Junglefrog Cooking » gizmo

Italian sausage stew

Simone (junglefrog) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:05:44 +0000

The ultimate comfort food

When the alarms rings at 7 am I am already awake. Not wide awake but my dear old kitty friend Gizmo usually thinks that 6 am is a perfectly fine time to wake up and get fed. So around 6-ish she starts walking over my head, all the while miauwing loudly. She is getting a little deaf at the age of 19 so she doesn’t hear her own voice anymore… Annoying to say the least. So she wakes me up but I refuse to get out of bed before the alarm goes so I stubbornly ignore her, but it’s pretty obvious that any real sleep is not an option anymore.

Outside it is still dark and I can hear the wind howling around the house, telling me that I should stay in bed, but unfortunately duty calls so a little past 7 (snooze button!!) I swing my legs over the edge and go and feed a screaming cat (who then eats one tiny bit and follows me into the kitchen, so she can annoy me a little bit more. Typical start of my day… )

Italian sausage stew

The wind and rain keep it up the entire day and it is one of the first autumn days that is grey, dreary and mostly very wet. It’s a good thing that I do not suffer from autumn depressions but I can see how it easily would effect people that are more prone to weather changes. Me, I love autumn. I think I can safely say that I’m a season-girl. I love all seasons. I am not even sure I would like to live in a country where the sun always shines. That would be boring now wouldn’t it? Autumn is such a wonderful and comforting season. The season to snuggle up indoors, while the rain pounds on the roof, warming your hands around a mug of hot chocolate (preferably with whipped cream ofcourse) and gorgeous glorious stews.

Needless to say on that very first very real autumn day, my mind immediately went to stews. I had recently bought a bag of puy lentils (more lentil recipes here, here and here) so I figured I should make something with them and searching on the BBC Good Food site (my favorite recipe site) I quickly found the recipe for this delicious stew. The ultimate comfort food! We had it with baked potatoes but I think it might even be better with a nice potato mash. O or a potato/celeriac mash… Hmm, gotta try that next time!

Yummy puy lentils

Stew with sausage and lentils

Print recipe

Serves	2
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	50 minutes
Total time	1 hour
Meal type	Main Dish
Misc	Serve Hot
Website	BBC Good Food

Ingredients

3 large baking potatoes
olive oil
4 pork sausages
1 onion (chopped)
1 garlic clove (crushed)
1 pinch chili flakes
2 carrots (diced finely)
2 sticks celery (cut into small dice)
4 sprigs rosemary (needles only and chopped finely)
1 tin canned tomatoes (400 gr)
300ml white wine (Using chicken stock is also fine)
3 tablespoons puy lentils

Directions


Heat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Cut the potatoes into 2cm chunks, toss in olive oil then spread out on a non-stick baking tray. roast for 40 minutes until crisp and golden, turning a couple of times during cooking.

Meanwhile, cook the whole sausages in a little more olive oil in a large pan until browned all over. Take the sausages out of the pan then add the onions and garlic and cook until softened.

Add the chilli (if using) carrot and celery, then cook for 5 minutes. add 2/3 of the rosemary, all of the tomatoes, wine or stock and lentils. Slice each sausage diagonally into 4 thick chunks then add back to the pan. Simmer with a lid almost covering for about 30 minutes, or until the lentils are tender.

When the potatoes are cooked, toss with some sea salt and the rest of the rosemary, then serve with the stew.

Kuaytiaw phat sii iew sai moo

Simone (junglefrog) — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:01:45 +0000

Ingredients

O, haha… in case you think I have lost my mind… it’s not so bad really. I just couldn’t resist to name this post after the official Thai title. Probably not so weird sounding if your Thai (I hope not at least) but if you’re anything like me you have no clue what this recipe is gonna be all about. Well, let me kill the suspense; it’s noodles with pork in soysauce. Suddenly it’s lost half of it’s exoticness…

I also have to warn you a little bit that if you are NOT a cat lover (or animal lover in general) you might find the photos here slightly appaling, but let me assure you that none of the food you see here has been consumed by anyone other then an animal. It wasn’t intended to be that way, but after Gizmo had her fair share of the food I sort of couldn’t have anyone else eat it anymore. It was my “test” food anyway so no harm done here.

