Hairy Bikers Chilli Salad Bowls

Whilst idling away my lie in this morning, I happened across an article by Janet Street-Porter which included a part on the subject of this country's fascination with cookery books.  She likened the collecting of cookbooks to an obsession with handbags or shoes.  Expensive, and after the first few, probably unnecessary.  Despite generally finding JS-P a bit irritating, I have to agree with her on this particular point.

It was my collection of cookbooks that set me off on this mission last year.  I had around twenty which I would leaf through, imagining myself lovingly making some of the recipes for my nearest and dearest.  Then reality would surface and I'd just cook whatever made people happy.  And so I promised myself I'd spend a year using the books I had and cooking something new every day.  Did I stick to it?  Nope.

Yes, this is 'diet' food - about 450cal for the plateful

Well I stuck to the new recipe bit and the blogging bit.  What I didn't stick to was using the recipe books that I had.  I was seduced into buying some new ones that were heavily discounted 'because I need them for my challenge'.  I used recipes from my Good Food Mag subscription.  And I discovered the joys of finding recipes on the internet.  So at the end of this year, I have at least eight more cookery books* than 365 days ago, despite having enough recipe books that if I cooked one new recipe from one of them every day, I'd probably not cook the same thing twice before I die**

At the weekend, when I was out with the girls, one of them mentioned the Hairy Dieters book by the Hairy Bikers.  I'm not a fan of Si and Dave, but having flicked through some of their books at my mum's, I thought that maybe I should add their dieters book to my armoury.  I then wandered off into iPad-land and discovered that some of the recipes were published online anyway.  So did I really need to buy the book?  Probably not.  At least trying some of the online ones might sway me one way or another.  So I settled on trying their chilli bowls recipe tonight.

And this just goes to prove JS-Ps point (you can read the article here***).  I used to make something very similar many moons ago.  Except I served it in a soft tortilla rather than a baked one.  It was a staple diet meal until the husband decided he didn't want it again, and I forgot all about it.  In some respects, it was nice to be reminded of yet another option to add to our weekly repertoire that's family friendly.  But if I'd stirred the old grey matter a little more, I could've thought this one up myself.

Chilli is something I normally batch cook (the husband doesn't like kidney beans) and so I freeze portions so that I can have something different to him for dinners when I'm not a slave to the 366 Recipe Challenge.  Of course, there are plenty of people out there who've never cooked chilli before and would probably appreciate the friendly Bikers' guidance.  But once you've bought a few cook books, you should probably spend your pennies on something else.

The Wahaca book has recipes re-hashed from Mexican Cooking Made Easy.  My two Gordon Ramsay books contain around 30% of the same recipes.  The Hummingbird Bakery are guilty of recycling into the follow up Cake Days.  Even Dan Lepard is guilty, with a significant number of recipes from Short and Sweet also being available online from on the Guardian website****.  And once you own a few baking books, you notice that they all peddle slight variations on the theme of chocolate, coffee, carrot, lemon cake.  There are only so many recipes to go around.  And unless you want to eat Heston-food every night for dinner, it all starts to get a bit samey.

Nevertheless, a year on, I still love my cookery books.  They've fed my imagination since I was a child and used to make up stories in my head that involved intricate scenes of cooking lavish meals and extravagant cakes*****.

So does this mean I'll never buy another cookery book again?  Of course it doesn't.  I am as much as a sucker for cookery books as I am for high heeled shoes.  If there's a little leeway in the budget and a book appeals, I'll buy it.  And I want to buy 'classics' from the Roux brothers and Richard Bertinet.  But I'll definitely check the internet first.

You can save yourself a few quid and find the Hairy Bikers recipe I used online here.  It was an okay family meal and really filling.  I chose to eschew the tortilla bowls and use tacos instead.  I've not eaten tacos for a million years and it was great to know that you can eat three taco shells for only a handful of calories more than a single flour tortilla.  This in itself made the recipe a complete bargain.  If I was feeling extravagant, I'd add chopped coriander to the salad.

And guess what I have for tea tomorrow night?  Yes!  Leftovers.  Because there is only one more recipe to go.  And Miss A has insisted we do cake :o)

*Two were Christmas presents (Lorraine Pascale's Home Cooking Made Easy and the Great British Bake Off Book).  One I've not used at all on this challenge (Jamie's 30 Minute Meals).  One I've lost (James Martin's Masterclass).  One was the best investment ever (Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet).  One was for the Weekly Bake Off Challenge (Mary Berry's 100 cakes and bakes).  The others were Wahaca by Thomasina Miers and Little Paris Kitchen by Rachel Khoo.  I'm sure there were one or two others.
**As I child, I believed everyone lived until 100 and died on their 100th birthday just after the party.  I intend to do just this.
***I read the Daily Fail online.  So sue me.
****That said, I never would've gotten my mum into Dan Lepard if I'd not sent her links to recipes from Short and Sweet.
*****I still do this

Mary Berry's Crab and Sweetcorn Soup

Next on the list of things-I-have-to-use-up-before-next-Tuesday-because-I'll-never cook-with-it-again was a tin of crab meat.  I bought it months ago with the intention of making Leith's Chilli Crab Noodles one night when I needed a store cupboard meal.  That was about eight months ago.  Obviously being tinned, it wasn't too much of a trauma and it didn't take up much space.  But it was sitting there looking too much like a spare can of tuna and it had to go before I decided I wanted a tuna jacket, only to find that all I had was crab meat.

I'd eaten crab a sum total of once before in my life.  That was 25 years ago and then it was only the tiniest morsel as I found it too 'sweet'.  We were on a family trip to Cancale in France - it's a haven of seafood that I'd love to visit now I'm older and would appreciate a plate of fresh-off-the-boat Fruits de Mer but back then all I wanted to do was crack open everyone's langoustines and was then resolutely horrified at the French lady who sat on the side of an oyster bed, picking them out, shucking them and knocking them back like she was doing tequila shots.  It seemed both gross (I was 10) and barbaric at the same time.

The crab dish wasn't at all planned for today.  I had every intention of making Cathryn's savoury strudel from this week's bake off but stuff happened at work and I ended up being dragged along to a free lunchtime Mexican fiesta.  They say there's no such thing as a free lunch.  When you have to walk a mile down hill and then back up it in four inch heels, you certainly pay the price.  But it was worth it to spend time out in the fresh air and laugh at the management team who - replete with fake 'taches - looked like the band from the Doritos ad.

So the soup was the antithesis to the excess of mass cooked, watery fajitas and slightly chewy mystery meat tacos from lunch time.  Storecupboard fodder and simple enough to make when you're also juggling cooking a steak and mushroom ciabatta and fish fingers with Peppa Pig spaghetti.  As I was making it for one I used a whole tin of crab meat so it was much thicker and bulkier than it would have been for two.  The flavours were good although I added some chilli to give it a little heat and that worked really well.

The recipe I used came from my trusty Mary Berry's Complete Cook Book (the original version) but you can find it through this Google Books link.

River Cottage Swiss Style Muesli

Yet again I have to take umbrage with the Channel 4 food stylists. Take a look at the picture from their website below. I know it's not a close up, but I fail to see any sign of dried fruits, nuts and seeds being added to this mix. And unless HF-W uses the world's tiniest apples, I don't get how his muesli looks like a bowl of orange juice-soaked oats with a few seeds and a dollop of yogurt and yet mine is a vibrant, jewel-like bowlful?

