A very quick and simple recipe, but also very tasty.

***

1 pack (6 or 8) decent pork sausages

2 long, pointed red peppers, deseeded and cut into large-postage-stamp-sized pieces

200g mini plum tomatoes, chopped

300g Meli Melo tomatoes (mixed red and yellow, plum and cherry tomatoes), ditto

Or 500g of your favourite tomatoes – mini plums and cherries are usually the tastiest, though

half a dozen large Pink Fir Apple potatoes, scrubbed, any manky bits cut out, and sliced thickly

2 medium onions, peeled, halved and sliced thinly

1 teaspoon sugar

2 Kallo organic veg stock cubes

Sea salt and black pepper

A little dried thyme or sage (NB: a little sage goes a long way), or fresh thyme, if you have any

1 tablespoon of sweet paprika (optional, but worthwhile) – I have Hungarian paprika, which also adds a little heat; not as much as you’d get from chillies, but enough to add interest

Boiling water

Tomato purée (optional)

2 cans Napolina butter beans, rinsed and drained, and added t the end to just heat through.

If you have any Brussels sprouts hanging around, trim a handful of small, firm, ones, quarter them and add to the pot. The stalk will hold them together nicely, and they go well with tomatoes.

***

I’m using Jimmy’s Farm Free Range Pork Sausages, but any good pork sausage will do. Some people use something cheap for sausage casserole – I think that’s a bad idea. Poor ingredients yield poor results. Be sure to use sausages with natural casings – collagen (artificial), casings don’t take kindly to being casseroled and can go  slimy.

Pointed peppers are tastier and less watery than bell peppers, but if bell peppers are all you can get, they’ll be greatly improved by grilling until charred, putting in a plastic bag, knotting the top and, when cool, removing the skins (add any juices to the pot), deseed and chop in the usual way. I’ve found that the pointed peppers don’t really repay the  effort of grilling and skinning; they’re OK as they are.

***

Start by frying the sausages. You want them just lightly browned – cooked just enough so that they firm up and don’t disintegrate into the stock when you cut them up. Set aside.

Spoon a little of the oil/fat in which the sausages were fried into a pan or casserole, and soften the onions and peppers (omit the peppers if you’ve grilled and skinned them – they’re already soft; add at the same time as the sausages).

When the onions are soft, stir in the paprika, if using, and cook out for a few minutes

Cut each sausage into 4 or 5 pieces, depending on size, and add to the pot along with any juices.

Add the tomatoes and their juice (cut them up on a plate so no juice is wasted), the thyme and sugar.

Dissolve the Kallo cubes in a cup of boiling water and add to the pot, adding more water until everything is well covered, put on the lid, bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for about 30-40 minutes.

Do not season yet.

After 15 minutes, add the sliced potatoes, return to the boil and continue simmering until the potatoes are soft.

Towards the end, taste and, if not tomatoey enough for you, stir in a couple of teaspoons of purée, and allow to cook out for a few minutes. Add the beans now, too.

When cooked, allow to cool a little, then taste and add pepper to taste.

Set aside to cool, then refrigerate overnight. I know I always say this, but casseroles, soups and stews always benefit from a chance for the flavours to snuggle up, get to know each other, and smooth out. The following day, taste for salt content (canned beans can add a little salt, so it’s best tasted next day), and season if needed.

Note: I haven’t made this yet, but I will be later today, exactly as described, and it’s going to be very good indeed. I’m just writing it up first while I try to gather together some spoons.

It gets just one spoonie spoon, as it’s a very easy recipe, and you can break off the prep with no problems if you need to sit down.

The crisis is apparently in the US meat market, where herds are being slaughtered early because of a record-breaking drought. Why this will affect prices so much here I have no idea, but it seems it will. I’m not sure how much we import from the US in terms of meat – I’ve certainly never seen it offered for sale – but I suppose we import grain and maybe vegetable produce (I stocked up on bread flour when this crisis first made the news). Of course, the 14% increase isn’t caused purely by the drought, it’s an artificial construct of the commodities speculators who, as a species, should be exterminated in the public interest.

Anyway, a rummage in the bottom of the fridge turned up a pack of mini plum tomatoes, 2 long, sweet, red peppers, a pack of 3 largish courgettes, all a tad past their best, plus a 250g pack of runner beans, and a large Echalion shallot, about as big as a medium onion, both fresh this week. I like shallots, as they contribute more flavour than most onions, and the Echalion variety is large enough not to be too fiddly to handle.

