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Growing my own Chillies

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Over the past year I’ve been spending a lot of my time, like everyone else, at home. So one thing that I have spent time energy and money on was my garden. I’ve written about that quite a bit over on my main blog.

Previously I’d noted how hard it was to get chillies in Ireland and what you could get was severely limited. With my greenhouse setup I tried to fix that situation.

I was able to get a couple of fairly standard chilli plants locally, but in order to get a funkier selection I ended up having to go online.

In the end I was able to get most of the plants to bear fruit, though I suspect that I could have got bigger peppers if I’d done things a bit differently.

Peppers are really really slow to grow. And once they’ve grown into something pepper shaped they’re very slow to ripen. I planted most of my chilli plants at the end of May when they arrived from Germany. Back then they were tiny:

A few months later (nearly November!) I have harvested the last of them and there’s no shortage:

I’ll probably pickle some of these though I’ll be keeping some of the bigger to cook with directly. They should keep for a week or two in the fridge and they’ll be a nice addition to a ragù!

Being able to pick a few chilli peppers directly from the plants and use them in my cooking over the last few weeks has been great. Though not knowing how strong some of them were going to be has been a tad risky!

Walking for Movember

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Man in shoes standing on cobblestones

Every year thousands of people around the world raise money for men’s health charities during the month of November. Most of them do it by growing a “mo”. So the name of the charity movement is, logically, Movember.

However some people opt to do something different.

I’m one of them.

This year I will be walking for charity.

I need to walk more, but I hate walking for the sake of walking. Giving my walks a purpose means that I’ll actually do it.

So you can encourage me to walk more by donating and you’ll also be helping a charity.

It’s a win win.

So if you want to motivate me AND help a good cause you can donate here.

For now both the distance and donation targets are set quite low, but I’ll tweak them if the targets are hit. Either target.

So the more donations I get the further I’ll have to walk.

Mexican Chillies Fresh vs Dry

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I like chilli and it’s one of those things that often gets added to a lot of meals to give the dish a little bit of a lift or maybe a bit of extra bite. Sure, a lot of people think of chiles as being purely about “heat”, but there’s a lot more to chilli in terms of flavour than pure heat.

However it was only in the last couple of days that I was made aware about how chile names change between the fresh version and the dry one.

Okay this might not be a revelation for many people, but it was for me!

The graphic below is focussed on the more popular Mexican chillies. On the left you have the name for the fresh variety (fresco) and on the right the name of the same chilli when it’s dried (seco):

Image via

Getting fresh chillies in Ireland is possible, but the selection generally is pretty awful, so I would often end up relying on my dried selection.

I tend to buy my dried chillies from a company in the UK who have an excellent range.

(Also spelling the word in English seems to be a problem for me, as I keep getting confused about how many Ls to use etc., I thought I was just being a bit dumb, but apparently I’m not alone and there is a rationale for the spelling and the varieties of it. If you’re bored you can read about it here.)

Vacuum Sealing Food for Sous-vide and Sanity

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I’ve had an Anova sous-vide for a couple of years. It’s a fantastic device and makes cooking meat and poultry to perfection so incredibly easy.

However I held off on getting a vacuum sealer. While I am a gadget addict I just couldn’t see the real need for a vacuum sealer. But that changed last week.

Why?

With the country (and most of the world) on some form of “lockdown” I’m trying my best to limit my shopping excursions as much as possible. What that means is that instead of picking up a couple of days’ worth of fresh meat and vegetables on my way home I now do one “big” shop per week. I might supplement it with one or two extra trips if I discover I’m missing ingredients or something else, but I’ve been mostly keeping to the one trip to the shops per week.

So getting a vacuum sealer suddenly went from “nice, but not necessary” to “very useful and possibly essential”.

Being able to vacuum seal fresh meat and other produce means that I’m able to keep them fresh for longer. I’m not 100% sure how much longer the vacuum sealer will extend their fridge shelf life, but the estimates I’ve read are more than enough for my needs. Basically I want to be able to buy fresh meat once a week and not kill myself with food poisoning before I get to the butcher again. Not a crazy challenge really!

