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

Pasta Florentine

You have no idea how much I wish I'd cracked an egg into this dish, just so I could call it carbonara florentine. I love dish names - I'm seriously considering making a pineapple crumble, even though I hate pineapple, because it has a cool name - and 'pasta florentine' just doesn't have the right ring. Why don't you try it with an egg and get back to me on how it works?

Without the egg, it was really good. I enjoyed it immensely and hope you do too.

Pasta Florentine

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 servings pasta

1 tablespoon butter

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

2 chicken breasts

2 tablespoons seasoned flour

4 rashers bacon

1 handful spinach or other green leaf

1 individual-serving-sized pot plain yoghurt
1/2 cup cream
25ml rum
Seasoning

Apple-Stuffed Chicken with Colcannon

St Patrick's Day on Thursday was the perfect excuse to make colcannon - which, I have decided, is one of the best foods in the world. I'd had colcannon once before, in an Irish pub at Stansted airport with my dad, and kind of immediately thought it was gross. In my defence, I was about sixteen and had had very little exposure to cabbage before. Anyway, I didn't even realize that colcannon had bacon in it, so once I saw the recipe on BBC Good Food I was sold. Not that I bothered to read the actual recipe. Just the ingredients.

The food was good - the roast chicken was surprisingly easy for a weekday, given that I generally have little more than an hour to prepare food (that's what happens when you get out of work at 9.30pm). It was, admittedly, a little tasteless, but what can you expect from plain chicken? The apple wedges and the colcannon really played their part, taking up the chicken's slack, and overall we were both very happy with this.

I've included a suggestion within the recipe to make a Guinness gravy, but as I didn't do it myself it won't appear in the ingredients list.

Apple-Stuffed Chicken with Colcannon

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

For the chicken:

1 medium-sized roast chicken

1 apple

Oil (about 3 tablespoons)

Herbs

Seasoning

For the colcannon:

6 medium-sized potatoes

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup cream

1 tablespoon butter

1 handful cabbage, or other thick green leaves (eg spinach)

3 bacon rashers

Seasoning

Quick Onion Pizza

It is a daily challenge deciding what to have for lunch, and one that Tom in particular finds very trying. It's a difficult meal, because I don't get another chance to eat until finishing work - seven hours of class without a lunch break. Luckily, I was recently inspired by my own onion-stuffed chicken to make a lunchtime pizza in the style of Flammkuchen. A perfect meal for my specific needs: quick, tasty, filling. I would advise using creme fraiche if you have it; if not, my cream concoction worked pretty well.

Quick Onion Pizza

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 1

2 rashers bacon

1 tortilla wrap

2 tablespoons onion relish

1/2 cup cream

1 teaspoon lime juice

1 tablespoon butter

(or creme fraiche instead of cream/lime/butter)

1/2 onion

1 teaspoon mixed herbs

Seasoning

Onion-Stuffed Chicken with Homemade Chips

Last night, Tom pretty much made this dinner while I talked to my parents and brother on Skype. I cut some of the potatoes, spooned the relish into the chicken, and stretched out the bacon. And promised my brother that I wouldn't say anything embarrassing about him on this blog. For example, I definitely wouldn't mention that time when he got really drunk on a couple of bottles of beer and my dad and I had to go and pick him up from god-knows-where and manhandle him into the car with judgemental neighbours looking on. But if I did, the wonderful thing about this medium is that if he tried to retort with tales of my drunken misdemeanours in comments, I could theoretically just delete it!

Speaking of comments, if you have any feedback - on this recipe, or another, or the blog in general - I'd love to hear from you. It makes my day when people take the time to let me know they've tried a recipe, even if it didn't work that well.

So on to today's recipe: even though I wasn't the main cook for this, it was still my idea, and a bloody good idea at that. The idea was to stuff chicken with onion relish, wrap it in bacon, and serve it with homemade chips (fries or wedges, if you prefer). I bought some onion relish recently but I gather it would be fairly easy to make from scratch - I will be having a go at it, probably using this recipe, once my jar's run out. Then again, chicken is very good stuffed with anything. Maybe caramelize some onions and use that instead of making a whole jar of onion marmalade. Your choice.

