Souper soup - Tomato and cannelini bean

Soup is a staple of my diet. M sometimes says it practically forms it's own food group. When I work from home it's nearly always my lunch, and I have a flask to take it to work when I'm training. Unless I'm poorly, I make all my soups from scratch. I don't usually blog the recipes, as in the main I don't use one, but it's come up on a couple of emails and comments that making your own seems a bit daunting or that cuppa soup was people's first Home Ec lesson.

Really? Who on God's earth planned that one? Lesson outcome: By the end of this session students will have boiled a kettle & safely added hot water to a packet soup.(!) Don't get me started - Mum, Mandy and I were having this discussion on Sunday - Mum's cookery at school was epic. Proper, old style learning to cook. Mandy describes her Home Ec classes as 'a catering course' and she covered some amazing skills. Mine started with apple crumble, and then we focussed on cakes for the first term, then did CDT, then textiles. And in the second year our Home Ec covered Child Development.

So as a starter in Souper soup... here are some things I think it's useful to know, and at the end a really yummy tomato and cannelini bean one.

Making soup is quick, easy and cheap. You can put in it exactly what you like to eat, use up those veggies languishing at the bottom of the salad tray or your leftover roast dinner, bulk it up with lentils or tins of beans... the possibilities are endless.

You don't have to make your own stock - cubes and bouillon powders are fantastic. My hero product would be Swiss Marigold bouillon (I use the reduced salt version) but I also happily use Knorr stock cubes. I do make my own chicken stock, but that's a personal preference and a way for me to eek out every last bit of value for money from a roast chicken - it's absolutely fine to use a stock cube or pot (I haven't tried the new stock pots but my Mum absolutely sings their praises!) Also, if you've got nothing in the cupboard - use water, it's by no means the end of the world. The only thing I do find with stock is just to taste the soup before I add salt as cubes can be a little salty for my taste buds.

You don't need any special equipment. A big pan - mine is an Ikea 365 pan - it was about £15 and I use it loads. A wooden spoon. A knife and chopping board. If you like your soup smooth, then a hand blender. For years I used a Tesco economy hand blender. It was £5 and never let me down, lasting for near on 10 years. If you like chunky soup, then you don't need a blender at all.

So - there's your need to know for soup. The first thing I do each week is open the fridge and look to see what veggies are hanging around. Inevitably at this time of year it's mainly root vegetables; carrots, swede, parsnips, sweet potatoes and then some butternut squash, the occasional leek, onion or a sad looking bit of celery all make appearances.

I will normally use a base of 2 sticks of celery, an onion and carrot to start off any soup. That said, it's not cast in stone... If I don't have celery I'll use a leek, if I don't have an onion I'll use a leek. Sometimes I just use an onion and carrot. It's all negotiable.

Then I have a look in the Pantry, red lentils, green lentils, tins of cannelini beans all bulk out those veggies.  And my stock options - bouillon, a cube, water or a quick dart over to the freezer for some chicken stock.

The recipe below is based on one I cut out from a magazine and then promptly found that I was missing some of the bits for.

Tomato and cannelini bean soup

Olive oil
2 celery sticks
2 cloves of garlic
1 red onion
1 tin of tomatoes 400g
1 punnet of cherry tomatoes, halved (I had these in the fridge as they were reduced in the supermarket)
Splodge of tomato puree
1.5 litres of chicken/ vegetable stock (or water)
1 tin of cannelini beans, drained and rinsed
Salt & pepper
Dried oregano

Chop the celery and onion as finely as you can, and put in the big pan with the olive oil, crush in the garlic. Cook these through until the onions start to go transparent and soft.
Add the tinned and halved cherry tomates, a splodge of puree and the dried orgeano
Add the stock, and cannelini beans
Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 45 minutes
Taste, and season as necessary
If you like smooth soup, blitz

Serve hot with bread and cheese for a fantastic lunch. I have a pinterest recipe for some cheesey pull apart bread that would be amazing with this. I'm going to try it tomorrow and will let you know.

For me this was storecupboard cooking as I had everything in the house - but I understand that if you don't have frozen bags of stock, or a packet of stock cubes around the house it's not a frugal dish in terms of initial outlay. If you're trying to cook more from scratch or try new things then it's definitely worth the investment.

It's just a roast 2012 - turkey lurkey time!

Following on from last year's "It's just a roast" mantra I had planned originally to continue in that theme with this year's Christmas posts. However, time, work and circumstance seem to have meant that it's suddenly the 21st December, the world hasn't ended but I've barely posted. 