The shallot, finely diced, was sweated in a little olive oil and butter, to which I added the peppers, deseeded and finely chopped, the tomatoes, sliced, and, when all had softened, the courgettes, wiped, topped and tailed, halved then sliced on a diagonal. Not deseeded, as I wanted the soft centres to dissolve and slightly thicken the sauce (which would, I hoped, give it a rather nice silky texture), The runner beans, also wiped, were topped and tailed and sliced on a diagonal; they went in before I started on the courgettes, as they take longer to cook.

When everything was added to the pot, I tossed in some dried oregano, seasoned it with home-made celery salt, a tablespoon of liquid chicken stock (Knorr Touch of Taste), and added boiling water, just enough to NOT cover the courgettes, which would contribute liquid of their own as they cooked.

The whole thing was left to simmer until everything was tender, the runner beans taking very much longer than I thought they would, as they turned out to be elderly and tough, even though they hadn’t needed de-stringing – clearly the season is pretty much over.

Once the bean pods were al dente, I seasoned the pot with black pepper (celery salt already in there of course), and stirred in a generous tablespoon of Bisto Caramelised Red Onion gravy granules. These are veggie-friendly as are many, if not most, Bisto products (some are even vegan-friendly). And served myself a large bowlful. Very nice it was, too, though it had little in the way of protein.

To what was left in the pot – another good bowlful – I added dark soy sauce, fish sauce, and a little sesame oil, completely changing its character. I’ll probably have that for lunch today.

So, considering it used up veg which would have had to be thrown out in a couple of days anyway, I’m extremely pleased with the result and got two large meals for well under a fiver. I resisted the temptation to toss in a can of butter or cannellini beans, as I wanted to keep the dish light.

With the benefit of hindsight, though, a chicken breast, sliced into strips as if for a stir-fry, would have been a very useful addition. Given what free-range chicken breasts sell for these days (£14.99 per kg), it would have added substantially to the overall cost, but stretching it to three meals would compensate (when I said I had a big bowl, I meant big).

For a veggie option use 2 or 3 Quorn pretend chicken breasts, likewise sliced and 1 Kallo organic veg cube, dissolved in hot water** before adding, instead of the chicken stock.

**Don’t drop straight in. They don’t dissolve particularly easily, and can sink to the bottom and burn. Knorr stock-pots, or gel-pots, or whatever they’re called this week, add little but salt in my experience, especially the veggie version. Touch of Taste beef and chicken are very good, the veggie one is disgusting!

Either version of this dish can be bulked up by serving over a handful of lightly crushed small potatoes (I’m rather fond of crushed potatoes – they absorb flavour nicely, and add substance, at a minimal cost in added work), or noodles, as below.

All things considered, I’m impressed with the results, especially as it was just thrown together on the spur of the moment (I often get the best results this way). Leaving the courgettes with their seeds did, indeed, add a silkiness to the sauce, as well as little jellified clumps of seeds which were quite pleasant, and the orientalised version will, I’m sure, be even better, especially if I bulk it up with a handful of soft, sticky, Udon noodles (in which case I’ll have it tonight, not for lunch).

I normally avoid special offers of perishables, unless they can be frozen, but in this case it paid off, and it’s certainly something I’d happily make again, but with added protein, either chicken, as above, or braising steak, sliced very thinly into strips.

My original thought had been to make this disparate and unpromising selection of veg into a curry; I’m glad I didn’t, now. It would have been tasty, of course, but the delicate flavours and textures of the individual veg, which came through nicely, even the courgettes, would have been lost in a curry.

It also enables meat to be stretched much further than usual. A chicken breast is a decent meal for one with some veggies, but in a dish like this will feed three, as would the same amount of braising steak (minced, and padded out with veggies and pulses, a little meat can be made to go a very long way, without actually feeling you’re being short-changed).

I, at least, have been eating this way for years, using meat as a protein and flavouring ingredient, not the centrepiece, and it works well. I still have scope for reducing my meat – and fish – intake even more, though, and if food prices increase as much as predicted, I’ll certainly do so, as well as making my own bread more often, as I’ve got rather lax about that, and making rolls rather than loaves, which suits my diet better.