Onion-Stuffed Chicken with Homemade Chips

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

For the chips:

5 potatoes

2 sweet potatoes

5 tablespoons of oil
Seasoning

For the chicken:
2 chicken breasts
2 tablespoons onion relish
4 bacon rashers
1 teaspoon mixed herbs
1 tablespoon oil
Seasoning

Bacon Vegetable Stew

A recent dinner had to be converted from a soup recipe to a stew recipe. Regular readers may already know why. Although Tom has been pushing his boundaries recently, with forays into the worlds of mushrooms (twice) and anchovies, I thought messing with his aversion to soup might be a step too far. Thankfully it was easy enough - just skip the blending part, really - and dinner was wonderful. The mint adds depth and freshness to what is otherwise a stodgy mess of vegetables. I really enjoyed the comforting mix of surprisingly complex flavours. And yes, I blended the leftovers for soup the next day. With a cup of wine. It was even more wonderful.

As I type this, I am nibbling away on something baked and brilliant, which I promise to share with you tomorrow. What a cliffhanger!

Bacon Vegetable Stew

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4

1 tablespoon butter

10 rashers bacon, separated

1 onion

500g leeks

1 clove garlic

4 potatoes

2 sweet potatoes

1 litre stock

50ml rum

2 fresh mint leaves

100ml cream

Seasoning (salt, pepper, mixed herbs)

Fidget Pie

I read about this ages ago under 'Bacon and Apple' in Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus. And eventually, this weekend, I got around to making it, with recipes adapted from here and here. It was good - usually I associate savoury pies with a dark, heavy filling, but this was surprisingly light. I would say definitely one to make again.

Regarding the stock: I went for 100ml homemade chicken stock with 50ml grape and apple juice, leftover from the making of the rustic grape butter. I recommend a similar mix of stock and cider, or wine - whatever you have to hand.

Fidget Pie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2-4, depending how hungry you are

For the pastry:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup butter

1/8 teaspoon salt

Up to 3 tablespoons water

1 tablespoon milk

For the filling:

1 tablespoon butter

1 onion

1 apple

3 potatoes

1 tablespoon flour

10 rashers bacon

1 tablespoon mixed herbs

1 teaspoon cinnamon

150ml liquid stock (see note above)

A few small pats of butter

Seasoning

Steamed Chicken and Strawberry Salad

When the weather begins to start hinting at spring, I begin thinking of salad as comfort food. Last night I went for a salad, topped with chicken (oven steamed), bacon, strawberries, a balsamic-rum-strawberry dressing, and blue cheese. It was heavenly. Roll on summer!

Steamed Chicken and Strawberry Salad

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

Foil

1 tablespoon oil

2 chicken breasts

1 tablespoon seasoned flour

1/4 onion

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1 teaspoon rum

10 strawberries

2 rashers bacon

1/2 cup crumbled blue or goat's cheese (optional)

2 servings' worth salad leaves

Seasoning

Lemon and Mushroom Carbonara

I had big, if vague, plans for dinner last night. There was going to be chicken, and marmalade, and caramelized onions were going to get a look in, and who knows what other exciting things. It was going to be a hodge-podge of super.

And then I looked in the fridge and in the freezer and instead of having four chicken breasts, like I thought, we had exactly zero. So I decided to do burger and chips. But we don't have chips. So I actually had to cook. Carbonara seemed the best way to go, to use up bacon and cream, and then we bought some mushrooms a while ago, and a lemon had been sitting mournfully on its own in the fridge for god-knows-how-long, and - well, dinner happened.

Dinner was good. It was fragrant (I love the smell of lemon) and spicy with the chilli powder: eminently refreshing, and nice to cook. It was slightly too sharp for me, by which I mean after I ate half my meal my throat was burning, so I've scaled back my measurements a little for this recipe, but Tom enjoyed it. The enokitake mushrooms (which Tom will eat! Hurrah!) are chewy, so be warned if that's not your thing, but add a delicious meatiness to a nearly-vegetarian meal. (Feel free to leave the bacon out and call it 'pasta with lemon mushroom sauce', if you prefer.)

