Tag: default dinner

Pasta with courgettes, lemon, and pine nuts

Veronica 4 Comments

Summery pasta and vegetables

Serendipity rules! I’ve long liked Patricia Scarpin’s Technicolor Kitchen, but an incompatibility with my feed reader meant I didn’t follow it regularly (if a site isn’t in my reader, it doesn’t get read!). Then today I discovered the magic switch to make it work, and her last 25 posts whizzed into view. I spent a happy half hour browsing them while simultaneously wondering what I was going to cook tonight, because it’s the end of the week and I haven’t been shopping.

What luck! I had all the ingredients for this recipe to hand, and it took barely longer to make than the time needed to boil the pasta. It’s very adaptable, and I loved the fresh flavour imparted by the lemon zest and juice. A new default dinner to rival tagliatelle carbonara! Picture taken hastily just before we dived in.

Note:the original recipe is credited to the late Sher, who sadly died unexpectedly a month ago, and whose blog I didn’t know about till today.
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Cottage Smallholder frittata

Veronica 2 Comments

I have become a dedicated follower of Fi’s blog, which is about all sorts of domestic matters other than food, including keeping chickens, gardening, and domestic life in general. She is also very adventurous on the self-sufficiency front, making her own bacon and salami. She’s posted about frittata a couple of times, so when I was short of ingredients and time I turned to her.

This frittata recipe is now officially a default dinner. I made it with what I had: lardons, cantal cheese, diced artichoke hearts, and a sprinkling of basil, with a couple of new potatoes steamed, sliced, and laid on top. Steve thinks Spanish omelette is the work of the devil, and even he liked it!

Swedish oven pancake

Veronica 2 Comments

I came across this recipe on a Swedish blog while googling Jansson’s Temptation. It immediately caught my attention because one of my favourite breakfast fry-ups used to be diced bacon, apple and onions, with a fried or poached egg on the side. I haven’t made that for ages, and here was the same tasty combination as a quick and filling supper dish. I had to try it and the results were excellent. A new default dinner!

I have tweaked the proportions a bit from the original because I found it a bit floury (though cooking it for a bit longer might have solved that problem). Though Swedish, it’s recognisable as a savoury clafouti.

This makes four very generous servings; we had it with smoked chilli jelly on the side, which was delicious. A salad or simply steamed green vegetable would be good too.

swedishpancake

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Jansson’s Temptation

Veronica Leave a comment

Seattle-based blogger Janelle has a category on her Talk of Tomatoes blog called Default Dinners, for those old standbys that you make over and over again when you are short of ideas, ingredients, time, or money (or all of them of course!). Immediately I read this, I thought, “Why have I never posted the recipe for Jansson’s Temptation?” Probably because I’ve cooked it for 25 years and don’t need a recipe. And surely everyone knows how to cook it, don’t they?

Well, OK, a quick Google shows that there are loads of recipes for it on the web, and even a whole Wikipedia page. But this is how I do it. I don’t like anchovies much, but they are essential (even if Wikipedia says they should be sprats), and the flavour is subtle, so don’t leave them out. I have been known to distribute them carefully so that most of them are in Steve’s half.

In short, I love potatoes, and this is one of my favourite ways of cooking them.

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Pasta e fagioli

Veronica Leave a comment

This classic Italian pasta dish is a good one for the pressure cooker, and substantial enough to serve as a balanced one-pot meal.

Tip: if you want to make a large quantity and freeze/reheat some, extract the part you are going to keep before you add the pasta. If you don’t, it will soak up too much liquid and go all stodgy.

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Tarte à la moutarde

Veronica 2 Comments

Ever since I discovered it in one of those 50p recipe books from Sainsbury’s, this has been one of my favourite recipes. It features fairly often in our repertoire — great for days when you are short of ideas or time for shopping, because most of the ingredients are generally hanging around in the storecupboard or fridge. And we never get tired of it. Extra bonus: it’s vegetarian.

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