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Home Cooked Sauces are Simple and Tasty

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I’ve always liked adding a bit of sauce to meat and poultry. A bit of sauce can make a relatively bland dish much tastier and interesting. However up until recently I wouldn’t have bothered making a lot of the sauces from scratch when I can buy them readymade in the shop. But I discovered that not only are these sauces quite easy to make, but they’re also a hell of a lot nicer than anything you can get in a shop. Ok, that last bit was pretty obvious!

So far this week I’ve made both a mushroom sauce and a peppercorn sauce. I used both of them with steak served with a bit of vegetable on the side.

The peppercorn sauce I made last night, however, is something I’m particularly happy with. I’ve always loved pepper sauce and I’ve tried just about every instant and packaged pepper sauce that you can get in both the Irish market and further afield.

It turns out that making a peppercorn sauce is actually quite easy and doesn’t use weird or exotic ingredients. I made it last night for the first time, but I’m confident I’ll be making it more often in the future, as it turned out to be so easy and so incredibly tasty!

Peppercorn sauce
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Peppercorn Sauce

A peppercorn based sauce that goes well with steak or chicken. The peppercorns will give it quite a bit of bite

Course Sauce
Cuisine French
Keyword chicken, pepper, peppercorn, sauce, steak
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 10 minutes
Total Time 15 minutes
Servings 2

Ingredients

  • 2 -3 tbsp Peppercorns Black peppercorns are readily available in most supermarkets. Mixed ones would add a more interesting flavour if they were available
  • 1 Shallot
  • 100 ml Brandy if you don't have brandy a similarly strong alcohol would work. I used Calvados
  • 50 ml cream
  • salt & pepper to taste
  • 50 g Butter
  • 50 ml stock beef stock or vegetable stock. I used 50 ml taken from a mug of stock I made using a single stock cube

Instructions

  1. Crush the peppercorns using a mortar and pestle. Alternatively you could use a rolling pin or an empty wine bottle or jar.

  2. In a iron skillet or frying pan melt the butter on a fairly high flame.

  3. Sauté the chopped shallot until it's soft

  4. Add the peppercorns and brandy and let it reduce for a minute or two. Make sure to keep stirring the ingredients

  5. Add the stock and let it reduce for a minute, while stirring it.

  6. Finally add the cream and mix it well. Do not let it boil, but ensure that it is heated thoroughly.

  7. Serve!

Recipe Notes

The quantities provided will serve 1 or 2 people, so you can simply multiply the quantities for a larger group. 

As a small update ..

I’ve since made this sauce again. In terms of quantities, if you want to double the amount of sauce you probably don’t really need to double the quantity of peppercorns that you’re using. If you increase the amount of stock and the amount of cream you can make the sauce go further without losing too much of the bite.

Misbehaving While on Holidays

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I travel quite a lot throughout the year. Sticking to a diet of any kind when you’re travelling can be a bit of a challenge, but it’s not impossible. It just requires a concerted effort at times and you need to simply avoid certain types of food. Of course the type of diet you’re following will have an impact on how hard (or easy) sticking to the regime is.

The diet I’ve been on for the better part of a year now is basically “low carb”, so that means in reality that I avoid:

  • potatoes
  • rice
  • pasta
  • bread
  • pizza
  • anything with sugar
  • sugar
  • sweet things of any kind (unless they’ve been made following keto style recipes)
  • beer

When travelling in most parts of the world it’s not that hard to navigate a menu and not go hungry. Most restaurants are happy to swap out fries for either vegetables or a salad, for example, so as long as you haven’t been dragged to a pizzeria you can get around the menu and still stick fairly closely to your diet.

I have always allowed myself alcohol, though I switched from beer to other things. So instead of drinking beer I’ve taken to gin and tonic or Moscow mules.

However for the last week or so I was on holiday in Peru. While I did try to stick to my diet initially I realised fairly quickly that it was going to be either impossible or just miserable.

Why?

