Olive Bread

I can count the number of times that I've baked bread on one hand. I'm looking forward to baking new and exciting breads with my new Christmas present (a bread machine). Recently, as photographed, I baked a bread that was half white and half brown (I ran out of white flour) with olive oil and pimento-stuffed olives. I added some thyme to it as well. It was great with extra olive oil and some balsamic vinegar.

 

Quick Chicken Soup

Sometimes after roasting chicken you're left with a sauce in the roasting pan that you can use to make a gravy with. Otherwise, you can use it as a stock to make a soup. Add some chopped potatoes, a carrot, parsley, cream, pepper and maybe a touch of tomato. All the other seasoning from your chicken roast will be in the stock so you won't even have to add salt. Boil it for a few minutes and serve with fresh bread.

Butternut Fritters

I tried to make pumpkin fritters with roasted butternut. It was a taste fail, but they still look kind of good, right? 

If you've got a good pumpkin fritter recipe to share with me, please leave it in the comments below.

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.

Chicken and Mushroom Pasta (with some avocado)

This is more of a supper-inspiration post:

Sautéd mushrooms and fried chicken mixed into some al dente penne makes a great meal. Since it's still avo season, add some chopped pieces of that and sprinkle over some black pepper and blue cheese for a kick.

Herman's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Around here these cookies, or biscuits of you will, have quite a delicious reputation. Our family friends, the Herman's, generously shared the recipe with me a bunch of years ago, and they stand the test of time and are still a firm favourite today. 

Ingredients: 
500g butter
2 cup treacle sugar
1 1/2 cups white sugar
3 free range eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
6 cups of flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
300g dark chocolate

Method:
1. Beat the butter into the sugar until it's creamy.
2. Add the eggs one at a time and beat them in.
3. Add the vanilla and beat that in.
4. Use another bowl for mixing the dry ingredients: sieve the flour, salt and bicarb.
5. Add the dry ingredients to the wet.
6. Mix in the chocolate (chopped into bits) and then roll the dough into 3cm wide balls.
7. I use a non-stick baking tray to put the dough onto. The cookies grow quite a lot in the oven, so I usually can only fit about 12 cookies on one baking tray.
8. Bake at 180'C for 20 minutes. If your oven is hotter at the back, be sure to turn the tray so that the biscuits closer to the element don't burn at the bottom.


Notes:
Sometimes I only use regular sugar if I don't have treacle sugar at hand.
I also like to divide the dough into thirds and then flavour each third differently. Flavours I've tried before include adding a little cocoa powder, some nuts, or cocoa powder and chilli, or just plain cardamom seeds with out any chocolate.

Miso Soup

I love miso and it's so healthy and easy to make. 

Just cut up some vegetables, like carrots and mushrooms and so on. Boil them for a few minutes in some water. Towards the end of cooking, turn off the heat and dissolve in some miso paste. You can serve it with rice but I don't think you're really supposed to, Anyway, here's a photo:

For more details, see this post.

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.

Cooking Quinces

Apparently quince isn't as much of a popular fruit as it once was. One of the reasons could be that they are too sour and hard to eat raw and so need to be cooked. Their toughness also makes them difficult to prepare.

The fruit are beautiful and rather like really big, hard pears, but a bit more apple shaped.

You will need a bug knife and some good strength to cut through them.

Once they have been cut into quarters or eighths you will need to take the seeds out. It's not a good idea to eat many of the seeds because they can turn into something horrid in your stomach. 

Then you can peel them.

And, because they turn brown easily like most fruit, you can keep them in some water until you are ready to cook them. 

We cooked our quinces in a pressure cooker with some sugary water. As they cook, they turn a lovely guava colour, all on their own! 

The pressure cooker was possibly not the best way of doing things as the quince ended up losing it's shape quite a lot. It was nice and soft though. We ate it with custard.

The best part was the sugary liquid left in the pressure cooker which we strained out and kept as a juice. It was really, really good. 

If you are dedicated, or bored, you could also make some beautiful quince jelly.

