Bad Boy Bass

Thank you Heng’s for making a super easy and tasty fish supper for me and Mr X. So tasty in fact I decided to blog about it. Best of all your delicious sauce contained no MSG or preservatives and it was indeed quick and easy. My cooking equipment included the oven, a pair of scissors, some aluminium foil and a cooking tray. easy lah.

I happened upon the sauce during one of my browsing sessions of the weird shit section of the supermarket. It’s not that weird I concede, but you should have seen some of the stuff it was alongside!! All I needed to do next was buy a bargain priced sea bass at NTUC supermarket ($5 people, that’s about £2.50 for my UK followers), gutted and cleaned or course. No fishy guts on this moms hands!

I cooked it, served it with boiled Basmati rice and simple steamed corn on the cob. Delicious, nutritious and quick. Will be doing again. Here’s a piccie pre-bake….and yes for all you lily livers it has the head on it still, oh grow a pair.  My Singaporean reader’s will be wondering what I am on about – don’t worry it’s a peculiar British thing that people like to pretend their headless fish were born that way!

 

BTW – in case you didn’t guess this recipe is for mum and dad, bloody spicy.

Spinach and Cottage Cheese Cannelloni

At least once a week I try to include a non-meat day, in the interest of our health, our wallet, and the planet. I tried a new recipe this week, spinach and cottage cheese stuffed cannelloni in tomato and basil sauce. It was based on a Ricotta and Spinach recipe but it appears there had been a run on ricotta at my NTUC! It worked just as well in my opinion and was probably a bit healthier.

Things I learnt from making this recipe were;

1. If you burn your onions a bit you can still taste it in the sauce when it’s finished! So brown them slowly, don’t be in a mad rush like I was.

2. Use a piping bag to fill your cannelloni rather than using your hands or a spoon, so much easier! Stand all your Cannelloni tubes upright next to each other in the baking dish. Then you can fill them in one go and there is less mess as you don’t need to put your piping bag down and pick it up after each tube.

1 small red onion
25g butter
1 large pack fresh spinach
A good pinch of dried thyme, or few sprigs of fresh
Small punned of mushrooms
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
250g tub of cottage cheese
1-2 tbsp grated Parmesan
1 x 350g tomato and basil pasta sauce
1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
3/4 pack dried cannelloni

Preheat oven to 200 Celsius/ 400 Fahrenheit.
Fry onion in butter until it is golden brown and softened. Add spinach, thyme and seasoning. Place lid on pan and cook for 1-2 minutes till spinach is wilted. Remove from heat. Add tbsp of oil into pan add garlic, stir for 1 minute, add mushrooms and fry for 5-10 minutes till soft. When cool, blend cooked veg together with cheeses in food processor. Using piping bag, pipe spinach mix into cannelloni tubes. Place in greased baking dish. Pour over pasta sauce and chopped tomatoes. Bake in oven for 30-40 minutes. Sprinkle with fresh basil and Parmesan.

Toddlertastic Crunchy Pasta Bakes

Flexible recipe suitable for all ages – dial down the salt for babies. Just blend!

Pasta bakes are great dishes for fussy eaters as you can blend in a myriad of unattractive vegetables in the sauce, and put the pretty ones on show! You can make lots of different versions of this recipe using a vegetable sauce, or white sauce (below).

Save time by making double quantities and freezing one (pre-baked) for next time. Use aluminum foil cooking dishes from the supermarket for your frozen future dinner – just remember to defrost in your fridge and not your microwave!

If doing the vegetable sauce, you make up a very thick blended veggie soup for the sauce. I use 1/2 leek, 1 parsnip, 1 potato, 1 handful of cauliflower florets, and 100 ml  cream. Start by gently frying veggies in saucepan, add boiling water, some herbs, simmer, then blend and add cream. You can also use my Secret Seven Soup if you like tomato sauces.

The Coup D’etat according to my kids is the crunchy topping. Which is….drumroll…. blitzed breadcrumbs, dash olive oil, Italian herbs and grated cheese sprinkled on top and crunchified in the oven. The crunchy topping shown above is yellow as it uses home-baked corn bread, get me!

As this is a “guess-ecipe” all measures are approximates.

For the white cheese sauce:
large knob of butter (approx 50g)
75g flour
900ml milk
1 bay leaf
tsp wholegrain mustard
seasoning (easy on salt)
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
100g grated medium cheddar cheese (save tbsp for crunchy top)

Melt butter in saucepan, add flour, stir vigorously for 1 minute. Stirring with a whisk continuously so it doesn’t go lumpy, gradually add rest of the milk. Add herbs, mustard and seasoning. Stir regularly and gently bring to boil. When sauce has thickened to yoghurt like thickness, turn off heat, remove bay leaf and stir in most of the cheese. Use the rest of the cheese for the crunchy topping mix (described above).

Pasta – your choice of shape, we have macaroni and Animaletti! Boil up enough for 4 people. Add handful of frozen peas and corn 2 minutes from end.

Combine pasta, sauce, peas and corn (and any other cooked ‘visible’ chopped vegetables you’d like to) and put in oven dish. Sprinkle with my much-sought-after crunchy topping, and pop in top of hot oven (180-200 degrees celsius) for 10 minutes and serve.

Black Bean Chilli

Vegetarian friendly. This recipe is from a clipping from BBC Good Food magazine, October 2012. I kept several recipes from this edition, all were unusual in the sense I hadn’t cooked anything similar before and all have become my ‘specials’. Watch out for the Guinness, Treacle and Ginger Christmas pudding I’ll be posting soon.

You can add more or less chilli as you like. Toddlers may or may not like this chilli as it has quite a lot of rich spices. My 2-year-old eats it, but his 3-year-old sister doesn’t… You can make it quite fun by serving with condiments in pots; Greek yoghurt or sour cream, chopped cucumber, guacamole, romaine lettuce and feta salad, pitta bread or corn bread for dipping etc…

2 tsp oil (grape seed or olive)
2 garlic cloves
1 large red onion, chopped
2 large green chillies chopped
3 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp hot chilli powder
1 tbsp tomato purée
2 x 400g cans of black beans
1 x 400g red kidney beans
2 x cans chopped tomatoes
250ml/9 fl Oz vegetable stock

Put a large saucepan over the heat and add oil. Add garlic, onion, chopped chillies, pinch of salt and cook for 5 mins. Add all the dry spices and tomato purée. Stir and cook for 1 min. Don’t worry if the mixture browns (not black!) and sticks a bit, all this adds a smokey flavour to the dish and you can stir it all in when you add the stock. Add all beans, tomatoes and stock. Slowly bring to boil, simmer for approx 1 hour. Season and serve with condiments. YUM!