Official Hiatus

After spending the last couple of months on an unofficial hiatus, I'm finally biting the bullet and making it real. There are some major life changes coming up for me in the next few months - moving, travelling, hopefully a new job - and I simply can't dedicate the time to this any more. I'm sorry for not having made this announcement before.

To tide you over for the next few months, crossing my fingers that I'll make it back to food blogging in the new year, here are some of the things I've been cooking and enjoying recently:

Pollo Asado from The Pioneer Woman
Pasta with Pea Pesto from Smitten Kitchen
Ale and Chocolate Cake from Everybody Likes Sandwiches

If you'd like to get in touch with me, either to ask about a recipe, or for recommendations, or about cooking abroad, or just to say you'd like to be notified when this site starts up again, leave a comment below with your email address. The comments are hidden so that only I can see them, and I will get an email notification when you do so. Have a wonderful rest of 2011, and I apologize again for any disappointment.

Rainbow Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Icing

I'm not the best at cake decorating. My birthday cake is all the proof you need of that, although putting the icing on this lemon cake before it had cooled probably shows an equal lack of skill. And this rainbow cake, from this recipe, doesn't look pretty great from the outside. The inside, however, is another story entirely. It's gorgeous. I love it. All you need is normal cake stuff and a bunch of food colouring - plus about a million eggs, particularly if you use the white chocolate buttercream from the original recipe. I had red, green, yellow and blue food colouring, and mixed them to make orange and purple layers too. The red came out pink, and the blue was disappointingly washed out - but seriously, when you look at this cake, that's not what you're thinking.

The icing, incidentally, is delicious and super-chocolatey but not at all cloying. Although you will obviously feel a little unwell if you eat too much of it, the sour cream reins in the sweetness and makes it refreshing. Well, you know. Refreshing for chocolate icing.

This recipe was all done by hand, but feel free to refer to the original recipe if you have a stand mixer.

By the way, if you're thinking "what am I going to do with six egg yolks?", I recommend mixing them with hot drained pasta, mixed herbs, and plenty of cheese. Objectively delicious.

Rainbow Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Icing

(Printable Recipe)

Makes a 6-layer 22x15cm rectangular cake

2 and 1/4 cups flour

1 and 3/4 cups brown sugar

1 and 1/3 tablespoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

170g butter (12 tablespoons)

1 cup milk

6 egg whites

1 teaspoon vanilla powder

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple food colouring

1 cup sour cream

1 cup dark chocolate chips

1 cup cream

2 tablespoons butter

80g icing sugar

Bitter Chicken

You need to be in a certain type of mood to eat this. If you're not, add a teaspoon of brown sugar and half a cup of water to the sauce halfway through cooking time.

Bitter Chicken

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

3 chicken breasts

3 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup raisins

1/2 cup dried blueberries

500ml dry red wine

Seasoning

Warm Asparagus Pasta Salad

Warm Asparagus Pasta Salad

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 servings pasta

7 asparagus tips

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon oil

4 asparagus spears

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

2 cups tomato sauce

1/2 cup cream

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Grated cheese, to serve

Seasoning

Detox Calzones

Blog note: I have just realized that although I've been editing all my photographs to be clearer and brighter, I have consistently been uploading the dark, unedited ones. Argh! I will be (slowly) going back through and redoing most of the photos because of this. Thanks for bearing with me.

It was a long weekend. When we got back, we were desperate for something healthy and fresh, so I suggested pizzas piled high with fresh vegetables. Luckily, Tom volunteered to make the dough (I do hate the hassle and mess of making dough), and the recipe he used suggested calzones, so that's where we went. We used asparagus, onion, spring onion, tomato, pepper, sukgat (edible chrysanthemum) and some chopped herbs from our balcony garden. We did not put cheese inside the calzone, but on top. You can substitute whatever you have to hand, because this is more a set of guidelines than an actual recipe. It was really, really good, and did its job as health-overload perfectly.

Dough notes: as mentioned above, we used this yeast-free recipe but Tom reports that he had to add way more flour and only used half the amount of baking powder. I have used this SmittenKitchen recipe to great effect before, as well as the SK pizza dough with wine and honey. You could also go pre-made, too.

Detox Calzones

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2 calzones

Dough (see note above)

1/2 cup cream cheese (with garlic and herbs if possible)

1/2 to 1 cup grated cheese

Seasoning

Vegetable filling:

3 stalks asparagus

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1/2 onion

5 spring onions

1 tomato

1/2 red pepper

Handful edible chrysanthemum

1 tablespoon fresh mint

1 tablespoon fresh sage

Sweet Potato Bacon Bites

This recipe started out as a way to make almost-vegetarian meatballs. I even served them with spaghetti (unfortunately without tomato sauce, because seconds before I went to make the sauce, I found that we didn't even have any tomato. That's called 'knowing what's in your kitchen like a proper cook'). But I don't think that's what these sweet potato bacon bites were intended for. On hungrily scoffing the cold leftovers the next morning, I think they would be great as snacks or canapes. They take quite a lot of work but the work is neither particularly fiddly nor hard.