Roasted Shallots

Purple, raw shallots

This is the first time we've eaten shallots. We don't get them around here so often. So, when I saw them, I just got them (for my husband).

He cooked them. He said they're supposed to taste a bit like garlic, but they were mostly just like really tasty onions.

He used red wine vinegar and sugar instead of balsamic. He also used butter. This recipe says olive oil so I'm not sure if it's exactly the same one, but here it is anyway.

Golden shallots, yum.

 Black and white shallots.

Avocado, the friend of Pasta

Oh, this poor, poor blog! I have dreams, aspirations and so many good intentions of making this blog something compatible with the Food Fox. You laugh, mock, and think I can't hear you. 

I imagine myself carefully styling a dish and moving a colourful serviette just the right amount of millimeters and getting the focus on just the right glossy part of my carefully dished up meal in a hand-made ceramic bowl. That's not real life. Well, not at the moment. Various choices in life have left me spending my time elsewhere and the only space to create good-enough-to-pass-and-look-edible photos, is in my mind. In real life, I make something different for breakfast, lunch and supper almost everyday (if I cook) or my husband does and then in a moment of triumph and finality, I gobble down what I have just cooked, famished and tired. 

The moral of this short story is that people with nice food blogs do not cook on an empty stomach. Maybe one day I will have the time and discipline to do that. Here's to good intentions.

Guacamole can go on a pasta because it can go on a pizza. Here's how:

Serves 3

Ingredients:
For the guacamole
1 finely chopped tomato
1 finely chopped red pepper
1 finely chopped clove of garlic
1 mashed ripe avocado
1 tsp chipotle Tabasco
Juice of one lemon
Salt
Pepper

For the pasta sauce
(200g cooked spaghetti or whichever pasta you like)
2 chicken breasts
A sprinkle of dried chilli
A sprinkle of dried herbs
1/2 tub of crème fraîche
Salt
Pepper

Method:
Fry the tomato, red pepper & garlic with some olive oil until soft and saucy. Add a touch of water if necessary to de-glaze the pan. Take that out of the pan & let it cool.
Mash the avo with the lemon juice and Tabasco sauce. Season with salt & pepper until it's tasty enough.
Fry the chicken breasts with the salt, pepper, herbs and chilli. Once cooked, chop them up into bite-sized pieces and mix in the crème fraîche. You can use Greek yoghurt as well I would think. It's definitely cheaper, but also less cheesy.
Now that the tomato and red pepper is cool, add it to the guacamole. If it's too hot it could cook your avo and make it go a strange colour or make it taste bitter (depending on the variety) as it could get cooked by the heat.

Serve your pasta, layer the chicken pieces over it and top with the guacamole! 

Gazpacho

I haven't tried adding bread to gaspacho before, but onions I have, and I can tell you: it didn't taste good. Both are more or less traditional ingredients for this chilled, refreshing Spanish soup. These days I just include generally green salad ingredients.

Ingredients:

6 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped

1/2 cucumber, chopped

1 tsp crushed garlic

1 red bell pepper, chopped

1/4 cup olive oil

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

Salt & pepper to taste

Method:

Get your blender out. Blend. Serve chilled with parsley leaves and a good bread. Enjoy thoroughly and pretend you are in a Spanish landscape painting.

Get some insight:

Apparently gaspacho, the food of shepards and peasant of old, even goes back to Roman times in a very basic form: bread, water, vinegar, oil and salt. That sounds more like a sauce. Today there are quite a few variations from that root. When we were in Spain we bought some of the red variety, which is more well known, in a one liter carton and drank it just like that for lunch. We should have kept an eye out for the cousins: green and white.

While the red variety is tomato based, white ones can contain nuts and dried fruits and the green ones are basically the same as the white but contain spices that make them colourful. Something new to try! Nuts in a soup!

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).

Sweet Tomato Soup

Unfortunately my memory on how I made this is now quite rusty, having been starved of the Internet at home for more than a month, I'm only getting back to updates now.

