of 4 family members - that's good enough for me!

Ingredients:

• olive oil
• 400g lean mince
• one eggplant, diced
• 2 very ripe tomatoes
• bottle of commercial bolognaise sauce or other variety (mine was Dolmio Red Wine pasta sauce) (and cut me some slack on the sauce, I'm busy)
• one celery stick, chopped (I buy celery and cut up each stick and put them in ziplock bags and keep them frozen for soups and sauces - so in my case this is one bag of frozen celery pieces)
• one packet of frozen spinach
• one sachet, or about 2 tablespoons, tomato paste
• squirt of tomato ketchup (if needed)

Method:

1. Heat the oil in a heavy pot over medium heat
2. Add the mince and brown it
3. Add the eggpant, celery, spinach and pasta sauce; mix so the frozen vegs are in the middle of the pot covered with sauce. Turn down heat to low, cover and simmer for 40mins plus, checking and mixing occasionally to make sure the mixture doesn't reduce too far.
4. When the sauce and veg are well cooked, mix in the tomato paste and leave on low heat uncovered while spaghetti is cooking.
5. Cook and drain spaghetti, mix in with meat sauce in the pot, and taste.
6. If a little extra flavour is needed, or if kids need enticement to try it, then at the table add a squirt of tomato ketchup.

Delicioso!