Week-end cooking

This is cross-posted from a guest post I was invited to do by Meltem Daysal.
Check out her blog: Fly Fun Fashion!

With two kids and a full time job, most week days, cooking is limited to quick thinking. In fact, the kids have some standard favorites that come back every other week, or more often, sometimes with variation. But I still try to cook at least one more complex (if fast) meal or two. And on weekend evenings, it is important to innovate. By default, kids are not very exploratory, they prefer routine. So I have made it a routine that weekend meals are mostly new stuff. To do this, Friday evenings and/or Saturday mornings are there to plan the weekend meals, and those for the rest of the week. Then some of Saturday is devoted to buying the necessary goods, with trips to the market, if possible, the bio supermarket, and the standard one. And then we ramble.

So on a recent Saturday morning, keeping in mind that Meltem had asked me to guest post. I planned the two new meals of the weekend. To chose recipes, I usually search in my cookbook collection and on the web. That week, a salmon filet wrapped in prosciutto with herby lentils spinach and yoghourt recipe from Jamie Oliver’s the Return of the Naked Chef caught my attention, and I decided to adapt it. That would do for the fish. And for the meat, I chose a Lamb-fry recipe which challenged me to prepare some home made Puri to boot (adapted from Curried flavor: family recipes from south india by Maya Kaimal). After a bit of protesting, the kids ate these perfectly well, although there was a change of plans: the Sunday was so beautiful that we spent a lot of time at the park and ended up eating pizza in the garden, and the Lamb-fry was postponed to the following Monday!

Salmon filet (serves 4)
Ingredients: 250g lentils, 4 salmon filets, skinned, 8 slices of prosciutto, or other cured ham (I used jambon de Bayonne), 2 good handfuls of mixed herbs (parsley, basil, mint, …) chopped, 3 handfuls of spinach, chopped, 200ml yoghourt, salt, pepper, juice of a lemon, olive oil.

The mix: Preheat the oven at 220C. Put lentils in a pan covered with water, boil then simmer for 25 minutes (or whatever you lentils instructions tell you, could be 20). Pepper the filets then roll them within the ham slices, sprinkle with olive oil and place in an oven proof dish. When the lentils are almost done, shoot in the oven and cook for 8 minutes if you like the salmon not too cooked, a bit more otherwise. Meanwhile drain the lentils, season with salt and pepper, the lemon juice and a bit of olive oil. Just before serving (so when you are satisfied with the fish’s cooking level) mix the herbs and spinach in the lentils and steer over high heat until wilted. Serve salmon and lentils on the plates and add a few spoons of yoghourt on the lentils, and enjoy.

Lamb-fry (serves 4-6)

Ingredients: 2cups thinly sliced onion, 1 ts minced garlic, 1 ts minced ginger, 1 ts minced green chili (hot and spicy if you like it that way, for my kids, I use a bit of hot but some sweet green pepper), 3 Ts vegetable oil, 2 Ts water, 900g of lamb trimmed of fat and cubed, salt, lemon juice. For the spice mixture: 3 ts coriander seeds, 1/2 ts cumin, 1/4 ts cayenne pepper (again can use partly sweet pimentón if you have kids who are starting to eat but not tolerating much heat),1/4 ts black pepper corn, 1/16 ts ground turmeric, a few cloves.

 The mix: For the spice mixture, put all the whole spice in a pan a dry pan them for a minute, then put them and other spices in a mortar and crush well. Add the water to make a paste. Fry onion over medium heat, add garlic, ginger, and green chili and stir for a minute. Add spice paste to this and stir over medium heat for a minute or so, until spices release their fragrance. Add the lamb and salt and stir frequently until the lamb is cooked, 8 to 15 minutes depending on the size of the cubes and all. Add lemon juice, and serve with rice and Puri.

 Puri: Combine 2 cups atta flour (durum wheat flour, or a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat flour if you can’t have that, as I did) with a pinch of salt, 2 ts vegetable oil (I used grape seed oil), 1/4 to 1 cup warm water to make a smooth flexible dough. Cover in a clean bowl with a wet towel for 30 minutes. Knead the dough a few times and divide in 16 balls. Keep balls covered taking on e at a time and flatten them on a flour prepared surface, then pin flat: should look like a tortilla. You can also, obviously, use a tortilla press for this.
Heat some more vegetable oil in a deep frying pan to 190C. Cook one at a time, pressing them gently with a slotted spoon. After a few seconds they will puff up and form bubbles. Turn over for a few second, and drain on paper towel. You want them soft and tender, not crispy.