Showing posts with label one pot meal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label one pot meal. Show all posts

Friday, March 25, 2016

Quick and Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti

Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti


It's been an almost unforgivably long time since I've posted. Sorry. I don't really have an excuse, just haven't gotten around to it. So for Good Friday I thought I'd post a quick and really simple seafood dish that tastes amazing.

This is the most frequently occurring dish in our house at the moment. And for the last, oh, month or so. It is divine and oh so easy to make. It helps that Lance has been hot-smoking salmon like there’s no tomorrow. And that I wholeheartedly support this habit. But most supermarkets and delis have some good hot-smoked salmon options available for sale these days for if you don’t have yourself a Lance. You only really need 1 fillet for this 4-person dish as the flavour of the smoked fish is quite strong and penetrates the cream so well. Smoke and fat are best friends, (think smoked butter, smoked cheese, smoked brisket) so it makes sense that the cream benefits from the smoke as well. And the whole thing cooks in one pot. Seriously. I’ve heard tell of one-pot-pastas but finally braved it myself and now there’s no going back. Especially with this specific dish. If it’s more than a week since we’ve had it, Lance reminds me that there’s smoked salmon in the house. And it tastes super fancy and complicated. It will impress the socks off people when in reality, you’ve cooked a bit of onion and garlic, then popped everything else in the pan and walked away until it’s cooked.


 Oh, and this works just as well with asparagus!


Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti



Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti

500g dry spaghetti
2 cups fish stock
3 cups water
1 cup cream
4 heaped tsps. prepared horseradish
1 bunch broccolini, sliced into 3cm lengths
1 hot-smoked salmon portion
2 tsp pink peppercorns
1 brown onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
Salt and pepper to taste
Parsley and red chili flakes to serve (optional)



Heat a large, deep-sided saucepan to medium and add a splash of olive oil. Add the onions and sweat for 5 minutes, or until translucent. Add the garlic and cook for a further 5 minutes. Add the pink peppercorns, the fish stock. water, cream and horseradish and stir to combine. Check the seasoning, but make it a little less salty than you ordinarily would. Otherwise when the liquid reduces, it'll be too salty. 

Add the dry spaghetti and push under the liquid. Raise the heat gently to bring the liquid to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and leave for 15 minutes. The noodles should be definitely soft enough to stir at this point. 

Add in the broccolini and salmon, stirring through the mixture. Cook for another 5 minutes, or until al dente. The majority of the liquid will be dissolved into a beautiful creamy sauce. Check for seasoning and serve with chili flakes and fresh parsley.
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti
Quick amd Good Friday Seafood - Smoked Salmon and Broccolini One-Pot Spaghetti

Monday, January 25, 2016

An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas

An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas


Even if the weather is hot and gross and the idea of having the oven on is unbearable, sometimes you feel like some roast lamb. That’s not just me, yeah? Thank goodness for hooded BBQs! We will actually roast in the BBQ all year around, not just in summer because Lance likes to get the smoker going to flavour, well, everything. But a smoked leg of lamb is a beautiful thing, so I do not complain. I encourage! This recipe is flavourful enough to not require the smoke, but 9 times out of 10, if you get served a roast at our house, it will be smoked. You can smoke this or not, either way it is pretty spectacular.
Over the past few years, aperitivos have really come into their own in WA as we embrace the bitterness in summery spritzes. I absolutely love the citrusy fresh flavours in Aperol and Campari and the like. We have spritz weather, and a particularly balmy afternoon with an Aperol and soda inspired this recipe. The basic premise of this dish is to balance a leg of lamb atop some chickpeas, onions, garlic and Aperol so that the chickpeas will soak up the delicious lamb juices as well as the boozey liquid below as they cook. It’s important to only rub salt on the top of the leg of lamb, otherwise the chickpeas develop a hard outer shell and become tough. Season the chickpeas at the end of the cooking process. The best part of this recipe is that you can just pop it in the BBQ and leave it cooking and it’s a side dish and meat in one dish. Add a green salad and you are done for dinner, folks. You can rotate the lamb a few times if you want, to ensure even cooking, but I don’t always bother (don't salt the lamb at all if you want to rotate). Still check on the liquid levels every so often to make sure the chick peas don’t dry out. I’ve also added some diced carrots and capsicum to the chickpeas to boost the vege content and that’s also worked a treat. Any leftover chickpeas can be used in salads to take to work the next day, the Aperol scent reminding you that the weekend is no more than 5 days away!

