Moules mariniere

Full of enthusiasm and inspiration having spent a lot of last week watching the various programmes as part of Channel 4's Big Fish Fight campaign, yesterday night we attempted to cook mussels for the first time and they were fabulous!

I'd been a bit wary about cooking mussels as it seemed there was a lot of preparation needed but the time you spend doing the prep is more than made up by the fact that once you've got them ready to go they literally take about 30 seconds in the pan to cook and hey presto! We decided to go plain and simple with moules mariniere and used the good old Jane Grigson Fish Book for our recipe. The sauce in her recipe is just made up of shallots, garlic, butter and white wine flavoured with a bouquet garnis which suits me as I'm not a massive fan of creamy sauces and it was divine all mopped up with a good chunk of warm ciabatta. So... in the words of Jamie, Hugh et al - get yourselves down the fish counter and give the old favourites (cod, tuna, salmon, prawns) a break and try something else for a change.



Amazing!

Autumnal cooking

Well as the days get colder and the nights close in, it feels more and more right to get some warming autumnal meals on the table. And so the other night we cooked up a cracking shepherd's pie. To give it a windowsill twist we used up some of the chives and parsley that's been growing all summer to make the mash all herby and delicious.



I tend to vary my recipe for shepherd's pie each time I make it depending on what ingredients I've got in the flat at the time so here's what went in to this one. Finely chop and fry up an onion and some garlic, add diced carrots and celery and let it all cook over a low heat until all of the vegetables are soft and collapsing. Meanwhile fry the mince in a separate pan and, when browned, drain off all of the excess fat. When the vegetables have softened add thickly sliced large, flat mushrooms and cook them down as well. Stir through the mince, add a good glug of Worcestershire sauce, a tin of chopped tomatoes, some tomato puree and dried mixed herbs. Stir all of the ingredients together and season with salt and pepper. Place into a pyrex dish with a lid and then into an oven preheated to 180 degrees and leave it all bubbling away and the flavours mixing together whilst you get on with the mash.

Add chopped potatoes and parsnips to salted boiling water and leave them until they are soft enough to fall off a knife. Drain, reserving a small amount of the cooking liquid and mash with lots of butter, salt and pepper. Add in chopped chives and parsley and stir through.

Remove the meat from the oven and scoop the mashed potato and parsnip mix on top. Smooth it out so that it evenly covers the surface and make a nice pattern with a fork. Cover with grated Gruyere cheese and place back in the oven without the lid this time. Leave for 45 minutes and then it is ready to serve. Serve with peas. Yum!

Fertiliser

On the weekend we had a trip down to the garden centre. A week or so ago I'd written about my herbs which seem to have hit a bit of a brick wall in terms of getting any larger. Jo at the Good Life suggested that they might have used up all of the nutrients that was in the compost originally and therefore I might need to start adding fertiliser. So off we trecked to the garden centre with "fertiliser" written on the shopping list.

I hadn't quite anticipated how many fertilisers there would be. We were confronted with an entire wall of Baby Bio, Seaweed extract, Miracle Grow, Tomatorite coming in boxes, bottles and jars... Not deterred by the huge range on offer and the fact that I hadn't got much of a clue what I needed I read a few of the labels and settled on some Miracle Grow that said it was organic and for fruit and vegetables (mildly hoping that herbs were included as a vegetable as I wasn't really in the market to buy a seperate fertiliser for herbs!).

On reading the label it suggests that for vegetables it should be applied once every 7-14 days from shortly after germination and so on Wednesday morning I mixed it up in my watering can and gave both the herbs and the vegetables a good water. Early indications show that for the herbs in particular the leaves seemed to get larger before my eyes and when I came home from work the leaves on the oregano and the parsley seemed much larger than they had been just that morning!

A sunny windowsill weekend

Well I've had a few days off the blog but over the weekend we decided to put the five herb pots out on the windowsill for a while whilst it was really sunny to see how they fared. They've been doing ok (and the basil seems to have perked up since I stopped watering it so much - thanks for the tips!) but what seems to have happened is that they've hit a bit of a stage where they don't seem to be getting any bigger particularly quickly so I thought some time out in the sun might do them some good. Unfortunately for the coriander by the time it was brought back in again it seemed to have flopped over completely. I'm not quite sure what to do about it to get the stalks stronger so that they can support the weight of the leaves. In the other pots I keep thinking that some day the skinny little chives are going to be getting a bit thicker but they don't seem to be showing any signs of that yet. The parsley seems to be doing ok, I was worried before that only one of our seeds had germinated but then I was informed that parsley always takes ages to germinate and since then we've had two more seedlings so things are on the up! And last but not least the mint still seems to be lingering behind as lots of very small little plants. So a bit of a hotch-potch with the lot of them but any advice on what these herbs should be looking like nearly two months after sowing would be much appreciated!

In other exciting news the spinach seeds that I sowed a week ago are starting to pop their heads up which is fantastic.

Parsley and mint!

Well over the last couple of days since we did all of the planting the parsley and mint have sprouted so now we've got our full complement of herbs from the seeds we planted in pots a few weekends ago! At the moment we've got just one solitary parsley plant and several absolutely tiny mint plants. Meanwhile the coriander continues to shoot up and the chives are going from strength to strength...