Ingredients (as I remember)
1 onion, roughly chopped
1kg tomatoes halved
5 cloves of garlic
1 red pepper, roughly chopped
Olive oil
Honey 
Some milk
Basil
Pickled jalapenos

Method:
Roast the onion, tomatoes, garlic and pepper drizzled with a generous tablespoon of honey and some olive oil until soft (just over an hour at 180 degrees Celsius). Blend the vegetables with some milk to make it creamier and add some salt and pepper if required.

Tear up a handful of basil leaves and stir them in. Serve chilled and garnish with some basil leaves and pickled jalapenos for some spice. A massive blob of sour cream would have been the ideal addition.

Chilli Con Carne

So, I thought I was making Bolognese Sauce - embarrassingly  it turned out that what I really was in the mood for was Chilli Con Carne!

Serves 6

Ingredients

1 chopped onion

1 chopped red pepper

2 medium-hot chillis

3 cloves of crushed garlic 

1 tsp of dried origanum

1 tsp of dried basil

2 tspn of dried coriander, powdered

1 tspn of cumin

A good pinch of salt

3 tsp of pepper

500g lean free range beef mince

400g can of tomatoes, puréed

400g can of Rhodes Mexican Salsa

400g can of kidney beans

400g can of butter beans

A good glug of red wine (dry Shiraz/ Merlot)

1 cup of water

Method:

Fry the onion and when translucent, add the mince.

Throw in the red pepper, chilli, garlic and fry for 5 minutes with the herbs and spices.

Add in the drained beans, and cans of tomato and salsa. Stir around with the wine and water and leave to reduce for about an hour.

Use as an addition to any Mexican meal, or wraps, or even enjoy with pasta!

Moroccan Chicken with Lentils

At the moment we are trying to cut down on carbs, one of the yummiest and healthier ways to do that is to eat lots of lentils! So, I found a recipe and adapted it a bit.


Ingredients
2 tbsp oil
8 - 10 little skinless, boneless chicken thighs (or leave this out and keep it vegetarian)
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp ground coriander seeds
1 tbsp paprika
3 whole thai chillis 
1 large onion , finely sliced
1 cup dry split red lentils
400g can chopped tomato
1 tbsp tomato sauce / paste / puree
Some chicken stock
1 cinnamon stick (about 4 cm long)
100g whole dried apricots

Method:
Fry the onion, garlic and chicken in the oil and add the ground spices. After about 10 minutes of frying, the chicken should be cooked. Add the tomatoes and let it cook for another 15 minutes to combine the flavours.

In another pot, cook the lentils in some chicken stock (they need to be covered). Add the apricots and the chilies there too. Cooking lentils takes about 30 minutes. Once it was cooked, I let the stock reduce and thicken for a while. 

Mix it all together in a casserole dish and put it in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius for about a half an hour (this isn't a necessary step,but maybe it helps the flavours mix better).

Because if the large amount of lentils, you can eat it just like that, or you can have it with rice or bread.


A Note on Lentils:

Lentils have the third-highest level of protein, by weight of any legume or nut. So, lentils are a source of inexpensive protein and also of iron for vegetarians. They are also healthy because of the of the folate, vitamin B1, other minerals and fiber (consisting of 11% - 31% fiber depending on the colour - red is the least fibrous). 


They are mentioned many times in the Hebrew Bible, the first time being the time when Jacob purchases the birthright from Esau with stewed lentils (they are tasty indeed).

In Jewish mourning tradition lentils and eggs are considered as food for mourners because their round shape symbolising the life cycle from birth to death.

In Italy, eating lentils on New Year's Eve traditionally symbolizes the hope for a prosperous new year, most likely because of their round, coin-like form.


