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

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

Bean Burgers

What to do with a bunch of chickpeas? Whizz them up with kidney beans and turn them into bean burgers. Obviously. I was planning on doing a roast chicken (more on which tomorrow) but as it hadn't completely defrosted, I was stuck with a bowl of chickpeas (which had been soaking for two days, which means I bought them raw and not in a can!) and the knowledge that when Tom came home to bean burgers for dinner, he would be a very happy man. Indeed he was. His genuine enthusiasm was quite endearing.

Anyway, for some reason I'd decided not to blog this recipe, hence the lack of in-process pictures. Also the fact that you may need to play around with quantities a bit to get the texture of the burgers right. Regard the below as guidelines (fairly accurate guidelines, but guidelines nonetheless) and enjoy a meal which is tasty and meaty (except it's not!) and actually - in my case - going to be quite easy to do again, as long as I remember to soak the chickpeas first.

Bean Burgers

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 6 large burgers

1/2 onion
2 cloves garlic

2 cups chickpeas

1 can kidney beans (410g)

1 tablespoon mixed herbs

1 teaspoon chilli powder

1 teaspoon powdered stock

1/2 cup breadcrumbs (I used crushed Pringles)

1 egg

2 tablespoons tomato sauce

1/2 to 1 cup flour, plus more for your hands

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon oil

Seasoning aplenty

Bobotie

During the World Cup, my mum made bobotie a lot. It's a traditional South African dish with curried meat and fruit, topped with an omelette, and I decided to mix it with my squash mince bake from the very early days of this blog for dinner last night. Tom really enjoyed it, but the amount of spice was a little too much for me. It was wonderful to have something that was curry-hot rather than chilli-hot for once, though!

Bobotie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

2 slices white bread

1/2 to 1 cup milk

3 sweet potatoes

1 tablespoon butter

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 tablespoons curry paste, divided

250g mince

1 teaspoon dried mixed herbs

1 teaspoon clove powder

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

2 tablespoons pickle or chutney

6 bay leaves

1/2 cup raisins

2 eggs

1/2 cup cream

Seasoning

Salted Fudge Brownies

I've been desperately trying to post this for the last 24 hours but have had trouble uploading photos to Blogspot. The blog's link might change over the next few days because of this, but I'll warn you first.

I'd never heard of Lindt's dark chocolate bar with a hint of sea salt, but a few times over the last week it has popped up in my life on various websites. So when I came across this recipe for salted fudge brownies, the ingredients for which were sitting happily and variously in my fridge and pantry, I thought I would bake that dark chocolate bar with a hint of sea salt right out of my life.

I loved the glossy dark chocolate and melted butter mixture, so much so that I took picture after picture of it. Tom and I both were wary of the long refrigerating time, but after leaving them to cool all day - oh my god, they were better than they were warm. Such good brownies. I'm tempted to just keep on eating them until they suddenly disappear.

Salted Fudge Brownies

(Printable Recipe)

Fills a 20cm square pan: 12-16 brownies

1 cup butter

75g dark chocolate

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

1.5 teaspoons vanilla

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon sea salt

Butter Lemon Cake with Ginger Beer Icing

We've been a little lemon-obsessed here recently. Only a couple of nights ago we ate lemon and mushroom carbonara, and my 100th post meal was chicken with a lemon-basil sauced pasta. When Tom washed up this morning, he smelled the leftover lemon juice and declared that he wanted a lemon cake. Given that a couple of weeks ago I vowed to make cake fortnightly (and then completely forgot about it), this seemed like a good cake to start with.

Thin, subtle and buttery, with a completely-unintentional crispy bottom (and an icing disaster which turned out to be not-so-catastrophic after all), I could eat a lot of this cake in one sitting. It's not horrifically sugary or lemony, and there's a very slight tang from the ginger beer spice-mix. The spice mix, incidentally, is one my mother bought at Habitat and sent me. The ingredients list is "ginger, sugar, cream of tartar," so I imagine a tiny bit of ginger and cream of tartar would be the non-pre-bought-mix equivalent.

This isn't strictly an original recipe of mine, but I did have a very specific list of ingredients in my head  - coconut milk, butter, eggs, fresh lemon - which didn't match any recipe I could find. Hence the following is a hodgepodge.