What I like about this recipe is that you are told to pick your own mix of fruit, nuts and seeds. Whilst I know that as a grown up I'm fully entitled to exercise my right to adapt a recipe I like that HF-W isn't so presumptuous as to believe that everyone in the world likes hazelnuts and raisins in their muesli. I certainly don't. It also gives you the opportunity to use up all those end-of-packet odds and sods that so often clutter up the back of the cupboard.

Poor lighting + Instagram ruined the colours...

My mix ended up containing apricots, cherries, dates, apple and a few token sultanas (I am not a fan of dried grapes if they are not in a cake but I like to push my own boundaries just a smidgen every now and again). To this I added chopped almonds, pecans and pumpkin seeds, which I roasted for ten minutes, and a handful of pre-toasted coconut flakes.

I followed the serving method, grating in a Pink Lady into the bowl and add some fresh orange juice before giving it a stir and leaving it for ten minutes. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this bit. I'm not a fan of soggy cereal. I've been known to throw a bowl of cornflakes away after just two bites as they've gone to soggy from the milk. I'd much rather eat cereal straight from the box (a habit I'm no longer able to indulge now I'm married) or at a push I'll eat granola with yogurt. Which is how I'll eat the rest of this batch of rather tasty muesli.

Here's the recipe link

Protein Bars

Yuck.  Just yuck!

Yesterday I wrote about how I'd gone to the effort of making homemade peanut butter in order to then deliver some low cost protein bars for the husband and I.  Wish I'd not bothered.

Budget sludge on the left, yummy expensiveness on the right

If you buy protein bars from a shop, they cost anywhere between £1.40 and £3 each.  My budget option was intended to save me heaps of money - when you get through 10 a week between the two of you, it gets expensive.  Instead, I'm about to either chuck £4 worth of food away or spend the next eleven days choking down my home made attempt.

Despite the oatmeal and homemade peanut butter, the bars are sadly ruined by the taste of aspartame from the addition of chocolate whey protein powder.  It's really all you can taste.  When you make it up as a drink with milk and stick a banana in it, it's pretty palatable.  Mixed into a stodgy batter, it's frankly quite disgusting.

On the plus side, they kept me so full up to lunchtime and beyond that I wasn't tempted by any of the free biscuits on offer at my course during breaktimes nor did I really want my lunch (my belly thought I'd eaten a lump of putty).  It did save me from snorfing the bag of crisps, flapjack and orange juice accompanying the free sandwich, that pushed the lunch well beyond the 1,000 cal limit.

I seriously need to revisit the healthy, protein packed breakfast issue during the course of my new blog. There has to be something I can eat easily at work that will keep me full til lunch and isn't messy.  Answers on a postcard please.

If you're interested, this is the recipe I used.  Word of warning, trying to clean up afterwards is akin to trying to scrape dried concrete out of a cement mixer.  You won't go far wrong with a hammer and chisel.  Goodness knows what it's done to my innards!



MagicPunt's MRBs (Meal Replacement Bars):

Combine in large mixing bowl:

3 Cups Oatmeal
1/2 Cup Natural Peanut butter
1 cup Skim Milk
4 Scoops Protein Powder
dash of cinnamon

Mix until a sticky batter is formed (may take a few minutes)

use a large spoon to spread out the mix into the bottom of a Pam-sprayed glass or metal cooking tray (spread until even)

put in the fridge overnight and cut into 8 equal bars that yield:

11g fat (good monounsaturated fats)
26g carbs
21g protein

285 calories

Natural Peanut Butter

With a course coming up this week, I'm going to be really tight for time in achieving my blog target.  Luckily, I've been banned from running for at least two weeks to I will just have enough time spare each morning to do the recipe thing.

A pale imitation of the 'real' stuff

My usual breakfast on days when I'm in the office is a protein bar.  One of my colleagues swears by them and after a lot of subtle hints persuaded me to try them.  I must say that whilst breaking my preferred ethos of knowing exactly where my food has come from, I'm actually addicted to a specific brand of chocolate and peanut butter ones and would happily eat them all day, every day.


Most of the bars are ridiculously chewy and you can spend a good half hour masticating and ruminating like a cud-chewing Friesian.  This is probably why they keep you full up to lunchtime and beyond (perfect when your work life is so manic that your boss has to remind you to go get lunch).  But I can work with the Supreme Protein ones.  They've saved me from ending up with a jaw as square as Arnie's*.

Of course, there are downsides to extended satiety.  Firstly the expense.  Secondly the contents.  Dealing with these issues in turn, you can expect to pay between £2 and £3 per bar if you buy them singly.  They're cheaper by the boxful on the internet but I still shell out £13 per 9 bars.  And as the husband eats two a day, this is causing a bigger dent in my finances than his previous red-wine habit.

The ingredients list includes things like Niacinamide, Vitamin A Palmiate, Ferric Orthophosphate and Pyridoxine Hydrocloride.  All of which I'm sure you can't buy from Ocado.  So I decided to look for a recipe to make my own.

The recipe I settled on (see tomorrow's blog) seemed pretty simple.  Whizz up some oatmeal, whey protein, natural peanut butter and a cup of milk.  First problem.  Exactly what is natural peanut butter?  Time to make my own.

Further research revealed it to just be peanuts whizzed in a blender with some oil and optionally salt mixed in at the end.  Or you can buy premade stuff.  Which is good because I already buy Whole Earth PB and this fits into the natural category.  I've always loved PB since I was a child and had a fad where I only ate crunchy peanut butter packed into the groove on celery sticks for months on end (much to my mother's eternal despair as she likes neither of these things).  As an adult, I eschewed the plastic Sunpat of my youth (the equivalent of Skippy for my international readers) in favour of the sugar-free Whole Earth brand.

Perhaps a waste of good peanuts?

I now eat the organic smooth variety as Miss A thinks the crunchy one is dirty (they blend the skins in to it for colour but in the crunchy version, it's mottled with red flecks - hence it being dirty).  But with a blog to write, I thought I'd give homemade a go as I've read several other foodies blogs on the subject.

This was supposed to be the simplest recipe I've made so far with just three ingredients.  Take some peanuts, blend, stir in some oil and salt.  Voila, home made peanut butter.  Research told me that it was better to do this in a blender rather than a food processor.  Those people obviously don't own a cheap old Kenwood Prospero.  Ten minutes of blending and scraping and blending some more and all I had was chopped up peanuts.  Should've gone for the food processor in the first place to save on having to wash both bits.

I then realised that if I wanted crunchy, I should've blended part of it til it was totally smooth and kept some back to make the crunchy bits.  So the texture was a bit choppy - like badly blended hummus.  But the taste was okay.

As for the expense, it cost me £1.44 to buy 250g Waitrose unsalted roasted peanuts plus a tablespoon of sunflower oil and a pinch of sea salt.  Let's call it £1.50 for 250g vs £2.68 for a 340g jar of Whole Earth.  So homemade is 60p/100g and shop bought is 78p/100g.  Makes you think, doesn't it?  But for the enjoyment factor and the ease of not having to wash my blender up, I will probably stick to shop-bought.  If I had the time and the space to store loads of jars and access to humungous bags of peanuts then things might be different.  But when I offered Miss A the choice of the two crackers in the picture, she went for the one on the left.  That made my mind up once and for all!

