Simple meal today; onion, a suede and quorn mince, fried for a while (yes, with chili and garlic flakes), then simmered with tomato puree, and thicked with Oxo cubes and gravy granules. Add mashed potato, peas, beans and spinach. Thick, warm and filling. Pity, really, that I got around to this just as the weather is starting to get warm.
And, yes, it should have been a pie. I've clearly been scared by the pastry experience of last weekend.
Decided to do sausage rolls and beans after a hill walk on sunday. Nice idea, but I turned out to have no beans, no self-raising flour and forgot to put fat into the pastry. The pastry was solid. The sausage actually worked okay, though. Some dodgy Sosmix from down the road. Just add boiling water. I put in spinach and garlic flakes into the water first, and lots of pepper.
Pretty good, actually.
I used to think that aduki beans were a joke from the Beano. When I was a kid, Baby Face Finlayson used to eat them after coming up with some dastardly scheme.
More recently, I discovered that they were real. So I tried cooking them last night. Rather nice, as it happens.
The meal was this:
All of this was fried in garlic flavoured olive oil, tofu first with the soy and vinegar till brown and then all the rest dumped in. This was eaten with rice, with peas and broad beans, with a light drizzle of liquidizied chilli.
Very nice as it happens. The aduki beans taste like a cross between baked and kidney beans, but didn't overwhelm the rest of the meal.
Decided to try the curry house from a few nights ago, as I was on the Quayside last night. I think it's called "the Rasa" but I forgot to write it down. Sadly, it was suffering from the Newcastle disease — it was fully booked. I don't understand why this is such a common problem here, but there you go.
Instead, we ended up next door at Vujon. It was okay. The seafood angle was well covered, but the veggie options were poor. I ended up with the set of side dishes option, which were adequate.
Finally got around to buying some garlic flakes that I saw being used in t a resturant a short while back. Combined with a bit of chilli, as well as being garlic flavoured, this are actually quite hot.
Cooked them with some potato, tofu, red onion and bulgar wheat. Very nice indeed.
Went out for a curry tonight, with an old friend of mine. Fortunately, he knows lots of nice places to eat in Newcastle; this is good, because, currently, I don't.
I can't remember the name of the place, but it's near the Quayside, and rather pink. But the food was excellent. We had a daal, a strange pancake bread, a cabbage dish, dosa and some vedna. I've been a fan of dosa for ages, since discovering them in the Punjab Tandoori in Manchester. I've only had then in one other place, so it's great to find another resturant cooking them. I even tried making them for myself once, using some of the wonderously named "Mr Git's Dosa Mix". It never worked.
As well as his dosa mix, Mr Git also makes vedna mix. I did buy some, but never tried it. So, this was the first time I've actually got to eat them. They were great. A light donut made out of lentils.
Afterwards, we went back to the pub and I almost fell asleep. I hadn't realised how tired I was.
Went to Bob Trollope's today. It's a veggie pub, near the quayside. Went there before, but got confused — I ended up looking at the menu of the pub next door.
Wasn't bad at all. Had a pretty good menu. As I'd been standing outside in the cold for most of the day, I went for the mixed grill. Was alright, but I think they need to make it a bit different from the meat version — it was too dry. I couple of pots of dips (a light chilli sauce, some brown sauce and something a little sweet, perhaps) would have been perfect.
Still, it's a pleasure to be in a veggie place, with lots of choice on the menu. It's not been that easy in Newcastle.
Having dug out my old recipe for bulgar wheat, I've been going all cereal. So I bought some polenta. I've never tried this before. It's like cous-cous, but a bit finer. You cook it for a while, then it goes solid.
It's relatively tasteless, but is spices up well. I did it with parsnips and potatoes that I'd lightly fried with lots of spices.
It was alright, but I need quite a bit more work on the polenta. Less water, I think, more spices.