But of course the original reason I was interested in getting a vacuum sealer was for my sous-vide cooking.

I had been happily using various resealable bags. They worked pretty well, but they were never 100% free of air. Sure, you can get a lot of air out of a bag using the “submersion method”, but it’s not perfect. What that means is that you end up having to weigh down bags or they start floating to the top of your sous-vide bath.

With the vacuum sealed bags, however, the cooking experience is significantly better.

I did some lovely rack of lamb in the sous-vide this week and the results were exceptional.

The meat is sealed fully and will sink right down. You can also season or marinade the meat in the vacuum bags, though that does require a bit of advanced organisation.

It also meant that I was able to store mince meat more sanely for several days and save space in the fridge.

So which vacuum sealer did I go for?

While I had been looking into this ages ago I really hadn’t made up my mind on which make and model to go for.

In the end I just took the “simple” route. I picked up one of the cheap and cheerful vacuum sealers from my local Lidl as well as a few spare rolls of the seal. They sell Silvercrest branded machines which cost around EUR 30. Extra rolls were about another EUR 4, which should keep me going for a few months.

I would warn you, however, that the instructions that come with the Silvercrest are terribly unclear. I ended up resorting to watching a couple of Youtube videos before I was able to make sense of how to operate it. It’s not complicated, but with instructions that badly written it does take a while to work out why every attempt at sealing a bag fails!

In any case once you’ve got the sealing down you’ll be able to store your fresh meat (and other produce) for longer safely in your fridge (or freezer) as well as being able to get more out of your sous-vide.

Delicious Low Carb Shepherd’s Pie

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At the moment, in common with almost everybody else, I’m stuck at home most of the time.

So what kind of things am I cooking?

I’ve been going through my usual stable of frequently used recipes, so I end up doing things like Indian butter chicken or some kind of chilli con carne, or simple dishes like “meat and veg”.

But I’ve also been experimenting with slightly different takes on some of the classics.

One dish that I’ve always loved is Shepherd’s pie. The traditional recipe is a meat base topped with mashed potatoes and then finished off in the oven. It’s what you’d probably call “comfort food”. And once you’ve made a batch of it you’ll have enough to last a few days. All you’ll need to do is pop a serving into the microwave for a couple of minutes.

Since I’m trying (mostly) to stick to a low carb diet I can’t use potatoes for shepherd’s pie. Instead I end up using a lower carb cauliflower based mash as the topping.

Of course there are plenty of recipes out there for low carb shepherd’s pie.

I’ve taken elements from a couple of them and added my own twist.

The meat sauce can be made that little bit more interesting by adding in a few ingredients that give it a bit more “oomph”. Adding some Worcester sauce and soy sauce as per this recipe makes a big difference. I don’t have tabasco in the cupboard, so I’ve been dicing some fresh chilli peppers when I have them or simply adding a bit of smoked paprika instead.

It makes the sauce that much richer.

I also like to add in some grated carrot and a couple of diced mushrooms.

Again, this is all about the taste profile.

I’ve made this twice in the last ten days and each time has been slightly different because I’ve varied the ingredients slightly.

The end result, however, has been lovely.

So which parts of the recipes have I adopted? The cauliflower mash from Diet Doctor’s recipe is pretty good, but I didn’t have any leeks, so I just left that out. Did it make any difference? Not that I noticed. While adding the egg sounds a bit odd it works out very well, so I’d definitely use that version of the mash recipe.

So the diet doctor recipe is pretty good, as it has the extra ingredients in the sauce, but I like to get more bang for my buck, so I’ll reduce the amount of mince and add tomatoes and stock. I usually buy mince in batches of about 250g, as I think that’s enough for most things. You can add more “bulk” via the other ingredients. The Ditch the Carbs recipe has a bit more to it so that’s my inspiration for the sauce, with the addition of the sauces from the other recipe.

A note: I always like to have some basic vegetable stock in the cupboard, rather than beef or chicken specifically. If you don’t use stock in your cooking regularly this is probably a happy medium. At the moment, as we’re all at home and cooking up to three times a day it might be worth getting a variety of different stock cubes.