Don’t forget, we only need a couple of ounces of protein a day, from all sources, and here in the West we routinely eat far too much, usually in the form of meat. I don’t, as I’ve made clear, believe that vegetarianism will save the world, but eating far less meat would be a step in the right direction. After all, you don’t  need that 32oz steak.

Nobody does.

***

NB: Yesterday evening my kitchen was suddenly invaded by flies. This was a major problem last year, so over the winter I installed an ultra-violet bug zapper (the u-v light attracts flies, which get zapped on an electrified mesh). Worked very nicely.

After dark, leaving the kitchen light off, the zapper on and the door open, the light attracted and zapped a few flies that had got into the living room, too, so I was quickly fly free again, without the use of toxic chemicals.

It also showed that the zapper worked best when it was the only light source in the room. So, as it can be moved to any room, if flies are a problem, leaving it in an otherwise darkened room overnight should fix things.

**Like many sausages that are 100% meat, though I find Bratwurst and other German sausages (also all meat), perfectly acceptable, so my chorizo will be lightened by the addition of rusk, in the form of dried fresh breadcrumbs from my own bread (as opposed to breadcrumbs made from stale bread, which tastes different – the only bread worth eating stale is a baguette).

The other thing I discovered is that morcilla** actually is very soft, much softer than black pudding, so what I saw as a fault in mine actually isn’t (my recipe was based on the info contained in a five-minute TV sequence, and an online product label). Mine do need more flavour, though and using a higher dehydrated blood to water ratio should fix that – plus not forgetting the paprika next time! Needs more salt too – I feared the blood might be salty, but it’s not – go figure. (Actually, that’s something else that made me think it’s too dilute.)

I’ve removed my recipe from my blog until I have a chance to make it again, somewhat revised – I’m not leaving a poor recipe up when I can do better.

The real bummer, though, with the fabada, is too much salt. Rick Stein’s recipe calls for a teaspoon, which I considered way too much, and just added a good pinch. Even that was too much, rendering it uneatably salty and, clearly, the amount of added salt it really needs is zero.

I’d also recommend not using panceta as I did (the recipe calls for bacon, also a high salt risk), as that’s cured with salt as well as paprika, but a couple of slices of quality belly pork (i.e., with more meat than fat), should be good, and won’t add unwanted salt (note: I like salt, and it if find a dish too salty, you can be certain that it is!). Frying the belly pork a little first will improve the mouth-feel of the fat (for me, at least, boiled fat has few charms when it’s served hot – totally different taste/texture when cold, though).

So there we go – nothing that can’t be fixed by a little DIY in the form of my own chorizo and morcilla, plus belly pork in place of bacon or panceta (which, of course, like its Italian cousin, is just streaky bacon from slightly up-market pigs).

And finally, I’ve treated myself to a copy of Claudia Roden’s new “The Food of Spain” – a book superior in almost every way to Stein’s. For example, there is onion in her fabada recipe (as with my own), and, equally important – NO SALT! Stein please note… Er, wrong, there is salt, and  – aaaargh! – salt pork too! Roden does have a suggestion – a good one too – cook the beans and meats separately, and combine at the end. While she doesn’t say so, using only a part of the meat stock to flavour the beans will dramatically reduce the salt content, something of which the Spanish are inordinately fond. And yet, despite the doom-sayers of the salt police, it hasn’t decimated the population.We’re on the same page regarding fat thought, even if not salt, as she, too, removes a lot of it, as I did.

And she provides vastly more information about ingredients, and their regional variations (there are several variations on the theme of morcilla that I really must make, including one from Malaga containing cloves, coriander, oregano, cumin and black pepper!).

The book is clearly a labour of love (Roden is a Sephardic Jew by descent, and that history shines through – I also have a Sephardic cookery book somewhere – must dig it out), as well as time spent immersed in the culinary culture of Spain – not just a canter through, at speed and often, if I’m any judge, frequently pissed, in the company of a TV crew.

Highly recommended.

300g dried beans, soaked overnight, use the traditional fabada bean, or cannellini, they’re much the same

4 torpedo-shaped shallots

1 scant tablespoon lard, home-made if possible

2 Packs fabada meats

½ pack of panceta

3 teaspoons sweet paprika (traditionally, this should be smoked, which I don’t like)

When everything is cooked, taste, and season with salt and black pepper as needed. NEVER cook beans in water that has been salted, or which contains a stock cube; they’ll take forever and the skins will be hard.

