Gousto #1: Harissa Chicken Curry

Our first meal from the Gousto delivery box was Harissa Chicken Curry.

The ingredients

The box provided just eight ingredients for this recipe:

Top: lentils, harissa paste, a nub of ginger, a chicken stock cube. Bottom: filthy potatoes, two spring onions, diced chicken breast and some yoghurt.

Along with salt, pepper and oil from the pantry, this was everything I needed to make the meal, and all in the correct volume. I found it strangely satisfying to have no leftover ingredients at the end, even though one of my favourite things about cooking is looking in the fridge and coming up with ideas to use up all of the nubs and stubs of yesterday's leftovers (after all, I did come-of-age in the Ready Steady Cook epoch of man). 

It was all organised very well. Really, the only downside was the childish wackywriting Gousto uses to signify it is an honest and simple brand. I'm beginning to find this marketing technique a bit wearying after 15 years (Innocent Smoothies kicked off the trend in 1999). So we inevitably had ingredients labelled with quirky names like 'gorgeous ginger', 'poh-tay-to poh-tar-to' and 'spread-your-legs spring onions', which didn't raise much of a smile and really only made it harder to find what I needed when I was delving through all of the other ingredients in the box.

The recipe

The recipe card was very easy to follow: 

1. Chop and fry the potatoes - sounds easy, but the potatoes kept sticking to the pot, and then flying off across the kitchen when I tried to loosen them... I assumed we weren't meant to brown the potatoes. Certainly there was no mention of that.
2. Add the chicken and some paste and fry off - you're supposed to fry until brown, but the chicken was quite soggy from sitting in its own juices in a plastic bag for several days so I just settled for white.
3. Add the lentils, grated ginger, seasoning, half the chopped spring onion whites, the stock cube dissolved in half a liter of water, the rest of the paste and a dollop of yoghurt and simmer until delicious - they recommended 7 minutes, I ended up at closer to 10 for the potatoes to be done.
4. Serve with the rest of the yoghurt - seasoned with salt, pepper and the rest of the spring onion whites - and sprinkle with spring onion greens.

It was fairly foolproof really, and I'm fairly certain this recipe would work well if you just put all the ingredients (bar the garnish) raw and cold into the pot, brought to a simmer for 15 minutes and then served. Browning the chicken really achieves next to nothing in terms of flavour when also paired with the chicken stock and harissa paste, while the frying of the potatoes might take a few minutes off the simmering time but otherwise had little discernible effect.

I followed the recipe to the letter and it took 30 minutes from start to finish, rather than the advertised 15, but this is still pretty quick dish to prepare and frankly only salad takes 15 minutes.

Alas, I forgot to scatter spring onion greens randomly across
the table top, as shown in the photo accompanying the recipe

The taste

The curry was very nice indeed - and my husband declared it thoroughly delicious - so this is something I'll probably make again. It's very good comfort good, possibly better suited to autumn and winter, and I think the only changes I'd make would be to swap the chicken out for some veg or butterbeans (the chicken didn't add much, in terms of flavour, and I'm loathe to slaughter another animal just to provide easy protein), and also perhaps finish with a splash of lemon juice or wine vinegar to brighten.

It was also a generous portion, I'd say the meal for 2 would easily stretch to feed three.

I'd score this meal 8 out of 10, if assessed as a homely, work night meal.

Value for money

I wondered how much this meal would cost if I just bought the ingredients via Ocado, which has all the convenience of home delivery but would not offer the advantage of eliminating leftover ingredients. Still, a jar of harissa can sit happily in the fridge for the next meal, while lentils, potatoes, ginger and spring onions can always find later use in the weeks and months to follow.

To buy these ingredients and then throw away all of the leftovers would cost £11.74, which actually makes Gousto cheaper than Ocado. Even if I take a conservative estimate of what I might use up in other dishes (with some throw-away of random off-cuts - for example, I rarely use a whole hand of ginger) it comes to £7.09 in total, which compares very well to Gousto's £5 per portion (which also offers extra advantages such as not needing to plan ahead or think of new dishes to make).

That said, the chicken accounts for a lot of the cost. If I replaced the poultry with butterbeans - as I probably would, for sake of my own health and that of the chicken - we're looking at £2 a portion. Which, as luck would have it, is about the price of this meal once the discount voucher used.

Conclusions...

Would I recommend Gousto? I think I'll need to try the remaining recipes before I decide. I wouldn't recommend it to enthusiastic and experimental home cooks, nor to harried workers with no time for cooking (Gousto doesn't really meet the needs of either of those). However, it's certainly looking promising for those who like to cook - or more to the point, who like to eat homecooked food - but don't have any time to think about what they actually want to eat.

I suspect when my daughter is born next month, that latter group might start to include me...