Original recipe:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1860/moroccanstyle-chicken-with-lentils

Simple Vanilla Cupakes

I'm going to try these today!

http://www.food.com/recipe/simple-vanilla-cupcakes-178370

Buttercream: 
1 Cup butter, 
3 cups icing sugar, 
1 tsp vanilla extract /  2 tsp essence 
Some milk / cream to make it nice and smooth

Roast Pumpkin & Aubergine Salad

Having limited ingredients in the house sometimes kind of encourages me to be more creative with food and putting things together that I would never have thought of otherwise. This is one of those surprising combinations.

Ingredients
1/2 half small pumpkin, peeled & chopped in chunks
2 big aubergines, chopped in chunks
handful of pumpkin seeds
2 little wheels of feta
olive oil
salt
herbes de provence
pepper

Method:
Lay out your pumpkin & aubergine in a baking dish - it's alright if it's not a single layer. Add some salt, a little pepper, a generous amount of herbes and some olive oil. Toss around & roast at 190 degreees celsius for 1.5 hours until soft.

When the veggies are looking a little wrinkly, you can take them out and toss them with the feta (crumbed) and the seeds. Add more olive oil if you like.

Green Creamy Soup

Hmm, this is really good: creamy, herby and very green.

Ingredients:
2 sweet potatoes, sliced
2 heads of broccoli, chopped
1 head of cauliflower, chopped
4 cloves of garlic
1 onion, chopped
1 tsp beef stock powder
2 tsp paprika
1 cup Greek / Bulgairan double cream yoghurt
3 twigs of thyme
3 twigs of rosemary

Method:
Fry the onion and paprika in a little olive oil. Once translucent, add the veg, stock, garlic and almost cover with boiling water. Boil until the water has reduced by about 2 thirds and then mash it a bit. Everything should be soft and mushy. Transport to the blender and blend. I had to do 3 batches of blending. Blend the last batch with your herbs- de-twigged and the yoghurt.

Mix it all up and enjoy, maybe with some crunchy croutons.

Sweet Potato Shepard's Pie

Serves 2 very hungry people

I made this the other day and it was so very tasty and so it's highly recommended. It's filling and tasty, and mostly healthy. The original recipe is from Good Food, and as I usually amend the recipes a bit depending on the state of my ingredients, or purse. So, here's my own version:

Ingredients:
250g beef mince
1 onion, chopped
1 leek, chopped
3 carrot, in rondels
2 cloves of chopped garlic
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp Marmite
1 cup dry lentils, cooked
3 medium-large sweet potatoes
Butter & milk for the sweet potato mash

Method:
Fry the onion & leek until translucent. Add the garlic, Marmite, Worcestershire & mince and fry until brown and almost crispy. Add the carrots and cook until soft. Add a little water if necessary. It should be a little bit saucy.

In the meantime boil the sweet potatoes. If you can cut them into 2cm slices they cook through quite fast. Drain & mash with butter & milk and a pinch of salt if you like.

And, then for the lentils: If you have a can or 2 you can use that, but if you are cooking dry lentils, it will take about 30 min. Put a cup of lentils into a pot with lots of boiling water. If you add a whole cup it will really make a lot of lentils but it will make your meal go further (my husband and I were particularly hungry this day and ate the entire pie in one night). Anyway  lentils are tasty and a healthy source of protein. But if you want less lentils to meat ratio, then use only half a cup.

Mix together the lentils and the vegetables and pour into a baking dish. Top with the mash & flatten. The butter in the mash is what should help it to brown and crisp a little bit under the grill. Grill for 10 min and enjoy hot!

Here is the original recipe: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1718633/sweet-potato-shepherds-pie

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.

Root Mash

This is a really simple and delicious side to a roast, or whatever you would normally eat mashed potatoes with, but much more exciting and healthy.


Serves 4 as a side dish


Ingredients:
5 medium potatoes
3 medium carrots
1 stalk of celery
1 medium onion
2 turnips
2 cloves of garlic, halved
2 tsp Dijon mustard
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp pepper
1 handful of finely chopped fresh parsley


Method:
If you feel like being fancy, you could make a rough mirepoix* by chopping your carrots into rondels** and slicing up the celery and frying that with the onion quartered. When the onion is translucent, add with the the potato, garlic and turnip to salted boiling water in a pot. Leave to simmer for 30 minutes until the vegetables are cooked. (Otherwise, you could just chop all the vegetables roughly and boil them all at once, altogether).


