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

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

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

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

Herbed Potatoes

We had a giant lump of pork in the fridge, which I didn't want to do anything complicated with. Salt, pepper, oil, roast is, I find, the best way to eat pork. (Except of course this BBC recipe which I cooked once and haven't been able to since and I'm still sad about that. It was so good.) So I decided to go all-out on the potatoes. The herb mixture was gorgeous, as were the occasional tastes of blackened onion, and I love the way mint adds a freshness to a mix of flavours without overwhelming.

I meant to photograph the entire process of potato-preparing but didn't get very far with that. Hence the lone photo of two onions on some foil.

Herbed Potatoes

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 2 as a side

2 onions

5 small potatoes

2 tablespoons oil, divided

2 garlic cloves

1 tablespoon each mint, rosemary, thyme

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)

Jansson's Delight

I made this from a recipe suggestion in Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus, under 'potato and anchovy' which suggests mixing chopped onion with anchovies at the bottom of a baking tray, covering with "fat matchsticks" (i.e. chips) of potatoes, and set them swimming in cream in the oven for forty minutes. I cheated and used hefty amounts of anchovy powder rather than real anchovies, and then didn't tell my significant other that it had anything fishy in it - and he didn't notice. He even went back for seconds. So I would venture that the anchovy powder just adds saltiness and depth to the dish, rather than an icky fishiness. It was good.

I served mine with chicken oven-steamed with balsamic vinegar, mustard and garlic. I figured that the super-creamy potatoes would need something acidic to balance it out - and it worked pretty well. To see how to oven-steam chicken, check my recipes here and here.

Jansson's Delight

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4 as a side

1.5 to 2 onions

1 tablespoon anchovy powder

3 potatoes

1 sweet potato

600ml mixture of milk and cream

(I used 200ml milk and 400ml cream)

1 slice bread

1 tablespoon butter, sliced into pats

Seasoning

Weekend Shepherd's Pie

One of the last Saturdays in January marks a special occasion in my family's social circle - the awards night for the cycling group that my father heads. There is generally a big party with shepherd's pie and champagne, a dinner party menu borrowed from British ex-politican and scandalmonger (that's definitely a word) Jeffrey Archer. Wikipedia says "In 1979... He also began to host shepherd's pie and Krug parties for prominent people at his London apartment, which overlooks the Houses of Parliament."

This menu is ostensibly to make the night easy to cater for, although this year I was only one of two people worldwide, as far as I know, cooking for the celebration - and the other one is a professional chef. Oh well.

My boyfriend is a member of this cycling group, hence our own celebration here last night, complete with leftover Christmas crackers. The pie was delicious. It's filling and comforting and best served so hot that it burns your mouth and for hours afterwards even plain water tastes smoky. It should be dark and wintry and thick and liquidy and one of the most rustic meals you've ever tasted.

In terms of time, you could no doubt have this pie ready within forty-five minutes. Unfortunately that's not the point of this particular recipe. The point here is to spend several hours doing something relaxing and weekend-y, occasionally getting up to stir the mince and add a teaspoon of this or that. The mince could probably sit forever slow-cooking, as long as you kept adding stock and alcohol to make sure it retained that red-wine-gravy texture.

Shepherd's Pie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4

1 onion

2 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon flour

400g mince, preferably beef or lamb

1 cup red wine

3 cups water, separated, each with 1 tablespoon gravy or beef stock powder

1 teaspoon anchovy powder

2 teaspoons worcester sauce

2 teaspoons mixed herbs

1 head broccoli

25ml rum

Seasoning

Mustard, for serving

1200g potatoes

1 tablespoon milk

1/2 cup butter

Seasoning

Chop the onion and garlic finely and fry in an oiled pan. Once softened, sprinkle the flour over to make a very loose roux. This will help thicken the gravy later.

Add the mince and stir through to break up any clumps, allowing the mince to brown all over.

Whisk two cups of cold water with two tablespoons of stock powder, and add it to the mince pan along with the red wine. Turn to the lowest heat possible, and allow to simmer for at least fifteen minutes.

Start peeling 1200g of potatoes, or simply three of the biggest potatoes I've seen in my life.

I struggled to keep my hand around them.

Once peeled, cut the potatoes into small chunks and boil them vigorously. You'll need quite a large pan for 1200g of potatoes. The softer they are, the better (and easier) the mash will be.