If you're me and a thirteenth hour Kate - you'll have watched Jamie, Nigella, Nigel, and anyone else on telly this last week and got loads of good ideas only to find out that the cranberries, star anise, shiny new must-have ingredient is sold out. Unless I'm prepared, I stick to the way of cooking below... it's simple enough and means that I can swap and change out my side dishes/ stuffings to make things different.

So in a final fit of organisation I'm sat down on my afternoon off and thought I'd add in some posts to go live over the next few days, they'll be picture light as I'm away from home, but I will add in photos as soon as I can. 

Let's work on the basis you're cooking a turkey - first things first we need to consider the food safety angle. The Food Standards Agency has got some guidance on their website to make sure that you're storing and cooking the turkey in the best way possible to stay healthy, safe and well. 

Although you need to store the bird somewhere cold - you want it at room temperature before you start cooking, so take it out about an hour before you want to start.

I don't stuff the turkey, in my eyes it makes timings more difficult and personally I prefer my stuffing cooked separately. 

Preheat your oven to gas mark 5, 190 degrees C

Make some herbed butter, I season unsalted butter with a little bit of sage, parsley, salt and pepper - but use herbs you like and that would go with what else you're serving with your dinner. 

Put an onion, carrot and a satsuma in the turkey cavity.

Separate the skin of the turkey from the breast by sliding your clean hand between the two and using a side to side motion to gently split them. (It's times like this I really should get M to film me) Then, again using your hand, push the butter under the skin, and almost massage the butter in. Do this on both sides of the breast, and with any remaining butter put more over the widest part of the leg, and the wing.

There are lots of different timings knocking around on the internet and in families, but I think this is the easiest way to work it out - and it worked well on a test turkey recently.  Working out your cooking times is easy when you know three main things:

• 20 minutes per kilo
• Add 90 minutes to the total cooking time if your turkey weighs more than 4kg
• Add 70 minutes to the total cooking time if your turkey weighs less than 4kg

Even with these cooking times test your turkey is cooked by inserting a skewer where the thigh meets the breast. If the juices run clear you're done!

If this doesn't help - or you're feeling flustered why not try this:

The British Turkey helpline, 0800 783 9994, is open from 9am-5pm every weekday right up to Christmas Eve. Or text the word 'turkey', followed by the weight of your bird in kilos, to 64446 and you you'll get an instant answer on the cooking time and how many it will feed. This service starts on 1 December and runs 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. (Texts are charged at standard network rate.)

Once the turkey is cooked, we wrap it in foil and then the foil in old bath towels until you're ready to carve and serve. We normally leave it to rest like this for about 30 minutes to an hour as, having a single oven we need the space for the roasties! 

Tomorrow's post, what can you do in advance... 

Christmas post the first: Stir up Sunday

The last Sunday before Advent is Stir up Sunday. The traditional day to make your Christmas Pudding. This year (for the first time ever, possibly) I was ahead of the game and on Tuesday, instead of Guides found myself once again at Leith's with some friends, stirring up a pudding.

There are lots of traditions around Stir up Sunday - my favourite is that each member of the family should give the pudding a stir and make a wish for the year ahead as they do so.  On telling this to our group at Leith's we made sure everyone made their wish!

Other traditions include:

• Stirring the pudding from East to West, to remember the journey of the three Wise men on their way to visit the baby Jesus. I'm a bad Guider - I would so need a compass to be able to do that!
• A pudding should be made with 13 ingredients to represent Jesus and his 12 disciples
• Traditionally there should be a thimble (for luck) a ring (for marriage) and a coin (for good fortune) hidden in the pudding. What turns up in your portion is your fortune for the year to come. Heaven only knows what Food Hygiene would make of that!
• Early Christmas puddings did contain meat (as did early mincemeat) The puddings we recognise today was introduced by Prince Albert to Queen Victoria.

A Christmas pudding is made as it were, in three stages:

1. Making the pudding mixture and putting it in the pudding basin
2. Steaming the pudding
3. Storing it - for up to 2 years to mature in flavour

We had a taste test of three puddings at Leith's, one was a newly made and steamed pudding, another 6 months old and the third 18 months old. Many of us liked the newer pudding, I wasn't too keen on the 6 months old pudding, but the one that was 18 months old tasted as if it had been steeped in a beautiful bourbon (Knob creek is my bottle of choice. Are you reading this Louise?)