Lemon and Mushroom Carbonara

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

150g spaghetti

1 tablespoon butter (plus some oil, optional)

1 bunch enokitake mushrooms

1/2 onion

1 clove garlic

4 rashers bacon

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1 cup cream

1 teaspoon oregano

2 teaspoons chilli powder

1 lemon

1/4 cup grated Parmesan plus more for serving

1 egg

Seasoning

Braised Boozy Chicken

Last night's recipe was somewhat similar to the last recipe I posted, I suppose. The taste and technique were very different, but the pictures are going to look same-y, I think. Given that four days elapsed between them, and that we ate a lot of different stuff in Seoul (I'm still happily remembering that pear and gorgonzola pizza with rocket and caramelized onions... sigh), I think I'm the only person who this is bothering. On, then, with the show!

I took this recipe from BBC Good Food's chicken braised with cider and bacon. Unfortunately we are a cider-less country, and hence a cider-less household, so I had to be more inventive than that. And I invite you to be more inventive too. This is a recipe crying out for alcohol - any alcohol. Whatever you've got. Throw it all in. It's delicious. And if there's any sauce left over, heat it up and eat it as soup the next day. Really.

Braised Boozy Chicken

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

1 tablespoon oil

3 chicken breasts

Half an onion

6 rashers bacon

1 apple

1 tablespoon flour

1 cup red wine

1 chicken stock powdered cube

(or 1 teaspoon chicken stock powder)

250ml apple juice

1 teaspoon mustard

Seasoning

Pasta Layer Bake

After my 100th post, I asked on Facebook if there were any particular recipes people wanted to see up here. Surprise surprise, many people asked for east Asian food, like sushi and gyoza! Currently on the list is sushi (particularly sun dried tomato sushi, which sounds delicious), rice balls, crab rolls, gyoza, and dosa. Tom may not enjoy the next one hundred recipes so much.

In the meantime, though, we have one of my very own brain-childs (brain-children?) to get through. It started with the ingredients for a carbonara, a recent carbonara meal turning me off that particular idea, and a very unenthusiastic teacher who hands round colouring pencils and then doodles dinner suggestions. Aren't my students lucky?

Dinner was great - Tom went back for thirds, claiming that he could just keep eating it (a claim well-proven), and I had it for lunch today, and there's still a serving or two left in the pan. It has creamy pasta, broccoli, bacon, cheese, and some yellow pepper thrown in for a bit of a crunch. I imagine it would make a great family meal, particularly as a way to sneak vegetables to small children. Experiment with it!

Pasta Layer Bake

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 6

200g pasta

1 head broccoli

1/2 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 chicken breasts

1/2 cup white wine

400ml chicken stock

200ml cream

Basil and thyme

Seasoning

For layering:

10 rashers of bacon

1 bell pepper

1 cup of crushed cheese-flavoured crisps or tortilla chips

1/2 cup grated cheese

Spaghetti Carbonara

Here is a quick re-do of my essential spaghetti carbonara recipe with pictures. As you will see later, my culinary energies were focused in a very different direction to boring old 'dinner' last night.

Spaghetti Carbonara

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

150g spaghetti

1 large onion

2 garlic cloves

6 rashers smoked bacon

2 chicken breasts

1/2 glass white wine

100ml cream
1 egg

Oregano and chilli powder

Seasoning

Grated cheese to serve

Cut the onion in half and into crescent-moon slices. Crush and roughly chop the garlic. Fry on a low heat.

Boil the kettle to put the spaghetti on while you roughly chop the chicken and bacon into equal-sized bits and add to the onion pan. (If the pasta is not yet cooking, put it on now.) Stir, and allow to cook until the chicken is nicely browned.

Add the white wine and simmer for a while.

