One Flame Super Student Soup

That's a soup for students, not made from, to be clear.

At a university visit with SC on Saturday the guided tour took in accommodation and a shared kitchen. I loved the community of the kitchen at my alma mater, though the very occasional disappearance of food from the fridge was annoying. As with my experience so today as regards the cooker - electric hob, doubtless to avoid yoots blowing themselves and others to bits.

A wonderful and easy shared meal if students band together to share cooking duties is a fish soup, easy, quick, nutritious and more than a bit virtuous. We had a version last week made with proper ham stock, but a chicken or ham stock cube (I avoid the fish and veg ones) is an OK substitute. Again this is really cheapo for four people, and there's just one pan to wash up.

In a large saucepan gently fry two chopped onions in oil. Don't let this brown. Chop the veg finely, they cook quickly and keep their flavour better. Add a selection of veg chopped finely: carrots are cheap and flavorful, so are turnips, maybe a Basics pepper or a courgette if there's a glut and they're cheap, plus two or three garlic cloves sliced thinly, and sweat them for two minutes. Boil 1.25l of water in a kettle and add this with two crumbled cubes (I like Knorr best), to the pan and up the heat until it reaches a bubbling simmer, then turn the heat down to maintain that simmer (easy with gas, a bugger tbh with electric hobs). Add either (or both) a couple of potatoes cut into small dice, or 100g spaghetti broken into very short lengths, and cook until they are just about done - about 10 minutes. At this point add your fish - cheapest in frozen packs of whitefish fillets or those bricks of pollock. When they are defrosted and cooked through, adjust seasoning and break up the fish into smaller chunks, then serve with bread and butter.

The economics: 520g pack of frozen whitefish fillets £1.75; vegetables if using Basics red pepper £1.25; spag 20p;  stock cubes 20p. Bread and butter according to hunger, but you can get excellent bread from Morrison's really cheaply - two small loaves for £1 so you can have white for most of us and brown for the saintly. Even with a ton of butter that's still going to be well below a fiver for four people.

If you want to push the boat out or play tunes with the idea a pack of smoked salmon bits for £1.50 added at the very end of cooking, or frozen prawns £2.25 for a 400g bag bunged in with the fish make this into a feast (that would actually feed six with another turnip, carrot and spud and half a litre more water). Or cube some 'cooking bacon' and add with the veg. Or throw in a few frozen peas or sweetcorn. This is more an idea/method than a recipe.

I wondered about mentioning that a dash of leftover cider would be good, then I remembered that this is meant to be for students, who tend not to leave much cider.

Lidl Wonder

The supermarket Lidl gets lampooned by comics, though I wonder when for example multi-millionnaire Russell Howard last shopped in one. It's an easy target, the focus being on value rather than looks and gimmicks so attracting the less well-off as a large part of the clientele. Food writers, however, have a lot of positives to say about the store: on my recent press trip to SW France the topic came up and they received nothing but praise, with one of the five almost in need of counselling for an addiction. On last year's jaunt to Parma (never did get the freebie ham I was promised, never mind, life is a veil of tears etc) the same thing was discussed, with similar pluses (one wine highly recommended by a guy who knew his stuff).

It is the 'continental' goods that get the thumbs up from foodies: their Parmesan is absolutely excellent and inexpensive; lardons are equally good, chunky with a smoky flavour; and Black Forest ham is superb. On a mission to get their super-cheap and high quality paper goods yesterday I bought among other things the ingredients for tonight's aubergine parmigiana, so pretty healthy, great flavours, and economic.

2 x aubergines @ 40p each (top bargain)
1 x tin of chopped toms 31p
1 tray lardons (of 2 tray pack for £1.79) so 90p
Parmesan 50g (200g pack £2.89) 72p

Added to this will be a tsp of sugar, an onion or two finely chopped, several cloves of garlic likewise, and a spoon or two of olive oil. The lot still coming in at under £3 by my reckoning. If it is preceded by pasta with chilli, garlic and olive oil (I love the way Italian household meals tend to comprise two complementary dishes like that), the three of us will feed well, with three fine contributions to our five- for which here read seven-a-day.

The method is simple for anyone who cooks at all: peel and slice the aubergines quite thinly, salt if you wish but often these days that's not needed, bitterness in the fruits now much reduced. Blanch the slices for a minute in water acidulated with either a squeeze of lemon or a glug of wine/cider vinegar. Make a sauce by frying the lardons and onion, adding garlic as they are nearly done, then stirring in chopped toms and a tiny bit of sugar, cooking for at least 15 minutes, preferably a very slow simmer for 40.

