Thai pork patties

I've never made pork burgers before so I decided to give it a try and  quite liked the idea of thai flavours, but I didn't have quite all the ingredients. Here is the original recipe, as usual I changed some things which to almost make a new recipe as you'll see below.

Ingredients that I used for the patties:
4 lemon grass stalks\ chopped
2 cloves of crushed garlic
500g pork mince
1 onion, chopped
1 tsp of crushed coriander
A handful of parsley
1tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp sugar

Other ingredients you may need:
Lettuce
Cheese
Tomato
Burger rolls
Gherkins 
Tomato sauce

Method:
Mix all the ingredients except for the oil and sugar.
Form 8 patties. 
Mix the oil & sugar and baste the patties.
Grill. Members of my family were concerned about only putting pork under the grill for only ten minutes, so we did 15 - 20 minutes at 200'C which was also alright - they weren't dried out or anything. 
Put your patties in a burger bun with some tomato, lettuce, cheese and serve with sweet potato chips and tomato sauce.

Guaca mole

You might have noticed that if you mash an avocado and add salt and pepper you have a pretty good mole. Then you need to add some lemon or lime juice to stop it from browning. And that would be good and you'd be done.

But what if you wanted to make a really good guacamole, how would you do it? Well, this is my suggestion:

Ingredients:
1 ripe avo
Lemon or lime juice
1/2 red pepper
1/2 tomato
1 red or green chilli (optional)
1 cloves of crushed garlic
1 tbsp of sour cream (or greek yoghurt if you must)
1 rasher of bacon
Tabasco sauce
A few stalks of dhania / coriander
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:
Fry the bacon until crispy and then remove it from the pan and chop it up into tiny bits.
Finely chop your chilli, tomato & red pepper and fry that in the bacon pan. Afterwards you can also fry the garlic a little bit.
Mash your peeled avocado and mix in some lime juice to preserve the green. Add in the sour cream and the bacon pieces. Add the tomato, chilli and red pepper. Tabasco can be added just for the flavour if you already used a hot chilli.
Salt and pepper can add a great dimension, so do add that as well.

Go and enjoy that with some crumbed fish or a burger.

Fact: Avocados are also called "alligator pears" and they are classified as berries.

Sweet Potato Chips

Or if you want to be, like, American, just call them "fries". But I refuse (I'm not American).

If you haven't made vegetable chips before, now's a good time to start. It's quite simple and not too time consuming. It's worth the bit of effort, definitely. You can flavour them however you want which means that each time you make them, you can add a new twist. My ingredient list is completely variable, except for the potatoes, salt, pepper and the oil.

Ingredients:
2 medium / small sweet potatoes
Olive oil to coat
1 tsp pepper
A sprinkle of salt
1 tsp dhania / coriander powdered
1 tsp jeera / cumin whole or powdered
1/2 tsp chilli flakes

Method:
Chop the sweet potatoes into any size from 1/2 - 1 cm wide with a depth of up to 2cm - depending on how crunchy you want them. Leave the skin on for a more chewy effect, but wash them well if you are leaving the skin on - perhaps with a vegetable brush if you have one.

Toss all the ingredients with your chopped vegetables and coat with olive oil. Lay out your pieces on a baking tray without them touching if possible - if they touch don't worry, but they probably won't be as crunchy.

Bake at 200'C for 15 minutes, then check them, turn them if required and keep an eye on them until lightly browned.

Tip: The more even the width of your potatoes are, the less they taper at the ends of the slices, the less likely the tips will be to burn.

For supper tonight, I just made vegetable chips with carrots (I flavoured them with chilli, garlic and pepper - yum).

Pumpkin & Lamb Stew

Ingredients:
1/2 pumpkin, peeled and roughly chopped (ours weighed 3,2kg whole)
5 tomatoes, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 can kidney beans
1 can butter beans
200g stewing lamb
1 heaped tsp minced garlic
1 heaped tsp minced ginger

Spices
Grind the following into a powder in a spice grinder:
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp coriander 
1 tbsp fennel seeds
2 tsp cumin
2 star anise
1 chilli
1/2 quill of cinnamon

Method:
Fry the onion with some oil and when brown add the garlic, ginger, spices, and the meat to brown. Just cover with boiling water. Then add the tomatoes and simmer for 40 minutes until the meat (if there is some of the stewing bones) is soft. 

Add the beans and pumpkin and leave the lid on to steam the pumpkin that is not covered with water / sauce. Cook this for about a half an hour, or until the pumpkin is cooked through.

Enjoy hot, topped with coriander and a dollop of creamy Bulgarian yoghurt.


Next time we're going to try a pumpkin dish with pork, bacon, apples and chilli.

Garden Update

I might have mentioned that we have a tiny herb garden on our balcony- which grows more and more overcrowded as time goes by...

Below are some tiny peppers that I planted from regular green and red pepper seeds gathered from peppers bought from the shop. My husband and my theory is that the seeds are genetically modified to last only a certain amount of harvests - there's not much chance of growing perfectly normal peppers from the seeds of peppers found in the shops.


Recently I had a brilliant thought > it tasted quiet brilliant too: frying red peppers with balsamic vinegar and chilli. They were extra sweet and super tasty. Other ideas are red peppers and red wine (haven't tried that yet) or roasting red peppers with baby tomatoes and whole cloves of garlic which makes a delciously sticky and tasty mess (according to my friend Charlene > I'm yet to try this as our oven is rather out of action lately).



Speaking of Charlene, I got her a Pineapple Sage for her birthday and recently got myself one too. They make beautiful cherise/red flowers and the leaves smell like pineapple even though they're a type of sage. The apparently come from around Mexico and the leaves are edible (in a fruit salad for example, although they don't taste like pineapple!).


I recently got a red/black basil from the same Charlene, and they are, as we discovered more hardy than the green type. She put some lovely nut shells in the pot on top of the soil. They seem so useful, being so sturdy and strong.



Below you can see that our latest coriander harvest is ready. What I like about coriander as a plant is that you can use the shrubby leaves, and the ones that get all long and straggely can also be used later on when they make those lovely white flowers and seeds!

I've never managed to keep coriander alive for long, as pruning it seems counter intuitive, although, I always end up replanting the seeds and never have a shortage of them as planting one seed can produce many times more seeds.



For fun, I plant beans now and again, but it's never really enough to use in a dish (when I have a garden I will plough through it and turn it into a mini-farm, perhaps then I will have enough beans to make a tasty chili). Below you can see the sugar bean pod. I just leave it on the plant until it's dry and then end up planting it again, most often. The colour of the pod is quite dramatic and interesting though - from far away it could double as a flower.




We bought a granadilla plant last year and at first it grew very well and then slowed to almost a complete holt after bearing two beautiful flowers and one small granadilla. I was pleased to see that it's starting to grow some new tiny leaves!



And at last! Our creeping thyme plant has decided to flower! I hope the camomile will soon follow...


If it does decide to flower, I'll post a picture!

red pepper and tomatoe cous cous

(Serves 3)
Fry half a red onion with a bit of fresh basil, a tspn of chilli paste and some baby tomatoes (careful not to pop them) and a big red pepper.
Add this to the cous cous (250g raw) once both look cooked and then mix it all together.
Add some olive oil and balsamic vinegar and top with crumbed feta and fresh basil.
For extra flavour, some garlic, cumin and coriander would go well frying with the tomatoes. To add bulk, add a can of chickpeas or kidney beans.