 ***

I was originally taken by the fabada in Rick Stein’s TV series, Spain, but as I said in this post the recipe in his book of the same name is something of a grease-fest, with back fat, fat bacon, chorizo and morcilla, topped off with butter! I also wasn’t all that thrilled by the fact that the usual basis for a stew, aromatics gently sweated off in fat or oil, didn’t happen (just because a dish is traditional doesn’t mean it can’t be tweaked/improved)).

A look around Google quickly showed that there are many fabada variants (some adding fried aromatics, like garlic, later in the process), so I saw no problem with going down the shallots and lard route, and also omitting the saffron that Stein has in his recipe. The back fat wasn’t an issue, as it’s unavailable.

The fabada meat packs contain a cooking chorizo (but see comments below), and a small morcilla, plus a piece of fat pork – extremely fat, as it happened, so that’s cut up into chunks and is quietly rendering down in the mini oven, and I’ve replaced it with a hefty hunk of panceta, cut into two equal pieces, which is much more meaty.

Stein says to cook the fabada for 2 hours, which seems rather too long for me. Hell, even chickpeas would be soft in that time, so I’ll see how it goes.** I’ll add the chorizo when the beans have plumped up, so that they have time to flavour the beans, and the morcilla, which feels quite delicate, near the end (in fact, in its casing it feels as soft as mine turned out, which is reassuring).

**It did occur to me that the cazuela, the terracotta dish in which this is traditionally cooked, might need to be on a lower heat than a metal container. It’s also cooked uncovered, which would slow things down quite a bit too, so play this by ear, and assess for yourself – by tasting – when it’s ready.

So, the method:-.

Peel and finely chop the shallots, and sweat over a low heat so that they soften without colouring. Stir occasionally. DO NOT add salt, a common technique to stop alliums browning.

When soft, stir in the paprika and cook out for a few minutes, add the panceta, and the beans, and just cover with boiling water (check occasionally to make sure everything is covered, and top up with boiling water if necessary). Make sure no beans stick on top of the meat – they won’t cook.

When the beans have plumped up and are just starting to soften, add the chorizo, and push well down – add more water if necessary. I floated the morcilla on the top after 15-20 minutes, giving them a brief but gentle dunk to ensure they were well moistened.

Oh bugger! As I’ve been writing this, and doing other stuff online, I haven’t noticed how long it took. I’ve a feeling it might just be about 2 hours though. Ah well…

Tip:-

By the time the beans were well cooked, the panceta and morcilla were cooked to perfection, the former wonderfully tender (I removed the skin and excess fat – boiled fat has few charms, frankly). The chorizo, however, were not – they were rock-hard, so I took some of the liquid out of the pot and continued to cook the chorizo in a small pan. In future, this harder, semi-cured type will go in at the start, though I’d be minded to use soft, cooking chorizo which is a fresh sausage.

Or not, because after 40 minutes at a brisk simmer, it was still impenetrable with a fork, so I scraped off the disgustingly slimy skin (god knows what it was made of, but it wasn’t the normal casing I’m used to) – when scraped off it looked like – well, frankly, it looked like something that might have crawled out of a sewage plant and died, it sure as hell didn’t look like any form of foodstuff. The chorizo itself, when sliced, had no discernible meat texture – I can’t begin to guess what the hell it was made of – a slurry of MRM, blood and collagen would be my best guess – it’s going in the bin! (I suspect the problem is that the chorizo casing was abnormally thick, as the micro-thin casings on my own sausages pretty much disappear when casseroled.

I have some proper, fresh, chorizo – I’ll cook up a couple of those and add them tomorrow. I’ve left the link for the fabada meats, but I strongly advise against buying, as the chorizo is unutterably shit. But if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Instead, I’d suggest fresh cooking chorizo, and fresh morcilla, plus the panceta (link above). Dried cannellini beans you can get anywhere.

Interestingly, the morcilla was in a relatively small-diameter (and normal!),  artificial casing, so I see no reason I can’t use my artificial casings, the 28mm ones are the right size. I’ll have to buy a filling kit as the mix is too wet to use my normal sausage filler, but they’re only about a tenner. I still think, though, that the standard blood hydration, as I’ve said, is too dilute, but as morcilla is clearly a very much softer product than our own black pudding, not, perhaps, as dilute as I thought.

I hereby pronounce myself officially impressed with my morcilla recipe, which would have been even better had I remembered the sodding paprika!

