Supper As A Service

Salmon and Potato Pie

2025-02-12T00:00:00+01:00

INGREDIENTS

potatoes
butter
onions
salmon
pepper
herbs
pie pastry
egg

DESCRIPTION

This was the product of running into some extremely cheap salmon at the grocery store because it had been sitting defrosted for a while and was getting weird. I will complain about how this should not happen another time. Briefly, all the fish in the grocery store arrives pre-cut and frozen! Just sell it like that! Goddamn! Anyway I had cheap salmon and while it would probably have held up fine to simple baking, I figured I’d try something more old-fashioned like a pie.

I glanced over a couple recipes and then winged this one. Consistent themes are poaching the salmon (if you’re not using canned salmon, an option), and a generally pretty light spice treatment based on herbs and pepper.

You want ~twice as much raw potato as salmon here, I think. I don’t typically peel potatoes for mash but you can if you want. An egg-wash on the pastry gives it a nice colour, and you can avoid wasting the leftover egg by putting some of it into the mash, which is a trick that I use in cottage pie as well to give the mash a fluffier, firmer texture.

Herbs here can go wild, I do dill or marjoram but you can go pretty wild. I do go very heavy on the pepper here. I don’t add any milk to the potatoes, I think you get enough liquid from the poaching liquid and if you want to add more liquid, consider just using the water you boiled the potatoes in.

A nice addition to the mash would be some kind of green onion and some kind of garlic, yet more tricks from my go-to cottage pie recipe.

I almost always use store-bought puff pastry for pies. The filling here is robust enough that you aren’t going to get a ton of stuff leaking out through small holes so you can patch up the crumbliness of generic grocery store pastry. Homemade stuff has real butter but I go pretty heavy on the butter in the onions step, swings and roundabouts.

I recommend using a spring-form tin for fully sealed pies like this, it’s very convenient to be able to just pop that stuff out. I have photos of this one! but I’m still figuring out automatic image rescaling in Pelican with asciidoc but for now just check this tumblr post.

PREPARATION

Cube potatoes and set to boil.
In a larger than advisable quantity of butter, fry diced onions.
Once onions have lost their edge and begin to soften, add water enough to roughly half-cover the salmon and nestle it down into the liquid.
Poach salmon with the onions until done.
Remove from heat, remove salmon from the onions, set aside to cool.
Drain and mash potatoes, adding herbs, pepper, and liquid and onions from the pan. If egg-washing the pastry, consider putting half an egg in here.
Once cool, remove skin from salmon, shred and mix in to potatoes. Adjust filling to taste.
Prepare a pie crust in a pan, add filling, seal over the top, egg-wash optionally.
Bake at 200°C for ~30 minutes or until pastry is ready
Allow to cool in tin until you can turn it out onto a cooling rack

Creamy Fresh Tomato Spinach Pasta

2024-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

INGREDIENTS

onion
pasta of your choice
fresh, small tomatoes
frozen spinach pellets, or fresh spinach, chopped
garlic
italian herbs
chili flakes
cooking cream
salt and pepper

DESCRIPTION

This is an easy, filling, and surprisingly rich-tasting tomato pasta that hews closer to a burst tomato pasta than to a bolognese. Everything is fairly minimally cooked, and comes together pretty fast. I usually do this when I see fun little tomatoes on the vine at a market or if I grab a few boxes of rosa tomatoes at the grocery store.

PREPARATION

Dice and fry an onion in olive oil until it turns translucent.
Get your pasta going.
Put whole small tomatoes into the pan and cook, moving occasionally, until they begin to burst.
Continue cooking the tomatoes, stirring and breaking them up a little.
Add spinach to the pan, cover to allow the steam to defrost and/or wil the spinach.
Once the spinach is all cooked, add garlic, herbs, and chili flakes, and cook briefly.
Once the flavours are mixed through, add cream and bring to a low simmer to thicken the cream.
Add salt and pepper, adjust chili flavour to taste. Drain pasta and add to the pan.
That’s the whole thing!