Add the anchovy powder, worcester sauce and mixed herbs to the mince pan. Taste, and season accordingly.

Break the broccoli head into small florets and add it to the mince pan, along with the third cup of water whisked with stock powder. Turn the heat up to a medium-low flame, and simmer for ten minutes or so.

Gravy is built in to a shepherd's pie, so don't simmer the entire thing away. Our meat mixture looked this liquidy before it was tipped into a deep ovenable dish. Taste again at this point - I felt there wasn't enough boozy flavour so added 25ml of rum, our red wine stock having been depleted by this stage of cooking. The heat can be turned off at this stage, although be sure to keep it warm to avoid re-heating dangers.

Drain the potatoes, which should have been boiled to almost breaking point, and mash them with milk, butter and more salt and pepper. This amount of butter should create a gorgeous mash, the buttery taste of which can even withstand the beefy boozy filling later on.

Tip the beef mixture into a large, deep dish (ours is 23cm across, 77cm around, and 8cm deep). Carefully spread the mash on top, and then use a fork to create mountains and troughs by raking and lifting. A smooth topping seriously detracts from this dish.

Bake for twenty minutes to forty minutes, depending on how desperately you need the pie, at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit). It's a good idea to put the bowl on a large sheet of foil, because - as you will see below - the pie will try to escape a little.

Serve. Tastes brilliant with mustard, particularly (I find) wholegrain.

See how the gravy has leaked out slightly, and how the mountains of the mash are a little blackened. Perfect.

After we'd each had a large bowl of pie, there was still this much left.

Continue eating the pie until it's gone. Which takes much less time than you might think.

Biscuit Chicken Potato Pie

Last night I thought I would have a go at recreating the Gallimaufry Pie, which was my fiftieth post on this blog - this post, incidentally, is (I think) my ninety-fourth, so we're nearly at the 100 mark! Very exciting.

Anyway, I wanted to use up some chicken, as well as the cream we bought yesterday, and I completely forgot to add the bacon, and we don't have any sweet potato anyway, so this pie is actually quite far removed from the original Gallimaufry. Hence the far less imaginative name.

It's a good pie nonetheless - I love the easy biscuit topping. (In fact, I loved it so much I made it again this morning. More details on that coming up.) It was tangy and sweet and salty and crunchy and creamy and gorgeous. What's more, it could easily be adapted to suit your particular tastes on any given night: add more potato, or some sweet potato, for a heavier meal, or courgettes for a lighter one. In fact, add whatever you bloody well like. I bet the bacon would be good in it as well.

That said, it is a bit of a frantic meal - in my small kitchen, with no help (during all the parts when I could have used a hand, Tom was conveniently either still out or on the toilet), I felt a bit overwhelmed at times. If you have time, this recipe can be done calmly and still be ready within, say, 80 minutes. As long as nothing burns, everything is perfectly happy to stay on the heat as long as you need it to.

Easy Biscuit Chicken Potato Pie

(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4 with a side

2 large onions

2 garlic cloves

1 large chilli

2 chicken breasts

Chilli powder

3 small potatoes

1/2 glass white wine

100ml cream

1 bell pepper

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1/2 tablespoon brown sugar

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 tablespoon lime juice

1 teaspoon mustard

Seasoning

Dough:

2 cups flour

1 cup milk

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon lemon vinegar

2 tablespoons oil

1 tablespoon of milk, separate

Finely dice one of the onions, both garlic cloves and the chilli. Chop the chicken breasts into chunks, sprinkle these ingredients with chilli powder, and fry in a large pan on a low heat.

Chop the potatoes (peeling first if you want) into chunks roughly the same size as the chicken chunks, and boil for about ten minutes.

Add the white wine to the chicken pan and turn the heat up, allowing the alcohol to burn off. Once the potatoes are ready, drain and add them to the chicken pan, along with 100ml cream (or slightly more if that looks too dry). Chop the bell pepper chunkily and add it to the pan. Turn the heat down to its lowest possible setting, and season. Add more chilli powder to taste.

Quickly mix the flour, milk, baking powder, vinegar and oil in a bowl. The mixture should be thick and sticky and difficult to stir.

Rinse out the potato pan and dry it. Heat some oil in the pan while you finely slice the second onion in half and then into crescent-moon shapes, and then dump into the pan. Stir. Once the onions are fairly soft, add the sugar and balsamic vinegar and stir to coat. Continue cooking this on a low heat, allowing the onions to soak up the balsamic flavour, while you prepare the mayonnaise mixture.