Anyway, so... onto the recipe - the one we used is the one that Asda have used for their Extra Special puddings 

• Makes one pudding for a two pint pudding basin

85g raisins

55 currants

100g sultanas

40g chopped mixed peel (I would usually leave this out and substitute glace cherries)

110g mixed dried apricots and figs, chopped

145ml brown ale

1 tablespoon run

Grated zest & juice of half an orange

Grated zest & juice of half a lemon

55g prunes - soaked overnight in cold tea, then drained and chopped 

1/2 dessert apple - grated

Soak all the fruit (except the prunes) overnight in the beer, rum, orange juice and lemon juice. In the morning add the drained, chopped prunes

Grate the apple into this mixture

110g softened butter

170g soft, dark brown sugar

1 tblsp treacle (dip your spoon in boiling water to make adding this easier)

1.5 eggs (nope, me neither)

55g self raising flour, sifted

1/2 tsp ground mixed spice (I normally call this cake spice I think)

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

Pinch freshly grated nutmeg

Pinch ground ginger

Pinch salt

110g breadcrumbs

30g toasted hazelnuts, toasted (again, I would usually substitute more glace cherries for this)

Beat together the butter and sugar, when light add the orange and lemon zest and the treacle

Whisk the eggs together and gradually add them to the mixture, beating well after each addition. It's a fairly stable mixture so I didn't add flour with each bit of egg

Fold in the flour, spices, salt and breadcrumbs

Stir in the nuts and dried fruit mixture, plus any of the soaking liquor

Spoon the mixture into a greased 2 pint pudding basin

Cover with two layers of pleated greaseproof paper, and one piece of pleated kitchen foil

Tie up with string (no knots required. Yes, I was sad)

When ready to cook, steam for 10-12 hours. Put a large saucepan (I would need to use my stockpot) on to boil and put an upside down saucer on the bottom. Using the string handle, lower the pudding into the boiling water. The water needs to come at least half the way up the basin. 

Cover the pan, and leave, topping up the water as necessary (use water from the kettle to top up)

Leave the pudding to cool, and re-cover it. You can now store it for up to 2 years, in a cool dark place.

When you're ready to serve, steam for 2-3 hours and serve with custard. Other toppings are available, but I'm afraid they're wrong. 

And there you have it - Christmas pudding, a la Leith's and Asda. We had such fun - and there's another two posts to come - one of which is an activity plan! I'm giving in to Christmas - let the festivities commence! 

A huge thank you to Asda and Leith's for hosting our event this week, I had so much fun, and really enjoyed not just making the puddings, but also meeting some new people, catching up with friends and having my first mug (or two) of mulled wine. 

A bad workwoman and her tools

Years ago. Certainly more than seven anyway. I was given a Le Creuset griddle. I think it was a hint from the boyfriend at the time to cook more steak. More and better. I was very good at slightly pallid, overdone steak, but a trip to see my family in South Africa introduced me to properly hung, rare steak. Which I learned that I could happily eat day and night.

In order to rectify the pallid grey product from my kitchen the griddle came into play. Only I didn't know anything about cooking on cast iron or seasoning my pan. So, in a diversion from normal recipe/ cake based goodness I thought I'd just do a little post on how to take care of your cast iron cookware.

If like me (as it were) your cast iron emits clouds of smoke most everytime you try to cook with it: it needs to be seasoned, or re-seasoned.

Seasoning instructions - which is a recipe of types

Turn your oven onto either 50 degrees C or the self cleaning cycle. Line the bottom with a double layer of tin foil

With a piece of kitchen towel wipe down your griddle/ pan. Now, you need to use an oil that can stand high temperatures - so not olive, but either sunflower, vegetable, or even lard/ dripping - use more kitchen towel to wipe that over your pan in a thin layer.

Turn your pan upside down, put it on the oven shelf for half an hour, then turn the oven off and leave the pan in there overnight.

Repeat this process, night by night - three or four times. Your pan will then have a shiny black coating which basically makes it non stick. Heat your pan up and cook a steak - it won't stick, you'll get a lovely crust and it will taste fab.

Each time you use your pan, wipe it out with damp kitchen towel, make sure that there's no reside from whatever you've cooked left on. You can wash it briefly in the sink, but in my experience this means you need to repeat the seasoning once.

Over time you will need to re-season your pan, especially if you don't use it very often. Since I've started doing this my pan has just gone from strength to strength (if only the same could be said for my biceps). I use it more, now I don't risk setting off all the smoke alarms in the block every time it gets warm. And I no longer need to add fat to what I'm cooking as the pan now no longer needs it to remain non stick.

This would also work if you have a traditional cast iron wok.

I know this is a departure from normal posts, but I thought this would have been so useful if I could have read it when I got my griddle, so wanted to share.