Sweet Potato Bacon Bites

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 40 bites

5-6 sweet potatoes

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon milk

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1/2 cup flour

Herbs, chilli flakes and cinnamon to taste

1 egg

20 rashers bacon

1 tablespoon oil

Seasoning

Chicken Saltimbocca

I was going to post a picture of my inspiration for this dish - which would have been a copy of Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus propped next to a flourishing sage plant - but I am completing the miraculous feat of posting a recipe the very night I cooked it, and it is too dark to take that particular photo right now. Saltimbocca is an Italian cooking style which uses pancetta and sage and sometimes lemon on a fillet of something (veal, plaice... or boring chicken). Most recipes require cocktail sticks to hold everything together, but I just swapped the placement of some ingredients round because I didn't like the idea of cooking or eating around a piece of wood. I also added a lot more sage than is typically called for, and am very happy I did so. I'm not sure how you would really taste one sage leaf per person.

But never mind, because here's a very simple and quick recipe which looks fancy just because of all the little sage leaves in it. Made with fresh herbs from my own balcony 'garden'!

Chicken Saltimbocca

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 chicken breasts

10 sage leaves

4 slices bacon

1 tablespoon flour

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 cup white wine

1/2 cup cream

Seasoning

Asparagus Hash Quesadillas

I have another recipe waiting in the wings to be published but this one was too exciting and spring-like to wait. Inspired by SmittenKitchen's asparagus pancetta hash, these quesadillas are bright and filling and surprisingly un-messy to eat. The bacon could easily be omitted for a vegetarian take, and the amount of grated cheese you add is totally up to you - I used about a quarter-cup per storey, which worked perfectly for me but was not quite enough for Tom.

They could technically be oven-free if you fried the quesadillas rather than baking them - this recipe on Pioneer Woman shows you how to do it, with pictures. Also, the amount specified below was enough for dinner for us (one double-decker quesadilla each), but I hasten to add that I knew we each had a quarter of a reduced-price about-to-go-off cheesecake to eat afterwards, so dinner was a little on the small side.

Asparagus Hash Quesadillas

(Printable Recipe)

Makes two double-decker quesadillas

2 tablespoons oil

3 large potatoes

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

130g asparagus

6 rashers bacon

1 teaspoon mixed herbs

1 tablespoon cream cheese

6 tortilla wraps

Grated cheese

Seasoning

Slow-Cooked Pork in Beer

Apparently writing blog posts in one's mind doesn't automatically mean that you're being an active food blogger.

This recipe was inspired by a recent event in which beer - in glass bottles - was accidentally left in the freezer for about twenty-four hours. Although no disasters occurred, there was quite a lot of fizzing once they'd been safely retrieved, which meant we were left with 1500ml of very flat beer. For a while I lamented our lack of a slow-cooker, and then pulled myself together and did it anyway. The meal was super-easy, super-tasty, and based very (very) loosely on the little I could remember from SmittenKitchen's brisket recipe, after cooking it once, more than a year ago.

I used Hite, a Korean brand of lager; if you try something else, let me know how it turns out for you.

Slow-Cooked Pork in Beer

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4

1 tablespoon oil

3 onions (3rd is optional)

1 tablespoon brown sugar

800g lump of pork

2 tablespoons ketchup

750ml beer (with extra to top up if necessary)

1 teaspoon chilli powder

Seasoning

Chocolate-Topped Strawberry Cheesecake

I accidentally bought a load of strawberry-flavoured Philadelphia and turned it into this, based on Bakerella's recipe for cheesecake bars. I was hoping for a no-bake cheesecake but didn't have any (unflavoured) gelatin, which it apparently needs to be able to hold its shape later on. Good times were had by all.

Chocolate-Topped Strawberry Cheesecake

(Printable Recipe)

Makes one deep cake in a 20cm tin

For the base:

36 Oreo cookies

2 tablespoons butter

For the filling:

2 tubs strawberry-flavoured cream cheese

2 tablespoons icing sugar

2 cups flour

2 eggs

2 cups cream, whipped until stiff OR double cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

About 20 strawberries

For the topping:

1.5 cups cream

1 tablespoon butter

275g dark chocolate

1 tablespoon icing sugar

Creamy Tomato Soup

I have a few backlogged recipes to catch up on, unsurprisingly, but this most recent meal is crying out to be blogged as soon as possible. I've made tomato soup from this BBC Good Food recipe before as a pasta bake sauce and as a soup, and it's worked really well. Unfortunately I don't have any baking soda, although the milk trick works really well, so substituted with cream. A really great easy soup, even better with grilled cheese on toast.

