Tuesday, December 31, 2013

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.
 




Monday, December 30, 2013

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.

Monday, December 2, 2013

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.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

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.

Monday, September 23, 2013

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.



Tuesday, September 17, 2013

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.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

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.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

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.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

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.


Monday, July 22, 2013

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! 




Wednesday, March 6, 2013

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!



Monday, March 4, 2013

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).




Tuesday, February 12, 2013

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.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

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!