And I know, I know, it’s not sanitary or wise but well, you know how it goes with old animals. You get a soft spot. Gizmo – as I am sure I have told you before – is suffering from a disorder of the thyroid gland which means she is not nearly weighing enough for her size. She’s barely reaching 2,8 kg and more skin and bones then fat. So any chance we get, she gets extra. Which means – ofcourse – that she is spoiled rotten. Don’t worry; I don’t normally let her get her paws in my food, but I just couldn’t resist the photo opportunity so I let her enjoy herself for just a little bit. And she loved the dish!

I have bought this great book last week which is called Bangkok street food and is sort of half of a travelbook and half of a recipebook. I totally fell in love with Thai kitchen when I was there years ago. At the time I was under the happy circumstances that I got to spend some more time in Thailand for work, so I have been to Bangkok a couple of times and I still love it. I mean; seriously, what is not to love about the Thai kitchen in the first place and then – on top of that – the foodstalls are just AMAZING. It’s the only country in the world where I feel safe to eat at a foodstall to begin with. I would not attempt to do that so easily when for instance in India. It’s just that our western stomachs are so terribly spoiled that we get sick easily. And I appear to have a rather strong stomach but still…

Obviously when eating from any foodstall anywhere; you have to use some common sense, so look around you before ordering anything. If they prepare the food in front of you and it looks relatively clean then you should be ok to eat it. But if it is already cooked and sitting in bowls, then walk along!

I did have some of the best Asian food while in Thailand and Bangkok in particular. It did help that we went along with our Asian colleagues who obviously knew where to go, but even if you don’t have that advantage you’d still find plenty of fabulous food.

But now on to this dish; it’s lighting fast and really the longest you will have to wait for is the cooking of the noodles. Which takes about 8 minutes to warm in hot water (so no cooking needed really)

Here is the full recipe (minus the cat) for those would want to give it a try!

Ingredients:

2 tbsp oil

2 cloves of garlic, mashed

200 gr porkmeat, in strips

1 handfull of ricenoodles, soaked and drained

1 qty chinese broccoli (I used bimi)

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 tsp dark soysauce

2 tbsp light soysauce

1 tsp oystersauce

1 tsp sugar

4 tbsp chickenstock or water

1/4 tsp white pepper

Heat the oil in a stirfry pan on medium high. Add the garlic and the pork and stirfry until the pork is getting some color. Add the soaked and drained noodles and the broccoli to it. Stir the egg through and mix well. Add the soysauce, oystersauce, sugar and white pepper and stirfry for another 30 seconds. Add some water or stock to make the sauce and add pepper to taste.

I can't reach the meat!!

Cat tales

Simone (junglefrog) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:44:19 +0000

Young and old

Now before I start let me explain one thing; I mainly talk about Gizmo here because she is the most “visible” cat in our household. She follows me around everywhere I go and ‘sits’ on me every chance she gets. So it’s not that I love her most… but that she loves me most…:)

I was looking for old photos of her today and found this adorable shot of when she was 13 weeks old and driving us completely insane. If you’ve been following the blog of Erin, with her amazing tales of the incredible Watson… well Gizmo was a bit like that when growing up. Completely impossible most of the times, anything that moved, she had her little claws in. If you would have seen me back then… I was completely covered in scratches most of the time. I can still remember taking the photo of her as it took endless patience to get her to sit still on the floor and looking at me with her big ears. That is why she is named Gizmo in the first place; because of her large ears. Looks a bit like a gremlin right?

At the time that Gizmo came into our household, we already had three cats; Lapje (who passed away), Joepie and Witje. My friend Jacqueline, had a Siamese who had run of with the neighbour cat and got herself pregnant of little bastards… That was the second time she did that, the little slut… She was supposed to get full bred Siamese offspring and not a random nest of little adorable kittens of no-breed whatsoever.

Now I told Jacqueline I would not come around unless I knew that all the kittens had a home. I know myself; can’t resist a kitten when I see one! So finally on day X in 1992 I was told it was save to come by. So I go over to her place and what do I find? Two little kittens staring up at me… One little black one which I knew Jacq was gonna keep herself and then there was this little grey furball. And as if she knew, she immediately jumped on my lap and curled up in my arms. Who can resist that? So there was cat number four…. Apparently the guy who had picked her up brought her back because she was running around on his white leather sofa… Come on, it’s an 8 week old kitten!!