Add the cream and seasonings, to taste. Once the pasta is cooked, add some of the pasta water to the chicken pan, and quickly drain the spaghetti. Break the egg into the chicken pan and stir through so that everything turns a sunny yellow.


Add the spaghetti to the pasta pan as well. Stir and allow the mixture to heat through before serving.

Stuffed Chicken with Roasted Cubes

I now have a new feature on this blog: printable recipes! A (Printable Recipe) link at the start of the list of ingredients takes you to a page where the recipe has been copied up, minus pictures and other frivolities. Scroll to the bottom and amongst all the little blue text ("Sign In, Recent Site Activity, Terms & Conditions") there is a little link that says "Print Page." It should be easy to use, and I hope you enjoy it.

So, a recipe. I decided to re-do one of my essential recipes (the stuffed chicken) and out came this. Ideally, though, the recipe is made with soft and mature cheeses, rather than milk and mayonnaise and the plastic-y stuff here. This is my recipe, but it does come from BBC Good Food's mustard-stuffed chicken which I would much rather eat. Rearrange these words to make the sentence that most often falls out of my mouth these days: Korea no sigh cheese in.

Last night's dinner was fairly easy and pretty tasty. There was a very herbal quality to it, despite only including half a teaspoon of oregano. I felt it lacked cohesion, but then again I'm rapidly becoming a cooking snob so I wouldn't let that bother you. Also, I served it with 'warm broccoli' for a reason: broccoli loses its temperature very quickly, so if you prepare yourself linguistically your dinner won't suffer.

Stuffed Chicken with Roasted Cubes

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2 with extra potato cubes

2 chicken breasts

50ml milk

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 teaspoon mustard

1 garlic clove

1/2 cup grated cheese

1/2 teaspoon oregano

4 rashers bacon

Seasoning

3 large sweet potatoes

4 small potatoes

Water

Salt

Oil

Mix the milk, mayonnaise, mustard, chopped garlic clove, cheese and oregano in a bowl and leave it to sit for a while. The mixture needs to be quite thick.

Peel and cube the potatoes and boil them in salted water until soft. Shake roughly in the pan before transferring to an ovenable dish and dousing liberally in oil. Sprinkle some salt over, and put the cubes in the oven for 40 minutes at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) to crisp up.

In the meantime, slit a pocket into each chicken breast and stuff with about 1/3 of the mayonnaise mixture. Wrap two bacon rashers around each breast, and pour the remaining mixture on top. Bake at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Serve with warm broccoli.

Flammkuchen

Tom's favourite meal in Germany - a huge thin slab of pastry topped with cream, bacon and onions. And yet it took me a Smitten Kitchen post on Flammkuchen (or one of its many other names) to consider recreating it in Korea. Thankfully it was an easy Friday night meal, especially as I point-blank refused to make the dough (my [rejected] idea was making pancakes, topping them with the usual Flammkuchen toppings, and baking them briefly), and Tom stepped up to take my place. He used the nice, easy recipe here, and didn't clean up the counter after himself. (Not that I'm bitter about it.) The toppings were my domain; I had to substitute and make buttermilk rather than sour cream, but it still tasted pretty damn good.

A quick note: you'd assume, if you'd not eaten Flammkuchen before, you might assume that one 'pizza' per person might be enough. Well - you'd be wrong. It's very more-ish, and the thinness of the base makes it feel virtuous enough that you could easily have a second. And a third.

Flammkuchen
(Printable Recipe)

Makes 2

Dough:

2 cups flour

2 1/2 tablespoons oil

2/3 cup water

Pinch of salt

Toppings:

500ml milk with 1 tablespoon lemon vinegar

or 1/2 to 1 cup ricotta

250ml milk with 1 tablespoon lemon vinegar

or 1/2 to 1 cup sour cream

1 clove garlic

1 large onion

10 rashers bacon

Seasoning

Mix the dough ingredients together. Divide into two and roll each out as thinly and widely as possible to make the Flammkuchen base. (Make sure it'll still fit in your oven.) Oil two baking sheets and place one under each base.