Let the Gousto Experiment Commence

I found a £25 gift voucher in my Amazon delivery last week, for something called 'Gousto'. It was a slow enough afternoon and a high enough discount to make me want to go find out what Gousto actually is.

It transpires Gousto is Timo and James, two humans on Homeworld who'll send you a box of ingredients portioned out for the various recipes you select, along with recipe cards so you can put the food back together like in the photos. At least, that's what they say.

You can order from around ten possible meals each week, so I ended up picking two portions each of this lot:

Images courtesy of Gousto.co.uk, your one stop shop for Gousto orders

Well, I thought £25 off seemed like it would be next to free, but I still had to pay £12.99 on top. I wouldn't ordinarily be willing to pay £35 for six home cooked meals, but the discount made it only £2 around per portion which definitely made it worth a try. 

The food parcel was delivered today. It didn't quite look the like the overflowing cardboard cornucopia pictured on the website, but I recognise it's hard to 'style' two spring onions, a yoghurt pot and a couple of buns (the rest was wrapped up in sheep's wool to keep it cool).

I'll update this blog later in the week so you can see if the meals turned out anything like in the pictures. Unfortunately I don't have any terracotta flowerpots to serve my harissa chicken curry in, and my white-washed 18th century trestle table is down the dry cleaners at the moment, but I will struggle through as best I can. 

How to separate an egg

An egg, relaxing at
home yesterday

I use a method of separating eggs which is effortless and requires no clean-up, and yet searching online I can't see anyone else mentioning it. This is baffling. A 'How To Separate Eggs' video I watched during my research recommended the use of funnels, or the vacuum from a compressed soda bottle, or running the egg through your hands. Euw, no thanks. My method means you just pour it out like you'd pour out milk, and then move on.

And I've never had a yolk break and mix in. Just pour it straight into your recipe.

I feel a bit like the first monkey to learn how to wash fruit in the river, then all the other monkeys see him and copy and it spreads like wildfire through the savannah. I really hope this becomes the dominant egg separating method by 2025. If that is all I achieve in life, and when I die in 2082 everyone on the savannah is cracking eggs the Rick Bot way, it will still truly have been a live worth living. 

So:

• Step 1: Crack the pointy end of the egg, just like you would normally crack the side.
• Step 2: Peel open the top slightly, like you would normally peel open the side... only you get a much smaller hole this way.
• Step 3: Pour the egg white into your bowl, and the yellow will stay behind.

That's it.

You can stick the egg yolks in the fridge in their shells until you need them, if you like. The antibacterial effects of the eggshell will probably* keep it well protected for a few days (unless you live in America, where the antibacterial effects of the shell are all scrubbed off by law).

*Here, 'probably' should be regarded as an adequate legal defence in any resulting homicide investigations.

ALSO, A BONUS EGG THOUGHT:

Why are most people not steaming their eggs? Boiling is so 20th century. Stick them in a steamer for however long you would normally boil them. They never crack when they're cooking - as there's no jostling in the water - and they're much easier to peel. I didn't invent this one, but I am eager to convert anyone I meet who cares.

This is my first food blog post in over 5 years. I rather enjoyed it. See you in 2020 - hopefully by then I'll have a new method for peeling fruit.

Attribution: photograph of an egg by 'digitalart', courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net, largely because I was too busy cracking eggs to take a photo. I recommend freedigitalphotos.net for all of your egg photo needs. 

Christmas was a boar

I needed to make Christmas dinner for six this year, and wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Last year I did the whole turkey, roast potatoes, red cabbage, spouts with chestnuts malarky that seems to be expected. Even using Mary Berry’s superb guidance (on the whole, prepare and cook everything you can in advance – including par-roasting the potatoes), it was still an incredible faff with countless pots and pans and dishes and a real drama to get everything warm to the table on time. This year I wanted zero effort.

The solution was a wild boar ragu with papardelle pasta. The ragu could be prepared a few days in advance (and, indeed, only improved with flavour) and is sufficiently unusual to look like I was making an effort, while the pasta was freshly made but shop-bought, and just cooked in boiling water for three minutes.

Christmas dinner.

I’ve been eager to make a boar ragu for years now, after a long autumnal holiday in a very rainy Tuscany where there was little to do but sit inside (and little local, seasonal food aside from boar).This dish also has another unintended consequence – simmered as it is in red wine and spices, throughout its long, slow cooking time the entire kitchen is enfused with a Christmassy fug of mulled wine. What could be more evocative of Christmas?

There are thousands of wild boar ragu recipes lurking out there on the internet, but so much about cookery these days seems to be about over-complicating the very simple. Good cooking should be simple at heart, so I stripped the recipes down and combined a mix of ideas to come up with the very easiest recipe I could. I’m not very into reducing down tomatoes when cartons of passata cost less than a pound, and I adapted the recipe to work with Tim Wilson’s oven-roast approach to stews, which has forever proven a more effortless way to make any stew, chili or ragu (and also minimises the washing up).