Drain the vegetables and then add the mustard, olive oil, pepper and fresh parley and mash it together until creamy.


Easy, healthy and delicious.


*mirepoix (pronounced "meerpwah"): the name for carrot, celery and onion chopped and used together for a base of a wide range of dishes.
*rondels: When you slice carrots at 90 degrees, they end up in little round circles, the word if from Old French, and also apparently Middle English. It's a very descriptive word. I like it.

Creamy Lentils

I pretty much just made this up right now and now I'm eating it and blogging about it at the same time so that I don't forget what I did.


Serves 2


Ingredients:
1 large carrot, chopped
2 peppers, chopped
5 tomatoes chopped / 440g can
2 tsp vegetable stock powder
2 tsp herbes de provence
1 bay leaf
1 cup water
1 tsp crushed garlic
1 cup dry, brown lentils
white sauce (1/2 c milk, 2 tbsp butter, 1 tsp flour)
1/2 block feta cheese
black pepper


Method:
Throw all herbs, garlic and vegetables in the pot with the dry lentils, water and stock. Boil for 45min until the lentils are soft. I think that the acid in the tomatoes and the salt in the stock makes them take longer to cook  - usually they take about 30 min.


Make some white sauce with about half a cup of milk, 2 tbsp butter and then gradually add in the flour and stir quickly to prevent lumps on a medium heat. As the butter melts, and the flour cooks, the sauce will thicken. Let it boil for 5 min, stirring. Honestly, I am not sure about the quantities, I have never made white sauce from a recipe, I just throw stuff together and stir it until it's thickened. Sometimes I like to stir in black pepper as well.


Serve white sauce on top of the lentils and top with crumbed feta. Enjoy with some toasted pieces of baguette.

Simple Borscht

As you may know, I don't like a lot of fuss when it comes to recipes- they shouldn't take days to prepare unless you are making something pretentious, ridiculous, and most likely Parisian. Most of the time, I don't think that the taste is much affected if it takes you 2 hours to cook instead of 2 days. This recipe I amended to be quick and easy. It is surprisingly tasty and one of my winter favourites.

Boscht, or Bortsch, is eaten from the Ukraine to Poland and Russia and can take many different forms, be eaten hot or cold, the common factor generally being beetroot. This version tends to be more typically Russian.

Ingredients:
8 cups beef stock
500g shin-in stewing beef
2 onions, peeled and chopped
5 medium carrots, chopped
8 medium beets, peeled and chopped into chunks
1 large potato, peeled and chopped into chunks
2 cups of thinly sliced cabbage
3 tsp red wine vinegar (lemon juice is a good substitute)
Double cream Greek yoghurt to serve (or sour cream)
Pepper to serve

Method:
This method is much simpler than the original recipe as you will see...
Add your stock, meat and onions into a large pot and let it get to the boil. Simmer for 1 hour until meat is cooked. If you like, you can get the meat out, cut it off the bone and cut it into bite-sized pieces to make it easier to eat.
Time for the carrots, beets and potato to go in. Let the pot simmer for an additional 30 min.
At this point, the meal is almost ready. Add in the cabbage and simmer for 15 min.
This is when you add the vinegar and stir in. Ladle the hot soup into bowls and top with a couple of tablespoons of the yoghurt and sprinkle with pepper.

Enjoy with a nice bread, or if you have a burst of energy, look up piroshski  (small Russian pies often enjoyed with borscht) and try making some.

Notes:
To illustrate how Borscht is made in different ways, Constance Spry's recipe involves egg white and the only vegetable included is beetroot, other variations do not include beetroot at all, some rather include cucumber and others include a tomato base.