Mix the mayonnaise, lime juice and mustard in a small bowl and whisk.

Now it's time to assemble the pie!

Spread half of the chicken potato mixture on the bottom of your oven-proof dish. Pile half the caramelized onions on top and dot with half of the mayonnaise mixture. Repeat with the second half of each mixture.

Using a couple of spoons, blob the dough mixture on top of the pie. It's going to look ugly, but don't worry. You're meant to be able to see the pie filling underneath the various biscuit blobs. Brush each bit of dough with the tablespoon of milk you kept separate.

Put in the oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for twenty-five minutes. Serve.

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.

Mexican Shepherd's Lasagne

I've mentioned already today that the last few days have necessitated quick comfort food. I'm something of an expert at whipping up meals that make me feel better - but only for myself. Tom isn't generally a fan of what I, personally, think of as comfort food. And the lack of decent cheese in Korea has hindered my ability in this area somewhat. (No, I will never stop going on about how much I miss cheese. It's even mentioned in my about me section - that's how deeply I'm affected by this.)

I had defrosted some mince yesterday, so decided that I wanted shepherd's pie. Unfortunately I didn't have the energy for mashing potatoes, and we'll be having shepherd's pie next week anyway (an annual celebration - I'll attempt to explain more at the time). So I thought - tortilla pie. And immediately discarded that thought, because we'd had tortillas the night before. In the end I went for a combination of the two, with a little bit of lasagne-esque layering thrown in - I'm just cool like that.

Dinner was pretty good, with the comfort factor of being able to eat it with a spoon, although the potatoes retained enough crunch to make it just on the wrong side of comfort food. Not necessarily a bad thing. This could easily be made vegetarian following the recipe for mince from the tortilla pie recipe rather than including mince.

Oh, and I shall warn you before you look at the recipe and pictures: this is not a pretty meal.

Mexican Shepherd's Lasagne
(Printable Recipe)

Serves 4 with a side.

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 chilli pepper

1 pack of mince (250g)

6 small potatoes

2 tablespoons gravy powder

300ml tomato sauce

Pinch of cinnamon and anchovy powders

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1 tablespoon chilli powder

1 tin kidney beans

1/2 cup red wine

1 tablespoon mayonnaise or sour cream

Grated cheese

Seasoning

Chop the onion, garlic and chilli and fry until softened. Add the mince and stir, breaking up any large clumps, until browned. Sprinkle with gravy powder.

In the meantime, slice the potatoes into thin discs and boil on a medium-high heat until easily pierced with a fork. Peel them first, if you like.

Add the tomato sauce to the mince, along with cinnamon, anchovy, sugar and chilli to taste. Reduce for ten minutes, then add the kidney beans and red wine. (I also added leftover mashed beans from the night before, to thicken the sauce a little - you could skip this step, or mash some beans before adding to the pan.) Cook for a further five minutes before adding a tablespoon of mayonnaise or sour cream to the mince and stirring through.

Drain the potatoes and allow to cool for a moment. In a deep oven dish, spread 1/3 of the mince mixture, cover with 1/3 of the potatoes, and sprinkle a little bit of cheese on top. Repeat until all the ingredients have been layered, using a heavier hand with the cheese on top. Bake at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Serve.

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.

Oven-Fried Chicken and Hasselback Potatoes

Yesterday I felt very much like Nigella as I decided to marinade some chicken for dinner about three minutes before we had to leave for work. If only I'd been wearing a lower-cut top, with mood lighting rather than brash sunlight, and a camera crew ready to put everything I needed within arm's reach. Instead I was rushing maniacally around my nonetheless tiny kitchen, grabbing and shaking and stirring and trying to reassure Tom that it would only take a second longer.

Dinner was delicious, and taken from recipes here and here. I've done Hasselback potatoes before, but in the spirit of my only real New Year's resolution (which is to make a bit more of an effort with this blog, in case you couldn't tell) I'll write up the recipe again. With pictures! Oooooh.

You may have noticed a new 'Recipes A-Z' at the top of the page. I'm not sure it's entirely easy to use at the moment, so please comment if you have any suggestions for improvement. Also, if you click on the title of a recipe and then scroll down to the bottom of the recipe, you should see a list of related recipes that might interest you.

In other news, I received Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus as a late Christmas present, and - wow. Just wow. In a few days I might have gotten over my infatuation with the book enough to talk about it like a normal human being talks about books, but for the moment I'm just going to wallow in my crush.

