Om nom nom: Dumpling pseudo-casserole
(It's a working title, but as good a name as I have for the moment)
My household does a fair amount of cooking. Admittedly most of that tends to be Alan, but that's mostly because he gets enthusiastic about it, and also because he tends to be home first (working 10 minutes up the road will do that). Last night was a bit of an exception, with me at least having the idea for what to cook, but then both of us cooking together.
A while back, Alan made casserole, and there was a whole bunch of it leftover, but mostly juices and less content, so I got some of the pork dumplings from the local chinese supermarket and added them in, and it worked pretty well. We hadn't had them in a while, so last night we made a pseudo-casserole with them in. Aside from the dumplings, everything else was just stuff we already had in, so I'll try and detail the things I think were important in the recipe as opposed to those we added in because we had things or had to replace for stuff we didn't. Quantities will be vague, alter to taste and available ingredients.
Base:
- Half a bag of pork dumplings. Not sure quite how many this was (it fed 3), and these were ones with chives.
- 3 peppers, cut into eighths. Quarter them, then chop the quarters in half.
Sauce:
- 1 carton chopped tomatoes. Tesco is doing these for 59p each and then buy-1-get-2-free, so we've got a lot of these in right now.
- Two stock cubes. We used one beef and one chicken, mainly because we only had one beef left :-(
- ~1.5 pints of boiling water
- Herbs and other flavourings to taste. We added some garlic oil (made couple of days earlier from excess garlic and olive oil), soy sauce, rosemary, and a decent quantity of red wine.
Find an oven-suitable dish, fill with base components. Mix all the sauce components together, cover base components. We made the first pint of sauce, figured it wasn't enough, and made up another 1/2 pint from water, soy sauce and red wine. It should be fairly liquid as quite a bit will boil off. Make sure the dumplings are all covered, as otherwise they'll dry up, but the peppers can stick out. Cook for ~30 mins at about 200 C (this is particularly vague, as our oven is somewhat overspec'ed and tends to cook stuff far more rapidly than expected. Short version: keep an eye on it).
This worked very well, and fed three rather hungry people. Red wine + tomato + stock = tasty. Next time, I'd like to try it either with butternut squash cubes or aubergine cubes instead of peppers.
My household does a fair amount of cooking. Admittedly most of that tends to be Alan, but that's mostly because he gets enthusiastic about it, and also because he tends to be home first (working 10 minutes up the road will do that). Last night was a bit of an exception, with me at least having the idea for what to cook, but then both of us cooking together.
A while back, Alan made casserole, and there was a whole bunch of it leftover, but mostly juices and less content, so I got some of the pork dumplings from the local chinese supermarket and added them in, and it worked pretty well. We hadn't had them in a while, so last night we made a pseudo-casserole with them in. Aside from the dumplings, everything else was just stuff we already had in, so I'll try and detail the things I think were important in the recipe as opposed to those we added in because we had things or had to replace for stuff we didn't. Quantities will be vague, alter to taste and available ingredients.
Base:
- Half a bag of pork dumplings. Not sure quite how many this was (it fed 3), and these were ones with chives.
- 3 peppers, cut into eighths. Quarter them, then chop the quarters in half.
Sauce:
- 1 carton chopped tomatoes. Tesco is doing these for 59p each and then buy-1-get-2-free, so we've got a lot of these in right now.
- Two stock cubes. We used one beef and one chicken, mainly because we only had one beef left :-(
- ~1.5 pints of boiling water
- Herbs and other flavourings to taste. We added some garlic oil (made couple of days earlier from excess garlic and olive oil), soy sauce, rosemary, and a decent quantity of red wine.
Find an oven-suitable dish, fill with base components. Mix all the sauce components together, cover base components. We made the first pint of sauce, figured it wasn't enough, and made up another 1/2 pint from water, soy sauce and red wine. It should be fairly liquid as quite a bit will boil off. Make sure the dumplings are all covered, as otherwise they'll dry up, but the peppers can stick out. Cook for ~30 mins at about 200 C (this is particularly vague, as our oven is somewhat overspec'ed and tends to cook stuff far more rapidly than expected. Short version: keep an eye on it).
This worked very well, and fed three rather hungry people. Red wine + tomato + stock = tasty. Next time, I'd like to try it either with butternut squash cubes or aubergine cubes instead of peppers.