Three alternatives to ketchup and spaghetti

Well, it’s the end of the month again. Worse, it’s exam time. So not only do you lack money. You also have little time. Hence this frugal blog post: no pictures, no poems and no-pennies recipes (almost) – written as I wait for my apple tart to cook.

Of course, when I were a lass, ketchup and spaghetti was what we ate at such times, shivering in shared houses as the mould crept across the ceiling. Aye, it were look-chérie!

But I understand that the youth of today have more exotic tastes, so here are three alternatives:

• Ketchup and rice
• Dog food
• Ketchup and string.

Only kidding. After all dog food and string have become so expensive these days. Here are my real suggestions.

1. Pasta, pesto and baked beans

This is one of my favourite meals, so it’s more of a reminder than a recipe. The proportions roughly are 125g of pasta, a quarter of a small jar of pesto and a half a standard can of Heinz per person. And if you have the misfortune to be a student in a country where there are no Heinz beans… well, scour the Internet until you find someone like the wonderful Clarence from Clarence and Cripps, who imports and dispatches them at astonishingly reasonable rates.

2. Pasta, butter and grated cheese

Another classic. Foodie types may witter on about half-parmesan-half-pecorino, but I think bog-standard, bagged’ngrated, industrial Emmental works best. The trick is to put plenty of butter, salt and pepper ­­– and to stir your drained pasta with the butter and cheese back on the heat ever-so-briefly to make sure the cheese melts. Amounts of everything to be determined by instinct and availability.

3. Love-hate spaghetti (aka pasta with marmite… and butter of course)

Yes, it sounds disgusting even to marmite lovers, but domestic goddess, Nigella said it worked – and it does. Shame her reputation has taken a bit of bashing this last week, but that was for substances other than yeasty spreads. The trick again is plenty of butter. Nigella suggests 50 grammes of butter for 375 gees of pasta, but I usually put at least 25 grammes for one serving of spag, with a small spoonful of marmite. The method is to melt the butter in a saucepan, then to stir in the marmite and mix, before chucking in the pasta and stirring it around. Add nothing more for sheer heaven on a plate.

And if you have the misfortune to be a student in a country where there is no marmite… well, Clarence stocks it.

Quiz question of the week

Q: How do you tell when you have passed definitively from the old world to the new?

A: When you use the term “care package” to describe the box of beans and chocolate hobnobs your mother sends you. Still, better than calling it a “tuck parcel”, I suppose.

Tip of the week

If your apple tart burns slightly while you are writing a blog, simply sprinkle it with icing sugar and no one will know. 

Cullen skink

Scotland has given so much to the world: bagpipes, man-skirts and Michael Gove to name just a few examples. My personal favourite, though, is cullen skink, the comfortingly creamy smoked-haddock soup. So imagine my joy when I heard about the recent rediscovery of a Robbie Burns poem dedicated to the delicacy! Of course, this juvenile verse lacks the polish of his classics, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘To a Louse’ and even ‘Address to a Haggis’. But it captures my feelings about cullen skink quite uncannily.

To a soup
On drinking a bowl of cullen skink

The best laid ’cipes o’ mams an’ men

Gang aft a-gley

But “a finer soup than the skink o’ Cullen”?

Tha’ I canna say.

Tatties an’ alliums, thou art blest

When mashit wi’ milk in the soup that’s best –

All cozyin’ up tae the fish so yeller

(I ken, I ken, ’tis a blastit smeller).

Cawl, chowder, bouillabaisse,

Minestrone, wonton… och, they’re less

Than home’s auldest kindness o’ cup.

Aye, life tastes better when I thee sup!

O cullen skink,

Ye may wel stink

O’ smokit wee haddock fishies.

But pleasure ye spread

An’ put worries ta bed,

Wen steamin’ in ma ikea china dishies.

Leekie all a’cock,

Teacek o’ tunnock,

Girders wrought intae irn bru,

Haggis, porridge, deep frite marsbar too…

Ium! We hae meat and we can eat.

Sae let the Lord be thankit.

More! We hae skink and we can drink

God’s culinary comfort blanket.

Enough bad poetry. Bring on the recipe…

Takes: about 40 mins

Serves: three as a main course if you’re generous with the bread

Ingredients

About 400 grammes of smoked haddock fillets (preferably not the bright yellow kind, despite what the poem says) – or other smoked white fish

Something from the allium family (one medium-sized onion or two leeks – or possibly even a small bunch of spring onions)

Two biggish tatties (that’s potatoes to us Sassenachs)

A generous knob of butter

About 300 ml of water (OK I admit it, I usually use half white wine, half water)

About 500 ml of milk (OK, I admit it, I usually use half cream, half milk)

Something green like a bit of chopped parsley, chives or tarragon (optional)

Salt (probably not much, as smoked fish can be salty) and pepper

Method

Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan over low heat. Meanwhile, chop up the onion. (If using leeks, remove the tough outer layers and the topmost ends, slice up what’s left and wash off any grit.) Then fry the onion bits (or leeks) gently in the butter for about ten minutes, so that they go translucent and soft without going brown.

