June 2012
6 posts
8 tags
On a Friday: Green pancakes with lime butter
Serves: 3/4 Approx Cost: £13.00
Back again with Plenty, I find it hard to drag myself away from a cookbook this good. I’m determined to work my way through it recipe by recipe knowing a very high percentage will be brilliant.
These green pancakes were wünderbar! The lime butter was a little faffy, and by faffy I mean it just took a bit of prep thats all. The butter is a must, you...
4 tags
On a Wednesday: Tenderstem broccoli and...
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £13.00
First, I need to thank someone. That person is @rob_hyde because without him, this book wouldn’t have come into my life. After a request to twitter for ‘new cookery books to try’, he championed this one. Its been wonderful, every single thing i’ve cooked from it has been brilliant. It is absolutely and definitely the best cook book...
5 tags
On a Monday: Cayenne white bait
Serves: Dependent on amount of whitebait Approx Cost: £4.00
White bait. I love it. I can never get enough of it. I thought it was time we learnt to make it at home, so
A) we could eat it as often as we’d like
and
B) we can eat as much of it as we’d like
White bait for me = greed, and i’m not ashamed to admit it.
I got this Rick Stein book from Abe Books for 64p. 64P! How...
3 tags
On a Friday: Baked aubergines
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £5.00
An easy peasy dish to make and instead of making two (as for a main) I made just one and used it as a side for the slow cooked chicken leftovers.
So, this is going to be the shortest blog post ever, but all you do is bake them in the oven for half and hour with some oil and seasoning, then plonk some mozzarella on top with some pesto and let it melt and bubble, et...
7 tags
On a Thursday: Smoked Paprika Chicken with Chorizo
Serves: 4 *just* Approx Cost: £8.50
This book was given to me as a gift for my birthday (January 31st incase you were wondering) back in 2010. I’d been given a slow cooker as my christmas present (25th December incase you were wondering) and so far had been using a Marks & Spencers slow cooker recipe book to no avail. I find that with most slow cooking cook books, they’re...
11 tags
On a Bank Holiday Monday: Mega Paella
Serves: 6-8 Approx Cost: £60+
I’m back! Yes yes, calm down, it’s ok, Rachael’s here. I’ve been on holiday and fell into my old pattern of pretty much eating out every single night. I had to force myself to stay in this week so that I could get a deadline out of the way and do some home cooking. As of this week i’m back on track, and therefore you should see some...
May 2012
3 posts
10 tags
On a Thursday: Ladies fine dining
I have a gang! Well, i’m part of a gang, we don’t have colours. We have onesies (yes thats me with a cigar). Although I threw mine away yesterday due to my increase in flab, i’ve made a bandana out of it, its fine. We rap on the streets and generally cause mayhem after wine tasting events. Some members don’t exist anymore (i’m not going to give you any more...
11 tags
On a Wednesday: Very full tart
Serves: 6 Approx Cost: £21.50
I’ve been desperate to get back to this cookbook. Such sumptuous veggie meals, seriously tasty, not always uber healthy *looks around innocently* but always very tasty! As proved with the halloween soufflés, sweet potato cakes and black pepper tofu. I’ve never made a tart before so thought this would be a good start.
Now, let me start off by saying...
6 tags
On a Friday: Cakes for dancing!
Chocolate Shortbread
Serves: 6 Approx Cost: £0 (Already had all ingredients in the cupboard)
Some of you may know that, oh, who am I kidding - no-one reads this thing! If by some miracle you’re reading my cooking ramblings then you may be interested that I dance Lindy Hop. Its FUN, and not at all uncool *raises eyebrows*. Honestly, I love it. It makes me happy and the music is what I...
April 2012
11 posts
6 tags
On a Saturday: Kidney Bean & Butternut Jamba Stew
Serves: 5/6 Approx Cost: £7.85
I saw this new book *squeeee* at my gents mums house. They’ve recently gone from vegetarian to uber vegetarian/vegan because of recent health issues. I saw the cover from across the kitchen an instantly fell in love/purchased on amazon mobile.
We’ve been eating much less meat of late, not really favouring it for weeknight meals, the only meat...
7 tags
On a Sunday: Fish rice with saffron
Serves: 4 Approx Cost: £14.70
Mmmmmm, monkfish rice with saffron, that sounds nice! *goes to ASDA*…WHAT no monkfish?! oh gawd, I suppose i’ll pick it up before we have this on wednesday.
Gets to Wednesday “shall we go out tonight?”, “ok”!
Gets to Sunday, “oh gawd! I forgot to pick up monkfish”. And so the tale went. This was, as you’ve...
