Curry Pie (Serves 4)

Ingredients

500g Beef Mince

4 Baking Potatoes

2 Large Onions

3 Carrots

1 tbsp Mustard

100ml Milk

4 tbsp butter

250ml good beef stock (use a whole stock cube even though it's only 250ml)

1 tbsp Olive Oil

Salt & Pepper

4 tbsp Pataks Vindaloo Paste

Optional: misc fixed vegetables, frozen mixed veg is fine, use fresh of you can

Optional: Thickening granules if your filling isn't thickening up well

Method

1 Preheat oven to 180°C (170°C fan)

2 Peel, chop and boil potatoes 

3 Peel, chop and fry the carrots and onions in the olive oil and the Vindaloo Paste

4 Add the mince, stir and cook

5 Add the water

6 Drain and mash the potatoes with the milk, butter and mustard (use a potato ricer of you can)

7 Reduce the filling over a medium heat, thicken with thickening granules as needed

8 Season with salt and pepper, tasting as you go, until the flavours are enhanced but before it tastes salty

9 Assemble pie and cook in oven for 20 minutes or until browned, when ready, brown under grill if necessary

Serve with courgettes

Really Dumb But Really Good Chicken Fajitas

Some made up nonsense I used to use up a packet sauce, chicken and salad that needed eating up

Ingredients

2 large chicken breasts, in long thin strips

2 bell peppers, I like green and red, also long 'n thin

1 medium large brown onion, sliced into thin half rings

1 or 2 packets of Levi Roots Jerk Coat 'n Cook sauce

A bag of mixed salad leaves

Small bunch of coriander, chopped

5 or 6 corn or wheat wraps/tortilla

A Tex-Mex dip selection

Cooking oil of choice

Optionally, more salad like baby plum tomatoes, cucumber, pickled gherkin or spring onions, all finely sliced

Utensils

1 oven tray with at least 1 cm of lip

Method

Combine in the oven tray or a separate bowl the chicken, peppers, onion, packet sauce(s) and a few glugs of your cooking oil to this tier sauce our slightly

Line the oven tray with kitchen foil

Transfer contents into the oven tray

Cool in a pre-heated oven at 190°C for 25-30 minutes

With you're happy with how cooked it is, remove from the oven, turn the foil into a pouch to keep it warm and put aside

Heat your tortillas slightly in a microwave

On your board or a plate, place a warm tortilla

Lightly coat the inside of it with your choice of dips

Spoon the chicken mixture in a line from the top to the bottom of the tortilla

Repeat with the salad, coriander and optional salad you chose, if any.

Perpendicular to the chicken mix line, pull the tortilla over the line, 3 or 4 cms worth

Now roll the left and right 'edges' up and over the mix, getting tight and straight

Flip it over so the weight pins the wrap in place

Hand it off on a plate to who's serving, optionally tie a ring of kitchen twine around it with a bow knot.

Serve with beer with lime in it.

Keeps for days in the fridge, chicken in its pouch, salad in a clip seal box or reseal the salad bag with an electric bag sealer (get one, they're fantastic), wrap the dips in cling field, wrap the wrap packet with cling film but don't store them in the fridge.

Slow Cooked Beef Bolognese with Hidden Veg

Foreword

This is one of my slow cooker recipes.

They are designed to make large amounts of my best recipes with a minimum of effort and minimum of cleanup (tend towards single pot recipes and rely on a stick-blender)

But not time.

Hence these are my 'Sunday Afternoon' specials, prep in the afternoon, cook overnight, check seasoning before work and portion it out Monday evening.

This is necessary, actual real chemistry stuff happens over the 24 hours, it is not really ready to eat until then.

If I were a raccoon, I'd be a fox👉🦊

They're really smart and I'm an extra smart one, with glasses

 And a jumper with patches on the elbows.

Indeed Fantastic.

For my Slow Cooker at least 2 of the following recipe will be needed to fill it and there's no point in not filling it. Don't try to brim it, slow cookers don't work if you over fill them.

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil

4 rashers smoked streaky bacon, finely chopped

500g beef mince (I recommend 15% fat mince)

250g Mushrooms, sliced (optional)

For the bolognese sauce

2 medium onions, finely chopped

2 carrots, trimmed and finely chopped

2 celery sticks, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 tsp dried Rosemary

1 tsp dried Basil

1 tsp dried Oregano

2 x 400g tins plum tomatoes

2 bay leaves

70g tomato purée

1 stock cube, beef or vegetable

1 tsp Medium red chilli flakes (Optional)

125ml red wine

75g parmesan grated

Method

My slow cooker recipes follow a certain pattern.

Chop 👉 Fry, browning the ingredients and cooking off the water 👉 Put in slow cooker

Thus:

1) Set up your slow cooker next to the stove, I recommend getting a timer plug for it. Put a large non-stick frying pans on a large ring. I recommend slow cookers that have an 'auto' mode. This mode should start on High and turn down to Low once the food is up to temperature. Once a slow cooker is up to temp, 1 hour on High is the same as 2 hours on Low.

If you've got water to cook off, remember:

1a) Mince absorbs moisture over time as it relaxes and cools. Learn how much you need to leave by practise.

1b) The point of browning the ingredients before they go in the Slow Cooker is to improve flavour, texture, look and remove excess water with high temperatures before they go in the slow cooker.

2) Add Groundnut or Rapeseed Oil to the pan (2 tbsp or 30 ml) and brown off the onion.

3) To the onion, add the carrot and the celery. This is called a Soffrito in Italy. Cook until nicely coloured, cooked, soft and dry.

Tip into Slow Cooker.

4) If you're adding mushrooms, start frying them now, in oil and butter until browned and the water has come out and cooked off

5) Into the Slow Cooker tip the following:

The garlic, rosemary, basil, oregano, plum tomatoes, tomato purée, stock cube, chilli flakes (Optional), red wine and parmesan.

Blitz to a fine sauce with a stick or immersion blender.

Add the 2 bay leaves, stir in.

6) If you're using mushrooms, tip into Slow cooker when ready. Brown the chopped bacon, tip into Slow Cooker, reserving a teaspoon of bacon. Brown mince, cook off some water, add to slow cooker. Do not drain the mince, add it and the juice.

7) Mix, turn up to high. Cover with lid and cook for 1 hour 

8) Turn down to Low, set timer plug for 4 hours.

9) In the morning adjust seasoning.

My Seasoning rules

9a) Taste, if it's salty, don't add salt

9b) If not salty, add salt by the ½ tsp. Mix well

9c) Taste. If it's started tasting salty, stop

9d) If not salty and the flavour seems stronger, enhanced, go back to (9b) and continued.

Long and short of it, the salt will enhance the other flavours but only to a point, then it starts tasting salty. Stop there.

9e) Add fresh ground black pepper, mix well, taste and keep going until you're happy with the flavour.

10) Late afternoon/ early evening separate into pots for the freezer, over here we can buy those plastic containers takeaway food comes in. I use those, each one has enough Bolognese for 2 people's dinner. Keep some aside for dinner that evening if you're having it for dinner too.

Serve with good quality Linguine or Tagliatelle.

10 ) Put reserved bacon in cat. (not optional)

See if cat likes beef Bolognese, some cats really like tomato sauces.

If cat likes Bolognese, buy cat a tin of Glenryck Pilchards in Tomato Sauce. It's so stinky that cats with a blocked nose will still eat it when they won't eat because they can't smell.

Then do it anyway because he's a good cat and deserves fishies who also have no neck.