Oven-Fried Chicken

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 2

3 chicken breasts

200ml milk

1 tablespoon lemon vinegar

1 teaspoon lime juice

3 finely chopped garlic cloves

Small handful of chopped onion

1 teaspoon mustard

Spice (I added a teaspoon of ssamjang and a hefty handful of chilli flakes)

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Seasoning

4 crackers

1 slice of bread

1 handful grated cheese

Sprinkle of chilli flakes

1/4 cup flour

2 grindings of black pepper

Mix the milk with the lemon vinegar and lime in a bowl, and leave to stand while you get the other ingredients out. Chop the garlic cloves and onion (I probably used about a quarter of an onion) and add to the slightly-curdled mixture. Add mustard, spice and cinnamon, and stir everything through. Dump the chicken in, turn to coat in the marinade if necessary, cover the bowl, and leave for work.

The chicken should sit in the marinade for at least three hours - mine sat for about eight. In a separate bowl, crumble the crackers and bread and mix with the cheese, chilli flakes, flour and pepper. I used a blender to whizz everything together to make a very fine dust which coated the chicken remarkably evenly.

Marinaded chicken ready to be coated.

Pick up each chicken breast and shake a little to get off any excess drops. Dredge in the coating and put on to a baking tray. If you want the coating to go properly golden, dot some butter on top of the chicken - I forgot to but was nonetheless perfectly happy with the results.

Waiting to go in the oven.

Bake at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit) for thirty minutes.

In the meantime, pour the marinade into a heavy-bottomed pan on a low heat. Stir frantically to decrease the likelihood of making flavoured ricotta. After about five minutes, it can be left on the heat to reduce - I left it for about ten minutes until the sauce was the consistency I wanted. Add seasoning, and herbs if wanted. I served this sauce on the side of the meal in a separate bowl in case it was disgusting, but it was actually really nice and added some less-subtle spice to the meal.

Hasselback Potatoes

(Printable Recipe)
Serves 2

6 small potatoes

Oil (lots of oil)

Butter

Seasoning

Put each potato in a wooden spoon and cut across at intervals. The wooden spoon will stop you from cutting all the way through, so each potato will fan out as it cooks.

Chopping the Hasselback.

Put onto a baking tray and cover liberally in oil, salt and pepper. Cut small pieces of butter and put one on top of each potato (which should be cut-side up). Roast for forty-five minutes at 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit), adding more oil halfway through if you think the potatoes don't look crispy enough. Bigger potatoes will take more time, and crispier potatoes (my boyfriend's eternal desire) will also take longer. Serve.

Dinner is served.

Honey Plum Chicken with Quick Roast Potatoes

This dinner is quick and easy: the 'roast' potatoes come from Nigella's rapid roastini recipe which I saw on Nigella Kitchen. As we had homemade gnocchi left over from earlier in the week, I thought I would throw it together with some chicken.

The meal was good, but the sweet potato gnocchi had a very intense flavour. That was fine when covered in the sauce, but there was nowhere near enough sauce. Make more sauce! That's my advice.

Also, I am a terrible, terrible food blogger because I can't even remember when I made this for dinner, let alone what specific quantities I used of everything. Oh dear.

Honey Plum Chicken with Quick Roast Potatoes
Serves 2

2 chicken breasts
1/2 cup honey
2 cups red wine
1/2 cup plum sauce
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1 clove garlic
Seasoning

24 homemade sweet potato gnocchi
Oil

Use a small amount of honey, plum sauce and balsamic to marinade the chicken for ten minutes. Tip the chicken with marinade into a pan and fry until the chicken is slightly browned on each side. Mince the garlic clove and add it to the pan. Continue cooking the chicken, adding seasoning and the remaining honey, plum sauce, red wine and balsamic vinegar, as necessary, until the chicken is cooked and you have enough sauce.

Fry the gnocchi in hot oil for four minutes on each side. Serve together.

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Red Wine Sauce

Original recipes can be found here and here. They go surprisingly well together!

This could also be an oven-free recipe if you boiled the sweet potato. I chose to roast it for extra flavour.