I’d give this a #spoonie rating of

It’s been suggested that, as a #spoonie,** I could rate my recipes using #spoonie spoons, so I shall, starting now. 1spoon = very easy to 5 spoons = doable but take it easy, maybe over 2 days, 6 spoons = get someone else to do it! This one gets 2 spoons purely because of the chopping of the shallots and cutting up hot meat, plus the trips to the kitchen to add the chorizo and morcilla; technically it’s very easy. Special equipment needed – tongs make removing the hot meat easier, otherwise use a large, slotted spoon to remove the various parts to a plate, not as Stein says, a board – way too messy and dribbly.

**See this blog for lots of info on The Spoon Theory, particularly if you suffer from chronic illness and have trouble coping – The Spoon Theory provides an easy way to explain how and why this is to others. (In a nutshell, we start each day with a finite number of spoons; everything we do uses up our spoon allocation, until we run out of spoons/reach exhaustion.)

I came across a partial soup recipe I thought I’d like to try, but making it more of a stew – chickpeas (garbanzos in the colonies), potatoes, garlic, rosemary as the base, plus a secret ingredient or two. No idea what, so I’ll have to wing it.

I thought I could do something with that, adding onion, sweated off in olive oil and butter, with the garlic, and something green, like chopped green beans, or broccoli florets, added near the end. Maybe a bit of carrot, too – a chiffonade rather than slices, perhaps, for colour and a touch of sweetness. All in a light veg stock. Yep – I liked the sound of that.

Then it got put on hold, as I only had one can of chickpeas. Last night, though, I remembered I had about 250g of dried chickpeas, about 2 years old, but the things are indestructible, so last night I set them to soak and, this morning, cooked them with a peeled and roughly chopped carrot, two squashed cloves of garlic (peeled), a few bay leaves, and a splash of olive oil. I’ve never been convinced that oil does anything for the cooking beans, but it smells good while cooking. They cooked quickly, too, surprising as the older they are, the longer they take.

The second stage is now under way. Two medium onions were chopped and sweated off in olive oil and butter (mostly butter, the oil stops it burning), and two finely chopped garlic cloves added once the onions were soft.

I peeled two medium carrots, cut them in half, across, then with a very sharp knife I took a sliver off the side of each piece to create a flat spot, as the next step needs stability – and that’s cutting the carrots into 1mm slices – a chiffonade – then cutting each slice into quarters, winding up with slices about 2cm long by 1cm wide, depending on the size and shape of the carrots, and 1mm thick – more or less, no need to get obsessive about it. Tip: when doing jobs like this, always use a razor-sharp knife – a blunt one is far more likely to slip and cut you, and hold the carrots so that your fingernails are the closest part of you to the blade.

I always have frozen rosemary in stock (in a plastic tub, in olive oil), as you can’t rely on being able to buy it. For example, in Sainsbury’s (Upton, Wirral), today the rosemary box in the fresh herb display contained nothing but thyme – good luck to anyone who didn’t know what rosemary or thyme look like!

So, I pulled out about two sprigs worth of leaves, poured some of the oil into the pan too, and chopped the leaves finely, scraping them and the oil that came off them into the pan with the onions garlic and carrots.

I had no idea about the secret ingredient. I could have asked but I thought I’d do my own thing, and added some sweet paprika. Stirred it well into the buttery-oily onion/garlic mix, added a Kallo organic veg stock cube (haven’t use these since I was a veggie, and they’re excellent), plus some celery salt (home-made), and white pepper.

They were covered with boiling water, given a good stir, brought back to the boil and left to simmer very gently until the carrots are soft (much quicker than if they’d been cut into slices or chunks. Smells great, and the texture as I stir it with the bamboo rice paddle** I use for cooking is amazingly unctuous and silky.

**I got this with a wok sometime in the eighties, and it rapidly became my standard stirring utensil – incredibly versatile and much easier to handle, if you have arthritic hands (I didn’t then, I do now), than a wooden spoon, as it doesn’t have a tendency to turn in your hand unless gripped tightly.

