About Me

JANUARY 13, 2015

Cooking with Ginger is my adventure into cooking and baking. I'm an amateur at both but with the number of recipe books I've been gifted over the last few months, I'm determined to make a proper go at this. Oh, and I'm vegetarian. A real one. So I'm afraid there will be strictly no meat or fish in any of my cooking. 

A bit about me. I'm a ginger twenty-something archaeologist digging up holes in the centre of London to find old things. I love old things. When I'm not covered in mud I'm at the gym, reading a book or deciding on the next thing to cook or bake. And I love giraffes. 

My culinary musings will mostly draw on recipes from a select few cook books, unless mentioned otherwise, in case anyone would like to follow along!

Plenty, Yotam Ottolenghi
Plenty More, Yotam Ottolenghi
River Cottage Veg Everyday, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Oxfam Vegetarian Cookbook, Rose Elliot
Vanilla, Janet Sawyer
Crumb, Ruby Tandoh
Good Food Bakes and Cakes

Mushroom Soup

18th January, 2015

This is one of my all time favourite recipes for winter: mushroom soup, from the River Cottage Veg Everyday. Because its basically the best kind of soup. And homemade soup is always a win.

And its so simple to make! Sauté the leeks until soft, add the mushrooms, then the stock and simmer for 20 minutes. I also chucked in half an onion I had leftover and a couple of sticks of celery to enrich the stock for the simmering stage. I of course needed two pans because I don't just have one large pan.

After 20 minutes, take off the heat and pop into a blender until smooth. I always have to do this in bits, a bit of mushrooms and leeks and a bit of stock to maintain a similar consistency. And also blending one pan at a time. I always leave the last bit less well blended so there's still a bit of texture to the final product.

Now, for some reason the first pan (right) ended up being a lot more greenish-grey than usual. I suspect that was due to the giant leeks I used as well as the addition of celery. It still tasted pretty mushroomy though. Mmmm. The second pan was the grey colour you'd expect at least. I added both pans together, stirred in the double cream whilst reheating and there you have it: perfection! And looking nothing like the picture in the book...

Banana Bread

16th January, 2015

A bit of baking next! This recipe is taken from Crumb. First I had to purchase a larger loaf tin - a 1lb tin is hardly going to make for a nice big cake.

The recipe was actually quite simple. Cream the butter and sugar (I opted to use caster sugar instead of agave nectar to keep things simple and costs low), add the eggs, rum and mashed banana and a bit of the flour. I used my food mixer to make sure the mixture was smooth and then added in the remaining flour, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and seeds from cardamom pods. I completely missed this in the recipe the first time I read it and it was lucky I had cardamom pods in the cupboard at all! And I always love an excuse to get out the heavy granite pestle and mortar to grind those seeds. This all mixed together to make a smooth batter which was poured into the loaf tin.

Here I actually nipped away for a bath rather than making the glaze straight away! But I had a spare egg yolk from making the mayonnaise a few days earlier which meant I could make a stiff icing that would set pretty quickly regardless of how long it was left. I didn't, however, check how much icing sugar I had left so it was probably a bit thin on the ground. Or the cake, as the case may be. Who cares, it tasted delicious!

Poached Baby Vegetables with Caper Mayonnaise

JANUARY 13, 2015

Recipe number 1 - here goes!

Opening page 1 of Plenty couldn't have been any more daunting. Homemade mayonnaise?? This was going to be one hell of an experiment, the first step of which was assembling the new blender on top of the Kenwood Chef!

In went the garlic, egg yolk, vinegar, mustard, salt, lemon juice...and the olive oil and lemon zest prematurely because I apparently can't read recipes properly. Not to worry, it actually turned out pretty ok for the first time making mayonnaise. Perhaps a little bit runny to begin with but nothing a bit of cornflour can't sort out. The chopped olives (I used olives instead of capers because thats what I prefer) were mixed in and the mayonnaise was all done. 

Next step was to prepare the poaching liquor. This required a tremendous amount of white wine(!!) along with more olive oil, lemon juice, bay leaves, onion and celery. While this was heating up I washed and halved all the baby veg ready to go. I also popped a veggie treat into the oven to accompany my poached veg as this was to be my main meal of the day. The last step was easy peasy: poach. 

All in all - the veg was pretty ok. The mayonnaise was a bit runny and quite mustard-y for my personal tastes, but this is something to play around with in the future. There were plenty of leftovers for the rest of the week, although the flavours were quite strong for a meal I'd want to eat regularly.