Sweet Potato Gnocchi
Makes about 50 gnocchi (enough for 4 meals)

4 large sweet potatoes
Oil
Seasoning

1 and 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup cream
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 cheesecloth (I used a clean pillowcase)
Or about 100g ricotta cheese

2 eggs
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
2 cups flour

Peel and cut the sweet potatoes into chunks. Put into a baking dish and toss with salt, pepper and oil. Roast at 180 degrees C for 40-50 minutes. (I layered the sweet potato in a narrow dish and it took about 55 minutes for all of it to cook - if all the potato was at one level it would cook faster.)

In the meantime, make ricotta: mix the milk, cream and lemon juice in a pan and put over a medium heat for five to ten minutes, until the curds and whey have separated. Stir occasionally to minimize any of the milk sticking to the pan. Put your cheesecloth into a colander and drain the ricotta. Leave for two minutes, and then squeeze gently to remove excess whey. Tip the ricotta into a mixing bowl.

Add 2 eggs to the ricotta and beat. Add the brown sugar and grated ginger and stir to combine.

Remove the cooked potato from the oven and mash it, trying to break up any lumps. Spoon the mash into the ricotta-egg mixture and stir everything together. Gradually add the two cups of flour while stirring everything through until you have a slightly sticky dough. With clean hands, pick up about a tablespoon of the dough and roll it into a gnocchi-shaped ball. If the dough sticks to your hands too readily, add some oil and re-mix. (Our potatoes roasted in quite a lot of oil, and I believe this helped the sweet potato dough achieve a texture which made it very easy to work with.)

Make the dough into gnocchi-esque balls - we got fifty exactly from ours. Boil a pan of water and drop some of the gnocchi into it (how many will depend on the size of the pan). Once the gnocchi float (this will take longer for the larger gnocchi, although generally about two to three minutes), remove them from the pan and serve. A regular serving is about thirteen gnocchi balls per adult, I find - although I did eat chocolate afterwards.

If there is any unused gnocchi, do not boil it. This can be refrigerated or frozen. With frozen gnocchi you can boil it exactly the same way as unfrozen gnocchi - it will add no more than a minute to the cooking time.

Red Wine Sauce
Serves 2

1 onion
1 garlic clove
1 cup black raspberry wine (or substitute a slightly sweet red wine)
2 chicken stock cubes
100ml boiling water
1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard
1 teaspoon cream cheese
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon gravy powder
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon thyme
Seasoning

This sauce takes about twenty minutes, so I started mine as the sweet potato came out of the oven and was being mashed; it required very little attention except for the odd taste and stir.

Chop the onion and garlic and fry in oil until soft. Add the red wine and allow the sauce to bubble for two minutes. Add the chicken stock and boiling water and stir. After two minutes, add the mustard and cream cheese. This then simmered for a little over five minutes while I made the gnocchi. In a separate bowl, mix the soy sauce and gravy powder together to form a paste and add this paste to the pan. After five minutes, during which the sauce should have reduced a little, add the balsamic vinegar and thyme. Season to taste. Once the gnocchi is done, this will be ready to serve.

Milk Chicken with Roast Vegetable Mash

I feel like I've not been in the same 'cooking' frame of mind, recently, as I have been for the last... well, year, I suppose. I didn't enjoy the second chilli con carne meal because it felt like a microwave meal, which (it turns out) I am oddly averse to. I've made simple meals, like a carbonara pasta bake, which I didn't post because I've made both carbonaras and pasta bakes in the past. Nothing special.

Last night I was thinking of doing chicken enchiladas, which we've also done before (but which I didn't write up because Tom was the main chef that night - my original enchilada recipe is here, though), when I decided that this slump must end - at least temporarily. I found this recipe from Everybody Likes Sandwiches, and read it, and all the other recipes it links to, and decided to put it with this recipe from BBC Good Food.

It was good. Not mindblowingly awesome, like so many of these recipes promised - I was disappointed that it wasn't the best chicken either of us had ever tasted, but I suppose it might work better with an entire bird (as intended) than three breasts (as I used). Tom's superior mashing skills played a major role, as always, in making the mashed vegetable mix absolutely delicious. Next time I would try properly roasting the sweet potato in peeled chunks, as suggested by the original recipe, but yesterday I simply didn't want to peel the sweet potatoes. Or cut them. I don't like dealing with raw sweet potato.