While the onions are cooking, put the fish in a small saucepan, cover with the cold water and bring to the boil. After a couple of minutes’ simmering, the fish should be cooked – that is, opaque, and easy to flake and skin. Take the fish out of the water (but don’t throw this precious cooking liquid away), remove the skin and flake it up with a fork.

You should still have time to scrub your two potatoes and cut them into 1–1.5 cm cubes before the onions have finished cooking. If not, hoots mon!, they just can fry a little longer.

Once the onions are cooked, add the potato cubes, stir them round and fry for a minute or two. Now add the cooking liquid from the haddock, bring back to the boil, put the lid on and simmer until the potatoes are well mashable (about 25 mins).

Now add the milk (and/or crème fraîche or sour cream) and bring back to the boil.

At this point, you’re pretty much done. You can either bung in the flaked haddock and mash the whole lot with a masher or you can liquidise the mixture with a hand blender, before stirring in the haddock. 

But I think good old Felicity Cloake has got it just right in her Guardian column. She takes out a large spoonful of potato and onion and replaces it with half the haddock, before blending. Then she stirs in the reserved potato and haddock bits to give some pleasing lumps.

Garnish with green stuff and eat with crusty bread or toast. Life will immediately seem better.



Tip of the day
You can give your cullen skink some fancy new-world name like "smoked haddock chowder", but it will immediately cease to be comfort food. Same goes for Frenchifying. Hachis parmentier and riz au lait are simply nowhere near as feel-good as shepherd's pie or rice pudding.

The adventures of Super-Veg

Everyone knows that an ordinary tin of tomatoes and an ordinary any vegetable will make, when combined, an acceptable pasta sauce. But there is something you can add to an ordinary tin of tomatoes to turn it into the most delectable pasta sauce ever. Is it a herb? Is it a grain? No, it’s a super-vegetable.

From mountain rescue to bleeding radiators...

From snatching ordinary any vegetables from the jaws of evil predators...

To tackling bad-ass books...

Super-Veg has some very special powers. But when he’s done saving the world, he flies away home to a Simple Sicilian peasant existence (also known as Norma life).

Seriously, though, aubergines (or are they “eggplants” where you live?) do have some wondrous properties. Almost meaty at times, they are capable of absorbing huge quantities of olive oil when fried – or of shrinking to about half their original size when roasted. Curiously too, they taste nicest when burned and served with tomatoes… hence these two recipes for pasta alla Norma (aka "simple Sicilian spaghetti").

Recipe 1: pasta alla Norma

Takes about half an hour and makes three or four servings.

Ingredients

• 1 to 2 aubergines
•  2 or 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 tin of tomatoes (400g)
• 1 slab of feta cheese (200g)
•  Olive oil for frying
• Salt and pepper for seasoning
• Basil or oregano for extra flavour (optional)
• Pasta to serve

Method

Slice up your aubergines. Jamie Oliver reckons they should be this shape and I tend to agree (but I’ve no idea why it's better than rounds).

Put a generous sploosh of olive oil in a large non-stick frying pan, heat until very hot and fry your aubergine slices on both sides until your smoke alarm goes off. Honestly, they really do taste nicer burned.

You’ll probably need two or three rounds of frying to get through all the slices, adding oil each time (although they do start to release oil once cooked). Be careful when you add more oil and slices, as – if the pan is hot enough – the little blighters will start spitting at you. Also, the second batch will probably cook a lot faster than the first.

Once all your slices are fried, let the pan cool down, while you chop up the garlic. Add more oil if there’s none left in the pan and fry the chopped garlic gently for a couple of minutes (You may be able to do this off the heat if you get them in the pan before it cools down completely. On the other hand, if you’re impatient and add it too soon, your garlic will burn – and unlike aubergines, garlic definitely doesn’t improve when browned.)

Now add the tin of tomatoes and simmer gently for about five minutes, still on a lowish-to-medium heat. If you’re using dried herbs add a sprinkling of them now and stir in. Meanwhile, cut up your feta cheese into cubes or crumble it roughly.

 Add the singed aubergine slices to the pan and stir them around. Cook for another couple of minutes until they’re hot again, then add the feta and fresh herbs (if using). Stir to break up the cheese, heat through and season to taste with pepper and possibly a little salt (depending on how salty your feta is).

Add to pasta for a truly delectable experience.

Recipe 2: Even simpler Sicilian

Takes about an hour and makes three or four servings.

Ingredients

As above.

Method

This version is, truth be known, slightly less yummy and takes up to twice the time, compared with the first recipe. But it’s easier on your smoke-alarm batteries, kinder on your neighbours’ eardrums and doesn’t spit at you. Also, you can go tackle a bad-ass book, while it’s cooking (but do keep an eye on it, just in case).

