Ready, Steady, Cook

October 19th - Still ploughing my way through back issues of old foodie mags and here's a really quick recipe for those days when you don't have a lot of ingredients in or if you fancy ringing the changes with some mince! It's a Bill Granger recipe for Spicy Beef Koftas with onion salad. Or not! Omit the onion salad if you are in a rush because you need to set them aside for an hour. Well if you are anything like me and starting dinner at 7pm then you don't want to be waiting that long! The pack of mince was flung in a bowl with a teaspoon each of cumin seeds and coriander, a chopped green chilli, some freshly chopped coriander and a grated onion. I love squelching stuff like this with my hands...takes me back to all the mud pies long.....long...ago. Bill suggests 24 koftas...I got 16! They were fried for a couple of minutes to brown and then into a hot oven for about 6 minutes. Just long enough to make a quick salad and a cucumber yogurt dip. From start to finish in 2o minutes and none the worse for the lack of onion salad.

Still Trucking

October 17th - I've been away for a week and not been doing a lot of cooking so the pressure was on to try out something new today. I realised that this is the first time in 50 plus years that I have kept a New Years resolultion for so long so I am determined not to blow it now. I've been trying to be good today, after a week of over indulgence so it had to be something delicious with vegetables. Caponata sounded nice. A couple of aubergines were chopped into chunks and salted for a while. Meanwhile I gently fried a sliced onion, a glove of garlic and added a tin of tomatoes, followed by 2 tablespoons of basalmic vinegar, a tablespoon of brown sugar, a couple of handfuls of sultanas, a couple of tablespoons of capers and some sliced green olives. This gave the sauce a real sweet and sour type taste. The aubergine was fried in a tablespoon of olive oil and then added to the tomato sauce. Easy.

Palaeo Treats

October 8th - The pressure was on. I was heading away to see the kids at uni...and nephew...so I needed to take them a wee edible treat. Out came the trusty digestives and I easily made a mallow log and some chocolate tiffin. But what to make for a son who follows a Palaeo diet. No grains. No sugar! Help! Then I remembered getting a scrumptious gift of Florentines from one of the children in my class and started investigating different recipes. There were lots of variations but here is my recipe for Florentines. I melted 50g of butter with 1/3 cup of maple syrup and boiled it a bit until it thickened. Then off the heat, I added a tablespoon of cream. To this mix I added flaked almonds, cranberries, chopped crystallised ginger, pistachios, some cinnamon, grated orange zest....anything goes! I did add a heaped teaspoon of flour just to bind the mixture. They did not take long to bake in the oven and then when they were cool I covered one side in dark chocolate. They were an early taste of Christmas!

Mashing it up....Mission Burger

September 30th - I'd been quite impressed with how easily Jamie Oliver made his tofu burger on the TV ..... And I was feeling like something healthy for tea..... So I headed off to the Co-op hopefully to find some tofu.  Amazingly they did have some, but the packet was so big I thought that we'd be eating tofu for a month so I headed back home and decided to try and make something up. I found a recipe for Spicy Bean Burgers in a scrap book of recipes that I'd cut out of magazines years ago. A finely chopped onion was fried with garlic, cumin seeds and chilli. Meanwhile I bashed up a can of chickpeas (artistic licence) with the end of a rolling pin....felt very African! The mash and onion mix were combined with some breadcrumbs, chilli flakes and an egg yolk. I also added in a spoonful of tahini since I guessed these were going to taste a bit hummus like! I fried them and served with a salad and spicy yogurt. Not bad, if I don't say so myself!

Taste of Scandinavia

September 27th - I'm still trawling through back copies of Delicious magazines that I found in a drawer and I saw a recipe for Upside Down Blueberry and Elderflower cake - a recipe from Signe Johansen. I've always got blueberries in the fridge because I like them for breakfast with Greek yogurt and I also had some wild blaeberries in the freezer, which I'd picked a while back. Perfect! The cake tin needed to be lined first with foil and then the blueberries 400g and elderflower cordial put on the bottom. 4 eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla extract and 250g of caster sugar were whisked until pale and fluffy. Then a mixture of 125g each of flour and ground almonds were added, alternating with a mixture of 125g each of melted butter and Greek yogurt. The batter was stuck on top of the berries and the cake baked for about an hour. I was so impressed with myself when I managed to get the cake upside down and still look decent.  It tasted gorgeous.