Milk Chicken with Roast Vegetable Mash
Serves 2, with extra sauce

3 chicken breasts
Seasoning
1 teaspoon butter
1 heaped teaspoon cinnamon
1 heaped teaspoon oregano
1 tablespoon lemon juice/vinegar
2 cups milk

2 large sweet potatoes
3 garlic cloves
4 potatoes
Milk
Seasoning

I pricked the sweet potatoes and put them on a baking tray with the garlic cloves with a little oil. Put them in the oven at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, I sprinkled salt and ground black pepper into a bag with the chicken breasts, and rubbed the chicken through the bag until it was lightly coated in seasoning. Melted the butter on a low heat in a saucepan and fried the chicken on both sides until each breast was white. (I didn't bother draining the fat as there was barely anything to drain.) Added cinnamon, oregano, lemon juice and vinegar (the lemon juice ran out while I was pouring) and the milk, and heated through for a moment. Tipped the chicken and warmed sauce into an oven-proof dish, covered with foil, and put in the oven. By now the potatoes and garlic had been in the oven for twenty minutes - I removed the garlic, and put the chicken and potatoes on at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for thirty minutes.

I peeled the normal potatoes and cooked them in water at a fairly low heat for thirty minutes. After half an hour, the foil came off the chicken and the heat was increased to 200 degrees (390 Fahrenheit). Twenty minutes later (at which point the chicken had been cooking for 50 minutes and the sweet potatoes for 70 minutes), I removed the sweet potatoes from the oven. The chicken stayed in. Added broccoli to the boiling potato pan and cooked for ten minutes. Drained the potatoes and broccoli, and removed the broccoli on to the foil, leaving some green broccoli residue in the pan. The garlic cloves were squeezed out of their skin and added to the normal potatoes along with the flesh from the sweet potatoes, and the vegetables were mashed together with milk and seasoning.

The chicken was removed from the oven (after having been in for roughly an hour) and served.

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.

Thanksgiving: The Sides (part 2)

There were a lot of side dishes yesterday. Along with corn and eggplant from our guests, we served roasted white and purple potatoes, baked sweet potato mash, homemade stuffing, homemade biscuits, broccoli, chard with garlic chips, and maybe even something else that I've forgotten since.

Roast Potatoes
Serves 5 with leftovers

10 large potatoes
Seasoning
Duck fat

I peeled and chopped each potato into three good-sized chunks before boiling them in salted water. Once soft (this took longer than necessary as I purposely kept the stove on a low heat), they were drained and Tom 'fluffed' the potatoes by putting them back into the dry cooking pan and shaking them roughly. It's a Delia trick, apparently, and one he swears by. At this point the duck had been removed from its cooking tray, and the potatoes were put into this. The duck fat was spooned over the potatoes and they were roasted for roughly two hours at 160 degrees (320 Fahrenheit).

Baked Sweet Potato Mash
Serves 5 with plenty of leftovers

A huge sack of sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons cream
1 tablespoon milk
2 tablespoons butter
Seasoning

First of all, regarding the amount of potatoes used: I have no idea. It took me about half an hour to peel all of them. They were of varying size and came in a big heavy bag from the school's bus driver, which I mentioned a few days ago. Sorry.

I peeled the potatoes, boiled them, and mashed them with cream, milk and butter. The mash was spooned into a large baking dish and baked for twenty minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit). The best mash I've ever tasted.

Stuffing
From this recipe
Serves 5 - I don't think there were any leftovers of this

4 slices white bread
4 rashers bacon
1 onion
3 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 egg
1 handful dried cranberries
Seasoning (every herb in the kitchen)

I tore the bread into chunks and blitzed these chunks in our mini-blender. Meanwhile, I diced the onion and garlic, and tore the bacon into small bits over a hot oiled pan. After a few moments of frying, I added the onion and garlic, turning the heat off a minute later. I left the bacon mixture in the pan to cool for about twenty minutes before adding it, along with the fat, to the breadcrumbs. I added the lemon juice, a ton of seasoning - as mentioned, every herb we own was used liberally, plus salt and pepper - and an egg to solidify everything a bit more. A handful of dried cranberries was later stirred through. The stuffing was left on the side for probably three hours, perhaps longer, before being baked for twenty minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit).

Biscuits
From this recipe
Makes 9 biscuits

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon active dried yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1 cup milk with 1 teaspoon lemon vinegar

I mixed the flour, baking powder, yeast, sugar and salt in a bowl. Melted the butter in the microwave before adding the milk and vinegar to the butter bowl (this makes buttermilk). Stirred the wet ingredients into the dry and left to sit for, again, about three hours before baking for 15 minutes at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit). Drop biscuits like this are brilliant, because all you do is take a spoonful of the dough and drop it straight on to the tray (hence the name). No rolling out dough or anything. They were, however, slightly too salty.