4 tags
On a Wednesday: Afghan yoghurt chicken
Serves: 4 Approx Cost: £10.00
I had been recommended this recipe in particular before buying this book by a friend of mine who has her own recipe folder. Her recipe folder is always throwing up lots of delights when we visit for food, so decided to make this on her advice for two friends who came round for dinner.
It. took. AGES. I wish browning meat took barely any time, thats what takes...
On a Wednesday: Lentil soup & Chilli and rosemary...
Chilli and rosemary cornbread
Serves: 12 Approx Cost: £5.00
I have moar new cookbooks! So many more! Its becoming an obsession actually. The whole point of this blog was to force myself to cook regularly and try and use the cookbooks I already have. However, its becoming evident that i’m using this blog as an excuse to just buy more and more recipe books, and I love it!
I kicked off with...
4 tags
On a Monday: Sweet potato cakes
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £6.30
As I said, I’ve picked out a few recipes already from this book for this week and this was one I was really looking forward to. I love potato cakes and I love sweet potato, what more could I ask for?!
The recipe was really smple to put together, after steaming the potato you leave it impantiently for an hour to lose its liquid then knock together a sauce while...
5 tags
On a Monday lunchtime: Black pepper tofu
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £7.01
This is fast becoming my new favourite recipe book. It must be because it made me want to try cooking tofu. Tofu for gods sake! The recipe looked pretty delicious, although the ingredients seemed strangely out of whack. 8 fresh red chillis?!?! Are you trying to blow my head off? Jeepers!
Again I decided to halve the quantities, no need to make so much food this...
10 tags
On a Sunday: Baking for my afternoon tea dance
I’m going to feature a few recipes in one post as I ended up baking a few different things for an afternoon tea dance I held at my flat. I have been taking Lindy Hop classes for the last year and a half and I absolutely adore it, and the people i’ve met while doing it. I decided to hold a dance at my flat with two rules.
1) Each guest must bring something they’ve baked...
On a Saturday: Halloween Soufflés
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £11.17
This book was highly recommended to me by quite a few of my twitter followers after I requested some new book ideas. I was eager for it to arrive and when it did I wasnt dissapointed. What a lovely book! Very nicely designed, laid out and had a surprising soft cover. It now stands out as the best looking recipe book I own!
I’ve picked a few recipes to have...
5 tags
On a Monday: Sea bass with vanilla butter
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £10.30
We’d been planning on having this dish for a few weeks now, the sea bass fillets have been living in the freezer waiting for a suitable day. Things have conspired to push that day further and further back with us happening to favour eating out or heating up leftovers.
We’re away visiting the gents folks this week, so again I’ve not planned any...
5 tags
On a Friday: Raclette Feast!
Serves: As many as you can get round the table Approx Cost: I daren’t work it out
We havent cooked much this week, when I say cooked I mean ‘cooked cooked’ . We’ve been trying to use up the freezer leftovers of all the meals you’ve seen on the blog so far. Thats the thing when you’re cooking for two, you always still seem to make a meal for four! Thats one...
March 2012
16 posts
3 tags
On a Sunday: Summer Frittata
Serves:4 (with a salad) Approx Cost: £8.78
We’ve had some lovely weather here in Manchester this weekend and i’ve missed it completely by being stuck inside doing a software course on projection mapping (which was actually fantastic. I was late home Sunday so James took role of head chef again to make us the aptly named ‘Summer Frittata’ from the Innocent cookbook.
Now,...
6 tags
On a Friday: Lamb kofta pittas
Serves: 3 Approx Cost: £10.22
While I said in my first blog post I’d try and make time for cooking no matter how busy I got, well I didn’t realise i’d get *this* busy again. As such instead of just phoning the takeaway, we’ve tried to stick to the plan of healthy eating, but I passed the torch to my gent and requested he cook a couple of the meals this week.
He’s...
11 tags
On a Tuesday: Coconut fish curry
Serves: 4 Approx Cost: £11.57
My gent talked me into buying this book, “look”! he exclaimed in ASDA, “three ways to do aubergines!”. I relented, rolled my eyes and decided to give it a chance, it was on sale after all.
This week is probably going to focus a little too heavily on it, but i’m giving it a chance, getting my money’s worth! Partly because I was...
7 tags
On a Monday: Sweet potato and peanut gratin
Serves: 4 Approx Cost: £5.96
As much as Hugh gets excited about chomping down on his vegetables EVERYDAY! after excitedly purchasing and leafing through, I myself, was rather underwhelmed. I’d been having spasms of guilt that about my excessive carnivorous nature of late and this happened to coincide with the release of Hugh’s new book (and new hairdo apparently).