An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas

Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas

1 leg of lamb
2 brown onions, cut into thin half moons
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup dried chick peas, soaked overnight.
3 sprigs thyme
1 cup dry white wine (such as Sauvignon Blanc)
1 cup Aperol
1 cup water
Salt and pepper
Rinse your soaked chickpeas and place them in a heatproof bowl or pot. Boil the kettle and pour over the chickpeas. Leave for 20 minutes while you preheat your BBQ to 160C using only the burners on the grill side, not the plate side (alternatively, you can use your oven). Drain the chickpeas.
Spread the chickpeas into the bottom of a roasting pan. Add the onion, garlic and thyme. Pour over the wine, Aperol and water, gently stir it all together. Rest the lamb on top of the chickpeas, presentation side up and put on the plate of the BBQ (indirect heat) and put the lid down. After half an hour, turn the lamb upside-down carefully with tongs. After another half hour, turn the lamb back the right side up. Continue roasting for a further 30-45 minutes, depending on how well done you like your roast. All the while, keep an eye on the liquid level of the chickpeas. They will slowly be soaking up the liquid, but you don’t want them to dry and catch on the bottom, add a little extra water if necessary.

When the lamb is done, remove it from the chickpeas and set aside on a warm plate, tented in foil to rest for 20 minutes. Pop the lid back down on the BBQ, keeping the chickpeas cooking in this twenty minutes, the liquid should evaporate, leaving a sticky gravy-like onion mixture and the chickpeas should be soft. Season to taste, and serve a pile of chickpeas with a few slices of roast lamb and a green salad.

An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas
An Australia Day Roast - Roast Lamb with Aperol Chickpeas

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

One Pot Potatoes - Diced Potatoes with Lentils and Olives


I don’t tend to eat potatoes very often. As in, normal, white potatoes. And it’s not because of the bad-wrap they got in the carb-hating phase that swept the world. I’m just not a big fan of them. Unless they’re roasted, I tend to find them pretty boring. A sweet potato I can microwave or boil and eat without anything else done to it. A white potato for me always needs a little extra help. I know other people will disagree with me. I know some people love them. That’s the brilliance of difference.

I did have a few potatoes left over from when I bought them to do a roast (because then they are an absolute necessity), and when I was given some lamb chops by a wonderful friend of mine (from her parents’ sheep farm, no less!) I thought they could be the perfect side. One of my favourite ways of preparing potatoes is this combination of fry/boil in a pan. I’m sure there’s a technical term for this type of preparation, I don’t know what it is. I just know that it’s easy and results in extremely flavourful potatoes. It also means that I can cook lentils in with it in the one pan.

Whilst you can serve these potatoes with any other meats and veg you have on hand I think this combination works extremely well. The caramelized sweet grilled figs, the rich juicy lamb and the salty creamy textured potatoes just….work, you know? The potato was enough to serve two for dinner and me for lunch the next day. The accompaniments were just for the dinner.

Diced Potatoes with Lentils and Olives
5-6 baby potatoes
1 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 sprig rosemary leaves, minced (about 1 tbsp)
¼ cup uncooked French lentils (du Puy lentils), rinsed and picked through
1 cup water
½ tsp sea salt
Good few pinches of black pepper
6 olives, de-pitted and finely sliced
Sprinkling flat leaf parsley, chopped
Splash of grapefruit juice (or lime)

 Served with
4 Lamb chops
4 Figs, halved
1 Sweet paprika, halved lengthwise, core removed
1 Small zucchini, sliced into 1cm slices, lengthwise

 
Peel and dice the potatoes into 2cm chunks. In a high sided frypan with a lid (or a makeshift lid of aluminium foil), heat the olive oil to medium heat. Add the garlic and rosemary and cook until fragrant, 1-2 minutes. Add the potatoes and lentils and stir well to coat in the garlicky oil for about 2 minutes. Crack some pepper over the top to taste. Add the water and sea salt, mix through and turn the heat up to bring to the boil. Once there, turn down to low, cover with the lid and allow to cook until the lentils and potatoes are tender – around 25 minutes.