In an oven-proof dish assemble: thin layer of sauce, layer of aubergine slices, grating of Parmesan, repeated until finishing with a good layer of Parmesan. Pop in a medium/low oven say 160 centigrade for about 80 minutes, though it is flexible and could cook (well watched) at say 220 centigrade in 35- 40 minutes, though the flavours won't have developed as well.

The Hungry Gap and One Flame Pasta

For those unfamiliar with the term, the hungry gap is the time of year when the winter crops have pretty much ended and the spring plantings not reached maturity. We have shops to get round the starvation problem these days, but for food gardeners it's an annoyance.

There are things like the pea-shoots mentioned the other day that will grow under cover year round, but you really crave fresh stuff smelling of outdoors if you love veg. Yesterday we had a dish that we made in our first home in Norfolk in the mid-eighties, when we had even less spare cash than today. It's just pasta (ideally penne or similar with a bit of substance) cooked al dente then drained (but leave a spoonful or two of liquid behind) and mixed while still hot with a good serving-spoon of butter and a load of freshly picked herbs from the garden.

We gathered little leaves of new-growth sorrel, a few sprigs of rosemary, some crispy tubes of Welsh onion, plus chives, sage and marjoram and a handful of over-wintered parsley, cut them fine with a mezzoluna, mixed into the pasta along with the butter and a good grating of Parmesan (Sternest Critic asked the other day is there any vegetable that doesn't go with Parmesan?), seasoned with crunchy salt and wolfed it. Still cheap, still good, still very quick and easy, ideal after a tiring day.

On Sunday a similarly rapid restorative dish met with approval, pasta puttanesca - pasta whore-style, so called apparently because it could be made on one burner (hmm) in minutes as trade allowed, though the strong flavours and smells masking others is an alternative explanation. This for me needs spaghetti or linguine, cooked until right at the point of being ready, then well drained. To the pasta pan add a few good glugs of basic olive oil (extra virgin somehow inappropriate) that has had a load of crushed garlic and a finely chopped chilli or two infusing in it for a few minutes or an hour if you think ahead. Stir together over a very low heat (don't fry the spag) until the garlic scent rises and the chilli fumes make your eyes water, then season with plenty of salt and lots of pepper. It is coarse and satisfying and the perfect thing to serve with a glass of ropy red wine - you could be drinking the finest Barolo for all your taste buds will be able to tell.

Like 1973 All Over Again

We just got back from a weekend in Scotland - not all of it at once of course, merely a little bit of Dumfries and Galloway. As the cottage we had booked was not near even a pub we took our food for the duration. With a three hour car journey this meant most of it was tins. And nothing wrong with that, if you go for the right stuff. On no account buy tinned carrots, ever - unless they are for someone you despise.

This took me back to our family holidays in the 1970s. It fits the austerity bill too, as my family was far from well off, my mother a teacher, my father a local government officer. The upside to those jobs, once my father had long tenure anyway, was that we had three week holidays generally spent abroad. In pre-credit card days, for them at least, that meant careful budgeting with the cash and travellers' cheques taken with us, and our caravan being packed with tins and dried foods that would last the trip.

For a couple of months before we left my mother would put away a few tins and packets every week. There were always a couple of tins of M&S chicken in white sauce; lots of pasta; the epitome of 70s supermarket cuisine Vesta curries and paella (curry good, paella awful); and tins of mince that would become a spag bol with a single onion and a tin of toms.

What was not spent out of the daily budget went into a fund for treats, which included the occasional meal out. We had great holidays.

I am not sure whether my choice of chicken in white sauce (from Sainsbury's this time) to take with us to the cottage was bought because of that heritage or not. But it worked as well as the stuff my mother used to make for us. Sunday's main meal was boil in the bag rice with a curry comprising that chicken, a tin of Bombay Potatoes, and another of vegetable curry, with a concession to fresh veg in the form of onion and lots of garlic fried before the rest was added and heated through. It was not at all hot spicy, and far from authentic, but like those meals in Interlaken and elsewhere in the dim and distant it was what we needed after a longer than expected walk (in the 70s that would have been a day on the lake in a blow-up boat, table tennis, and riding foldy-up bikes): it was moist, filling, tasty and nutritious. So you can more than get by on tins (and a bit of fresh veg).

