So people of the internet, we’re going to start today’s post with a little quiz. I’m going to show you some pictures and you can try to guess what these things have in common. Are you ready? Ok, picture #1 is my version of Matt Preston’s Mr Kransky’s Panel Van Meatloaf. No, I don’t know why it’s called that either.
Next up? Clue 2…
Any takers? Okay, clue 3 coming up!
And finally…
Have you got it? Meatloaf, 1979, Bat, Hell…shall I take the words right out of your mouth?
Today we are celebrating Meatloaf’s album Bat Out of Hell which was released this week 40 years ago! My parents had a copy of this album and in particular my Dad LOVED it and played it often so Bat out of Hell is part of the soundtrack of my childhood. There would have been a time where I could have song every song word for word. Those days are gone but, I will confess that if I’m in the car and radio hopping and I catch a few bars of “Paradise by the dashboard light” I will always listen just because it reminds of the time when “We were barely 17 and we were barely dressed” was the most risque thing I had ever heard! Nowadays I will crank the volume up and join in that operatic crescendo at the end “So now I’m praying for the end of time so I can end my time with you” Which in the words of PJ O’Rourke is definitely a case of age and guile beating youth, innocence and a bad haircut.
I celebrated this 40 year anniversary by making the aforementioned Mr Kransky’s Panel Van Meatloaf. I don;t know who Mr Kransky is or why he decided to make (eat?) his meatloaf in a panel van (aka a shagging wagon) but I can tell you it is delicious. That sweet glaze over the top? Mmmmmmwha!
I used lamb mince in my meatloaf as I don’t eat pork and added a little chilli into the meat mixture too.
This was so good.
The only downside is that the recipe makes a TON of meatloaf, I have been eating it all week! Still, it was worth it as this really is very tasty.
My two favourite ways of eating this are first, very traditionally with mashed potatoes and steamed green beans. The other is in a long roll with some lettuce and pickled vegetables (carrots, daikon and onion), coriander and with a little chilli sauce mixed into the glaze to become a kind of cheat’s bahn mi! Perfect for work lunches!
Have an awesome week everyone! I’ll be eating so much meatloaf and trying not to hum “Two out three ain’t bad” out loud.
PS – let me know at what number clue you guessed the quiz topic!
What can you do with a load of leftover roast veggies? Make one of the best-named dishes ever – Bubble and Squeak! Bubble and Squeak is a British recipe which is traditionally made from the leftovers from the traditional Sunday roast. It is supposedly called Bubble and Squeak due to the noises made during the cooking process. I think this last bit may be apocryphal. My Bubble and Squeak neither bubbled or squeaked. It was totally delicious though!
So what’s it all about Alfie? Given the Britishness of this dish, feel free to use your best Michael Caine cockney voice as you read that too!
Well, get your leftovers – I had some Ottlolenghi Harissa Potatoes and some Brussels Sprouts. You can use pretty much whatever veg you have as long as you have one that can be mashed up. Mashed potato will also work a treat in this.
Mash up your veggies and add a beaten egg. The rest is up to you. Add some of your chopped up leftover roast if you like, throw in some herbs or some cheese. Add some chill or a dollop of mustard. Be as fancy or as simple as you like. I kept these pretty simple, just the veggies and egg because the potatoes already had some harissa and spice seasoning.
When you are ready, pan fry your Bubble and Squeaks to make delicious patties. These are delicious as a side dish, make a great vegetarian burger patty or are good just by themselves.
Topped Bubble and Squeak
My favourite way to eat Bubble and Squeak is to pan-fry the little cakes until they are all crispy and brown on the outside and then top them with all sorts of delish things. These are one of my go-to’s for lunch (or breakfast) when I am working from home.
Breakfast Bubbles
No, I’m not talking about champagne although, having just come back from Europe where a glass of sparkling is de rigueur with your brekkie I’m totally on board with bubbles in the AM. Hmm…if you had some sparkling wine with your breakfast Bubble and Sqeak I guess that’s double bubble!
Bubble and Squeak with an egg makes a for a super breakfast. You could pan fry some bacon as you heat the bubble and squeak if you wanted to have some meat but I like to have mine just with egg. Grilled cheese on top of your B&S is another delicious breakfast option.
Lunchtime Squeaks
Come lunchtime, I like to top my Bubble and Squeak with some chilli labneh and pickled red cabbage or hummus and tomato salsa as per the top picture.