Butter Lemon Cake with Ginger Beer Icing

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 1 20cm square cake

For the sponge:

1 cup butter

1.5 cups brown sugar

4 eggs, separated

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup coconut milk

1 lemon

For the icing:

1/2 cup butter

80g icing sugar

1 teaspoon ginger beer spice mix

1/2 lemon

2 tablespoons cream

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

Cake Batter Ice Cream

I was a complete fool yesterday and made a really nice dinner - the planned title of the blog post was written in my notebook at work - and completely forgot to photograph the final dish. Hence the yoghurt chicken with orange and clove shall wait for another day. In the meantime, let's have some ice cream.

The original recipe revealed itself to me on Tasty Kitchen's Valentine-themed (ugh) front page yesterday. I don't have any red food colouring (or any food colouring at all, which is the only reason I didn't make this cake for my birthday) but I thought it made a pretty good idea anyway. The ice cream tastes a bit unusual but is very nice.

It's also very easy. Not as easy as my other ice cream recipe, true, but I found the recipe half an hour before I went to work, and had enough time to make it and eat lunch.

Edit: Before eating, break some dark chocolate into shards and stir them through the ice cream. It improves the ice cream exponentially.

Cake Batter Ice Cream

(Printable Recipe)

Makes 6 servings

3 egg yolks

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 cup coconut milk

1 cup milk

2 teaspoons cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup cream

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.

Chicken Nuggets

It's been a quiet few days on this blog - it's not that I've not been cooking: just that I roasted a chicken on Sunday, and I don't think anyone needs more recipes for a basic roast dinner (although I did stuff it with a rum-poached tangerine, which made awesome gravy), and my mornings since then have been fairly busy. I have time today, though, to write up three whole recipes! (Well, two and a half, kind of.) Hurrah!

I've done chicken nuggets not long ago, but it was only shortly before I started documenting my cooking with photos, so I felt that Monday night was the perfect time to recreate it. They're good and simple (although it would take quite a long time to make enough for a family, especially if your nuggets are small).

Chicken Nuggets

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2

3 chicken breasts
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon Italian mixed herbs
1 egg

1/2 cup milk
2 slices bread
Oil

Chop the chicken breasts into small chunks - I got about eight to ten chunks per breast.

Mix the flour and herbs in one bowl; beat the egg with milk in a second; make breadcrumbs (I used the blender) and put these in a third bowl.

With clean hands, cover each chicken chunk in flour, egg, then breadcrumbs - it's a good idea to use one hand exclusively for the flour and egg, and the second for breadcrumbs. Drop each nugget into an oiled oven-proof dish and cover with a little more oil.

Cook on 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for about thirty minutes, or until cooked through and slightly crispy. Serve with chips and lots of mayonnaise.

Mulled Wine & Christmas Cake (and a gravy note)

Posting has been fairly light of late - I'm spending most of my non-teaching time knitting rather than cooking. Hence we've had quite a few unimaginative, if nice, meals, and my attempt at something innovative last night went really badly. (I made pumpkin seed pesto, which actually hurt to eat. Pumpkin seed shards are no fun.) I did make a leftovers soup this morning from a roast chicken dinner on Sunday, with lots of white wine and half a teaspoon of ssamjang, which was delicious, but there's no point rehashing old recipes.

Speaking of Sunday's meal, I forgot my resolution to never be allowed near gravy again, and actually ended up making a really nice sauce. I roasted the chicken with one onion (cut into eighths) and eight or nine garlic cloves; to make the gravy I removed six garlic cloves from the pan, squeezed the others out of their skin back into the chicken juices, and put on a low heat. I added red wine, gravy powder, salt and pepper, and stirred. There wasn't much gravy, because I have finally learnt that when you're only cooking for two you don't need enough gravy for six, but what there was was thick, and delicious, and onion-y. Mmmm.

Anyway. We also made mulled wine on Sunday, using Jamie's recipe. Leftovers went in the ice-cube tray (without any of the peel) so we can have 'instant' mulled wine whenever we feel like it. We're also planning on putting a couple of the ice-cubes into Christmas Day gravy. Ooooooh. I also spent this morning making Christmas cake - I've never liked it so didn't even consider making one, but when Tom expressed his despair at the prospect of Christmas Day without Christmas cake, I had no choice. I went shopping after work last night (which is really late!) and picked up about a kilogram of dried fruit, and this morning I got up early to start. I used this recipe.