Best not to do that every day, though I recall the story of an arctic adventurer who had to spend a winter in a hut somewhere in the frozen wastes. His food, other than what he could shoot or catch, was tinned. A flood of his store washed all the labels off these tins, and, no gourmet it seems, he then for simplicity and perhaps variety determined to simply take three tins at random and heat them in the same pan. Thus he enjoyed the likes of custard and mince and prunes on occasion. Which maybe puts my makeshift curry in a better light, if it needed to be. Which it didn't.

The Monetary Value of Time

That title one for the accountants and MBAs out there - a sort of pun on the time value of money - my how they didn't laugh. Net present value and all that. Never mind.

This post comes out of last night's meal, something very simple but I am sure hugely improved by the time factor involved. It was spaghetti with meat ragu, or as we called it in the 1970s spag bol. Too often it is something done rapidly, a standby that can with practice be on the table in edible form in 20 minutes. But the rapid version doesn't have the smoothness or the depth of something simmered for an hour or more, and food should be more than just edible.

Time is the magical factor in transforming mince (admittedly here Aberdeen Angus mince from the most excellent Henry Rowntree) from something a bit grainy into a tender and toothsome pleasure. Likewise in taking tinned tomatoes and rounding off their tartness, combining with the sweetness of the chopped onions to make a mellow vegetable (yes the tom is a fruit, don't care) base that can be called a sauce.

I cooked the ragu for about 90 minutes, on very low heat, and it was so much better for the extra time. Even before that simmer time played its part - the meat allowed to brown properly, caramelize in places, instead of being merely turned in a hot pan then moved hastily on.

Ah! Sugar Sugar

Sugar, especially white sugar, has become one of the pariahs of contemporary food. We have various plant extracts and chemical substitutes offered in place of it; warnings about the damage it does to our teeth and our overall health; chefs finding ways to avoid it. This is very different from the way cooks a few centuries ago looked upon what was then a luxury item. And to me it seems as with so much in life moderation is the key rather than abstinence; and as a natural product I have more confidence in sugar than most alternatives, just as I prefer butter to processed spreads.

This thought came from reading Gervase Markham. I have doubts about his real culinary knowledge. Some of his pronouncements don't make much sense, but he like Elinor Fettiplace regularly used sugar as a spice, to perk up sauces, gravies, to prettify dishes and to correct seasoning generally. It remains a valid and cheap way of improving flavour - sweet after all is one of the basic tastes. Thus a spoon of sugar in a simple spaghetti sauce rounds it out, bringing the flavour of tomatoes to the fore. It doesn't hurt in many beefy or porky stews either.

I'm not advocating sugar butties or loading the stuff into everything as old Gervase seemed to wish, but it is not something we can afford to consign to the outer reaches because of fashion and our fears about obesity.

Starter, Side, or Supper? (and Inadvertent One Flame Cookery)

I had some kale from our allotment to use yesterday, so fell back on something mentioned on a previous post - remove the stems, wash (very carefully in salted water, it often harbours scale insects and the occasional tiny slug, though supermarket stuff almost certainly just needs a quick rinse) and steam the leaves, then cut them fine and add a boiled egg or two, a tin of anchovies and their oil, some crushed garlic, and a good grating of parmesan. All this chopped together and mixed up is put still warm on hot buttered toast. The flavours are not exactly subtle, but on a damp November evening robust is good.

When I was planning our evening meal I had this in mind, and tried to think of how to turn it from what is a good starter or maybe a side dish, into a main course. Potatoes, rice or pasta would be inappropriate. Another veg in it would be too much, even finely diced onion. A vegetable with it seems weird. The only thing that tempted me was adding a fried mushroom or two (with hindsight perhaps steaming one or two briefly would be better), but even that didn't get my vote. The only way I can think of (any ideas gratefully received) to make this a main course would be to do lots of it, but good though it is...

So some things are perhaps not meant to be a full supper, or dinner, or tea,  depending on how you style your main meal. Pity, as it is cheap, tasty, nutritious, and just takes ten minutes to knock up. I ended up making a small amount of spaghetti with meat balls (three sausages to use up) and mushrooms and a simple tomato sauce to follow it. 

Though it was not what I had in mind when actually making it, if you boil the egg first this is another one flame cooking thing (provided you have a toaster, though good crunchy bread would be equally good), and a very healthy one too. And there is a minimum of washing up, always a plus.