I love the combination of the crispy roast veggies, the creaminess of the yoghurt and the bite of pickle!
Bubble and Squeak can become quite addictive and now I routinely cook extra veg just so I can have them over the next few days!
Here’s a recipe but feel free to experiment as you wish with herbs, condiments etc. My version does not include cheese in the mix but, if you were going to add it, you could play around with different types. Having said that, now I desperately want to have Bubble and Squeak with some blue cheese crumbled through it!!!
Tell me, what is your favourite way of using up roasted veg?
So, what do you do when life gives you lemons? Make lemonade of course!
And oh boy has life given me lemons! We came home from holidays to find a tree that was so laden with lemons that the branches were nearly lying on the ground!
Poor tree!!!!
Emergency lemon measures were called for! Friends and family were called. However, friends and family were either having their own too many lemon dilemmas or were already hooked up with other peoples too many lemon dilemmas. So, unable to give them away, I started thinking about how to deal with the lemon glut of 2019 on my own!
My old fashioned lemonade is a total classic. It’s the kind of lemonade you can imagine kids selling from a homemade stand, Lucy Van Pelt style back in the day. Or the kind that these kids gave away to marchers during the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Bless their non-capitalist hearts!
Old Fashioned lemonade is also incredibly easy to make! It has just three ingredients – Lemon juice, sugar and sparkling water. Garnishes of lemon wedges, mint leaves and ice cubes are optional.
But if you also wanted to add a little splash of booze, well, I won’t judge you. 😉
Stir the sugar into the lemon juice until it has completelty melted.
When ready to serve, fill a glass to about a third with the lemon and sugar mixture.
Add icecubes.
Top with sparkling water.
Garnish with lemon wedges and mint leaves.
Notes
The lemon and sugar mixture will keep for about a week in a bottle in the fridge.
I’m sure I will have many more lemony dishes in the coming months including a much more fancy lemonade and a super sounding pickle that was in a book I got for my birthday.
Let me know what you would make if you had a million lemons – I need all the inspiration I can get.
Coming home from vacation is always bittersweet. One of the best parts for me is being able to get back into the kitchen. My head is always buzzing with ideas of how to recreate the food I ate on holiday back at home. But before any of that, there is the first meal at home. This is usually some sort of comfort food. I crave something that is both utterly of home and different to what I’ve been eating. After time in Asia this might be meatballs or shepherd’s pie. This time after a month in Europe, the item I most wanted to cook was something spicy. Chicken Curry Mildura fit the bill perfectly!
Chicken Curry What?
Chicken Curry Mildura. Now the only Mildura I know of is a country town in northwestern Victoria about 6 hours drive from where I live. It is situated on the banks of the Murray River. It is famous for olde worlde paddle steamers and is a centre of fruit growing, particularly citrus and grapes.
The name Mildura is thought to have come from an Aboriginal word meaning either “sore eyes caused by flies” or “red rock”
Let’s go with the red rock shall we? Because it really is a delightful country town! And a beloved vacation place for many Victorians.
After researching it for this post I’m quite keen to go spend the next long weekend up there!
What I could not find at all was why, out of all the Victorian country towns, Mildura alone gets to have an eponymous chicken curry.
Now, the aspiring Sherlocks in the crowd may be thinking “might this curry contain some of the fruit for which Mildura is famous?” No, there is not so much as aa peep from any of those stalwarts of the 1970’s curry – apples, bananas and sultanas. (Thank goodness).
Chicken Curry Mildura does contain one odd, to me anyway, ingredient which is Oyster Sauce. I have never used Oyster Sauce in a curry before! It does not taste at all of oysters or seafood of any kind. I think what it brings to the curry is a lovely deep umami flavour that makes this rather simple curry taste a lot more complex than it is!
My PSA
The recipe, which you can access here calls for 6 birdseye chillies. I need to be careful when I cook because although I love my chilli, The Fussiest Eater in the World who has a white boy palate extraordinaire. However, even I feel that 6 birdseyes is a step too far.
I used two chillies in mine and it was PLENTY hot enough. Add your chillies with discretion so you can enjoy the taste of a very delicious curry!
Happy Pieathalon People of the internet! Yep, it’s that special time of year when a group of bloggers get together and bake the good, the bad and the ugly of vintage pies! It’s also my birthday week so it’s double the celebrations for me! Pie and champagne! Life, my friends, is good indeed!😍
Let’s get down to it, shall we?