I swear, apart from ensuring you're organised enough to remember to put together the marinade 12 hours before you want to cook (and ideally several days before you want to eat it), this is utterly the simplest boar ragu recipe I’ve seen while also being a total winner with my husband and in-laws on Christmas Day.

The recipe below makes enough for six pretty hungry people.

1. Put the meat in to marinate
Choose your boar meat – I used leg, but shoulder is probably just as good – and cut off any large lumps of fat and skin (smaller bits of fat are fine, they will vanish into the finished sauce, but no need to make it too greasy). Cut the meat into bit chunks – say a couple of inches square – then put into a glass bowl with the wine and aromatics, stir, cover and chill for at least twelve hours.

Here are the quantities I used:

• 1.5kg boar meat (or about 3 pounds) – prepared as above
• A bottle of cheap Chianti
• 300ml of cold water
• 1 or 2 large onions (or 3-4 small ones), chopped up smallish
• 2 tablespoons of dried juniper berries, crushed lightly to loosen but whole
• 1.5 teaspoons peppercorns, crushed lightly to loosen but whole
• 6 large bay leaves
• 3 sprigs of rosemary

That all sounds like a faff to pull together, but it’s really very easy. The precise volumes of each aromatic matter very little so don’t get anxious about that. Feel free to add a pinch more of your favourites.

  

2. Twelve hours later, cook the meat

Put the oven on to 180C, then drain the meat in a colandar, catching the marinade in a bowl for later use. Pick out the meat and dry it off with kitchen paper. It will now be pink and squishy and look fairly repellent. Have a lot of kitchen paper to hand, this is messy business.

Coat the bottom of a large, deep roasting tray in light olive oil – just a series of good glugs – warm briefly in the oven then tip in the meat, stir to coat the meat and then roast for 15-20 minutes in the oven until browned all over. You may wish to stir mid-way to keep things moving.

  

Remove from the oven and add the following, in this order:

• 1-2 tablespoons of plain flour – sprinkle over the meat, and stir well
• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
• Half a small carton of passata – just glug it out by feel, then stir well again.
• The marinade, with all of the aromatics included – and give it a good stir again

Take a piece of baking parchment or grease proof paper slightly larger than the roasting tin and scrunch it up, then unfold and lay across the surface of the food (pushing down so it is in contact - chefs call this a cartouche but that seems a little pretentious). Then seal the whole tin with wide foil so no steam can escape and return to the oven for about an hour an a half to braise. Remove the coverings and leave in the oven for another half hour to reduce the sauce down.

3. Shred the meat and finish the sauce

Pick all of the large lumps of meat out from the juices and shred on a chopping board – I did this with a knife and fork, roughly chopping and tearing to leave good texture.

If the sauce still looks a bit thin then reduce it down a little: leave it bubbling on the stove top while you shred the meat (although of course it will all thicken when you return the shredded meat to the sauce).

Remove the rosemary stalks and bayleaves from the sauce, put the meat back in, season to your taste with lots of salt and pepper (it can take a lot of salt, and mellows when it is resting, but you can add more later if you want to play it safe), stir through and then let cool, chill and store for at least a day in a covered container to mull over.

4. Shortly before you want to eat, assemble

Put the sauce to warm in a saucepan, cook your papardelle in another pan. Papardelle is just really wide tagliatelli, so use that if you can’t get papardelle. You can make your own pasta if you care enough about that sort of thing, althought the fresh stuff I got wrapped in paper from Waitrose was delicious.

5. An optional garnish, if you don’t mind washing an extra pan

At this stage I had a third pan going, but only because I really wanted the dish to be infused with the delicious taste of rosemary, which is how I remembered it tasting when I dined alone one evening at the 14th century La Cisterna hotel in San Gimignano.

I gently warmed some olive oil in a frying pan and added the leaves from about three sprigs of rosemary to cook through and mellow in the oil. This made a not-especially fresh but very aromatic garnish, in a recipe where coriander or parsley wouldn’t really work.

I couldn't eat a whole one.

6. A fresh crisp salad, should you need one

The sauce and pasta makes a great dish, but I also made a simple salad to add crunch and freshness to an otherwise soft and rich meal:

• Green apples – granny smiths, cored and sliced super-thin and dipped in water with a squeeze of lemon to stop them browning
• Fennel – slice super-thin with a bread knife
• Walnuts – chopped into lumps
• Watercress – for bulk
• Fennel fronds – for decorations

Some might like to add a dressing to all of that, but everything else was wet enough already and I didn't want to mess with the freshness. Squeeze on some lemon if you must.

So serve all that up at the kitchen table on any cool day of the year, the whole room embraced in a cloud of mulled wine, and I defy you not to think it's Christmas.


Attribution: photograph of boars by 'anakkml', courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net. I recommend freedigitalphotos.net for all of your boar photo needs.