Vegetables: plain broccoli and garlic-chip-chard
Serves 5

2 heads broccoli
2 large handfuls of chard leaves
8 garlic cloves
Seasoning

I chopped up the broccoli, reserving the lower woody part of the stem for another time, and boiled it in salted water. Once cooked, I drained it and kept it warm before serving.
I sliced the garlic cloves into 'chips' and put them in a cold pan with oil. They slowly cooked on a low heat until slightly golden. The chard leaves were then stirred into the pan to sauté. Once wilted, the heat was turned off. This was possibly the least successful part of the meal, but at least it was only a small part. The chard was still slightly wet from having defrosted, and should have been cut into smaller pieces - each leaf is really big!

Pork with Chilli-Apple Sauce Disaster

Oh, this dinner could have been so nice. I fried apple chunks, chopped chilli and pork in a pan to go with the stovetop roast potatoes. The first time we served it up, the potatoes were somehow uncooked in the middle. Everything went back in the pan, and the second time it was served up, the sweet potatoes were burnt and the pork had gone rubbery. Sigh. Oh well, when you make it, you'll know better.

The chilli barely added any spice at all, even with extra chilli powder - there was just a hint of warmth. I would add one or two more next time. Also, alcohol (of course) would make this apple sauce better. By the way, this is one of the easiest sauces I've ever made, given that apple sauce pretty much makes itself.

This is just the recipe for the main dish - the recipe for the side can be found above. I did five small potatoes and three larger sweet potatoes, and my mistake was in boiling them for under 10 minutes before draining them to be fried. We also put the normal potatoes in the frying pan about five minutes before the sweet potatoes, as sweet potatoes seem to cook faster.

Pork with Chilli-Apple Sauce
Serves 2 (generously - probably serves 3 really)

200g pork
Handful of chopped onion
1 kwari pepper (a small, green, curled chilli)
1 and a half apples
Chilli powder
Cinnamon
Seasoning

I chopped the pork and pepper, and peeled and chopped the apples. The onion and apple were put into a hot oiled pan and fried for five minutes. The chilli and pork were added, along with spices and seasoning. The pot was left for ten minutes, though I stirred occasionally. The apple releases its juices and creates a lovely brown sauce which the pork braises in.

Purple Pasta

This dinner was so exciting - not only was it a fabulous colour, but almost all of the ingredients were alliterative! In the interests of full disclosure, this was pasta with pork, potato, (chilli) pepper, and probably some other p-words that I've forgotten a few hours later.

Despite John suggesting that 'purple pasta' bore some resemblance to vomit, tonight's dinner was really quite good. It started out with my Friday adult students telling me about the lunch they'd had at a Chinese restaurant - noodles with pork, sweet potato, onion and spinach. The day before we had bought purple sweet potatoes at Home Plus, and I was eager to cook with them. I was convinced that we had bought curled mallow (in fact, I still am convinced) but the hunt for it proved fruitless, so the spinach equivalent was missed. It was flavoursome but in an amazingly subtle way, with a kick from the chilli.

I also made myself a fragrant pumpkin risotto for lunch, which was delicious - I added pumpkin chunks between the adding rice and adding wine steps, and cinnamon as one of the spices. Nutmeg or ginger would have gone well too.

Anyway, the proper recipe:

Purple Pasta
Serves 2 with small second servings (more alliteration! I'm so happy)

200g pork, chopped into bite-sized pieces
2 purple sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into small cubes
1 onion
1.5 garlic cloves (one of the cloves was smaller than my littlest fingernail)
2 servings spaghetti
400ml hot vegetable stock
Honey
Soy sauce
1 green chilli
100ml cream
Seasoning (including chilli powder)

The pork, potatoes, onion and garlic were chopped and fried in a hot pan for five minutes. The vegetable stock was added and the pan was brought to a boil before being put on a low heat to simmer. The spaghetti was also put on a low heat in a separate pan for fifteen minutes. The potatoes had turned the pale stock a pretty burgundy colour, to which roughly a tablespoon each of honey and soy sauce was added, along with the chopped green chilli. The nearly-cooked pasta was drained and added to the pork pan, along with the cream and seasoning, and heated through (about five minutes). Served, with the sauce now a pretty lilac colour.