Prepare the buttermilk/sour-cream-substitute by mixing the 250ml milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon vinegar, stirring, and allowing to curdle.

Make the ricotta by mixing 500ml milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon vinegar in a pan and setting on a low heat. Stir occasionally.

After a few minutes, the curds will start to pull away from the side of the pan like this.

Within ten minutes the milk will look like this. Prepare a colander by lining it with folded cheesecloth (or an old tablerunner folded in four, like me) and pour the mixture through. Allow to sit for five minutes before using the ricotta.

Finely chop the garlic and mix with the ricotta and buttermilk, in a blender if you want to make it really smooth. Season and spread half of the mixture on to each pastry base.

Cut the onion in half, and finely slice each half into crescent moons. Put in a heavily oiled pan and let them soften over a low heat. Chop the ten rashers of bacon into thin matchsticks and add to the onion pan until they are semi-cooked, and the onions are caramelizing a little.

Spread half of the onion and bacon mixture on to each Flammkuche and bake on the middle shelf of the oven at 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit) for fifteen minutes, turning halfway if necessary.

It's ready once the toppings are slightly browned. Serve, and eat with a knife and fork unless you feel like you can balance that paper-thin crust on your fingers.

No-Fish Fishcakes with Garlic Hasselbacks

So what are no-fish fishcakes? They are my attempt (based, of course, on ideas from Niki Segnit) at creating crab cakes that Tom the fish-hater will eat. They are made from sweet potato, bacon, breadcrumbs, mayonnaise and lime juice, and are really quite good. Served (as they were) with garlicky Hasselback potatoes and caramelized onions, they were amazing - the combination of flavours was superb. I was very happy with last night's dinner, and I didn't even have to prise a crab into several pieces to make it.

This recipe isn't, however, quite perfect as is. The cakes were fairly soft, although it wasn't the end of the world. To create a cake that truly holds its shape, you could add perhaps a tablespoon of flour at the mixing stage, or (as Segnit suggests) deep-fry them. I'm currently struggling with a few concepts related to food texture, so if I come up with any other suggestions, I'll let you know.

Oh, and I fried the bacon in melted butter, just because. Oh my god, it smelt so good. No doubt it was particularly unhealthy, but it felt like a bacon-in-butter night, and I'm so glad I did it.

No-Fish Fishcakes with Garlic Hasselbacks
(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

(Makes 9 cakes and 7 Hasselbacks)

7 small potatoes

3-4 garlic cloves

2 large sweet potatoes

1 pack bacon (10 rashers)

1 slice of bread

1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1 tablespoon lime juice

Oil

Butter (optional)

Flour

Seasoning

Balance each small potato in a wooden spoon and make cuts through it, as detailed here.

Nobody will know I re-used this picture from before.

Thinly slice the garlic cloves and put a sliver of garlic in between each 'chip' in the potatoes. One clove should be enough to stuff two potatoes.

Like this.

Put the potatoes on an ovenable tray, drench in oil, and heavily sprinkle with salt. Put them in the oven at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for forty minutes. (They will need extra cooking time, but we'll come to that later.)

Peel and dice the sweet potatoes and put them in salted boiling water over a high heat. Fry the bacon (in butter!) until it has reached the texture you like.

Make the bread into breadcrumbs - I used the blender - and put it a mixing bowl. Season.

Carefully remove the bacon from the buttery heat, allowing the fat to drip back into the pan, and either chop it finely or blend it into oblivion. Mix with the breadcrumbs.

The forty minutes' cooking time for the potatoes should be up around now. Turn the oven down to 150 degrees (300 Fahrenheit) and cook for a further thirty minutes, topping each potato with a pat of butter if you feel like it.

Back to the cakes:

Drain the sweet potato and mash it thoroughly, with a splash of milk if necessary. Tom swears that the secret to mashing is to keep mashing until it's smooth, and then mash for a minute longer. Tip the sweet potato into the bacon-breadcrumb mixture, and add mayonnaise, lime and more seasoning before shaping into cakes. I made nine, each of them a little smaller than the palm of my hand. Wrap the cakes in clingfilm and refrigerate for twenty minutes.