Beetroot are good for your heart, liver and can help prevent diabetes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeturia

I got my recipe from Simply Recipes and adapted it a bit: http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/borscht/

Nacho Soup

The problem with this post is that I didn't have nachos to enjoy my 'soup' with so I just used some baked potatoes as the accompanying starch and served the soup over that.


WARNING: This is an extremely lazy meal.


Serves 2
Ingredients:
1 can Rhodes Mexican tomato mix
1 can kidney beans
1 onion, chopped
2 tsp ground garlic
1/2 cup frozen or fresh corn
2 avocados
4 tbs double cream greek yoghurt
1 tsp whole coriander
3/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 cup water 


Method:
Fry the onions and garlic until the onions are translucent.
Add the can of tomato, corn, water and the beans with the spices.
Simmer on medium heat for 15 minutes to combine the flavours.
Serve with a avocado cut up on top and add the yoghurt. If you have some fresh coriander, it will also garnish the dish nicely. A extra splash or Tabasco also won't do any harm. ;)


Enjoy.

Caramelised Apple

A tasty crêpe topping!

Ingredients:

1 granny smith apple

1 big tbsp demarara sugar

1 tsp butter

Method: 

My pans don’t often burn so I hardly use butter or oil when frying, but in this case it may help the process.

Cut the apple in half, core and finely slice – about 5mm thick if possible. Lay these in your pan, covering the bottom with one layer. This should use up all the apple. Add in the sugar and butter on top and let it melt and soak through.

When they’re brown and slightly sticky, you can remove them from the heat and arrange on a crêpe with some stiffly beaten cream, fold traditionally.

Yum.

How to make crêpes.

Raspberry Clafoutis

Traditionally a clafoutis is made with whole cherries, if made with other fruit it is called a flaugnarde. It comes from an area near east of Bordeaux called Limousin (yes, it vaguely has something to do with the word limousine). I ate a raspberry clafoutis in Carcassonne and decided to try my own one this week!

Ingredients:

1/4 cup full cream milk

3 tbsp melted (but not hot!) butter

1/2 cup cake wheat flour

3 large, free range eggs

1/4 cup brown sugar

250g fresh raspberries

Zest of 1 lemon, finely grated

Icing sugar for dusting 

Method:

Beat all the ingredients together, except for the berries (always remember that if you are adding melted butter to egg, there is the danger of the egg cooking if your butter is too hot - gross!). Once your batter is smooth, pour it into a 10cm diametered baking dish. I found that a 20cm dish made the clafoutis too thin and difficult to serve properly. 

Carefully spread your raspberries out into the batter – they will sink down while cooking.

Cook at 180’C for 30 minutes and rotate it in the oven half way through, if necessary.

Dust with the icing sugar immediately before serving otherwise it will disappear. I think it can be eaten warm or cold, but we liked it cold and with vanilla ice-cream!

For this culinary adventure, I Googled my way to this link. 

Mexican Salad

A matching side dish for the Mexican Roast Chicken. The salad contains beans, so it can also count as a starch. Although, if you are not convinced, use it as an excuse to get some Nachos and a can of Rhodes Mexican-style chopped tomatoes with green pepper and chillies as a salsa.

Ingredients:

20 olives (without pips)

A golden habanero chilli

20 baby tomatoes

3/4 tin of red kidney beans

A handful of fresh coriander

Half a cup of corn

An avocado peeled and cubed

Cottage cheese

Dressing:

2 tbsp. of lime juice

5 drops of tabasco sauce

2 tbsp. canola oil

Salt

Pepper

Method:

Chop the olives, tomatoes and coriander roughly.

If your avocado is ripe, the pieces can be quite big (3 x 3cm), but the habanero you should chop as finely as you can, taking care to wash your hands afterwards and not touch your face at all.

The beans and corn can be added whole after rinsing , if from a can.

Pour over the dressing and toss the salad.

Serve with a dollop of cottage cheese on top and a sprig of coriander for garnishing.

Variation: Squash was also a popular Aztec food, so cooked, chopped and cooled, it would make a good addition and bulk up the salad.