Chickpea and Green Beans Currry with Coconut Cream

2024-11-12T00:00:00+01:00

INGREDIENTS

onions
whole black peppercorn
whole cardamom
other mirepoix vegetables
tomato paste
spice powders
canned or soaked + boiled chickpeas
canned or fresh chopped tomatoes
marmite
frozen or fresh green beans, chopped to bite size
sugar
coriander leaves

DESCRIPTION

This is a staple curry in my house that is a easy to prepare in large quantities and tastes good enough to eat for lunch or dinner every day for a week. It’s also the main thing I tend to make when I get back from travelling and need something heavy on fibre and vegetables to recover from eating grocery store sandwiches and tacos for every meal.

Mirepoix vegetables constitutes a lot of things, I usually do carrots and peppers at least.

Spices for this are usually fairly South-Asian in character, cumin, coriander. I ususally add some prepared garam masala or mixed leaf masala in various quantities, and adjust heat with chili powder. Hold off on salt until later, since the marmite going in the middle here can be very salty.

Marmite? It works! The very heavily fried vegetables go a long way to making this "hearty" but marmite adds an extremely strong savory flavour here. You can go with a mushroom stock here I guess, or OXO cubes, but you do want some very strong source of that kind of flavour.

PREPARATION

Chop onions and other vegetables, and fry in a pot with whole spices until they start to brown.
Fry some tomato paste briefly.
Add your spice powders and fry briefly, then add chickpeas and stir them in to coat them in spices
Cook until the vegetables are very brown, then add tomato to prevent burning, and stir to break them up.
Stew this together until the chickpeas start to soften. Add a large spoonful of marmite, and stir it through.
Once everything is mostly cooked, mix in as much frozen green beans as you want. Kill the heat while they defrost and cook slightly in the sauce.
Adjust the flavour of the sauce with salt and sugar, and garnish with coriander leaves.

Murkoo

2024-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

INGREDIENTS

500g rice flour
2 tbsp urad dal flour
2 tsp cumin seeds
50g butter
chili powder to taste
½ tsp salt, or to taste
vegetable oil, to fry

DESCRIPTION

This recipe is directly lifted from chefinyou’s murukku recipe which is the first place we ever learned to use urad dal flour to make murkoo.

Urad dal, or black lentil, flour, is extremely hard to find in many places, and seems to be crucial to getting the texture of this just right. You can probably get it online, and frustratingly this recipe uses like one tablespoon of it. In theory you can make it from black lentils but I do not want to mill flour in my blender.

Typically a heavy hand-cranked brass press with a star-shaped extrusion plate is used to pipe out the murkoo, either into spirals on a tray or directly into the hot oil. I have seen people form this by hand, but I’ve never done that. Most conventional biscuit presses don’t have a sufficiently sharp, or sufficiently small, star-shaped press for murkoo.

You want the dough here just barely pliable enough to force through the press without breaking, so err on the side of less water in the dough. You can set aside a little dough if you want a backup if you overshoot, but you have a decent amount of leeway so just go slow. Very firm doughs can be easily pressed right into the oil, but might not form nice fancy spirals. Softer doughs can be formed into spirals and then moved to the oil more easily. Both are good.

PREPARATION

Mix all the ingredients together to form a slightly breadcrumb-like texture
Add a little water and mix until incorporated, repeat to form a firm dough.
Press through a murkoo press and into hot oil over a moderate heat. Cook until it is still bubbling just a little, and remove from the oil. Set on a plate lined with paper towel to drain and cool.

Chanamagaj

2024-11-01T00:00:00+01:00

INGREDIENTS

500g chickpea flour
1 tbsp ghee
2 tbsp milk
225g ghee
325g icing sugar

DESCRIPTION

This is a sweet that is best described as a dough made from a chickpea roux, which is frankly a terrible description but why don’t you try and do something better after reading this.

Important

you really want relatively fresh chickpea flour (gram flour, chana flour, there are so many names for this bean) for this recipe. I have used still-good but year-old chickpea flour and had it go horribly wrong.