After recieving...
6 tags
On a Wednesday: Lamb and butternut squash tagine
Serves: 4/5 Approx Cost: £21.30
I’ve barely cooked this week, not because i’ve not wanted to, but because that jambalaya has been so hard to finish! Still left with tupperware here there and everywhere full of the gorgeous gloopy stuff.
I’d not allowed myself to cook anything else in favour of making sure we ate all the leftovers in the interest of not wasting anything and...
9 tags
On a Monday: Jambalaya! Jambalaya!
Serves: 8-10 Approx Cost: £22.00 Music you should cook to: Fats Waller
You have to read the title to the tune of Bamboleo by the way. Now i’m going to admit something, I dont actually *own* Jamies America. I’ve been craving this recipe for weeks and normally Mrs Petticoat (her wonderful food blog) cooks it for our group of friends and I get to take home whats left. I...
7 tags
On a Sunday: Duck breasts with various veg
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £6.50
This was a really basic sunday dinner. I had two duck breasts which I had managed to snag from the reduced section in the supermarket and fancied a meat and veg kind of tea.
I didnt follow a recipe for this, however I did use a recipe for the broccoli side. I roasted up all the veg and after browning the skin of the duck I stuck that in the oven too. What I really...
6 tags
On a Sunday: Plum and honey tea bread
Serves: 10 Approx Cost: £0 - I used ingredients I already had in the cupboards
I fancied a little baking today, and instead of reaching for my trusty spicy banana bread, I decided to give a recipe in this book a try. It was a christmas present and I hadn’t had chance to use it yet. On a seperate note from the recipe, this book is absolutely gorgeous. Filled with tips on cooking, baking,...
6 tags
On a Sunday lunchtime: Seared scallop, fennel and...
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £7.41
I promise I’ll be moving onto a new cookery book as soon as i’ve used these ingredients up! We had some scallops in the freezer, and a freebie bulb of fennel (a gift from the lovely people at Lurpak who sent me an Abel & Cole veg box out of the blue!) so I went on the hunt for a suitable recipe.
This one called for those ingredients to be mixed with...
On a Saturday: Fennel and lemon baked sea bass
Serves: 2 (depending on how many fillets you buy) Approx Cost: £10.65
So I needed a reason to use my new Falcon ware roasting tins, and I found the perfect excuse in this sea bass tray bake. Its pretty simple and easy to make, boiling up the new potatoes first and throwing in the fennel after. I’m not ashamed to admit I needed to logon to YouTube to find out how to cut my fennel. Some of...
On a Saturday lunchtime: Avocado quesadillas
Serves: 2 Approx Cost: £7.45
I decided to mix it up a little by dipping into Nigella’s KITCHEN, (yes it does have to be typed in capitals), for a quick and tasty lunch snack.
Reaching for the avocado again, my new favourite food, I decided to whip up some of her heathy(ish) quesadillas, but adding a couple of changes and additions to the original recipe.
Nigella requests politely that...
On a Thursday: Mexican Burgers
Serves: 4 Approx Cost: £8.78
So yes, you guessed it, i’m getting pretty keen on this book. I decided to have a go at the Mexican Burgers in hopes to satisfy my gents appetite for spice.
This would be the first time i’d ever purchased Turkey mince, and possibly the last. I understand why they chose it - very lean, good for the old muffin top, but I found the burgers quite dry.
I...
on a Wednesday: Thai seafood and vermicelli noodle...
Serves: 4/5 Approx Cost: £18.85
So I made a boo boo, flying high from my success of Monday I invited a friend round for dinner. I decided to make the Thai seafood and vermicelli noodle salad from ‘Cook Yourself Thin’. SALAD!??! who said anything about a salad?! I’d read the recipe wrong on “big shop” day and hadn’t realised this was a cold dish. Ew, cold wet...
2 tags
On a Monday: Lasagne
Serves: 6 Approx Cost: £17.55
First recipe and boy is it a good ‘un! Taken from the recently purchased ‘Cook yourself Thin’ a book to accompany a Channel 4 series which I never saw. Why not start my cooking challenge by cooking from a book that supposed to be ‘the delicious way to drop a dress size’? Seemed like the perfect start to me!
So lets get into it, this,...
Why does the world need another food blog?
Well it doesn’t does it, however this is more a diary for myself, charting the recipes i’ve tried and tested and ones I shall never go near again.
I started this blog after realising that work has taken over my life. I barely cook anymore, let alone eat regularly or even healthily, and as a result i’ve piled on the pounds, eat at irregular intervals and stuff my face with...