Well Peruvian cuisine is all about potatoes. They pride themselves on the large variety that they have, so most dishes are served with some form of potato. So the diet kind of went out the window for most of the week. The only potential saving grace is that I walked quite a lot and also Peruvians use very good fresh ingredients, so my misbehaviour could have been a lot worse.

causa norteña - seafood with potatoes and onion in a rich sauce

Peru is also home to pisco, which is a bit like grappa. The pisco sour is available in just about every single bar and restaurant and it is wonderfully decadent. It’s also carb rich!

pisco sour

Today I’m heading home and I know I need to go “cold turkey” pretty much immediately. I am dreading going anywhere near the scales, though I know I’ll have to weigh myself at some point in the next day or two. What worries me is that I know I’ll have put on weight over the last week or so, but I’ve no idea how much. Putting weight on is easy. Losing it again is a LOT harder!

Jazzing up Dinner With Cooking Experiments

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While I enjoy cooking I’ll be one of the first to admit that I avoid complicated recipes. If it involves magical incantations it’s not going on the menu. If it involves ingredients I can’t get locally or online then it’s off the menu.

Recently, however, I’ve been trying to get myself out of my “comfort zone” a little by trying something different most evenings. Over the past couple of weeks those experiments have been partially successful and partially not so successful. I haven’t had any complete failures, as that would have meant ending up without anything edible!

One of the local supermarkets has been offering very cheap chicken thighs, so I ended up having chicken several nights in a row. However after a few days I had to vary it a little, so I switched to beef then lamb. I also generally swap specific types of stock or broth for a vegetable stock which I always have some of in my kitchen cupboard. Similarly I’ll often use frozen spinach instead of fresh as it’s nearly always on hand in the freezer. If a recipe only calls for one or two cloves of garlic I’ll probably double the quantities.

So what did I try cooking?

I tried a number of different recipes over the course of the last week or so:

One of the things I’ve found very handy is cooking in cast iron cookware that you can take straight from the ring to the oven without having to mess around. Of course cleaning it afterwards can be a pain, but so be it.

Other recipes I tried:

The key thing for me was finding “interesting” recipes that made dinner that little bit more adventurous, but without getting stuck dealing with overly complicated instructions or impossible to find ingredients.

Here are a few photos of the various dishes I’ve made over the last while:

Cooking is fun 🙂

Low Carb Burger in Central London

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Back in January I posted about having a low carb burger in LA. This weekend I’m in London, which, while packed to the gills with restaurants, probably isn’t famous either for burgers or for low carb options.

A couple of minutes walk away from Leicester Square I came across Byron. They’re a burger restaurant chain that offers a very interesting take on the burger. I’ll admit I’d never heard of them, but after checking out their menu I thought I’d give them a go. Why? Because they offer a “skinny burger”, which is the burger served with salad on the side, instead of in a bun.

Low carb burger ie. without any bread in central London

Overall it was excellent, though their salad dressing wasn’t exactly “amazing”.

Service was fast and friendly and the setting was nice and relaxed. The other plus was that there wasn’t a massive queue to get in and get a table, while a lot of places around Leicester Square proper had massive lines.

Why do I care?

Well I enjoy eating out when I’m travelling and I like to be able to order directly off the menu. I don’t like having to negotiate with a restaurant’s waiting staff in order to get a version of a meal that will work for my diet.

So any burger joint that offers a bread free burger straight off the menu is, in my mind, winning 🙂

 

More Obligatory Clothes Shopping

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Close up of old English dictionary page with word baggy.

I’ve never really liked tight fitting clothes – even when I was a lot slimmer I generally preferred to go for clothing that gave me freedom of movement. Basically I don’t like feeling that I’m stuck in a straitjacket!

But there’s a big difference between “loose” and so “baggy” that you nearly break your neck. And that’s where I ended up last week. While navigating Dublin Airport on the way to get a flight I found that my previously comfy trousers had become so loose that they were a liability. Fortunately I didn’t break my neck and the belt I was wearing did its job, but it wasn’t pleasant. And when you’re travelling you want to be comfortable.