*As it used to be back in the eighties when he was Mr Universe.  I can probably rival his current more jowly look.

BBC Good Food Asian Steamed Fish with Shiitake Mushrooms and Noodles

There is definitely no such thing as a free lunch.  Where I work, the pork pies are one of the favourite features of a working lunch.  I'm really fussy when it comes to pork pies and will only eat them if they don't have jelly in them.  In some ways that's good because it stops me from eating them too often.  I only really like the pastry bit but when in polite company, it's not really the done thing to hoick out the pink (or more often grey) nugget of 'pork'* and scrape out the jelly bit.  But the work pork pies are pretty good.  Pink meat*.  Crusty-ish pastry.  No jelly.

So of course I had one.  Or a half anyway.  My boss kindly showed his chivalrous side and let me have the only diet Coke to make up for a less than healthy lunch.  But even that did little to negate the impact of my poor lunch options and my need for a consolatory Flake in the late afternoon.  Hence why I ended up with a super-healthy fish dinner tonight.

I wrote yesterday that I'm still having trouble letting go of the Olympic Food Challenge.  Three days on, and I was really tempted to do another foreign recipe, but I ended up saving the Chimmichurri Steak (inspired by our esteemed OFC Coach Ewan**) for tomorrow night and cooking a country-agnostic fish dish instead.

Overdid the veg - the fish and noodles are in there somewhere!

Having not quite managed to let go completely, this allowed me to make a second use of the steamer I bought to make Nepalese Chicken Momos for the OFC.  I need to embrace my steamer and make good use of it before it manages to disappear into the black hole that my tupperware dishes have fallen into.***

The dish is pretty simple in that you just pop everything into the steamer for ten minutes, and hey presto healthy, tasty, low fat dinner for one.  The downside is that it is a pretty expensive dish what with the mushrooms, ginger, chillis etc which you can generally only buy in multiples and not in quantities for one - so something that you would possibly only afford once in a while.  It does use Pollack however which is pretty cheap in the fish stakes (no pun intended!).

I still have my head very firmly buried in the sand about just how much I've spent in this past year buying food I wouldn't normally buy just to complete this 'challenge'.

That point has actually given me some inspiration for my future ramblings over on my new blog which will be coming online in October.  I'll also be doing a bit of guest blogging elsewhere - more on that shortly.  In the meantime, I'm thinking about how to best let go of this blog.  I'd like to do so with some input from the lovely people who've taken the time to read my blog.  At the moment, I've had just over 35,000 page views since started.  This has blown me away and so I feel I should draw a definite line at the end of the year and celebrate the finish.  So I'd like to invite anyone who has read this to ask me a question about the blog.  If you visit 'The Last Post' page and leave a comment then I'll do one final post after 26th September (day 366) where I'll answer them all.

PS In lieu of me posting a flag today, I'll leave you with this cartoon I pilfered from FaceAche on the subject of Tupperware.  This sums up my relationship with plastic boxes perfectly.

PPS: The recipe for the fish can be found here


*factory floor sweepings in most cases
**I stole the asterisk thing from Ewan as I use to many bracketed comments in my stream of nonsense (it's not quite a stream of conscience)
***the husband sneaks things he deems to be clutter into the bin when he thinks I've not used them recently and I might not notice they are missing.  I then end up buying new boxes to replace them.  He then throws them away so I buy more....you get the vicious circle...

Olympic Food Challenge - Funche - Puerto Rico

It's polenta - not shortbread

Really quick blog post today.  Bridestock has finally dawned and in just a few hours, the lovely @BridestockBride will be hitched to the lovely David.  Far more important things to do today than labour over a blog post.  Very sorry Puerto Rico.  No disrespect to your lovely country.  I did quite like your breakfast.

Funche is simply sweetened polenta.  Cooked with a combination of water, milk and sugar and then either eaten soft, like porridge or left to set and cut into wedges.  I went for the set wedge option and served with some fruit you'd find in Puerto Rico, and some you most likely won't - unless they're expensive imports.  See if you can guess which is which from the picture.

Just a bronze medal for this recipe as I'm still not swayed by polenta.  However, I have finally gotten to the end of the bag I bought some months ago thanks to the Italian Cornbread, Cheesy Polenta with Mushrooms and the more recent Pap and Chakkalaka recipes.  It's been an experience.  Not sure if I'll be repeating it any time soon.

Here's a link to the recipe.  Will try and expand on this another night.

Olympic Food Challenge: Toiyo and Paw Paw Salad - Solomon Islands

It's finally here.  Day one of @EwanMitchell's Olympic Food Challenge.  Despite having a good few months of notice that this day was coming, I still got caught napping, thinking that we were starting tomorrow.  So I got my knickers in a bit of a twist for only having enough ingredients to do one dinner, no time to shop on the way home tonight.  The dog ate my homework, Miss!  And all that jazz.

It's paw paw - not carrots.  Honestly!

I do have a list of recipes for my countries, neatly organised into an excel spreadsheet with links to the websites (I never made it to the library to look for books) and notes about accompanying dishes and anecdotes for the blog posts I'll be writing.  But I still haven't put them into an order.  The Ocado man is coming on Friday and I have no clue what to buy still.  Other than our usual staples.  Most of which don't fit in with the countries I've got on my list.

Nor have I solved the problem of where to buy cassava from (I really must check out the fresh section at Morrisons on Friday).  I have a feeling I'm going to have to improvise a lot.  As I did tonight in order to deliver my first dish.

The Solomon Islands are group of over 1,000 islands located to the east of Papua New Guinea.  Despite having heard of Guadalcanal before (in relation to WWII) I never new the islands existed before they popped up on my list.  Their head of state is none other than our own Queen.  Population of approximately 523,0000 (thank you Wikipedia!)  You can find out more about their Olympic progress here.

Despite a largeish population,  I found tracking down recipes online harder than for some of my other listed countries.  There was one really good blog about a lady who lived in the Solomon Islands for a while.  And many of her stories reminded me of a holiday that the husband and I had in St Vincent where my father is from (even though it's half a world a way).

When you're from the 'Western World' it's a whole other ball game in so many ways.  Especially when it comes to food.  When we first booked our trip to St Vincent I was looking forward to feasting on all manner of exotic fruits, fresh from the tree.  Two years previously we'd 'done' Antigua for our honeymoon, staying in the Americanised Sandals compound.  But going 'native' is very different.  My father owns several banana plantations and gave us some fresh-from-the-plant bananas one day.  They tasted bizarre.  But that is how a banana should taste when it's left to ripen on the tree.  Not how they do in the UK where they've been plucked from the tree whilst still green, transported thousands of miles and then artificially ripened in a massive warehouse somewhere.