Next step is to peel and chop some spuds, a mix of Rooster and Maris Piper (for no better reason than that’s what’s in the fridge), including some cut very small so they’ll collapse and thicken the stock, plus another stock cube as I’ll be adding more water. Then, when the spuds are almost cooked, gently stir in the cooked chickpeas, taste and season with Maldon sea salt and white pepper (despite two stock cubes, it took a surprising amount of salt. Once the spuds are fully cooked I’ll set it aside to cool, then refrigerate it for 24 hours

I was going to add something green, for colour, but with the orange of the carrots and the red of the paprika, it’ll look too much like traffic lights, so I think I’ll pass on that,** not least because I’m starting to feel frazzled, because in between the various stages I also cooked a pan of soya mince, with loads of carrot, swede and peas, for the freezer (not veggie, as it’s flavoured with Bovril). Not to mention tweeting, signing online petitions and generally furtling about online. And writing this.

**And that turned out to be a good plan, as the starch from the spuds has combined with the red of the paprika to produce a wonderful ochre shade, with oily scarlet hi-lights

However, inspired by the blog linked to in the second para, I’ve ordered a bunch of Japanese ingredients so I can try this recipe, a soya bean stew with tofu noodles (I ordered Udon as I can’t find those in the recipe, the rest is as per). And as so often online, you’ll find me there too, and on this page, where there’s a simpler soya bean recipe which I also plan to try (I seem to be heading into a veggie phase…).

And after spending much of the last 5 hours in the kitchen**, I feel a lot better. Still crappy, but not soul-eroding crappy! Though I seem to be developing a sore throat!

**To clarify, not continuously – lots of breaks to sit down, and/or wait for one part of the process to cook out before going on to the next

And – something I haven’t done for ages, I had lunch while I was beavering away – a bowl of instant sweet and sour noodles . At first I had to force them down – part of the recent problem has been overwhelming nausea – but my stomach soon got the hang of being fed at a very unusual time and they disappeared pretty smartly.

And here’s the usual disclaimer, lest the DWP stumble across this – most of the time I am totally unable to cook (and by cook I mean start with the raw ingredients and end up with a freshly-cooked meal on a plate, table set with napery and flatware), and live on snacks, sandwiches or ready meals. So when I’m able to, I have to make the best of it and cook for the freezer, as I don’t know when I’ll be able to do it again. The Japanese ingredients, above, will keep until I’m able to cope again.

Talking of sarnies, last night I had slices of warm, freshly-cooked boiled gammon, thinly-sliced strong Cheddar (I use a cheese-plain – very easy to get uniform slices), and mayo on home-made wholemeal bread. Amazingly good. Does mean I had to buy bread today though, as I finished my loaf early.

Been here before, but it’s a theme always worth revisiting, by which I don’t mean repeating, as I get new readers

Sainsbury’s are running a TV ad claiming it’s possible to feed a family of 4 for under £50 a week. Considering what it costs just to feed me, I feel a tad cynical about that.

Yesterday morning, I spent a whisker over £30 in Sainsbury’s; later in the day I processed an online order at Tesco for about the same amount (mostly food, plus a very few non-food items). The only luxury (i.e., non-essential), item was a 500g tub of Green & Black’s Vanilla ice cream.

OK, I don’t eat rubbish (mostly!), but nor do I buy top-of-the-range stuff, it’s all mid-range, decent-quality food. I figured out quite some time ago that the best value lay in the mid-range, not the bargain basement (except for canned tomatoes, which are brilliant), nor in the Taste the Difference or Finest ranges (Sainsbury’s and Tesco), which all too often simply aren’t worth their price premium.

What pushes my bill up is buying pre-prepped food, pretty much essential for a #spoonie who likes good food. And by the way, fresh pre-prepped veg is infinitely better than frozen abominations, like “casserole veg”, which taste of bugger all! And any surplus can be frozen – you’ll be using it soon, so no need to blanch**. No freezer? Make soup! Though really, for a #spoonie, a freezer is a must-have. I bought myself a giant American-style fridge-freezer about 18 months ago – best thing I ever did, food-wise.

**Tip – mix watery veg, like onions and celery, and herbs like basil and rosemary, with oil before freezing. This will prevent their going mushy.

It’s very difficult – if not impossible – for me to cook conventional meals as, by the day’s end, there’s a severe spoon shortage (pork chop, roasties, greens and gravy, from scratch, for example, would be impossible**), so I devise meals which give me the maximum enjoyment and nutrient for the minimum of preparation.

**Not because I can’t cook – I’m bloody good! I just don’t have the physical resources/spoons.

For, example (serves one), quarter a pack of mini plum vine tomatoes, toss in a pan with a good splash of olive oil, salt and pepper, and put over a brisk heat (garlic is optional – I don’t like it with fish). Put on a pan of pasta to cook – I prefer linguine.

