Half-term Goodies

February 11th - It's been half term and we were meeting up with our daughter who wanted to go skiing.  As a mum I've always taken some goodies when I've seen the kids at university - in fact I used to post them to our son. I shudder to think how much that actually cost. After all, variations on chocolate and digestives can be quite weighty! Anyhow Malteser cake is her favourite so that's what I made.  But the combination of my resolution and recent baking success prompted me to try another cake. I love gingerbread and looked to Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries to provide an easy recipe.
So Double Ginger Cake it was. I liked the chunks of stem ginger and sultanas, though they did sink to the bottom, and the cake was indeed 'light and moist' but I added more than the 2 teaspoons of ginger that it said in the recipe and could have done with more gingeriness.  Also my cake does not look like the picture in the recipe book......(does this sound familiar?)

Family joined us for a night...and by morning all the Malteser cake was gone.  Long live digestives!  Here's the recipe - from a good friend of mine. Don't think about the calories - a little bit of what you fancy and all that....

Melt 4oz butter, 8oz milk chocolate and 3 tablespoons of syrup over a low heat.  Add 8oz crushed digestive biscuits and 8oz Maltesers (take out about 10 and crush for later).  Press into an 11x8 inch baking tray.  Then melt 8oz white chocolate and use it to cover the Malteser cake, sprinkling the crushed Maltesers on the top.  Set in the fridge.  Cut when set (this is quite tricky so probably burns off quite a few calories before you sit down and enjoy it!!)

Really?

February 9th - Bought pork for tea - we've never really eaten much pork since our daughter never particularly liked it but empty nesters get the chance to rediscover foods they used to eat BK (before kids). After the stresses of yesterday I just needed something simple so Balsamic-baked onions and potatoes with roast pork sounded just the job, though didn't have any potatoes! The pork was straightforward enough - sprinkling with rosemary, ground fennel seeds, garlic and bay leaves - and the finished pork had a lovely flavour of fennel.  But the onions - I could not bring myself to use 200g of butter and 350ml of balsamic vinegar - did they really need as much?  I guess that's why the onions were a tad dodgy....or maybe they just missed some potatoes.

Lemon Polenta Cake

Here's the recipe for Lemon Polenta Cake courtesy of Nigella (Nigella Kitchen).

200g butter
200g caster sugar
200g ground almonds
100g fine polenta
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 eggs
zest of 2 lemons

Line a 23cm round cake tin and preheat oven to 180C.
Beat the butter and sugar till light and fluffy.  Mix the almonds, poenta, baking powder and beat some of this into the butter/sugar mixture followed by 1 egg.  Alternate dry ingredients and eggs, beating all the time. Finally beat in the lemon zest and put into the tin.  Cook for about 40 mins.  A cake tester should come out cleanish and the sides of the cake should have begun to shrink away from the sides.

Make a syrup from the juice of 2 lemons and 125g icing sugar, boiling them together until the icing sugar has dissolved.  Prick the top of the cake all over and pour the warm syrup over the cake.

I hope this works for you too.  There is hope for all would be bakers!

No Pressure

February 8th - Cooking is more than just that isn't it.  It depends on the mood of the day, how knackered you are after work, what needs using, what you just fancy eating at the time....and of course the context in which you are cooking. So when husband announces ' hope you don't mind but I've invited this chap round for a meal - you don't mind do you?' that's when the pressure starts.  I really don't mind cooking or having people round - even at the last minute - but there is a sliding scale of pressure depending on who you are cooking for. Cooking for people you don't know - or people who you know are really good cooks themselves does stress me out.  So there I was - end of the week - needing to try out a new recipe - and a vegetarian visitor coming to eat with us in the evening!  We eat quite a lot of vegetarian dishes (husband used to be macrobiotic and have 'hippy' tendencies) so that didn't phase me and River Cottage Veg Everyday offered North African squash and chickpea stew and red cabbage, parsnip, date and orange salad. I really like the combination of sweet and spicy tastes and love dates, apricots and other dried fruits. I adapted the recipe, omitting the orzo (serving couscous on the side instead) and adding roasted sweet potatoes and red onion for that smokey taste at the end.  The salad had finely shredded red cabbage (from the garden), raw parsnip, orange and luscious dates - a seriously good combo - thanks Hugh!

On the theme of being intimidated by really good cooks I should mention a work colleague who is a goddess when it comes to baking.  Every Monday we drool at the prospect of the cake tin she'll be arriving with and all thoughts of diets on Mondays go right out of the window.  Chocolate muffins, chocolate and marscapone brownies, coffee cake, almond and apple loaf...the list of goodies is endless...and never a digestive in sight.  My son, bless, loves my cooking and has always said 'why don't you take a cake into work on Monday?' - you must be joking! But, readers, I made a seriously good cake, under pressure for our vegetarian guest - lemon polenta cake. J might have been a wee bit impressed!

