Recreate a Meal From Your Childhood

When I was growing up we didn't have a lot of money, my parents had a lot of bad luck and things were a bit tight. But it never felt like it, Mam worked really hard to make sure we were fed. She was a brilliant cook and her cakes were out of this world, she made fresh scones and we had good, solid, thoroughly northern pastry based meals.

That's not to say she didn't have a much larger repertoire but dad liked stodge. And growing up so did I. One of my favourite things was steak and kidney stew with dumplings. She made fabulous dumplings.

Now, this is not remotely vegan and there's something about offal that looking back I don't really miss but warm, beefy stew is definitely something I want to eat regularly. So, I needed to do a little work to recreate her stew in an appealing way. The first and most obvious choice was mushrooms, when quartered chestnut mushrooms look like kidneys but taste much nicer. Then I decided that TVP chunks would work nicely for the cheap stewing steak she used to use.

I threw together a nice rich stock, a bit of "beef" stock, some marmite, soy sauce and miso and it was dark and luscious. I used that to re hydrate the TVP and strained it off to use in the stew. Then I fried a large onion til brown and soft before adding my mushrooms and TVP chunks.

Into that went a little corn flour and then my strained stock and I left that simmering away nicely. I don't have the first clue how to make dumplings with suet, not even the vegetable based stuff so I decided to use the recipe from Isa Does It from the rosemary stew and added thyme rather than rosemary.

In went the dumplings and I whipped up some broccoli mashed potatoes and some grated carrot with black pepper. I thought I did a bloody good job replicating the taste and Mam was very impressed by the dumplings so I'm more than happy with that

Stew however is not pretty, even with lovely orange veg.