So yet again I found myself heading into my “go to” clothes shop in the centre of Carlow town and buying a couple of more pairs of trousers. I bought a couple of pairs back in January before heading to the US on a business trip, but even those trousers are now a little bit too loose around the waist. Yes, that’s a good thing and overall I’m delighted. However it’s a tad confusing when you look at the numbers on the scale and they still aren’t moving much. Sure, they move, but we’re talking about fluctuations in both directions of less than a kilo over the past couple of months.

I also invested in a slightly smaller belt. When your belt is so loose that it’s become an ornament it’s time to get a smaller one. Again this is a very positive thing and I’m not complaining.

When you’re on a diet you often find yourself focussing on specific metrics and the most obvious one is weight. But that’s often a bad idea. It’s over simplistic. Losing weight and changing your diet will have an impact on your overall “form”. In my case it’s most noticeable in my waist and, to a lesser degree, in my face. As I’ve lost “weight” skin has tightened up and my shape has changed (a bit).

Now to work on moving the needle on the scales again!

 

Save Time by Prepping Your Sous-Vide and Freezing it

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While I’ll freely admit that I have become quite addicted to cooking with my sous-vide, it’s not the only way I have for cooking food. The novelty of sous-vide has worn off to a degree, so now it’s a key part of my cooking, but it isn’t the only way I’ll cook!

I like getting meat from a butcher instead of a supermarket. There are a number of reasons for this, but a very good one is that the overall quality of the meat is usually better when you go to a local butcher. You’re also supporting a local small business instead of a faceless multinational supermarket chain!

My local butcher often offers “deals” where it works out to be more economical to buy more meat in one go than you’d normally use. I don’t like buying too much at one go, as it’ll go off before I get to use it and I don’t like freezing meat. One of the reasons I disliked freezing meat was that in order to cook it you had to first defrost it, then prep and cook it. So if you wanted to eat the chicken breast you froze last week you’d need to take it out of the freezer in the morning and hope it’d have thawed enough by the time you got home from the office.

With sous-vide cooking, however, you can make this process a hell of a lot simpler. Take chicken breast for example. You’ll often get several on special at the butcher or maybe your local supermarket is doing an offer on a tray. It’s more than one person or two are going to eat, so you’d normally either skip the offer or freeze half the pack. With the sous-vide you can cut that down to something a lot saner using some vacuum bags and a bit of seasoning.

Simply prep the chicken breast as you would if you were going to put it in the sous-vide ie. add some seasoning and then pack portions into the airtight vacuum bags. They don’t need to be anything particularly fancy – I’ve been using some of the freezer bags that you can get in most shops in packs of 20 or more. Pop the portions into the freezer.

Now when you want to cook some chicken breast just do it as you would normally in the sous-vide and simply add an hour to the cooking time.

Simple and effective!

Hitting a Weight Loss Plateau

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A street sign with a "Weight Loss" theme

Dieting and losing weight is wonderful and very satisfying when you see results. You know, when you weigh yourself and that number on the scale keeps getting smaller and smaller, lower and lower. It’s a very satisfying sensation and it really helps to boost your morale and encourages you to keep going.

It’s a different matter, however, when the number on the scale stops moving or starts to gently edge its way back in the other direction.

That’s kind of where I’ve been at for the last couple of weeks.

I hit a very satisfying “low” in January, but since then it’s been downhill (or uphill, depending on how you want to view things).

I haven’t changed my eating patterns radically. Breakfast is usually eggs and bacon, unless I’m travelling when I’ll just go with whatever is low carb and convenient.

Lunch at the office is still grilled chicken and salad. It might sound boring, but it’s simple and I like it.

Dinners vary, though, as I’ve mentioned I’ve been doing a lot of cooking in the sous-vide over the last few weeks.

No matter what way I look at things, however, I know that I haven’t drastically increased my carb intake yet I’m not seeing as much weight loss as before.

That is incredibly annoying.

It’s disheartening.

However I’m not going to succumb to temptation or have a minor tantrum and simply give up.

No. I won’t do that.

It’s simply not worth it.

I wish I had some sage advice to offer but I don’t. All I know is that I’ve hit a bit of a plateau which is both annoying and a little depressing. I won’t let it stop me and I will continue to do what I’ve been doing for the last few months. However it’s harder when you aren’t seeing the satisfying movement on the weighing scales!