Solomon Islands Flag

Likewise mangoes.  I love the sweet-sharp taste of a 'decent' mango.  Yet when you eat a ripe sugar-mango straight from the tree, it's the most sickly-sweet fruit I've ever tasted.  I picked one that was green as you'd find them in the supermarket in the UK.  My aunt nearly had a fit.  Yet it had a more familiar taste to me.  I was then shocked to hear that my aunt and uncle who had several enormous mango trees in their garden, bowing down under the sheer weight of their fruit, would just leave most of the fruit to fall and rot.  Such a waste.  I calculated that if I paid £2 for a mango in the UK, the tree probably hand about £500-worth of fruit on it.  But they had so much and no market for it, it just went to waste.  I guess in the same way as you often see people with amazing traditional apple trees, just allowing the fruit to fall and rot.

Of course, the exotic fruit and vegetable import industry in this country dictates the state of ripeness we get our fruit and veg in.  So the recipe I chose from the Stilettos in the Solomons blog was doomed from the start.  It was a slightly tenuous Solomons recipe anyway because it was inspired by a Thai dish eaten in Hawaii, but adapted to use local ingredients.  The key ingredient being green paw paw. So I cheated and used a ripe paw paw instead.  I did manage to source a Kaffir lime which I assume is the same as a Bush Lime (they look the same).  Stupidly I only bought one which I used in the dressing so had to use a regular lime for the garnish.

The recipe suggests substituting red cabbage for the green paw paw, but I wanted to try it with the fruit so just went for regular, ripe papaya.  I've never liked papaya so the dressing made a welcome mask for the bland flavour of the fruit.  Again, I wonder how they'd taste eaten fresh from the tree rather than with after gaining a whole bunch of food miles. In all honesty, I didn't much rate the smokey undertones of the sesame oil.  It was different.  It worked.  But it isn't something I'd do again.

I added a handful of coriander (wilted by the intense sunshine in my back garden) and some mint to give it some colour and additional flavour.  The crunch of peanuts was a welcome contrast to the soft flesh of the paw paw and the rather excellent slab of tuna I'd managed to procure to go with it.

I chose to serve it with a simple piece of griddled tuna (seasoned with salt, pepper and lime juice) as I understand that Toiyo is commonly eaten in the Solomons so hopefully I'm not going to lose too many OFC points for not staying true to the original dish.

All in all, an interesting start to the nineteen days.  Do check out the recipes from my fellow participants.  You can find out more over on the OFC blog.

Wahaca: Green Rice Salad

One of my overriding childhood food memories is the annual family barbecue to celebrate my mum's birthday on August 3rd.  You could guarantee a pound to a penny that it would rain and my mum would end up barbecuing in the rain while the rest of us sat inside and watched her.

An Ingram family barbecue always consists of the same things.  To this day.  Sausages and burgers must come from the local butcher.  The only other thing we're ever allowed is chicken.  The salad contains cucumber, lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions and eggs.  Nothing else.  And most definitely no dressing.  Mayonnaise not salad cream.  My grandmother's homemade coleslaw and my mother's rice salad.  And that's it.  Them's the rules.

It's like Christmas day.  We have rules.  God forbid you consider breaking them and trying something new.  And my family always say I'm the unadventurous, fussy one!  In fact, when I hosted Christmas at my house last year, I was so terrified of doing something different from the norm that I very nearly didn't post anything that day.  In a moment of rebellion, I then plumped for Brussel Sprouts with Pancetta but also made regular sprouts for everyone else lest I got in trouble.  I was the only one who ate the 'weird' sprouts.  And very nice they were too.

There are a few green bits in there.  Somewhere.

Mum's birthday barbecue is fast approaching and I'm desperate to get my family to try the Wahaca Three Tomato Salad, an amazing looking Courgette and Goats Cheese Bread by the lovely Fiona Harvey who I met on my recent soujourn to Scotland.  And I want them to try today's rice salad recipe. But I know I'll wimp out and just end up making the birthday cake which I've always been allowed free reign with since I was about eight.

My mum's rice salad contains damp long grain rice, frozen prawns which always seem to have retained a bit too much water, peas, carrots and diced red pepper.  Colourful maybe, but despite the addition of a little vinaigrette, it's so bland.

Whereas the Wahaca salad is brightly coloured and packed with a different taste sensation in every mouthful.  Salty feta, sweet courgettes and corn, spicy chilli and the subtle seasoning of coriander and mint.  I had this for my lunch today and it was really quick to prepare and very filling.  It would go perfectly with barbecued meat but I'm not sure I'm man enough to make it for the big day.

Miers mentions that the original recipe contained leftovers from her green rice recipe but that she now just makes it with plain basmati rice for speed.  I definitely want to make the green version at a later date but the idea of putting green rice in front of my family is definitely a step too far.

If you want to try this recipe yourself, you can find it in Wahaca: Mexican Food at Home.

Mary Berry's Provencal Chicken

"Why is there a whole chicken in the fridge?" was the first thing the husband said to me today at around 11am.  "Because the Ocado man bought it with him" I replied.  The husband eyed me suspiciously.  We never have whole chickens.  It was dead, plucked and shrink-wrapped, I hasten to add.

Poor perspective - this was the Pamela Anderson of chickens

The husband doesn't "do" roast dinner.  We might have roast beef once a year after which he complains that there's too much washing up and that he shouldn't have eaten such a heavy meal at 7pm.  Oh and I forgot the bit where he scrapes the gravy off of every bit of meat, searching for the slightest hint of blush in the flesh.  He needn't worry - I now microwave his so it's as tough as old shoe leather (such a waste).  I then announce that roast dinner is too stressful and I will never cook it again.  A year passes, we forget the fuss and the whole drama plays out all over again.  Just like Groundhog day.  Except he's a bit balder and I'm a little greyer.

So when I finally admitted we were having roast chicken for tea, he rolled his eyes like Miss A does when I tell her she's got to eat what the grown-ups are eating and I know she'd much rather have a chocolate Philly and peanut butter sandwich.  This set the atmosphere for the rest of the day.  A bit of sulking.  Lots of suspicion.  But he's the one who's supposedly on a health kick and when he asked me yesterday why I only feed him stuff from Tiers Four and Five of Michi's Ladder, he got a short shrift because he won't eat anything from the first three tiers.

In essence, the recipe is for a pot roast chicken in a red pepper, tomato and carrot sauce.  There was nothing for him to not like.  True, he doesn't 'do vegetables, but I figured it was pretty much like a fresh version of Heinz tomato soup (overly sweet and orange) which he loves.

It's pretty simple to make.  Stick everything in a casserole, cook for an hour and a half, blitz the cooking juices and carrots, carve and serve.  A few roasties on the side and veg for me, peas for him (peas aren't a vegetable according to the husband) and we were done.

Ready for the oven

I put the plate in front of him, served his sauce on the side in case he didn't like it.  He tentatively dipped the second bit of meat into the pot and asked why I couldn't make all of our chicken as soft and juicy as this.  I didn't know whether to breathe a sigh of relief or slap him.  I've been on tenterhooks all day.  Despite him saying he'll eat whatever I put in front of him, no matter how much he rolls his eyes, it still stresses me out and I'd prepped both regular gravy and a ham and cheese sandwich just in case.  Phew!

This now means that I will have to find lots of other recipes where the chicken is poached rather than baked (his technique, not mine).  But hey, I've got a tick in the box for this blog.  I got him eating something new.  Result.


Because it was only the three of us, there was so much sauce left, that I've saved it for lunch tomorrow to eat as a soup.  Which is a good excuse for me to make Dan Lepard's soup bread from today's Guardian as tomorrow's recipe.  Double result.

And I then realised that today is also Bastille Day so I've also ticked the 'National Celebrations' box with this recipe.  Without even trying.  Yay me.

Recipe - serves 4-6

• 1.8kg free range chicken (without giblets)
• 350ml fresh chicken stock
• 50g carrots, diced if large and whole (I used baby Chanteray ones)
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1 bulb garlic
• small bunch parsley
• 1/4 tsp dried basil
• 1/4 tsp dried oregano
• 250ml red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp tomato puree
• Maldon sea salt and cayenne pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 190c/170c fan.
2. Separate the garlic cloves and peel half.  Place the unpeeled garlic cloves in the chicken's cavity along with most of the parsley (reserve a few sprigs for the garnish).
3. Season the chicken well with sea salt and cayenne pepper
4. Put the chicken in a lidded casserole dish.  Arrange the peeled garlic cloves, red pepper and carrots around the chicken and pour over the stock.
5. Cover and bake for 1.5 hours or until the juices run clear when a skewer is poked into one of the legs.
6. Whilst the chicken is baking, boil the vinegar until reduced to about 2-3 tbsp.  Put into a blender with the basil, oregano and tomato puree.
7. When the chicken is cooked, lift it out onto a plate and pour the cooking juices and vegetables into the blender.  Blitz until you have a smooth sauce.  If it's a little runny, put in a saucepan and simmer for a few minutes until reduced.
8. Carve the chicken and pour the sauce over, garnishing with the remaining parsley.

Wahaca: Three Tomato Salad

I have hated fresh tomatoes with a passion for my entire life.  They loiter on the side of your plate in pubs, oozing their juice over the best chips or lurk surreptitiously in the middle of shop-bought sandwiches, making the bread soggy.  This makes me grumpy.  If I'm dining in company, whoever my companion is (historically my grandfather or mother, now the husband) will immediately be furnished with said tomatoes in exchange for cucumber and/or coleslaw.  They offend me so much I can't even have them on my plate.  It's the slimy insides I don't like.  And cherry tomatoes are the work of the devil as they have the greatest slime-to-flesh ratio of all tomatoes.

I've got nothing against cooked tomatoes.  Not cooked whole tomatoes, you understand.  But if they're in a sauce then I'm okay with that.  And, one of my favourite recipes from this blog so far has been Thomasina Miers' chilli jam - which contains mountains of tomatoes.  I keep a huge jar in the fridge to dollop into sandwiches or eat alongside salads.

Not quite as nicely styled as the book version but just as tasty

The only time in my thirty-something years on this planet that I've ever enjoyed tomatoes was the first time I met the parents of my very first boyfriend.  Despite him being off to the top end of the weird scale, I really liked his parents and when they offered to make us dinner, I politely accepted.  His dad was a keen gardener and grew all his own fruit and veg.  You can imagine my horror when the aforementioned meal turned out to be chicken with a fresh tomato salad.  But because I was bought up to have good manners (things have changed since then!) I accepted the plate with good grace and steeled myself to do battle with the mound of tomatoes, taunting me.

What a surprise.  These were firm and tasty and had that gorgoeous fresh-grown tomato smell.  I've always loved that smell and it reminds me of when my mum used to grow tomatoes when I was a child.  Dressed in a simple vinaigrette and sprinkled liberally with salt, they were an absolute revelation.  Nothing like those squidgy, slimy, dreary salad tomatoes peddled by the supermarkets.

Sadly for my tomato-eating career, we split up soon afterwards on the advice of his mother.  She had the sense to see I could do better for myself (I couldn't have done worse!).  Don't get me wrong - she liked me. She even told me I was dating the wrong son and that I'd be a fantastic daughter-in-law (I was a late starter on the dating scene).  But the weird, psychotic tendencies of son number two quickly sent me running for the hills.

The past fifteen years have been plagued by further encounters with both people firmly at the wrong end of the weirdo scale and nasty tomatoes too.  I'm sure I've eaten in places that could've changed my tomato fearing mind, but it's just something I would never consider ordering.  When you go out, you go out to eat for pleasure, not to torture yourself.  Lycopersicoaphobia has remained firmly rooted in my psyche.

Until I got my copy of Wahaca: Mexican Food at Home by Thomasina Miers.  If you're a regular reader, you'll know I adore Thomasina's books.  And I'm now eager to holiday in Mexico one day (although I'll be going by myself as Mr Fussy wouldn't eat the food and would worry that he'd get kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel).  Flicking through the book, the one recipe that really captured my imagination was the aforementioned Three Tomato Salad.  Yes.  Seriously.  I've been obsessing about this for a couple of weeks now to the point where I'm wondering exactly why I'm craving something I can't stand.

For the record, I would like to categorically state that I am not pregnant.  My mother will obviously be very disappointed by that.  My boss will most likely be relieved.  As will the husband because he's starting to make noises about me working late too often.  I am actually working to keep a roof over our heads!

Pretty colours

So today, I headed to Morrisons to pick up some real tomatoes.  They've recently revamped the fruit and veg section and you can buy all manner of weird and wonderful things.  And lots of it doesn't come stuffed into a huge plastic box so you can just buy what you need.  Okay, it's probably more expensive, but I don't mind paying a bit more to buy only what I need if it's far tastier than a giant economy pack of flavourless tomatoes.

I was spoilt for choice with stripy Heirloom tomatoes and tiny orange plum tomatoes, regular cherry tomatoes on the vine and pretty orange and yellow tomatoes.  I really wanted someone to share this joyous occasion with but the husband is crashed out on the bed after another session of the Insanity workout and I'm too impatient to save it until the next time I'm at my mothers so it seemed the perfect antidote to yet another wet and dreary day.

The flavours are amazing.  Fresh tomatoes with feta and pineapple, mixed with a red-wine vinegar dressing.  The salt of the feta cuts beautifully through the sweet tomatoes and is balanced well with the acid from the pineapple and the dressing.  In fact this now ranks up there with my all time favourite recipes from this year.  And I have enough tomatoes left to make it again for tomorrow's lunch.  I was planning on using them to make Gazpacho, but it seems a criminal waste of beautiful tomatoes.

I'm now firmly converted!

Lil Ms Squirrel's Rhubarb Fool

There was a recent episode of The Apprentice where some of the supposed finest young minds of modern Britain spent ages coming up with a new product to market, only for one of them to announce "Actually, we've just created the bin."  I felt a bit like this tonight as I set about trying to make a healthier version of James Martin's rhubarb fool and finally realising that I've just about made low fat rhubarb and custard.

Healthier than it looks

Admittedly I've never eaten rhubarb and custard before so it's new to me.  But I missed the obvious whilst going to so much effort.

James' recipe combines ready made custard with whipped cream.  Because I was looking for something lower in fat, I decided to combine my homemade custard (made using skimmed milk) with Greek yogurt.  Having done a little research on the best way to poach rhubarb, I settled on a method from Dan Lepard where you roast the rhubarb with a little sugar.  He rightly points out that poaching it in a pan can leave it watery.  I love his method because you get a thick, tasty syrup in the bottom of the dish.  Trouble is, it's so tempting just to lick the bowl clean.

Because my rhubarb was quite mature, rather than the thin pink rhubarb you get earlier in the year, I left it in whole chunks and layered it with the custard mixture and crushed amaretti biscuits.

It was an okay pudding for someone looking for a healthy, diet friendly pudding to combat a bout of hormonal sugar craving.  And I have the rest of the lovely roasted rhubarb to eat with my breakfast yogurt tomorrow.

Unfortunately for my diet, it's now reminded me that this lovely recipe from Sadia from the Baking Elements blog is still on my to-do-list.  I think my work colleagues are in for a lucky week next week.

Here's what I did.  It's a bit faffy, so you could substitute the homemade custard for a small pot of low fat, ready made custard for speed.

Recipe - Serves 2

For the custard mixture

• 1 medium egg yolk
• 2 tsp cornflour
• 2 tsp sugar
• 200ml skimmed milk
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 tbsp low fat Greek yogurt

For the rhubarb

• 400g rhubarb, cut into two inch chunks
• 75g caster sugar
• juice of 1/2 lemon

To assemble

• 4 amaretti biscuits, crushed
• 2 small glass tumblers

1. Preheat the oven to 170c/150c (fan).  Place the rhubarb in a shallow glass dish, sprinkle over the sugar and lemon juice.  Roast for an hour.  Leave to cool.
2. Mix the egg yolk and cornflour together in a bowl.  Heat the milk to boiling point then pour over the egg mixture, whisking quickly.  Pour back into the pan and heat until thickened.  Beat in the sugar and leave to cool.
3. To assemble put a few pieces of rhubarb into the bottom of each glass.  Add a tablespoon of custard and sprinkle with some of the biscuits.  Repeat the layering, finishing with a layer of biscuits.

Mushroom and Ginger Soup

Today's recipe of choice comes from one of those tomes that you pick up in discount book shops for a few pounds.  It's been sat on my desk for years.  I flick through it at least once a week.  I find something I want to make but yet never get round to making it.  Even though the book is entitled "Quick and Easy" and should be full of recipes perfect for someone as time-poor as myself, I just don't seem to have the time to try them.

Never one to make life easy for myself, in addition to having a two-year-old toddler, a full time job with a ninety minute commute and penning this blog on a daily basis, over the coming month I also have to contend with the following obstacles.  "The Olympic Food Challenge" starting on 27th July, my mother's birthday cake and assorted bits for a celebratory barbecue on August 3rd (you can guarantee rain in Winchester that day), at least two different types of cake for the tea tent at my gorgeous cousin Laura May (aka @BridestockBride)'s Wedding Festival on August 4th, a belated birthday cake for my goddaughter on August 5th, a week long Prince2 Practitioner course and training for the Bristol Half Marathon - which is in late September but the training is going on now.

It took longer to eat than to cook (too hot!)

Oh and planning my new blog too.  Thankfully that's currently in the capable hands of one of my best friends who I've coerced into designing the background and logo for me.  More on that another night.

So forgive me for actually finally choosing a recipe from Practical Cookery: Quick and Easy for once.  It was quick, easy, tasty and meets the current criteria for low in fat too.  It also gave me the opportunity to try out dried mushrooms.  I know they're a little pricey, but given that I'm the kind of person who regularly buys mushrooms and then never gets round to using them and throwing them away when they're slimy, having the dried ones to hand means I won't ever waste them.  Unless of course, I accidentally split the packet and the scatter floor-wards into the mouths of my waiting pooches.

Watching them rehydrate reminded me of some fake worms you used to be able to get from joke shops when I was a kid.  I used to stick them in my grandad's cup of tea and watch them grow.  Highly entertaining to a delinquent eight-year-old.  Just like when my delightful toddler peered into my bowl this evening and announced "Euuuuwww.  Mummy, Dexter's done a pooney in your dinner"  Cue toddler giggles.

I did manage to enjoy the meal despite that image being firmly rooted in my brain forever.

Serves 2 (for a main meal)

• 15g dried mushrooms
• 700 mls good quality vegetable stock
• 1 nest medium egg noodles
• 3 garlic cloves, finely sliced
• 1 tsp ginger paste (or 2.5cm root ginger, shredded)
• 1 tsp soy sauce
• handful beansprouts

1. Soak the mushrooms for at least thirty minutes in half the stock for at least 30 minutes.  Drain, reserving the stock.
2. When the are ready, cook the noodles for 2-3 minutes in boiling water.  Drain and rinse.
3. Spray a large frying pan with spray oil and place over a  high heat.  Add the garlic, ginger and mushrooms and stir fry for two minutes.
4. Add all of the stock and the soy sauce to the pan and bring to the boil.
5. Stir in the bean sprouts and cook for 1-2 minutes until tender.  
6. Divide the noodles between the serving bowls and ladle the soup on top.  Serve immediately.

BBC Good Food Griddled Chicken and Corn on the Cob

There's a quote from my favourite film that just about sums up the advice I'd like to give out to several people that I know today.  It's something that I need to learn to remember as well.


"But sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can't see past the end of his nose."


I won't go into any details on the subject, but it just about sums my day up.  And why although I think my day today has been a Crappy day from Crapsville, there are people around me who've had worse days and have worse problems in their lives.  There are also people who I know are currently judging me for apparently not seeing past my own mediocre problems who if they knew the whole story (which of course, is none of their business) would understand my apparent myopia.

This July weather makes for rubbish light in my kitchen

Anyway, enough myopic belly button staring.  Monday's are always a tough day for fodder in our house.  It's a long day in the office, now preceded by a 4am start for a run so by the time I'm home at 6pm, tea needs to be quick, simple and tasty.


Monday's are the day I really rely on the simplicity of BBC Good Food to come up with something from the content of my fridge.  This is from the June 2012 issue of the magazine which is still lurking on my sofa.  I've still to find the time to read the latest edition.


I needed to stop off for a couple of bits and was horrified to find that corn cobs were £1.99 for two.  I know it's out of season, but I just couldn't justify the expense at the moment.  Especially when I know in a few short weeks, they will be selling them fro about 25p each.  So I improvised with tinned corn, cooked it in a smoking hot frying pan and it still chargrilled really well.


There's not much else to say about the recipe other than it's simple and quick.  I'd not thought about making my own spice coating much before - I tend to use the Schwarz pre-made ones - but this worked quite well and I'll use it again to add a bit of variety.  


You can find the recipe online here.


PS: Without Googling, do you recognise the film that this line is from?  I've only watched it about 1,000 times and know it word perfectly.

Wahaca: Easy Horchata

As part of my new diet, one meal a day is either a protein bar or a protein shake.  I feel a little guilty about consuming both of these products as they contain a ridiculous number of ingredients that I have never heard of and are produced in a laboratory rather than grown in the ground.  This goes totally against the principle I've been trying to adopt of only eating things that you know where they come from (and I don't mean you can eat something because it comes from Waitrose - other supermarkets are available).