True love/ 1992

But having said that; I am glad that he did. I didn’t need very long to convince Tom that we really needed to give a good home to Gizmo. He has a big mouth but when it comes to kittens, he is almost worse then me…

We picked her up, which was a bit cruel as we had to get her away from her home and she was screaming so loud in the car that people passing by where trying to look into the car if we were abducting someone! Well and that was the beginning of her life with us. And it’s been a good one. She always manages to charm everyone. She is funny and can pull amazing faces. She has a morning temper… Really, it’s true. She always likes to play around, except early in the morning. I’ve never managed to take a photo of her with her morning temper unfortunately (I don’t exactly sleep with my camera next my bed…lol) but maybe I will one day.

Checking back on her old photos you can really see how thin she has become due to her thyroid gland problem, but thankfully it’s pretty stable right now.

She does look a bit thin and scruffy, doesn’t she? Anyway, that is part of the reason she is very spoiled as I like to give her little bits of tasty treats to make sure she keeps whatever weight she has left.

If I can find kitten photos of both Joepie and Witje, I might bore you with their stories as well…

O and especially for Christie… Here is the rose in bloom!

Rosa Bobbie James

Can you tell it’s too big for the garden?

Grilled chicken

Simone (junglefrog) — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:45:50 +0000

Grilled chicken

I was wondering on how to start this post; I mentioned Queensday only briefly in my post about the fish and what was supposed to be a national celebration has ended in a national tragedy with a lunatic trying to attach the royal family while they were touring the city of Apeldoorn. In the process he wounded 23 people and killed 7 (as of today, there are still people in critical condition in the hospital) The guy who did it, has also died this morning.

For those of you who do not know queensday I would suggest you visit Dutch Girl Cooking. She has a beautiful blog and also has a fantastic post with beautiful pictures of before the news was out…

Some of you might have heard it as it has been on a lot of international news channels.I will not spend too much time on the tragedy as I just don’t think that people like that deserve that amount of attention!

So on to the more eartly things; our chicken….

After the disaster with the fish I was a little anxious as to how the chicken would turn out, but as Christie already said “You can’t do much wrong with a chicken” (or something along those lines…) I wasn’t to sure about that though. I have a tendency to get insecure about certain things and doing something I had never done before… can pretty much trigger that! Ok, we eat chicken a lot, but I had never ever grilled an entire chicken other then at the kookstudio, so the thought of doing that was still a little daunting. To be sure I wouldn’t mess things up I checked a couple of recipes on the internet, but we felt safe stuffing the chicken with lemonparts and putting herbed (we added lemonthyme and parsley to the butter as well as salt and pepper) butter under the skin before putting it in the oven. As you can see Tom was the lucky one who got to do the dirty work again… I did help though with loosening the skin! (just so no one can tell me that I ‘chickened’ out. hehe…

After 20 and after 60 minutes in the oven

As you can tell from the above photos it was browning nicely in the oven. I checked it after about an hour and the juices did run clear after piercing the thighs but paranoid person that I am, I decided to leave it in for another 15 minutes. I didn’t want to have another uncooked creature on my hands and certainly not a chicken. Needless to say that it should have been left slightly shorter… But it was still delicious.

We had baked potatoes and asparagus with the chicken and we made a mushroom sauce to go with that from the chicken juices, cream and mushrooms and some herbs we threw in. It all tasted lovely, although taking photos of the end result was a bit hasty so forgive the not so fabulous quality…:)

I do have a confession to make; I have a chicken trauma…. When I was little I used to always go to my friends house. Her parents had a farm and I have always loved animals, so being there and helping with the pigs, the chickens and the cows was heaven for me. There was one thing however that I did not like and that was the eating of the chicken. Remember I was about 8 years old at the time, so this made a huge impact on me! Once the chickens were old the had to be slaughtered as they didn’t give so much eggs anymore, so my friends father did that himself on their yard and I have seen many a chicken being killed. Now… that was not the problem as a headless chicken running around was always kind of funny. We cleaned the chickens as well from their insides, put them in hot water so the feathers would come out easier and burned of the remaining feather bits above the stove. That was all fine, but after doing all that; I could not get myself to eat the chicken anymore. And my friends brother…hmm, how shall I put this delicately; he is the reason I have this chicken phobia. Simply because of the way he ate; and he ate everything of the chicken; hearts, neck and god knows what else. It all looked absolutely disgusting to me, so I never really wanted any of that. Because the chickens were old (compaired to the ones you buy in the stores anyway) they were also a bit chewy and difficult to eat. Lots of muscles and sinew running around their bones… I can’t really describe it I guess, other then that is where my phobia comes from! So having this whole chicken was a break-through let’s put it like that.