The dough here is pretty strange. You mix the flour with milk and ghee to form a kind of scone-esque crumbly texture, but you really want some fairly big chunks in there. These form the characteristic crunchy bits of chanamagaj. I usually just mix this until I get bored with it, it will never get down to the scone-like texture you might be expecting.

When we say "stir constantly" here we really do mean it, once you’re making the chickpea flour paste it will catch and burn in seconds, especially if you haven’t got a feel for your stove’s temperature control. This is a very time-consuming recipe, put on a podcast, I recommend that you pair the Anthropocene Reviewed episodes on Tetris and the Seed Potatoes of Leningrad and Auld Lang Syne, which, together, at 1× speed, should just about cover it.

Once you mix in the ghee and the sugar this is a pretty pleasant dough to shape, it is very greasy so it doesn’t stick to your hands, doesn’t really melt very much, and it forms a pleasant shiny surface.

This recipe doubles pretty well and halves decently well.

You can decorate this various ways, I typically do roasted chopped almonds.

PREPARATION

Mix 1 tbps ghee and 2 tbsp milk and melt. Pour this over the chickpea flour, and mix and rub with your fingers until it forms a somewhat crumbly, somewhat chunky mix.
Heat 450 grams of ghee in a pot until it is a clear liquid, and add all the flour mix.
Cook this mix on medium to low heat, stirring all the time and scraping out the corners, for at least 45 minutes. It should change colour from a very light brown to a medium brown paste.
Take the mix off the heat and let it cool to handling temperature. It will taste very bad at this point. That’s normal.
Once it is cooled enough to handle, add the icing sugar to the pot and rub it through the mixture with your fingers to evenly distribute it. Unmixed pockets of dough will taste extremely bad, so try and get everything.
Once it is fully mixed, shape it into blocks and decorate.

Burfee

2024-10-31T00:00:00+01:00

INGREDIENTS

500g full-fat powdered milk
1 cup full-fat milk
360g icing sugar
1 cup water
60g butter
rose essence
cardamom powder

DESCRIPTION

Burfee is a very milk-based confection flavoured with rose and cardamom, it’s probably one of my favourite diwali sweets.

Caution

Getting the syrup right here is crucial, and is the easiest part of this to screw up, as I have done many times. You want to err on the side of too thick. You want to boil the syrup until it’s quite sticky when allowed to cool, you can take a spoonful out and see how it behaves in open air to check your texture. My mother recommends you boil it for at least 20 minutes at a medium boil. You aren’t making candy here, you don’t want to get rid of all the water, but you can get pretty close to thread stage before you’ve gone too far, and you could theoretically bring it back from threads with a little water.

Historically burfee is prepared with Khoa, a kind of dehydrated whole milk product. In the modern day, commercially produced whole milk powder is a much easier to handle ingredient. The high sugar and low moisture content means they’ll last days to weeks at room temperature and well over a month in a fridge.

Rose essence is not too hard to find, but I have had to order it online sometimes. Different rose-essences taste very different, and finding one you like can take some time. I’ve had good luck with the TRS brand rose essence in glycol.

People differ greatly on how much of each flavour to use. Some people only do cardamom! Those people are wrong. I say about a teaspoon of cardamom and a tablespoon of rose essence is a good start, but you can just taste it and adjust.

The dough will become very firm if you let it set all the way, I recommend working it roughly as soon as it cools enough to handle. I just shape blocks by hand, some people have fancy forming moulds, and other people form slabs and slice shapes out like it’s fudge. Shaping the blocks by hand is kind of a pain in the ass because the dough is very temperature sensitive and loves to stick to your skin and leave behind a sugary, milky residue. I will sometimes just wear nitrile gloves to handle it, but this is a convenience thing. Cooler dough is less messy but forms less robust blocks.

You can decorate this various ways, I typically do roasted slivered almonds, but other options include powdered sugar, powdered milk, shredded coconut and gold leaf.

PREPARATION

Mix milk powder and milk liquid together, and rub until it forms a crumb-like texture, a little like if you were making scones.
Put icing sugar, butter, and water in a pot large enough that you can add that milk powder mix later, and bring to a boil.
Boil the sugar syrup until it becomes fairly sticky, you want at least 20 minutes at a gentle boil.
Lower the heat on the syrup and add the milk powder mixture and stir it in over low heat for a few minutes.
Take the mixture off the heat. Allow it to cool a little. Mix in flavours to your taste.
Once it’s cool enough to handle, form shapes and set aside.

Melting Moments

2024-10-31T00:00:00+01:00

INGREDIENTS

225g butter
1 cup flour
½ cup icing sugar
1 cup cornstarch
2 teaspoons baking powder
salt to taste

DESCRIPTION

This is more or less the Melting Moments recipe from the very widespread (at least in South Africa) Indian recipe book Indian Delights. Most of the recipes in this site are less detailed than what you would normally get from a modern recipe book. This recipe has significantly more information added over the original recipe in the book.

These biscuits form a very versatile dough, it’s soft but holds together. I normally pipe it out of a manual biscuit press, which is good if you want nice fancy shapes, but you can absolutely just form some balls and squish them with a fork to form little shapes.

These bake extremely quickly, between 5-12 minutes most of the time, you want to keep them pretty blonde. If they start to brown a little it’s fine but they very quickly go from "golden" to "burnt" if you aren’t on top of them.

You don’t have to press these onto baking paper! I guess you could if you’re doing it by hand, but with a biscuit press the additional stickiness of non-stick metal trays works much better. There is enough butter in here that it will not stick to a normal non-stick tray, you’ll be fine.

You can decoratee these with icing sugar or chocolate or sprinkles if you want but I generally think that these negatively affect it by introducing moisture or additional texture that detracts from the very specific, dry, light, fragile character of these biscuits.

PREPARATION

Mix all the ingredients together and mix until a smooth dough forms.
Press out into biscuit shapes directly onto a non-stick tray by hand or with a press, with a little space between biscuits so they can rise.
Bake in an oven at 180°C, for 5-12 minutes. Pull the biscuits once they just begin to brown, maybe earlier!
Pull the tray and leave it to cool for a few minutes to allow the biscuits to solidify a little.
Once the trays are solid enough to move, move them to a cooling rack to cool.

Chickpea Shakshouka

2024-09-29T00:00:00+02:00

INGREDIENTS

onions
peppers
garlic
tomato paste
spices
fresh or canned tomato
canned chickpeas
eggs

DESCRIPTION

One of the infinite array of times people went "yo I think tomatoes and eggs would go together really well" and were right.

The peppers here are best if they’re a relatively thin-skinned type, rather than chunkier bell peppers. Bell peppers might want to be sliced thinner and cooked longer. The chickpeas allow this to be eaten as-is, but served with some kind of bread or toast is a good idea.

Shakshouka can be prepared a few ways, from entirely on the stove to under a grill. You want a wide, shallow pan so that you can thicken the tomato sauce pretty quickly, which gets this on the table reasonably fast. Non-stick works well here, but if you keep the heat conservative anything works. I’ve done this in cast iron with no real issues despite what people say about tomato affecting coatings, but your mileage may vary.

PREPARATION

Slice onions and peppers and fry until they begin to soften. Fry a generous spoonful of tomato paste.
Add spices and fry until fragrant.
Crush or chop your tomatoes and garlic if they aren’t already and dump in the pan. Fry until it starts to thicken a little.
Drain off chickpeas and add to sauce. Simmer for long enough to cook the chickpeas through.
Form some divots in the sauce and crack eggs into them. Preheat your oven grill to high while those cook.
Once the eggs start to cook, slide the pan into the oven and grill the top to get some colour on the sauce and cook the eggs
Pull the pan before the yolks go solid. If you still need more cooking, you can put it back on the stove or just wait and see for carryover

Butternut soup

2024-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

INGREDIENTS

Onion
Red bell pepper
1 small butternut
Italian, Spanish, or French herbs
Garlic
Chili Flakes
Cream
Sugar
Black pepper

DESCRIPTION

It’s a butternut soup. This is a simple version that cooks everything in one shot. The amount of each vegetable is pretty variable, but this is a dish that is maybe ⅓ butternut by raw weight. You can add some other vegetables if you’d like, I’ve previously put potatoes and beets in this as well, although beets will start to shift the colour more towards red than orange. This also works well with any other hardy winter squash, hokkaido pumpkin and blue pumpkin both work pretty well.

This is related to my roasted vegetable soup, which has more setup but produces a much richer and sweeter flavour.

PREPARATION

Dice and fry off the onion, carrots and peppers in a deep sided pot.
Deseed and cube the butternut, and add it to the softened mirepoix. Just cover with water.
Bring to a simmer and cook until butternut is soft
Crush and add garlic, along with herbs and chili flakes. Blend with an immersion blender until smooth.
Add cream, bring to a simmer to thicken without causing the cream to break.
Add salt, sugar, and ground black pepper to taste.

Four chocolate brownies

2024-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

INGREDIENTS

185g butter
185g dark chocolate
85g plain flour
40g cocoa powder
salt to taste
50g white chocolate
50g milk chocolate
3 large eggs
275g caster sugar

DESCRIPTION

We spent like ten months trialling different brownie recipes and this one is reliable and good, and has the benefit of lasting an astoundingly long time at room temperature.

PREPARATION

Cut butter into small cubes and tip into a medium bowl. Break dark chocolate into small pieces and drop into the bowl.
Melt butter and chocolate mix with a bain-marie or microwave, stirring occasionally. Leave mixture to cool to room temperature.
Set oven to heat to 180°C. Line the base of a 20cm square tin with baking paper.
Sift flour, salt, and cocoa into a bowl. Keep in mind if you’ve used salted butter
Chop milk and white chocolate into chunks.
Crack the eggs into a large bowl, pour in the caster sugar. Use an electric whisk on maximum speed for 3-8 minutes. The result should be about twice the volume and leave a trail for a second or two when you pick the whisk out.
Pour the chocolate-butter mix into the egg and gently fold together. Avoid beating the air out of the mix.
Pour in the dry ingredient mix and fold it in. The mixture should eventually take on a fudge-like consistency.
Stir in the chocolate chunks thoroughly.
Pour mixture into the tin, easing it into the corners with a spatula to smooth it out. Bake for 25 minutes.
When you take the brownie out, shake it a bit. If it wobbles, put it back in for five minutes. If it’s not wobbly it’s fine.
Let the brownie cool in the tin. Once cold, dump the brownie out. Cut into whatever size pieces you want, and I guess eat them or something.

Buttermilk Scones

2024-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

INGREDIENTS

3 cups flour
⅓ cup sugar
2½ cups baking powder
¾ cup butter, grated or cubed
salt
1 cup buttermilk
milk

DESCRIPTION

I make these so I have breakfast. You can freeze them and they’ll last long enough that I can’t really tell you when they go bad. A pastry cutter makes short work of cutting in the butter, and the American technique of grating frozen butter is handy, but all the usual methods work fine.

PREPARATION

Preheat an oven to 200°C
Mix dry ingredients
Cut butter into the dry ingredients
Mix the buttermilk in and adjust the texture as needed with milk
Fold and layer the dough, and cut out pieces, transfer to a baking tray
Brush the scones with milk, egg wash, or buttermilk
Bake for 15 minutes or until lightly browned and risen

Campfire Bread

2024-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

INGREDIENTS

2 cups of flour
1-3 tbsp honey/syrup
warm water
1 tsp yeast
3 tbsp oil [olive/sunflower/other]

DESCRIPTION

This is a generic and relatively easy to make bread intended for use in a cast-iron bread pan. You can also use a normal bread pan and oven but in that case you may prefer a more complex recipe. This is not a no-knead recipe which does make preparation while on the move kinda suck, but for a static campsite it is pretty good. This is for a smaller rectangular dutch oven and you may need to scale it up by about 50% for the round cast-iron pots.