But that's what the meal plan says and so that's what I've been trying to do in my last-ditch, desperate attempt to get back to my happy weight so I can wear my favourite two outfits once more this Christmas.

The only thing these products have going for them is that they're pretty filling.  And because, since having Miss A, I tend to get the munchies at 4.30pm, I have one or other of these 'meal replacements' to banish my grazing needs once and for all.  I have tried Graze boxes, but they don't work - I'll just end up eating two or three if I'm that kind of mood.  But the protein stuff seems to be the solution.

Leafing through my new copy of Wahaca: Mexican Food at Home this week, I found two potential replacements for the protein shakes.  Although not scientifically balanced and guaranteed to help me lose weight (provided I eat nothing but lettuce and exercise seven hours a day, seven days a week), they're made using simple ingredients, packed full of all the good stuff that you're supposed to eat.

A drink that knows where it came from - my kitchen!

I tried the Horchata first.  This is a blended mixture of rice milk, almonds, oats, cinnamon, honey, banana and yogurt.  I chose it because I thought I could share it with Miss A.  Unfortunately whilst I liked mine, she wasn't a fan and insisted that she wanted a chocolate milkshake.  I ended up re-blending hers with a teaspoon of cocoa powder - it was then consumed in about five seconds flat.

The one thing I didn't do was serve it over ice as recommended.  I thought it would be okay because some of my ingredients were chilled and we had no ice, but on reflection I think it would've been far more refreshing served that way.  I think it would also work well blended with some soft summer berries.  If the sun ever comes out and ripens my raspberries, I'll definitely be making this again with some of those thrown in.

I would definitely recommend buying the book.  Although this is the first recipe I've tried, based on my experience of Thomasina's last book - Mexican Cooking at Home (the recipes I've tried from it can be found here), it will be jam packed with amazing recipes.

There are loads of variations for Horchata on the web so give it a Google.  Next up - Avocado Milkshakes!

Mexican Egg White Omelette

This new diet thing is very protein-based and so today, I decided to try an egg-white omelette for my breakfast.  Having done a bit of research online into recipes, I ended up a bit worried that it would be tasteless and runny - according to a Martha Stewart recipe they can be watery - but I was actually pleasently surprised.

An medium egg contains around 70 calories, with only 17 of these coming from the white meaning that it's a good diet choice.  Before I started I decided I'd include one egg yolk in the mix - lucky because I ended up dropping one in! - so I had four whites to one yolk.  With the filling, this came to just 218 cals for breakfast

Shortly before it got really messy!

There's not much else to say on the subject.  I treated it like any other omelette I'd make by seasoning it well with salt and pepper and throwing in a handful of coriander.  Normally I'd add a splash of water too (I can't remember who I picked this tip up from or what difference it makes) but based on the research, I didn't just in case.

Ordinarily I'd fill an omelette with mushrooms, spinach and a sprinkling of strong cheese, but  I was so concerned about this being tasteless, I went for feta cheese and salsa.  In Thomasina Miers' books, wherever she recommends a medium-hard cheese for a recipe, she says that feta makes a good substitute so that's Mexican enough for me.

The colour and taste wasn't as bad as I expected.  The colour was probably helped by the yellow from the single yolk and the herbs.  The texture was a little more rubbery than I would like but this is probably because a lack of fat from the egg yolks.

One bonus was it actually held together getting it out of the pan than a regular omelette does, although next time I'd probably fill it out of the pan as I made a mess with the salsa everywhere - hence the picture of it before folding and serving.

Recipe - Serves 1

• 3 medium egg yolks
• 1 whole egg
• small bunch of herbs (coriander or parsley)
• salt and freshly ground pepper
• 30g feta cheese, crumbled
• 40g fresh salsa
• cooking spray

1. Preheat the grill to high
2. Whisk the eggs together with a fork, season generously with salt and pepper and add the herbs before mixing well.
3. Spray an omelette pan with spray oil and heat over a medium heat.  Pour in the egg mixture and stir with a rubber spatula as the curds start to form, ensuring that it covers the bottom of the pan well.  When the mixture is nearly fully set, put the frying pan under the grill for 1-2 minutes to ensure the eggs are fully cooked.
4. Use a palette knife to release the omelette from the pan and slide carefully onto a plate.  Fill with the salsa and feta before serving.

Cumin Chicken

I've now lost all hope in surviving the next eight weeks of the husband's diet.  I thought that this low fat curry might be a keeper, but sadly not.  It was the way he looked at it when it was put in front of him that told me I'd wasted my time in the kitchen.  I so nearly gave him a fiver to go and buy his tea from the chippie.

However, I quite enjoyed this dish.  I made a small error by adding yogurt (an optional extra) and this curdled the sauce which slightly detracted from the presentation by putting tiny grainy blobs in the liquid.

It was really quick to cook.  I think I spent more time hunting through the cupboards looking for my chilli powder (didn't find it) than I did actually cooking the dish.

One word of warning - if you make this, take care when frying the mustard seeds.  It said fry them for thirty seconds.  After ten seconds, they were popping and jumping out of the pan and scattered all over the kitchen floor.  It may be to do with the size and shape of the frying pan I used.  But don't do this if you've got exposed skin or small people in the vicinity of the cooker - they fly quite a long way.

The blog I found this recipe from explains variations on the dish and how the author had no yogurt one day and so made the sauce with just a stock-base instead.  I also noted that whilst the recipe states to use  tinned tomatoes, the instructions don't tell you when to put them in.  As I had some fresh toms in, I cut one into large chunks and added it with the veg then threw in the tinned toms after the chicken had fried.

I'm guessing this is why mine looked nothing like the picture on the website (I wasn't really going for outstanding presentation anyway) but the sauce in the picture clearly lacks the tomatoes.  But for the thicker, yogurty sauce, I'm sure they're essential.

http://www.greatcurryrecipes.net/2012/04/30/how-to-make-cumin-chicken/  It was so nice to be able to make a quicky, tasty curry without having to resort to a jar sauce, like I normally would for a curry for the husband.  He's always whining that the Loyd Grossman sauces have changed and have no taste.  So I cook him a tasty curry and he still moans.  http://www.greatcurryrecipes.net/2012/04/30/how-to-make-cumin-chicken/

Not long to go now - less than 90 days and counting!

You can find the recipe here.

Inside Out Chicken Kiev

I so, so, so want to make something from my new copy of Wahaca: Mexican Food at Home by Thomasina Miers, but because I'm a) supposed to be on a diet and b) didn't get the book before I booked my Ocado order about two weeks ago, I've been left with basic store cupboard ingredients.  I have feta cheese and avocado and flour tortillas, which I'm sure could go a long way towards trying one of the recipes, but it would most likely equate to my entire daily food allowance.  So I'm just making do with longingly reading the book.

According to a recent study that I read about in the Daily Fail Online, adventurous eating makes us fat. Bland, predictable and repetitive food is the key to slimming because nobody really cares to eat more of that kind of food than they need to sustain them and satiate any hunger.  Which is probably why I've struggled to lose weight doing this challenge.  Baking aside, I know I've not been consistently good - mostly towards the end of the week when I'm exhausted from work and motherhood and just cook something new for the sake of cooking something new and blogging about it.

