Intro

Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries is both an entertaining read and a fabulous cookery book. Join me as I journey through the year cooking along with him...
Do buy the book from Amazon or your local book store. It's not just the recipes, its the gentle writing style and the importance of food provenance which strike a chord with me.

Wednesday 15 January 2014

Week 2 - Onion Soup and Cheesy Smothered Potatoes

I'm joining Mr S this week on p16 for a bowl of soup.  I don't appreciate soup enough - if there is one thing that I have in abundance, it is vegetables from the allotment.

I can't think of one time of the year when there is not a soup that I can make - yet rather than a delicious and nutricious soup, I tend to have something-on-toast instead for lunch.  Hmm.

Having said that, the one thing I do not have at this time of the year is onions, and the one thing that onion soup calls for is - well - onions.

So I bought a big bag.  Of course, when I scrutinised the recipe properly I found that a couple of potions of onion soup do not require an entire sackful of onions.







This was a marvellous recipe which involved roasting the peeled onions rather that crying away onto the chopping board, and when soft, boiling with stock and wine.  The crouton on the top is a french stick with Emmental cheese, the whole lot grilled to melt the cheese. Delicious.






Tonight's second recipe - on p17 - is a comfort eating dish of fried potatoes and cheese - a more sophisticated version of cheesy chips.

With the potatoes scrubbed and cooked on the hob with plenty of butter and oil, this is never going to be a dish to win approval with Rosemary Conley, let alone when the Emmental cheese is laid on top and left a minute or two to melt, but it was very tasty.  I had it with cooked chicken and veg.

Lovely! But it does want eating straight away - if the cheese goes cold it stops being decadently gooey and reverts to plastic and tasteless.

I'm noting after just a couple of weeks, that Mr S does have a feel for a generous portion - the soup went into three, and not two; using a half a pound of potatoes per the recipe meant that the second dish went into two comfortably rather than being a single portion.

2 comments:

  1. Last weeks dinner sounded really good, as I love stews, casseroles etc. and do a lot in my old crockpot, especially during winter. I also love soup, but not onion so much and the spuds sounded great except my hubby probably wouldn't eat them with that sort of cheese. Looking forward to seeing what comes next. Once we move I must get back into cooking and using all those cookbooks I have. We are both bookaholics and I'm missing all mine at the moment. Living for about 5 months now with them all packed has been a strain. I'll pop in next Monday, have a lovely week and take care.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I enjoy cooking and now I've emptied the freezer a little by eating some of the veg and making wine from some bags of red and blackcurrants, I have some more room for batch-baked stews and soups. Fabulous on a winter's day. :-)

    ReplyDelete