PREPARATION

Mix together wet ingredients, adding just enough water to bring the dough together without getting sticky.

Set the dough aside to rest and rise. Oil the pan in the meantime. Preheat an oven to 200°C or get a fire going if you haven’t.

Get the bread into the pan and set it over the heat. If you’re using a dutch oven, suspend it over the fire and get some coals on the lid. It’ll take 40-50 minutes over a fire, or 35-45 minutes in an oven.

Take the bread off the fire, let it cool for a few minutes before upending it and dumping it out. Cast iron pots aren’t great at letting water escape so it’ll generally be denser if you make it like that than if you made it in an open-top breadpan.

Honey Ginger Glaze

2024-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

INGREDIENTS

2 tbsp honey
sesame oil
soy sauce
sriracha sauce
garlic powder
ginger powder

DESCRIPTION

This is a pretty fast and easy honey-ginger glaze. The honey makes it glaze and the sriracha adds some easy complexity and heat. It goes pretty well with fish, in particular oven-baked salmon.

PREPARATION

Really just mix all that stuff together in a bowl
That’s it you’re done, congratulations
Pour it on top of the thing you’re eating and then stick it in the oven
If you’re feeling fancy do multiple applications as it bakes to thicken the glaze

Tomato Tuna Casserole

2024-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

INGREDIENTS

Onions
Carrots
Red peppers
Tomato paste
Canned (or fresh) chopped or crushed tomato
Italian herb mix
Black pepper
Spicy whole chili or chili flakes
Frozen greenbeans
Pasta noodles
Canned tuna in oil

DESCRIPTION

This is a spicy canned tuna casserole based on a few recipes I’ve read. It uses a tomato sauce base instead of the more traditional bechamel or mornay, and mixes a roughly even amount of green beans and pasta noodles in as the bulk ingredient. You could do this entirely with pasta if you prefer. I have to stress that I really think this comes out better with tuna in oil rather than brine, and that oil really contributes to the richness of this otherwise fairly vegetable heavy pasta.

You can eyeball most of the proportions in this dish without messing with the flavour, but if you want to scale it, I usually do two cans of tuna, with two onions, a large red pepper, six carrots, two cans of tomato, 250g of pasta, and 200g of green beans. Those last two correspond to half a pack of each, typically.

This recipe is intended for a single-pot approach, I have an induction stove so I use an enameled cast-iron roasting tray but if you’re on gas or electric you could use any ceramic dish. I’ve also done it in a normal stainless-steel pot which works perfectly fine but might perplex your guests. It also cooks the pasta entirely in the oven, rather than pre-cooking the noodles, which saves on dishes and makes the past taste very strongly of the sauce.

Two inspirations that might help you make sense of this recipe are this poorly-reviewed but conceptually interesting tomato tuna casserole on epicurious and also this Adam Ragusea tuna casserole recipe which, like this one, cooks the pasta entirely in the oven.

PREPARATION

Dice and fry off the onions, carrots, peppers, and any other mirepoix-esque vegetables you want. Once they’ve softened or maybe started to brown, fry off a dollop of tomato paste.
Add enough tomato to make a tomato sauce, and bring to a simmer. Mix in herbs and chili. I typically use diced pickled habaneros here, but anything to your taste will work. Go easy on the habaneros.
Adjust the chili, herbs, salt and pepper to taste, keeping in mind that there’s still more bulk to come, you want it a little spicy here. Now’s probably a good time to start preheating the oven to 200°C.
Chop the frozen greenbeans into pasta-length pieces. Mix the dry pasta and the greenbeans through the sauce. Turn off the heat on the stove.
Empty both the tuna and the oil into the pot. Stir to break the tuna up into chunks and distribute it through the casserole without shredding it.
Add some water to cover the pasta. You can calculate the ideal amount of water as 2-2.5× the weight of the pasta you added.
Cover the dish with a lid or foil and put it the oven. After 30 minutes, remove the covering and allow to cook for another 10-15 minutes to brown the top.
Take the casserole out, allow to cool for a while before serving.