Mulled Wine
Makes 4 servings and 12 ice-cubes

2 tangerines
250g brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon cinnamon
5ish gratings of fresh ginger
1 teaspoon vanilla powder
1 bottle red wine

Using a peeler, cut off the outer layer of the tangerine skin (the orange bit) leaving any of the white pith behind and put the peelings into a pan. Squeeze the juice from each tangerine segment into the pan (this part is time-consuming!). Add the cloves, cinnamon, ginger and vanilla, and enough red wine to just cover everything in the pan. Simmer roughly for five to ten minutes until the wine has reduced and is very hot. Add the rest of the wine and heat through before serving.

Christmas Cake
Makes 2 cakes

1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
5 eggs
2 cups flour
1 lemon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
5ish gratings fresh ginger
2 tablespoons honey
200ml beer
100g almonds
About 800g of dried fruit (raisins, cranberries, blueberries)

First of all, the original recipe says to preheat the oven before starting on the dough. It took me sixty-five minutes to get to the point where I was ready to use the oven, so I'm glad I ignored this instruction!

I let the butter soften to room temperature and then squished it together with the sugar with my hands. I then whisked it roughly for about five minutes.

In a separate mug, I beat one egg and then added it to the butter mixture, stirring it through. Repeated with each of the five eggs until the mixture was fairly wet. The original recipe warns against potential curdling at this point but I had no problems. Zested the lemon and added this with flour, clove, cinnamon and ginger and stirred through - I loved how this batter completely changed texture several times throughout the process. At this point it was very dry and stiff.

I bought two 60g packs of almond slices, and blitzed them in the blender to make an almond 'flour.' I added this to the dough along with the 200ml beer (I used the Korean brand 'Black Beer Stout', which is apparently quite similar to the original cook's Old Speckled Hen) which made the dough extremely wet again. It required a lot of stirring at this point to get the beer to assimilate entirely. I folded in the dried fruits.

After some difficulty, we managed to line two glass oven bowls with parchment paper. The first cake was big and took 70 minutes at 150 degrees C (300 Fahrenheit) until a toothpick inserted into the centre came out clean; the second was smaller and only needed an hour. After cooking, we tipped each cake out, removed the baking paper, and returned to their bowls. Poked some holes in the top and poured rum in and around them. Covered in clingfilm and they are currently sitting happily in our kitchen - tomorrow they'll be re-fed with more booze.

Chicken Nuggets

You need three separate bowls for this recipe, so both of us were grateful that we happen to be Tupperware Royalty. We have tons of the stuff. It's very useful.


Anyway, chicken nuggets were an idea I had originally considered for Tuesday, so when Tom asked if I wouldn't mind cooking something with chips (fries), this was perfect. I had briefly thought of adding some flour to the now-very-thick vegetable stew leftovers (incidentally, blending it into soup didn't go too well - not the best tastes, although it's still edible) and making vegetable nuggets to go with it. In the end, though, I just couldn't be bothered. It was a good meal anyway.


Chicken Nuggets
Serves 2

3 chicken breasts
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon Italian mixed herbs
1 egg
1 and 1/2 slices bread
Oil

Chop the chicken breasts into small chunks - I got about eight to ten chunks per breast. Mix the flour and herbs in one bowl; beat the egg in a second; make breadcrumbs (I used the blender) and put these in a third bowl. With clean hands, cover each chicken chunk in flour, egg, then breadcrumbs - it's a good idea to use one hand exclusively for the flour and egg, and the second for breadcrumbs. Drop each nugget into an oiled oven-proof dish and cover with a little more oil once done. Cook on 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for about thirty minutes, or until cooked through and slightly crispy. Serve with chips and lots of mayonnaise.

Pesto Spaghetti with Egg

Written on 3 October.

One of the exciting things about our new flat is that it has a gas stove.

I say 'exciting.' I've never cooked with a gas stove before – never – and although I'm sure that by the end of the year I won't be able to live without it, at the moment I'm not relishing the sense of hurry it makes while I'm cooking. It's not just that preheating gives me a few minutes extra to chop, it's that everything seems to cook so much quicker on gas than electric anyway, and I've gotten used to a slow, happy pace in the kitchen. I imagine the fact that I'm suddenly cooking for two instead of eight has something to do with it as well.

Oh well!

