Two (easy) recipes

11/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.

Saturday feels like the day I talk about stuff that I do round the house, so here are a couple of really easy recipes.

They both come from my mam. I've been cooking them both for about 30 years; or, she has, and I used to hang around and help.

I love cooking. It keeps you busy: gives your hands something to do but allows your brain to wander a bit. It's great thinking time.

Anyway, neither of these will tax your skills (or wallet) too much.

Vegetable soup

It's getting cold, and that means soup. This is so easy anyone can make it.

Ingredients

• 50g knob of butter.¹
• One large leek.
• One large head of broccoli.
• Two large carrots.
• Three large potatoes.
• Black pepper.
• Powdered vegetable stock.

Instructions

1. In a really big pan (mine might be 5 litres?), heat the butter.
2. Chop the leek in to 1cm rounds and fry until soft. Don't brown.
3. Chop the carrot, broccoli including stalk, and peeled potatoes in to chunks. It doesn't really matter how big. Add to pan.
4. Add 2 litres of boiling water.
5. Add a really good amount of freshly ground black pepper. I do about 1tbsp of peppercorns but I like it spicy.
6. Add 3tsp of the vegetable stock, or adjust to taste (it's mostly salt).
7. Boil gently for at least an hour.

Eat with fresh bread slathered in really good butter.

The rest will keep in the fridge for a few days, or it freezes really well.

Corned beef and potato pie

This has been a favourite as long as I can remember. When I was in my early 20s I had cool jobs where I'd fly all over the world. Mam used to make a pie to take with me. It'd be in my luggage, wrapped in silver foil.

So I'd land in Nigeria, check in, and eat a slice of pie.

One of the first web pages I ever made was this recipe. It would have been at http://york.ac.uk/~jen101/pie.html or similar. 1995! Lost like tears in rain, alas.

Ingredients

• 2 frozen puff pastry sheets. If you can find the stuff made with butter vs. vegetable oil, obviously it's better.
• One 340g tin of corned beef. (The 'lite' variety works great.)
• One medium onion.
• Three potatoes.
• Black pepper.
• An egg.

Instructions

1. In an 8" shallow pie dish, blind bake the pastry base at 180C for about 15 minutes.²
2. Boil the peeled, chopped potato. Drain.
3. Chop the onion: half quite fine, half a little larger.
4. Add the chopped onion, corned beef, and a good helping of black pepper to the pan with the boiled potatoes. Mash roughly.
5. Add the beefy-potato-mush to the pie. Top with the other pastry sheet.
6. Bake at 180C for about half an hour. I find turning the top oven element on at the beginning puffs the pastry a little better; then I switch back to regular fan oven.
7. Near the end, beat the egg and brush over the top.

It'll be thermonuclear so let it cool a touch before eating. Best with mushy peas and gravy.

I think I prefer this cold the next day. But I've always been a cold-savoury person. I like the way that everything congeals. I could eat a kilo of this for lunch the day after (with a bit of hot English mustard).