Salads in Winter

February 1st - I'm a woman on a mission.  The glacier growing on the top of the freezer is threatening the next ice age but the freezer drawers are still pretty full of things I'd put in for Christmas.  I decided that if I used up a duck then that would free up a lot of space in one go, but what to do with it?  You must think I do nothing but watch cooking programmes on TV...but when I'm busy working at home to prepare for the week ahead I need a bit of background 'noise' but nothing too heavy thatI need to follow a storyline so cooking programmes are ideal.  Nigel Slater was about to come up trumps again!  Warm duck salad with a citrus dressing.  This recipe wasn't actually in the (two) Nigel Slater cookbooks I have (The Kitchen Diaries) - does anyone else find these hard to navigate? - but I got enough of the gist of it to cook it for supper.  Basically it's slices of juicy orange, green salad leaves and then warm, roast duck on top.  Added chopped chilli, spring onions and made an asian style citrus dressing.  It was seriously good.  Warm salads are so good in the depths of winter when you really don't want cold food but it still feels light and healthy. Mmmmm.

Wot....no digestives?

January 25th - I am no baker! I can only watch in awe at contestants in the Great British Bake Off do there stuff - how do they do it? But....give me a packet of digestives and I can transform them into delicious tiffin, marshmallow log, Malteser cake, truffles for Christmas....I am queen of digestive 'baking' (I use the word very loosely!)  I have one go-to all-in-one cake recipe that I have adapted over the years when I've needed to make birthday cakes, cup cakes, fairy cakes or trifle cake and I switch between plain 'Victoria-sandwich' type and 'chocolate'.  But that's it.  However another week was up....the resolution needed addressing......and I had some very old bananas lurking in the fruit bowl.  The usual banana smoothie was not an option but I decided to brace myself and make a cake.  All the cookbooks got hauled out and Nigel Slater's Chocolate Muscovado Banana Cake sounded fairly straightforward. I like Nigel Slater - keen on good ingredients, not fussy and he likes flinging things together, though probably a tad more successfully than me.  I had all the ingredients, and even a loaf tin liner, but not muscovado sugar.  What is it with all those sugars?  I have caster sugar in the cupboard all the time...and happened to have some demerara left over from Christmas. Was that the reason the cake burned round the edges or was it the oven?  Anyhow I'd probably only give it 3/10 for looks, though the middle bit got wolfed down.

Illusionary Fishcakes

January 21st - Was feeling a bit more adventurous and I really fancied something spicy.  I had fish and prawns in the fridge that were heading for a fish pie but I decided to try Thai Fish Cakes. However I am one of those people that never follow recipes exactly and shove in things that I like......I think the prawns were my undoing!  As per the recipe I zapped all the ingredients in the food processor, let it rest in the fridge and then shaped and fried......

Tasted fab....and they look fab (though I feel a bit of a twat taking pictures of food I've cooked!) But the truth of the matter is that these were 2 out of 10 that looked half decent.....the rest all broke up in the pan and looked like a dogs dinner.  Snapchatted daughter who got a good laugh anyhow.

And the salad on the side....another new recipe Green Salad with Thai dressing (cheers Hugh).  Dressing was really tasty - sesame oil, fish sauce, honey, (rice) vinegar, (mirin) and (tamari) soy sauce. Brackets are what I didn't have!

Not just a Toasted Bagel and Cream Cheese!

January 18th - Home alone.  Husband away on business, son in Canada, daughter at university.  The temptation to go for the easy option for tea - toasted bagel and cream cheese - is almost overwhelming.  But I spent the afternoon working while watching back episodes of Nigel Slater and I saw a nice easy steak recipe - Hot Spicy Yogurt Steak - and thought I'd give it a go.  Marinade was easy - yogurt, crushed peppercorns, garlic, turmeric and a bit of cumin - then just grill as normal.  As my daughter would say - lush!

Finishing off the Brussel Sprouts

January 10th - First, let me come clean - I like brussel sprouts....and I also like a bit of 'hippy food' as my daughter puts it (she had to ask what we were having for tea before asking her friends round so that they would not be subjected to lentil dishes...or was that just to save her embarrassment?)  I also like Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall and all the River Cottage programmes so it seemed a natural place to look for a recipe involving brussels. Puy lentils with roast Brussel sprouts promises 'nutty and sweet sprouts, tossed with earthy lentils and a delicately garlicky basalmic vinaigrette.' Hugh suggested  it would be a great side dish for roast pheasant......but I've never cooked pheasant and only had sausages in the fridge, so here's the result!

2 down, 50 to go....and roasted sprouts were a bit of a revelation!

Not another New Year Resolution

My first blog and I can't actually believe that I'm doing this.  I suppose the idea came from watching Michael MacIntyre (very funny!) hosting a New Year bash where Jamie Oliver made an appearance.  You maybe watched it too....anyhow they ambushed different people off the street and tried to guess whether or not they had Jamie Oliver cookbooks and I have to confess that I have a few.... A wash of guilt came over me as I thought about the shelves of cookbooks that I look at from time to time but don't use as much as I should so I resolved to try a new recipe out each week.

January 4th - The 'do more exercise' resolution and the 'no wine till the end of January' resolution had already been kicked into touch and that only left the wine fuelled idea of a recipe a week so I decided to go for it.  Pressure was on - daughter's friend over for tea and his mum is an awesome cook - but I pulled out a favourite cookbook (Annabel Langbein's The Free Range Cook) and decided that it needed to be easy....Baked Lemon Grass and Chilli Chicken. Mixing sweet chilli sauce with some lime juice, fish sauce, crushed garlic and pouring over the chicken was simplicity itself and the result......lovely!  Finely grated lemon grass is not 'widely available' where I live (on an island off the west coast of Scotland) but I always alter recipes a bit anyway so a bit of lemon zest hit the spot! So 1 down, 51 to go!!