Flour the cakes very lightly on each side and cook in the buttery bacon fat from earlier, adding oil if necessary.

The cakes should only need two to three minutes cooking time, turning once. Make sure they are heated all the way through - as long as you don't actually burn them, it's probably better to over-cook than under-cook.

Serve with the garlic Hasselbacks and caramelized onions.

Chicken & Onion Clove Baguette

On Thursday I read the "Onion and Clove" part of Niki Segnit's Flavour Thesaurus, and loved the idea of slow-frying onions with a hint of clove and piling them in a baguette with slices of roasted chicken. From there hatched a three-day wait and a plan to make French bread from scratch.

I followed the ingredients exactly, but I wonder if there's something different about Korean yeast vs. Western yeast. My bread was slightly heavy, tragically, but I can't figure out why that would have happened. Sorry that I can't offer any more pointers! It was still delicious. The onion, clove, chicken and bacon mixture had an amazing subtle flavour to it, although I was surprised that it lacked richness. I added mayonnaise to my sandwich. I think that if you added cream rather than milk to the onion mixture, that might solve it.

Original bread recipe is a video.

Baguettes

(Printable Recipe)
Makes 2 small loaves

4 cups flour, divided

2 pinches of salt

1 tablespoon yeast

2 cups warm water

1 beaten egg or 1/2 cup water

1 oven-proof bowl half-full of boiling water

Dissolve the yeast in the water and add two cups of flour with one pinch of salt. Mix with your hands to form a sticky dough. Cover and leave to rise at room temperature for three hours.

Before rising.

After rising.

Work the extra two cups of flour and another pinch of salt into the dough, and knead for ten minutes. The dough should become very elastic. Shape it into a ball and leave to rise for another hour.

After the hour has passed, divide the dough into two and knead each half for a few minutes before rolling into a baguette-shaped log. My oven is tiny so I made the baguettes quite thick and small. You could also make two thin, full-length loaves with this dough if your oven is big enough.

Let the baguettes rise for another half hour.

Make four slashes on the top of each baguette and brush lightly with egg wash or water. Heat the oven to 250 degrees (480 Fahrenheit) and put the bowl of boiling water on the lowest shelf. Heavily grease some baking paper and sprinkle with a little more flour. Place the baguettes on the baking paper and put on the middle or highest shelf in the oven for fifteen minutes.

After fifteen minutes, remove the water (carefully! Steam burns!) and turn the temperature down to 220 degrees (430 Fahrenheit). Bake the bread for a further twenty-five minutes before turning it over and baking with the bottom side uppermost for another five. Let the bread cool slightly and eat.

Chicken & Onion Clove Filling

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 2, or 4 with a side

3 chicken breasts

3 rashers of bacon

Herbs

Seasoning

2 onions

1 tablespoon butter

Oil

1 scant teaspoon of ground cloves

1 tablespoon white wine

1 tablespoon milk

Lime or lemon juice

Seasoning

Slice the chicken breasts lengthways in half through the middle, as if to make a sandwich, and place a rasher of bacon in each cavity. Put the top half of the chicken back on. Cover the chicken with herbs and a little bit of clove spice, season, and bake at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for twenty five minutes.

In the meantime, melt the butter with some oil in a pan and thinly slice your onions into half-moons. Fry the onions on a very low heat in the butter and oil with the teaspoon of ground cloves, stirring regularly. Once the onions are soft, after ten to fifteen minutes, add the wine and milk (or cream). This will make the mixture just barely into a sauce.

Taste the onions and add a squeeze of lime or lemon juice if necessary.

When everything is cooked, pile the baguettes with onions and lay carved chicken slices on top. Cut the baguette in half and serve - either one baguette per person, or half a baguette per person with a salad or some chips, is more than enough.

Drink white wine while you eat. Yum.