After a few minutes, the tomatoes will have given off a lot of liquid, so stir in as much oregano as you like. Then cut a skinless cod fillet, previously defrosted if necessary (or whatever white fish you happen to have – coley is fine), into bite-size pieces, or smaller if you like, and add to the toms. Stir, cover, and turn the heat down a little. Once the fish has turned opaque, remove from heat. It’ll continue cooking a little. The fish will give off liquid, too – that’s fine.

Drain the pasta, add a splash of olive oil, season with salt and lots of black pepper, and stir through.

Tip pasta into a bowl, pour over the tomatoes and fish, toss lightly, drizzle with more olive oil if you wish, then grate over some Parmigiano Reggiano (genuine Parmesan, not pre-grated crap), and get stuck in.

Total cost, maybe £3, for a very tasty and filling meal, with minimum of time and effort involved.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling more robust than usual (happening less and less since the onset of heart failure), I’ll drag out my slow cooker, and make a casserole for the freezer (foil trays are available in various sizes from Lakeland).

Tonight, for example, I’m having lamb and cannellini beans, flavoured with rosemary, paprika and ground coriander, which I put up last October and is still very well flavoured (food does lose flavour while frozen, but I find this is much reduced by using foil trays rather than plastic bags, which are, in fact, micro-porous, hence the flavour loss). Trays, being a uniform shape and size, are easy to store, too, than randomly knobbly frozen bags.

Over the weekend I cooked and froze 4 portions of braised steak with carrots and onions. With instant mash (or frozen roasties, or chips), and frozen veg, I can have a meal in 15 minutes.

I have physical problems cooking (ME/CFS, osteo arthritis, COPD, for new readers), so much so that, though I’m a good cook, I tend to live mainly on snacks and fried stuff, with occasional stews, bad news on so many levels. Last week, though, I made a beef casserole that was almost no work – diced Aberdeen Angus braising steak from Waitrose/Ocado (zero waste, which made up for the price – I reckon on about 15-20% waste with Sainsbury’s meat, so Waitrose is more cost-effective), and frozen/pre-prepped  casserole vegetables took care of normal prep, with stock, herbs and flavourings from my store cupboard – and the results were great.

The problem came when putting the casserole in the oven – bending while holding it (quite heavy), was remarkably painful. Ditto taking it out again, with the added risk of boiling stew. There had to be an easier way.

There was. I was browsing through the Lakeland catalogue, when I spotted the slow cookers. I wanted one of 2.5 litres, but they only had 1.5, 3.5 and 4.5 (I’ve found out since that the actual capacity isn’t the working capacity (so why don’t they declare that – not just Lakeland, anybody?), and that a 3.5l cooker has a working capacity of 2.5l.

After mooching around Google for a while, I wound up on the Morphy Richards website, like the look of the translucent black Accents model, and when in search of a lower price, and the rest is history.

Now there’s one thing – other than pretty much any casserole – that slow cookers do really well, and that’s cook beans to perfection. Their original purpose, I believe, when invented by the Crock-Pot Company.

Pre-soaked beans, with flavourings, veggies, and a chunk of fat pork** (no salt til the end or the beans won’t cook properly), left to their own devices for 6-8 hours, will be wonderful. The only beans you have to boil are red kidney beans. Not that I ever eat them, they’re vile.

**Beans cooked with a slice of fat pork belly are amazing. In an ordinary casserole, the pork floats to the top and is useless except as a flavouring, but in a slow-cooker the weight of the beans keeps it on the bottom   convection currents are minimal), from where the fat permeates the beans on its slow way to the surface – result, unctuous perfection. If you’re a veggie, leave out the pork, and substitute olive oil, it’ll still be damn good. Some butchers don’t sell pork belly (or belly-pork), so if you can’t buy a slice, buy a pack from the supermarket, and freeze the slices separately for future use.

I love casseroles, as they need no attention while cooking and now, as the slow cooker will be at worktop height, or maybe sitting on top of the cooker, putting the thing in the oven, and getting it out again, is no longer a problem

As a bonus, the oven will stay free of unwanted odours, which matters because I bake my own bread (using a peel – minimal bending). The last thing I need is garlic-scented sourdough.

I think my new slow cooker and I are in for a very tasty, labour-free winter.