Gizmo falling asleep next to the asparagus

Anyway, the meal was really lovely and I liked the chicken (yeah!!) so all was well!

I couldn’t resist posting this photo of Gizmo as well. I wanted to take a photo of the asparagus before peeling them and ofcourse Gizmo – curious little devil that she is – needed to come and sit next to the asparagus so she could make sure I did everything alright. As you can see she has a bit of a funny mouth. She is missing most of her teeth, but her front fangs are still there and sometimes her lip kind of ‘hangs’ on the fangs, without her knowing it. But it looks very silly, but cute nonetheless… At least I think so…

She thought the chicken was fabulous too!

Goatcheese salad with pinenuts and apple and cat-stories

Simone (junglefrog) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:47:43 +0000

Goatcheese salad

Today was supposed to be a schoolday, but when I finally arrived in Amsterdam it turns out that our teacher was ill and no replacement. Pfftt… I hate it when that happens! We are in the last phase which means that we each have to complete a project and write a personal development plan which will also be used for the next phase of the specialization part. But that also means that it is quite important to not miss any part of school and to keep the momentum going. We tried to find another schoolday but school is also moving to a new location, so not possible.

Instead we went to the Foam museum where there was a Richard Avedon exhibition, so at least we still did something useful with our day. Ofcourse with the weather being as gorgeous as it is today, it’s not really a punishment to have an additional day of, but it’s always better when you know that before you get up and not after. O well, what can you do?

On my way back from the museum I bought some stuff to make lunch. I felt like a goatcheese salad with some honey mustard on top and it was delicious!

Tom and I had been walking in Amsterdam for most of the afternoon yesterday and now I did the same for this morning, so I was quite hungry but the goatcheese gives it just enough filling that it feels like a proper meal.

Coming home I opened the garden doors and let the cats out. Now they are all very very old. We have three cats; the youngest is 17 years old (Gizmo), then we have Witje who is 19 years old and last but not least we have Joepie who is 21 years old! People often wonder what we do with our cats that they become so ridiculously old. ..:) Good food and loving care? No idea really. I think we have just been lucky.

Witje enjoying the sunshine

There are quite a few disadvantages of having such elderly cats I have to confess and if you’re not a cat-lover then you should probably stop reading or you will be seriously repulsed…:)

One of the problems is the rather frequent throwing up. Witje you see here is very good in throwing up on the most inconvenient places (anything which is difficult to clean basically) and I have become a master in reacting with lighting speed whenever I hear the warning signs of her about to puke. I even react in the middle of the night (yes, they sleep on the bed too…) when I hear the dreaded sound, jump up, throw cat a, b or c of the bed, watch where they are going, clean up and go back to sleep. Tom doesn’t even notice ANY of it, can you believe it? He swears that he is not pretending to stay asleep but I have my doubts sometimes. lol…

Other than that minor (and sometimes major) headache, they are and have been quite healthy over the years. Joepie, the oldest one, is deaf, half blind and slightly demented, but other then that she is a happy senile little cat. Witje used to be quite a nervous cat when she was younger as I also think she is slightly mentally disabled. She is very sweet and wouldn’t harm a fly. In fact she ‘adopted’ Gizmo when she was little and they are still best buddies….

Gizmo is the one that is ill as she needs to have a pill everyday. She has a thyroid gland problem and is therefore rather thin. The pills keep it under control but she is never going to be heavy like she used to be.

Joepie a few years ago

Anyway, I didn’t start out by wanting to write about our cats, but that is just what happened. I also found out – while searching for the photos I have of Gizmo and Witje together, that I really need to improve on my archiving…. It takes way to much time to find anything and I haven’t found the photo I was looking for either.. Anyway, sorry to bore you with cat-tales!

Junglefrog Cooking » gizmo

Italian sausage stew

Stew with sausage and lentils

Ingredients

Directions

Related Posts:

Kuaytiaw phat sii iew sai moo

Related Posts:

Cat tales

Related Posts:

Grilled chicken

Related Posts:

Goatcheese salad with pinenuts and apple and cat-stories

Related Posts: