For the Bubble and squeak topping: Potatoes, swede, carrots, black pepper, cabbage, salt, grated cheese, herbs.
I use left overs or make a big pan for more to save as this makes the base for loads of other dishes.
1) boil the potatoes and in a separate pans or steamer, the swede and carrots and the cabbage until tender. 2) mash the root veg with the potatoes and stir in the cabbage. 3) add a spoon of cooking water if you need it softer, season to taste
For the minced beef filling: 1 large pack lean minced beef Two beef stock cubes 2 onions Dried mixed herbs Black pepper Gravy granules Boiling water Cooked Peas & carrots (tinned, frozen or left over work great)
1) spray a pan with a little oil and fry the onions until brown, add the beef, cook until brown 2) crumble in the stock cubes 3) make up the gravy and add to the pan 4) stir in the peas and carrots. 5) place in the base of a large casserole dish 6) cover with the bubble and squeak topping and a little grated cheese. 7) bake until golden
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This looks quite good but, just an observation in all this....remember that you're talking to an American audience, so when you talk about anything like something "minced" or whatever, if you're using general terms originating from UK.....they may not translate [i]quite[/i] as well here across the pond. By example, I don't bake based on a gas mark rating on a stove, nor by celsius etc.
@Patientlywaiting This is sort of funny because, I'd done my first "toad in the hole" but only after converting british measure to U.S. measurement. So....anything you offer in terms of time in an oven where, you would state a certain gas mark, that would make no sense in America. If one is bent on converting, they will pose the question on the internet.....I've done that personally. I'm wondering if your "minced" might be out cooked hamburg? I'm not sure on this one. I think I may not be alone.
Modern cookery books published here use metric units but most have conversion tables to guide you. Similarly, measuring-jugs normally have three scales: pint, fluid-ounce and litre units.
The instructions on purchased, part-cooked foods like ready-meals and pies, usually show the temperatures in ºC for electric plain and fan ovens, and in Gas Mark number.
My own kitchen scales use loose lb and oz weights so I have to use the tables to convert from recipes' metric to avoirdupois units. I could quite easily make gramme-multiple weights but I've enough things to do as it is!
If you do a lot of cooking it is worth making printed temperature and weight conversion-tables to keep in the kitchen as a lot quicker than keep looking them up on the Internet. The main ingredients are often in simple weight proportions so once you've established the largest one, you can weigh the others by simple fractions of that weight.
(Our Mam used to weigh sponge-cake ingredients against the unbroken eggs!)
'
A burger is made from minced meat, but an uncooked burger is not the same as minced meat. The burger is mince plus ingredients such as seasoning, binders and thickeners. Mince is that meat alone.
"Ready-meal" manufacturers tend to use coy terms like "textured protein" in their ingredients list!
@ArishMell @Freeranger "mince" is just meat that's passed through a mincer, I'm not sure if it's called ground beef elsewhere. It's what I use to make Bolognese and burgers but I've also made the above recipe with stewed meat if I have that instead.
I have a chopping board that hangs in my kitchen with all the conversions burnt in by pyrography but usually I just cook by sight and taste.
@Patientlywaiting @Freeranger Ah - cooking by skill and experience. I still have to follow the instructions!
Just to make the terminology more fun, I don't know if there is an American equivalent but in Britain we have[i] mince[/i] and [i]mincemeat[/i]; both completely different!
[i]Mince[/i] is minc[i]ed[/i] meat as we know "meat" nowadays (animal tissue).
[i]Mincemeat[/i] has no such meat in it! It is a very sweet, syrupy preserve of dried fruits (raisins, chopped apple etc.), candied peel, and the like. This is usually used as a filling in pastry, making the[i] mince pies[/i] particularly popular over Christmas.
They go back to Mediaeval to Tudor times when there was a much smaller range of foods available, and fruit and vegetables were seasonal. Without refridgeration, protecting any food from going off was difficult though the very wealthy sometimes had "ice houses", as effective cold stores. So cooks had to be inventive, develop various preserving techniques like salting and smoking, and waste as little as possible. The word [i]meat[/i] was often used generically, for all foods; and the original [i] mince pies[/i] were commonly savoury, with many ingredients including beef, mutton, pork or game such as rabbit.
[An ice-house was a stone or brick shed sunken into the ground, with a drain in the floor. The foodstuffs it stored were stacked on ice collected from natural water surfaces in Winter, and could be further insulated with straw.]