When I was struggling to get to sleep last night, I planned tonight's dinner. This was the only contender that I actually dreamed about, so hey presto, I made it. There was a bit of a bug nightmare with the first lot of spaghetti I planned on cooking, but let's not talk about that. In the end it was nice, with enough each for seconds (although you'd have to do another egg, or go without), but I doubt it'll be a regular meal as pesto is not widely available here. I would like to do this again with home-made pesto, and with softly poached rather than fried eggs.

Oh, and this satisfies the campaign my boyfriend and father are running, called “More Eggs in Food.”

Pesto Spaghetti with Egg

Serves 2

250g spaghetti

2 eggs

Pesto

White wine

Herbs (rosemary, basil)

Seasoning

I boiled the spaghetti with salt in boiling water until al dente, which probably took about eight minutes. Drained the spaghetti, reserving a splash of cooking water, and poured both into a glass dish. Mixed with three tablespoons of pesto, a glug of white wine, rosemary, basil, salt and pepper, stirring through all the while. Covered.

Each egg was fried in a hot pan with a dribble of oil. Pasta was served into bowls and eggs dolloped on top.

Eggy Spaghetti

A lunch for two. Another recipe that I wrote for my little brother before he decided to take a gap year.

Eggy Spaghetti

For two people

Takes about 10 minutes

You will need:

Spaghetti (make a circle with your first finger and thumb – you should need about that much for 2)

2 eggs

Grated cheese

Salt and pepper

1. Boil enough water for the spaghetti in your kettle.
2. Break the spaghetti in half, if you want to, and put it in the pan with the boiling water.
3. Crack 2 eggs into a mug and stir them quickly with a fork. Add salt and pepper and stir a bit more.
4. When the spaghetti is cooked (taste it to see), use the colander to drain the water out.
5. Put the spaghetti back into the pan you cooked it in, which should now have no water in it. Pour the beaten eggs into the spaghetti and stir until most of the spaghetti is covered in egg. The spaghetti will be hot enough to just cook the egg as it is, so don't worry about eating raw egg.
6. Add grated cheese and serve.

We didn't break the spaghetti, cracked eggs straight into the cooked pasta, and added both mozzarella and gouda, grated. Didn't add enough salt+pepper though. A quick and easy lunch!

Penne alla Betsy + a breakfast

From this recipe for a creamy, tomato-y pasta - wow, it's delicious. There was much left over and I had it for breakfast and lunch the next day.
Made for 10.

The main substitution was that I used chicken breast chopped into small pieces instead of shrimp - my boyfriend and little sister will absolutely not eat seafood. So I chopped 8 breasts (2 were huge) into small bits and fried them for 10-15 minutes in the butter and oil mixture on a medium-high heat. It produced a LOT of liquid: I drained it and continued to fry for a couple of minutes on a high heat. Put the chicken to one side.
Added a bit of butter to the hot pan along with 2 chopped onions and 4 minced garlic cloves. Cooked till translucent, then added half a bottle of white wine and half a litre of vegetable stock. Allowed to reduce briefly on a high heat before adding roughly 700g of passata. Salt + pepper. Stirred on medium high heat for quite a while - probably 15-20 minutes, I didn't really keep an eye on the time.

In the meantime I boiled 1kg of pasta in salted water and drained it.

Once it started simmering, I added 3 cups of cream to the sauce while my boyfriend (who was meant to be stirring it in) exclaimed over how pretty the cream looked. Finally got him to help mix it! Salt + pepper. Left it for five minutes on a medium heat before putting the chicken pieces back in. Stirred. Ran hot water through the pasta and mixed it into the sauce. Served - there was TONS. Enough leftovers to feed a good few people.

The pasta was still too cold and we didn't leave it in the sauce on the heat long enough: it was cold and the eight people eating then ALL had to use the microwave. Sigh. Served with some grated cheese. My mum commented that it was very like a dish that her friend used to make a couple of decades ago. It's nice to be reminded how cooking can be such a historical thing.

Also a quick recipe for cheese-onion-mustard scrambled eggs that I made the other day and forgot about. One serving.

Half an onion, chopped and fried in butter on a medium heat until beginning to soften. Two eggs cracked into the pan and swirled round. Handful of grated cheese thrown in and mixed. Heat turned down to low. Teaspoon of mustard added. Salt + pepper. I like my eggs a tiny bit runny, so I spoon them into a bowl sooner rather than later. The whole thing takes about 5 minutes.