Uber healthy dinner

Day three of the current diet and the food has still been pretty bland.  I managed to sort myself out with a low-calorie prawn wrap for lunch (stuffed with little gem lettuce and thinly sliced radishes) that was very tasty and breakfast is consistently bircher muesli or a protein bar, but teas are still proving to be a little bland.

Take tonight's recipe from the BBC Good Food website.  I picked it for being low calorie, simple and something that I knew that we could all eat with varying accompaniments.  It was easy to prepare, using all storecupboard ingredients (except my addition of fresh parsley to give it some colour) and I ate mine with a mountain of vegetables.  The crumb was tasty - I used garlic puree for laziness and to save my hand from smelling.  But the chicken was still bland, as was the cauli and broccoli.

The carrots, however were great.  I'm not a massive fan of boiled carrots unless they're accompanying a roast and under a significant puddle of gravy.  I'll eat them by the bucket-load if they're raw.  Or if they're cooked Vichy style - thinly sliced then cooked in a tiny amount of water with butter and a little sugar to make a glaze - so not a vegetable I would normally buy given that we never eat roast dinner at home (apart from Christmas day).

But tonight, I picked up a bag of tiny Chantaray carrots in Waitrose, tossed them with a little olive oil and baked them alongside the chicken.  Yummy.

This is how I made my version

Serves 2

• 2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
• 15g unsalted butter, softened
• 15g natural dried breadcrumbs (I used Paxo breadcrumbs but would've preferred Japanese Panko)
• 1/2 tsp garlic puree (I use Gia)
• couple of sprigs of parsley, finely chopped
• 200g Chantaray carrots
• 2 tsp olive oil
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 190c (fan).
2. Place the chicken breasts on a baking tray and make two diagonal slashes in each, cutting about 2/3 of the way through the flesh with each slash.  Season with salt and pepper.
3. Mix the butter, breadcrumbs, garlic and parsley.  Divide between the tops of the two pieces of chicken. 
4. Toss the carrots in the olive oil and add to the baking tray.
5. Bake for 20 minutes.

BBC Good Food Pineapple and Pink Grapefruit with Mint Sugar

The final recipe in this week's mint quadrilogy.  I was feeling really virtuous when I came home from work and tucked into a plate of soft, sweet pineapple and cheek tingling red grapefruit (I didn't pay attention to which colour grapefruit I picked up at the shops so don't shoot me) and summery mint sugar.  And then the husband persuaded me to have a chippy tea so now I'm feeling fat and bloated and a bit greasy.  For every yin, there is a yang and all that.

Not much to say tonight, mostly because I have to do a whole load of washing, ironing, packing, recipe printing and more cooking related packing.  And work.  Hence the really quick and easy recipe and lack of soul searching post.

Never would've thought about doing anything with these fruit other than eating them by themselves.  I added a squeeze of lime to the mix for a really tropical taste.  Will definitely be eating this a lot post holiday!

Recipe is here.

Stuffed Peppers

At the moment, I'm reading Nigel Slater's 'Toast'.  Although he was born in 1958 and is a contemporary of my mother and my uncle; many of his food references could have been picked straight from my own childhood.  Brands like Cadburys Smash and Mini Rolls; Birds Custard; Dairylea on Cornish Wafers; and tins of Teatime Selection Biscuits.


Like Slater, as a child, I used to pore over my mother's recipe books and dream of eating many of the things on those glossy colour plates.  Never the things that were drawn or photographed in black-and-white; just the things in glorious technicolour.  Sadly, secondary school cookery (and my mother's assertion that catering was a bad career choice) put paid to any foodie aspirations.

Need to practise with the Instagram aperture setting!

One of my favourite books as a youngster though was a copy of Cookery for Children.  Despite most of the pictures being coloured drawings, there was something exciting about the idiot-proof step-by-step guide to making chocolate orange cheesecake or egg-in-the-window.  I also had copies of Gardening for Children and Modelling (as in craft!) for Children.  All three of which were much thumbed.  But I never once made anything from any of them.

I'm sure the books are probably still stashed away somewhere at my grandparents house, waiting faithfully for me to discover them on that sad day when we'll have to clear the house out.  They are most definitely on the list of things that will be being saved.

My mother recently bought Abigail a cookery book and I was amazed to see that despite technology having progressed so much and it being far easier to do step-by-step photographs, the pictures are still reassuringly hand drawn.  You could almost believe the artist is the same as the style is so similar.  It's only the modern recipes that give away the fact that it's not the same book.

Leafing through it at the weekend, I came across a recipe for stuffed peppers.  As a child, my mother used to have a habit of stuffing anything that found its way into the kitchen and didn't move after five minutes.  Of course, chicken and turkeys expect to be stuffed, but she also stuffed rolled pork joints, capsicums, aubergines, marrows and all manner of offal things.  The thought of stuffed hearts still turns my stomach to this day.

Her stuffed peppers were filled with mince and rice.  I have no idea why I refused to eat them (I guess I was a child and it was my prerogative).  Instead, I got mince, beans and rice - basically chilli without the chilli and using baked beans instead of kidney beans.  She also used to stuff her peppers by slicing the top off, filling the middle and then serving them with the lids back on top, mince peeking provocatively from the top.  Even that didn't sell it to me.

Much as I'd love Abigail to eat stuffed peppers, I think that day is a long way off in the future.  In the meantime, the sentimental side of me couldn't let another children's cookery book go unloved so I decided to make the peppers for my own lunch today.

It's not exactly the weather for such fresh, healthsome food.  These demand to be eaten outside in the sunshine with a crisp green salad, a glass of wine (not for the children of course!) and some crusty bread.  It's a good storecupboard recipe for using up random things from the fridge - I have five more capsicums to do something with before we go on holiday next week.

I also added a handful of pine nuts to the recipe for a bit of crunch, but this is one of those very forgiving recipes that you can tweak to your hearts content.  I also used arborio rice and think next time, I'd cook the rice in stock (as per adapted recipe below).

Can see this working well with chilli con carne (my review of Lorraine Pascale's is the second most popular post on this blog) and loaded with sour cream.  Served of course, like my mother made hers with the top serving as a lid, goodies just about ready to spill over the side.

Forgot to write down the details of the book, but will update the post with the correct references later.

Serves 4

Memories of my childhood

• 4 bell peppers, halved and de-seeded
• 125g arborio rice
• 125g cheddar, grated
• 25g parmesan, grated
• 1 small onion, finely diced
• 1tbsp olive oil
• 2 tomatoes, de-seeded and diced
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely sliced
• small handful each of parsley and basil, chopped
• 25g pine nuts, toasted
• half a chicken or vegetable stock cube
• salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan/350F.
2. Add the stock cube to a pan of water, bring to the boil then cook the risotto rice for 12 minutes. Drain under cold running water to stop it cooking further.
3. While the rice is cooking, heat the oil in a small frying pan over a medium heat and saute the onion for 3-4 minutes until translucent.  Add the garlic and cook for a further 1-2 minutes, taking care to not let the garlic burn.  Remove from the heat.
4. Place the peppers onto a baking tray.  Mix the onions, garlic, rice, tomatoes, cheeses, pine nuts and herbs together.  Season to taste.
5. Bake for about 30 minutes or until the pepper shells are soft.