Heat your oven to about 200 degrees centigrade. Chop your aubergine into cubes, place in an oven-proof tray, sploosh with olive oil, stir to coat and put in the oven. After about 15 minutes take it out, give it a stir and maybe add another sploosh of oil if the cubes are looking dry.

After another 15 minutes, add the garlic – finely sliced (don’t ask me why, it’s nicer sliced than chopped if roasted) – and stir, before putting back in the oven. The cubes of aubergine should be browning nicely by now.

After another 10 minutes, the aubergine should be well browned and the garlic cooked. Now add the tomatoes and dried herbs if using. Heat through in the oven for about 5 minutes. Then stir in the feta (cubed or crumbled) and fresh herbs (if using) and pop back in the oven. After another 5 minutes, it should all be hot, the feta should have melted in and you can eat it with pasta, just like before.

Tip of the week

Aubergine (and mushrooms for that matter) can be diced up nice and small and fried with onions to create a kind of student version of mincemeat – which you can use as the base for chilli sin carne or faux Bolognese sauce. Ideal for those evenings when you just can't look another lentil in the eye.

A cheesy saga

Once, two siblings of the brassica (aka cabbage) family were living a bucolic existence. She was complex and beautiful – fractal even at times.

 

Unashamedly romanesco, she also had rather intellectual leanings – given her rustic background.

He was sturdier and simpler, with a taste for far less challenging pursuits.

But despite their differences, they were family, they were organic and everything in the garden was lovely. Sometimes life really was a bed of roses.

Other times were just green and idyllic.

Then one day they both drowned – deliciously – in cheese sauce. The end.

The magic moral of this tragic tale is that even cauliflower and broccoli become heavenly when coated in cheese sauce. The same goes for that most horrid of pastas: macaroni. The weird thing is that cauliflower and macaroni taste yummier in cheese sauce than regular nice foods do. The trick is to go heavy on the sauce, light on the stuff inside it and generous with the browning on top. Here’s how you make the sauce.

Cheese sauce

Takes about 15 minutes and coats enough pasta and/or vegetables for about three main-course servings.

Ingredients

• 2 ounces or 100 grammes of butter
• 2 ounces or 100 grammes of plain flour
• 1 pint (an ye olde worlde British pint, which is 20 fluid ounces) or just over half a litre of milk
• 4 ounces or 200 grammes of grated cheese (as strong as possible) – plus an extra ounce or two to give your dish a brown, bubbling topping… mmmm
• salt, pepper and optional spoonful of mustard to taste

Melt the butter on a low to medium heat.

Stir in the flour to make a paste and cook gently for a minute or two.

Now pour in a sploosh of milk and stir into the paste until it’s smooth again. Now pour in another sploosh and repeat. Repeat again. And again.

Carrying on doing this until all the milk is absorbed and the mixture is too liquid to be called sauce. This is fairly tedious, especially at the beginning. Sometimes at the beginning too, the paste gets thicker before it gets thinner (some science-defying kitchen magic that I don’t quite understand). But towards the end each sploosh is easy and quick.

Once the milk is all in the pan, heat gently stirring occasionally – or heat more vigorously stirring all the time – until the sauce thickens. Then simmer gently for a minute or so.

Now, like a good fifties housewife, you know how to make a white sauce. Or, as we know it in foodier, less housewifely times béchamel sauce (of lasagne fame).

You can turn your béchamel into cheese sauce by stirring in the grated cheese (and some mustard if you like). Or you can turn it into parsley sauce by mixing in – you guessed it – chopped parsley. Or simply grate in some nutmeg for a slightly sophisticated flavour. But only cheese sauce can be used to make cauliflower or macaroni cheese, which you do as follows…

Take some vegetables or macaroni. The one-pint-of-milk sauce recipe is enough for a large cauliflower (ordinary or romanesco) and a stump of broccoli. Or it will do 300 grammes of macaroni. Alternatively 200 grammes of macaroni and a stump of broccoli will make broccaroni cheese, which is a healthy compromise. The method is obvious, but I’ll tell you anyway.

Cook your florets of vegetables and/or macaroni in boiling water (save time by doing it while you make your sauce). Timings are about 5 minutes for broccoli, up to 10 minutes for cauliflower (depends on how big you make your florets) and as on the packet for the pasta. Then put them in an ovenproof dish, pour over the sauce, stir to mix/coat if necessary and top with the additional grated cheese (and breadcrumbs if you want to add a bit of crunch). Heat in a hot oven for about 15 to 20 minutes. Or bubble under the grill for about 5 mins, keeping a watchful eye over it.

Thank you for being a saucier’s apprentice.

In next week’s brassic classic…

Marcel Sprout goes in search of the Turnip Perdu.

Tip of the week

Speed up your sauce-making and reduce the likelihood of lumps by heating the milk first. And if it does go lumpy, simply deploy the magic wand that is your hand blender.