I do wonder, though, why those who don’t like slow cookers get their knickers in such a twist. What’s your problem? I mean, apart from being wrong.

If you don’t like slow cookers – as well as my new one, I had one about 30 years ago too; not sure why I waited so long to get another – then don’t buy one. It’s a pretty simple solution, rather than going online and bitching about your dislike.

Most people, it seems, get peeved because the only thing slow is the actual cooking (well, doh!), the degree of prep remains the same, and may be a tad more for some dishes**. Or you can be like me and opt for pre-prepped veg, and meat.

** Online, I’ve seen slow cooker recipes that start with you boiling the beans for an hour first, by which time many beans will be sludge. Not a good idea. It is a good idea, though, to bring them to boiling point before putting them in the slow cooker, just to be safe. There’s no need to boil buggery out of them, though!

What they want is something they can simply throw ingredients into and, 6-8 hours later, take out a finished meal. Ah, if only the world was so simple.

You can do the taking out bit OK, just don’t forget the work that needs doing first, and occasionally during. And, if you did forget, well, there you go – I’m sure there’s room at the back of the cupboard, next to the breadmaker!

Normally, what I’m making would take a just couple of hours of intensive work  (there’s quite a bit of prep), but the exigencies of ME/CFS mean that the process may well take all day. The recipe hasn’t been modified to take account of this – I intended it to take a long time from the outset, as like many people with ME/CFS, the amount of time I can spend on my feet is very limited.

I’m making a hearty winter stew of Sicilian sausages with chick peas (I cooked those yesterday, with carrots and garlic), grilled and skinned red peppers, roasted butternut squash, garlic, red onions, celery, and chestnut mushrooms, with just a touch of cumin or perhaps Cayenne pepper, to counter the sweetness of the veg – I haven’t made up my mind yet, but it’ll probably be cumin, as it’s far less assertive. Ideally, this would be cooked long and slow in a cast-iron pot in the oven, but the thing is so damned heavy it doesn’t get much use these day, so it’ll be simmered, very, very gently, on the hob, in an ordinary pan – I always cook dishes like this in a large pan (depending on quantity, of course), and transfer to a smaller one when finished – I find it easier to have a lot of room in the pan. I’m not using any herbs, as the sausages are adequately herby (I actually wanted Toulouse, but couldn’t get any).

I like butternut squash, but that’ll only use half of it, so I think I’ll make soup with the other half, seeing that soup weather has arrived with a vengeance – it should go well with carrots and red lentils, with ground coriander and a touch of garlic, blitzed smooth with a hand blender the finished with chopped coriander leaves.

Tip: Soft herbs, like basil and coriander, can be frozen by mixing the unchopped leaves with olive oil, bagging and  - once bagged –  spreading the herbs out in a layer about as thick as a pound coin then freeze. You can just break off what you need and chop while frozen. Don’t stint the oil – too much is better than too little.

My recipes live in my head, but if anyone’s interested, let me know and I’ll post them here.

Tip: I had to buy far too many mushrooms as they weren’t available loose, only in a 300g pack – doesn’t sound much, but that’s a lot of mushrooms – but they freeze very well once cooked, so I’ll trim off the stalks, slice about as thick as a pound coin, and fry them hot and fast in just a splash of olive oil. Any liquid given off should be drained off as it forms and reserved for the main dish. Once fried off so they’re limp and dark – a matter of a couple of minutes – I’ll use what I need today and the rest will be bagged, cooled and frozen.

OK – I’m halfway through and knackered (for those who don’t know, ME/CFS and kitchen heat don’t mix – when I called this slaving over a hot stove, I wasn’t being ironic – I haven’t tackled a dish with so many stages for many years, but there comes a time when the effort justifies the results). One amendment – once roasted there’s not enough squash for two dishes, so it”l all go in with the sausages. The soup – postponed until tomorrow – will be a classic carrot and coriander. I have a surfeit of carrots, as I got half a kilo free with a bag of Maris Piper spuds, and soup is a good way to use them up.

And now, back to the fray. . .

Right, I’m finished. I will post the recipe, but a note for disabled cooks – it’s perfectly feasible to spread the preparation over 2, or even 3, days – doing it all in one go, even with plentry of rest stops, was too much. Once it’s cold, it can go in the fridge for 24 hours, to quietly fester – er, mature. Stews, casseroles and soups always benefit from being made a day in advance.