I’ll be trying a few other recipes over the coming days, but this kind of meal is so tasty and simple. It’s an absolute pleasure to cook and of course to eat!

Eating Properly During the Pandemic

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Over the past few weeks we’ve all got used to living a whole new reality, or at least we’re trying to. Terms like “flatten the curve” and “social distancing” are now part of our everyday vocabulary.

So obviously I’m at home pretty much all the time, except for some brief forays out to get supplies or to get some fresh air. Anyone reading this now is probably in a similar situation.

I’m more or less used to living like this now. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with it or 100% comfortable with it. I’m not. But I can cope. Most of the time.

The upside to being at home for several weeks, which will probably become several months, is that I am 100% in control of what I eat. There’s no chance of me being tempted by a breakfast buffet or a tantalising “treat” in a café.

But the current situation is far from normal. I can’t go food shopping like I would have done previously. I used to swing by a supermarket or the butcher on my way back from the office. But these days my office is at home and we’re all expected not to make unnecessary trips to shops or anywhere else.

So now I’m going shopping about once a week. I’ll go to my favourite butcher and pick up a range of protein that I’ll spread out over the rest of the week. Some of it will get frozen so that I can use it later in the week, but, as my freezer isn’t exactly gigantic, I’ll try to keep as much of the meat in the fridge.

Once I’ve stocked up on the meat (the all important protein!) I’ll then go to one of the larger supermarkets like Dunnes or Aldi. There I’ll be able to get the rest of the groceries I need for a week.

With the market closed I thought I wouldn’t be able to get good quality fresh vegetables, but fortunately several of the producers are still operating, though it now involves picking up vegetables directly from the farm. I did that a couple of weeks ago and was also able to drop by Malone Fruit Farm to get some nice homemade fare including chutneys made using their fruit.

I’m trying to “behave” most of the time, but I am probably drinking a bit more alcohol than I should.

My nutritionist has put me on a plan that involves changing some of my eating habits, which hasn’t been too hard now that I’m not travelling at all. I’m taking a range of supplements including vitamins and magnesium and drinking water with lemon juice in the morning. She’s also encouraging me to reduce my caffeine intake, so I now switch to herbal tea from lunchtime onwards.

Food and cooking-wise I am not really suffering at all. With being at home all the time I have to prepare some form of food three times a day. So I’ve been exploring new options. I’ve tried out recipes that I normally would have avoided. The other evening, for example, I made stuffed courgettes. I’d normally have avoided anything like that, as it’s just too finicky for my liking, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well it turned out.

stuffed courgette

I’m still not particularly good at planning my shopping and my cooking for a week at a time. I’m getting better, but I still end up a few days into the week realising that I’ve miscalculated in some way and either have too much or too little of some ingredients and have to switch around what I’m doing.

By the time we return to any form of “normal” I’ll probably have mastered some new cooking skills at least!

Fresh Vegetables From the Local Market

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Not all vegetables are created (or grown) equal. This weekend I was able to do a bit of vegetable shopping at the local farmers’ market in Carlow. It’s not a particularly big market, but there is always a reasonable selection of vegetables.

What I like about farmers’ markets is that you can often find a more interesting selection of produce than the average supermarket will stock. That can mean vegetables that you might not find easily, but more often than not it means things like artisan cheeses that rarely make it into the main supermarkets.

In the photo below you can see the comparison in size between a “normal” parsnip that I got in Dunnes or one of the other supermarkets and the much bigger one from a local farm that has a stall at the market:

Not all parsnips are equal. The one on the right is shop bought, while the one on the left is from the local farmers’ market #food #vegetables #cooking

Fresh vegetables from a farm or a market may not be quite as “pretty” as the ones you’ll get in your local supermarket, but they’re going to be better. Also it’s nice to be able to support a producer directly – buying at the market cuts out the middle man!

I’ll be trying out a few variants on existing recipes with these rather large parsnips. They definitely lend themselves to something a bit out of the norm.