Low GI stew with 'bread'

After a week of minimal experimentation in the kitchen, I was really missing the whole 'trying new things' experience. On Monday I made gnocchi - I've made it many times before, true, but never that particular way, and never with sweet potato - and yesterday I decided I would make bread. The problem was that I would only be able to start the bread at around 9.30, and we didn't want to leave it for hours to rise or anything. I ended up using this recipe, which promised far more than it delivered. During cooking, the bread stank. Although it was edible, and some of the crusty bits were quite good, the bread was really heavy. Even picking up a slice made you think 'god, this bread's heavy.' This morning, I went to cut a slice, and no knife could penetrate its stone-like exterior. Tom christened it 'It's Bread, But Not As We Know It.' I'm not going to record the recipe as I followed the original instructions exactly.

Luckily the stew was good. Not mindblowingly brilliant, sadly, but still good. And also good reheated the next day.

Bacon and Bean Stew
Serves 3

8 rashers of bacon
2 onions
1 tin red kidney beans
3 chicken stock icecubes
700ml boiling water
2 teaspoons tomato sauce
75g fusilli pasta
1 teaspoon each of rosemary and parsley
1 tablespoon each of soy sauce and gravy powder
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 tablespoon of milk
Seasoning

Roughly chop the bacon and dry-fry over a medium heat. Cut each onion in half and each half into sixths, and add to the pan once most of the bacon fat has been released. When the onion is soft, add the kidney beans, chicken stock, water, tomato sauce and pasta. Cook over a low heat until the pasta is cooked. Add the rosemary and parsley. I felt my stew was too thin, so made a paste of soy sauce and gravy powder and added it to the pan. I also wanted it to be creamier, so put baking powder in a bowl and poured the milk over it, stirred them together, and added that to the pan as well. This will make it foam on top, but keep cooking it and the foam will disappear. After 20 minutes of simmering the pasta should be cooked. Serve with 'It's Bread, But Not As We Know It,' or just normal bread.

Garlic Chicken with Sour Cream Mash

Yesterday I had a new class - which means that two days a week, I'll be teaching until 9.10 instead of 8.20, and the other days, my co-teacher will have the class and I'll be waiting around for fifty minutes. Knitting time!

Anyway, I'm teaching this class 'writing,' which I generally try to avoid because when the students are writing, I'm staring into space and waiting for them to finish. Yesterday I spent the time figuring out what to cook for dinner: I wanted to use potatoes. And if you're using potatoes, you should probably have sour cream. Oh, and roasting garlic is something I've been wanting to try. I might as well defrost some chicken as well. And I'm not entirely sure of Tom's opinion regarding baked potatoes, which seems to be the obvious place to go with potatoes and sour cream, so I was going to have to be a bit inventive there.

After a lot of crossings-out and re-working the ingredients into different places, I ended up with this:

Garlic Chicken with Sour Cream Mash
Serves 2

2 servings of potatoes (I had 9 which were of varying sizes, mostly small)
4 cloves of garlic
3 small chicken breasts
3 rashers of bacon
Garlic sauce

Cream cheese

Milk

Lemon juice

1 tablespoon butter
Seasoning

Peel the potatoes and chop into small chunks. Heat in boiling water over a low heat.

Cover the chicken in garlic sauce (alternatively, cut a pocket in the chicken and slip some garlic inside) and wrap each breast in a bacon rasher. Chop the top and bottom off each garlic clove, peel, and put both the chicken and garlic on a cooking tray, with a little oil over the garlic. Cook at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for 15 minutes.

Blend cream cheese with lemon juice and milk (I honestly just eyeballed the amounts so they would fill my small blender, and probably ended up with about 1 and 1/2 cups) to make sour cream. Pour into a cold pan.

After fifteen minutes, remove the garlic from the oven, put in the sour cream pan, and mash with a fork. The chicken goes back in the oven for another 10 minutes. Heat the sour cream and garlic on a very low heat, turning the heat off if there are any bubbles. This sauce just needs to be warmed rather than cooked, and you don't want it to split or anything.

Mash the potatoes with some butter and about half of the sour cream and garlic sauce. Serve alongside the chicken, with the extra sour cream sauce on the side.