casa mitchell everyday.

so, things have been crazy busy at casa mitchell lately. i've had preparation for our spring menu at work (not to mention easter weekend and the royal wedding, phew), my garden has been bursting into activity every time i turn my back for more than ten minutes (there are blossoms on my strawberry plants already, and my red lettuces seem to be making the push to be eaten at an alarming rate), and my mum's partner bob is moving in today so i've had to make a concerted habit to stop leaving piles of my crap everywhere. difficult, because i have a tiny attention span, which i blame on overstimulation. i leap from one task to another without even thinking about the mess i'm leaving behind; it's a pretty terrible habit.

all of this hasn't left an awful lot of time for the slow cooking i'm so accustomed to, and the weather is too nice to be inside pottering and stirring and fussing anyhow, no matter how much i enjoy it. so i've regressed somewhat into habits i had at university when i had a deadline on, or was possessed by some academic obsession that meant i barely left my desk. i've been making up massive batches of things that can be dipped into by the bowlful here and there. it's not necessarily the most exciting way to eat; but food can't always be the central focus of life, even i'm not that optimistic. the trick to doing something like this for a week or so, or so i find, is to make sure that a) you choose something appropriate to the task you're asking of it (to remain something you want to actually eat for a couple of days, namely), and b) you make sure it's possessed of enough colour and flavour to keep your interest (dishes that improve in flavour over time are your friends here). then it crosses the line from being boring to making you feel like an enterprising little kitchen-squirrel, stashing stuff away for later. brilliant, right? right. so here's two of the things i whipped up for just this purpose this week just past.

blue cheese and walnut coleslaw

1/2 red cabbage

1x red onion

4x celery sticks

50g walnuts

2 tbsp creme fraiche

about 75g blue cheese (i used danish blue cos it's what i had in the fridge)

juice of a lemon

couple of tablespoonfuls of creme fraiche

apples to serve (totally optional)

okay so this is easy, you don't really need me to tell you how to make coleslaw, but whatever. i grated the cabbage, and finely sliced the onion and celery in the food processor, then chucked it in a big bowl with the walnuts. i crumbled the blue cheese into the creme fraiche, squeezed in the lemon juice, and whisked like mad, then tossed the veg in the dressing until everything went a kind of surreal lilac, and seasoned to taste.

everytime i grabbed a bowlful of this i served it with chopped apple (you want a tart variety with this rather than a sweet, i used some tiny unnamed variety that was not dissimilar to a cox's orange pippin, but use whatever you can get), like so:

so this is the first of many batches of coleslaw i will be making in the warmer months. when i was younger, my dad always homemade coleslaw for barbecues, the traditional kind, with white cabbage, onion and carrot, and while monumentally better than shop bought stuff for obvious reasons, i'm pretty sure he dressed it with heinz salad cream, so i have never really tried to replicate it. having spent four summers in a row on the sunny south coast, beach barbecues, garden barbecues, and southsea common barbecues were de rigeur from about april to september, and i've got a few years of coleslaw making under my belt as a result. in truth, i love it in all it's forms, and think it's one of the easiest barbecue staples to calibrate to whatever else you're cooking. in my time i've made wasabi dressed chinese cabbage versions, apple and mustard white cabbage variants, all sorts, but my heart still lies with the red cabbage for colour purposes alone. the minute red cabbage meets dairy it goes the bizarre purple colour you see above, a colour that you almost instinctively think food should not go; it feels almost transgressive in the eating, like you've cheated nature into becoming an artifice or something. it reminds me a bit of the barbecue scene in edward scissorhands (the only film guaranteed to make me cry on every watching, by the way), where all the (totally stylin') technicolour housewives are force feeding him all these psychedelic pastel coloured foods. or like, maybe if john waters directed a coleslaw or something. either way, i may have mentioned that virtuous vegetable cooking isn't really my style; i leave that to tumblr's massive californian vegan contingent. so yeah, this recipe has a lot of dairy. why? because it's awesome. especially if you add in the apples. the tastes all blend and contrast together in such a way that you forget you're essentially eating raw veg. blue cheese, cabbage and walnuts? there's no way it isn't going to work. and this was ideal for some mid-digging eating out on the bench in the garden while i read american short stories and tried not to get sunburnt.

so the second recipe is maybe a little bit more substantial. i flicked through nigel slater's tender, looking for inspiration for the excellent spinach i keep buying lately, because it's all well and good eating it raw with oil, lemon juice and salt while i pad around my little veg plot, but that isn't exactly gonna keep me going on a saturday night shift, is it? i went with this indian influenced little beauty:

an indian inspired dish of spinach and potatoes

potatoes, 500g

a large onion

vegetable oil or melted butter, 2 tablespoons

garlic, 2 fat cloves

a small green chilli

ginger, a 2cm lump

black mustard seeds, half a teaspoon

turmeric, half a teaspoon

spinach, 450g

the juice of half a lemon, probably less.

scrub the potatoes, cut them into large pieces, then either boil in deep, salted water or steam until tender. drain and set aside.

peel and finely slice the onion. warm the vegetable oil or butter in a large pan, then add the onion and cook till soft and just starting to colour. finely chop the garlic, chilli and ginger and stir them in with the mustard seeds and turmeric. continue cooking briefly, stirring the onion and spices regularly so they do not burn.

add the cooked and drained potatoes and a wineglass of water. bring to the boil and simmer for four or five minutes, until and crustings of onion and spices stuck on the pan have dissolved into the liquid. turn up the heat so that the liquid bubbles almost to nothing and the potatoes are starting to take on some of the colour and flavour of the spices, then add the spinach, thoroughly washed and trimmed of it's toughest stalks. season generously with salt and a little ground black pepper. once the spinach has wilted and is bright green, check the seasoning, squeeze over a little lemon juice, and eat.

here is mine, enjoyed in the garden while i read up on planting peas:

again, just look at the colours on that. way brighter and zestier than the traditional saag aloo, and an interesting bowlful to eat but with enough starch to keep me on my feet for the lengthier shifts. this was a pleasure to eat sat on my bench in the sunshine before work, collecting the last few minutes i had to myself before a series of intensely demanding weekend shifts.

so, not the most glamourous of cookery from me today, but i'd be lying if i said i was creating intricate and complex dishes every evening and baking cakes every other day as standard. especially not when life is this hectic.