After about 10 minutes, heat your BBQ, lightly oil and grill the vegetables. Place the figs cut side down and don’t turn. The zucchini and paprika need to be turned after about 5 minutes on each side. Grill the lamb to your liking, I do mine about 3 minutes either side for a touch of pink in the middle.

When the potatoes are ready, turn the heat off and stir through the olives, parsley and a splash of grapefruit juice to ‘brighten’. Check for seasoning.

Serve with the lamb chops and grilled vegetables.

 

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

One Pot Meals - Yummy Chicken with Squash, Quinoa and Popcorn

During the week, as much as I love a quick meal, I also love an easy to clean meal. Especially since our dishwasher died the other day. I used to hate the idea of dishwashers. I thought they were a pointless waste of time and money. When we bought our house, it had a dishwasher already and in the first year or so of living there, we only ever used it about 4 times. They were when we had a big dinner party that used pretty much our whole cupboard at once. I'm not sure why, but sometime after that first year, something changed and we started using it all the time. There's only the two of us, so generally it takes 4 days or so to fill - but it's awesome. A revelation. So much of my life was being wasted at the sink! And now it's broken, and folks, you can't go back. It's impossible. So I'll be spending the next few weekends shopping for a replacement. My husband scratched up his hands cleaning the gutters, so he currently can't help with the dishes - but he does massage my shoulders while I do. A fair compromise, I think!

Until the dishwasher is replaced, I'm leaning towards cooking everything outside on the BBQ, or making one pot/pan dishes. Like this one. The flavours for this were inspired by a dish my aunt makes that she calls something technical like yummy chicken sauce. It's basically a mixture of whole-seed mustard and peanut butter, that she puts in the pan as she cooks her chicken breasts. It is yummy, so it's well named. I've changed it up a bit to allow for the extra liquid required to cook the quinoa. And added the veges so it all cooks together in the one pan. I swapped peanut butter for cashews, used a different mustard and added maple syrup. So, it's not exactly 'yummy chicken', but it is yummy chicken. I only tell you all of these substitutions, because I remember her once offering me a slice of carrot and walnut cake. Only she didn't have carrot, so she used zucchini. And she didn't have walnuts, so she used pecans. But it was still a 'carrot and walnut cake'. So I think she'd be ok with my substitutions.

And, in a fit of pure craving-based inspiration, I topped it off with fresh plain popcorn. Did you know you can cook plain kernels in a plain paper bag in the microwave? Chuck 1/4 cup or so in, fold the top down a few times so it 'seals' then put it in the microwave for 2 minutes. Done. No oil, no nothing else required. Which is perfect for this dish, because you get all your flavours from the sauce, and it remains a one pot meal. The popcorn is not necessary, but totally worth it.

One Pot Meals - Yummy Chicken with Squash, Quinoa and Popcorn

Yummy Chicken with Squash, Quinoa and Popcorn

2 tbsp rice bran oil
1 brown onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tsp dried thyme
4 chicken thigh fillets, cut into medium-ish strips
6 yellow squash, large diced (I cut each into 8 bits)
Half a zucchini, large diced
quarter of a cabbage, thinly sliced
2/3 cup cashews, roughly chopped
4 heaped teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/3 cup maple syrup
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup quinoa (I used black, but whatever you've got)
1 1/2 cups more water
parsley, finely chopped for garnish
1 cup popped plain popcorn

Heat the oil in a tagine or deep frypan with a lid. Add the onion and garlic, cook for a few minutes until translucent. Add the thyme and mix through the onion.

Add the chicken to the pan and brown on all sides, a few minutes per side. Add the vegetables and mix through.

In a jar with a tight fitting lid, add mustard, maple syrup, 1/2 cup of water and apple cider vinegar. Shake well to mix completely. Pour into pan. Rinse out with the extra 1 1/2 cups of water, pour into pan.

Add the quinoa and cashews, then mix it all through really well. Put the lid on and allow to cook for 15 minutes or so, until the quinoa is done. Check for seasoning. If it's still a bit liquidy, leave the lid off and reduce it down for a few minutes.

Serve with a sprinkling of parsley and a handful of the plain popcorn.

One Pot Meals - Yummy Chicken with Squash, Quinoa and Popcorn