Creamy Tomato Soup

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2 small or 1 large portions

1 tablespoon oil

1/2 onion

2 cloves garlic

1.5 teaspoons basil, fresh or dried, divided

3 cups tomato sauce/passata

1/2 teaspoon parmesan dust (optional)

1 tablespoon cream

(OR 1 tablespoon milk with 1 pinch baking soda)

Seasoning

Encrusted Chicken Salad

Okay, so the name of this dish is kind of offputting. I apologize. As you may have noticed from the looooong break in posting, things have been getting a little out of hand here in Korea, what with pests infesting my apartment and suddenly becoming part of a social circle. (The two are not related.) I'm so out of it that I made an awesome sweet & spicy enchilada dish last night, hoping to start a new phase of tweaking my original meal, and completely forgot to photograph it. Just this morning I had to leap into action when I realized that Tom had pretty much started a flood in our kitchen and then left for the gym.

My point is that I'm sorry for both the unexplained hiatus and the name of this dish. But it is crusty chicken! And it's actually really easy and really nice! After a weekend of excess, a simple chicken salad with blue cheese and the world's easiest vinaigrette was perfect.

Encrusted Chicken Salad

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 chicken breasts

3 tablespoons flour

1 tablespoon chilli flakes

Oil

2 portions salad leaves

1/2 cup blue cheese

1 tablespoon each oil, balsamic vinegar, honey, mustard

Seasoning

Orange-Scented Chilli

Despite my only blogged recipe for chilli con carne, I am a firm believer in sweet potato in chilli. I hinted recently at a vegetarian version with sweet potato, but even the meaty ones should have some. Unfortunately, I didn't have any sweet potato when I decided to recreate this amazing recipe for orange-scented chilli so turned it into a meat-lover's fest. The orange truly does wonderful, wonderful things to it. Also, Tom had the leftovers on toast with a hard-boiled egg (of all things) the next day, and that was pretty spectacular too.

Orange-Scented Chilli

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

1 tablespoon oil

1/2 onion

1 clove garlic

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon chilli powder, plus more to taste

250g mince

1/2 cup red wine

2 cups tomato sauce

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 tin kidney beans

Juice and peel of 1 orange

Seasoning

Garlic Black Bean Enchiladas

These chicken enchiladas are so good. They are, however, made using a packet of ready-made black bean sauce. I'm a big fan of making most things from scratch - so much so that it often doesn't occur to me that there's a quicker, ready-made way to do it - but this was different, partly because I just did a search for a black bean sauce recipe and couldn't find anything. Apparently black bean sauce isn't too hard to find in the Asian section of most supermarkets. If you see it, get it, and make this. It's brilliant.

Get some garlic too while you're there. This recipe, based on a Guardian Food garlic topping for patatas bravas, calls for five cloves of it. Pungent. Despite having two eggs in it, it went mousse-y rather than omelette-y, providing a really nice contrast to the much chewier texture of the chicken. Oh, and I also went waaay overboard on the chicken, using four whole chicken breasts for the meal. I recommend using two breasts and then adding half a head of broccoli cut into small florets, or some other vegetable or bean to bulk it up a bit. This also means that this could be adapted to make a pretty good vegetarian recipe.

Garlic Black Bean Enchiladas

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

1 tablespoon oil

1/2 onion

4 chicken breasts

(or 2 chicken breasts + vegetable/bean - see note above)

4 tablespoons seasoned flour

1 cup black bean sauce

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon chilli powder

Seasoning

2 eggs

5 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1 cup oil

Seasoning

4 tortilla wraps

1 tin kidney beans

1/2 cup grated cheese

Potato-Crusted Chicken Pie

This is a sort of inverted shepherd's pie, but with spicy chicken in tomato sauce instead of rich beef in gravy. I liked it. Tom didn't. I won't presume to make any assumptions about whether you'd like it or not, because it's completely your choice as to whether you even want to read this recipe, let alone recreate it. Good luck to you either way. I hope your dinner is fabulous, whether it's a potato-crusted chicken pie or not.

This recipe sees the first outing of my new set of digital scales. I had precisely 678g of peeled potato, so have rounded up a little to account for the skin. How exciting!

Potato-Crusted Chicken Pie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4

700g potatoes

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 cup milk

Seasoning

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 green chillies

1 tablespoon oil

2 chicken breasts

2 tablespoons seasoned flour

200ml tomato sauce

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon mixed herbs

1/2 teaspoon chilli powder

1/2 cup cream

Seasoning

2 slices bread

2 tablespoons butter

Seasoning