The Pie
Pie choice day is always exciting. What will that email from Yinzerella reveal? There is always a slight worry in the excitement – I am happy to have an odd pie – but not too odd. One of my favourite parts of Pieathalon is that I get to eat a pie so I always give a little silent prayer. “Please do not let this contain anything disgusting like offal or beetroot. Or sugary onions.” Speaking of the sugary onions, my recipe came from The Nostalgic Cook who sent Jenny the Sweet Onion Pie recipe last year!
Luckily the Gods, (and Kari and Yinzerella) smiled down on me. The pie I received was a gorgeous sounding Honey Cream Cheese Pie from Sunset’s New Kitchen Cabinet Cookbook from 1938. It is described as a “not-quite-so rich version of the very rich German Cheesecake. This Honey Cream Cheese Pie will be welcomed by everyone”. It was more than welcomed by me. I had most of the ingredients which is important when you are leaving the country for a month! I did not want to buy things only to have to throw away any leftovers because we were going away!
This book looks great. I love the little cartoony insets. The recipe page also had a v cute cartoon for a less than appealing sounding carrot mould.
Speaking of which…remember a few Pieathalons ago, when I made the Lime Jello Pie? I totally forgot that I had moved it to the fridge in the garage so the housesitters could use the main fridge. When I opened the garage fridge about a week after we got home, it was like I had just put it in there. It had not changed one iota in the month it had been in there.
Terrifying!!!!!
The Song
Every year I get a song stuck in my head at Pieathalon time. For my first Pieathalon it was Waterloo by Abba. For the lime jello pie I went a bit hair-metal and subbed in the words “Lime Jello Pie” into “Sweet Cherry Pie”
There were two contenders this year. The first was, of course “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch” by the Four Tops. But nah, too obvious. The song that stuck was “Honey Child, what can I do?” by The Ballad of The Broken Seas. Which became Honey Pie what can I do? Which then morphed into….no, we’ll get to that…
Ch…ch…changes
The recipe for the pie says that it is big! Enough for 8 which was way too big given our impending departure. There were three eggs in the original recipe and everything else was easily divisible by three so I decided to make a third of the original recipe. And also that small pies were going to be easier to distribute out if we didn’t eat them all. It might be weird to give the neighbours who are picking up our mail a half-eaten pie. But I think, perfectly acceptable to give them a few freshly baked tartlets as a pre-emptive thank you.
The Bake aka Honey Pie what did I do?
I baked my pies on Saturday afternoon where there was a LOT happening. We were still booking some accommodation so there was stuff happening on the internet, there were phone calls, there was washing and packing and I don’t know just a lot of things going on. I was also obsessing about the nutmeg. Personally, I don’t like it so was trying to decide if I used it on all of the pies, or none or some.
But the making of the pies went perfectly. There was enough mixture for the 6 small pies and some leftover. I had a little taste of the raw filling, it was really good!!! I nutmegged three of the six tarts, popped them in the oven and went to hang out the washing.
When I came back inside I noticed a jug of milk on the bench. And realised that I had totally left the milk out of the recipe!!!!
It was too late to do anything about it. I briefly contemplated pulling the pies out of the oven, scraping out the filling, adding the milk and refilling them but they were already a little bit too set for that.
So, there was nothing to do but to sit and wait to see how these milkless tarts would turn out.
My song quickly became “Honey pies what did I do?”
The Verdict
The honey cream cheese pies looked so gorgeous when they came out of the oven, gorgeous golden domes. The smell of the baking was divine. And they tasted delicious!
We had one each while they were still warm from the oven and they were like a cross between a cheesecake and a Portuguese tart. So tasty.
I don’t know what the milk would have done to these but they were so good without it that I will not add it in when I make these again, which I will definitely do!
We had no leftovers to give neighbours or anyone else! I ate the last one the following night as we waited for the Uber to take us to the airport. With a little glass of sparkling wine, it was the perfect end to Pieathalon 2019 and the start of the holiday!
Thanks as ever to the amazing Yinzerella who organises this whole shebang each year!
You can find her Pieathalon recipe over at Dinner is Served 1972 and check out all the other pieathletes per the links below. Why not start with Kelly over at the Velveteen Lounge who got my recipe for Angel Pie?
Here is the full list of this year’s participants. Some of the links will not be working yet, I will update later today as people post their recipes!
And finally…
