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So last night we made a(nother) Jamie Oliver recipe – Salami and Fennel Linguine (Jamie calls it Spaghetti with Salami, Fennel and Tomatoes). It was yummy, with the delicate flavours of the fennel coming through a hearty tomato sauce and fatty slithers of salami. This is my tweaked version of Jamie’s.
Salami and Fennel Spaghetti
Feeds two
spaghetti or linguine for two
a couple of thick slices of salami (I used Milano salami and asked my deli to cut it into thick slices rather than thinly sliced)
2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced
1/2 tsp fennel seeds, crushed
small bulb of fennel, finely sliced
feathery fennel tops
1 tin of tomatoes (I used tinned cherry tomatoes)
pinch of dried chilli flakes
chunk of stale bread, whizzed into breadcrumbs
sprig of rosemary
Take your slices of salami and cut them into matchsticks.
In a pan, heat a couple of glugs of olive oil and add the salami, sliced garlic and crushed fennel seeds. Stir over a low heat until the fat starts to cook out of the salami and it starts to crisp ever so slightly.
Add the sliced fennel and stir – cook for a couple of minutes until soft. Add the tinned tomatoes and a pinch of dried chilli. Cook on a low heat for about 25 minutes until the sauce has thickened. Season with salt and pepper.
Meanwhile, heat a pan of boiling salted water and cook your spaghetti or linguine.
In a small frying pan, heat a glug of olive oil and add the sprig of rosemary. As the rosemary starts to sizzle and release its aromas into the oil, add the breadcrumbs and fry until golden and crispy. Remove the rosemary sprig and discard.
Drain the pasta and toss it into your tomato sauce. You can either stir through the crispy golden breadcrumbs and serve, or sprinkle them over the top of your pasta once plated up. Top with a few green feathery fennel fronds.
*Taken from and slightly adapted from Jamie Oliver’s Happy Days with the Naked Chef.
It seems that Friday night for us is often comfort food night. We crave all things comforting – curry, pizza, cheese – to name a few. Healthy eating rarely comes into it.
Last Friday we made an old favourite, one of those recipes that takes you back to your childhood, to meals your granny made as a special treat. This Friday we made Welsh Rarebit loosely following Jamie Oliver’s instructions from his Jamie at Home book.
The below ingredients are what we used, not an exact replica of Jamie’s recipe as we were lacking in some ingredients and had to improvise - but it still tasted delish!
Welsh Rarebit
Enough for 4 large slices
4 thick slices of bread
2 egg yolks
a couple of big handfuls of grated Cheddar cheese
a large teaspoon or two of Dijon mustard
a couple of dashes of Tabasco
about a cup of plain yoghurt and single cream combined (should have been créme fraîche but we didn’t have any)
Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper
First you need to preheat your grill to the highest setting so it gets nice and hot – essential for golden bubbling rarebit.
Next, in a bowl mix together the egg yolks, yoghurt, cream, and mustard. Make sure its well mixed together.
Add some salt and pepper to season, a few big handfuls of grated Cheddar cheese, and a couple of dashes of Tabasco sauce for added bite. Mix well until it’s all combined – it makes a kind of thick cheesey gloop – not too runny.
Lightly toast your thick slices of bread on each side, before spooning over the rarebit mixture. Make sure it’s nice and thick and right up to the edges of the bread so that it oozes over the sides.
Bung them under the grill and watch them as the cheesey mixture bubbles and starts to turn golden.
As it cooks, the top forms a sort of film. So once the rarebit’s were starting to go golden brown, we gently used a knife to criss-cross the top, then splashed over some Worcestershire sauce and bunged them under the grill for a little longer.
Finally, once they are sufficiently golden brown and with cheese oozing down the sides, remove from the grill. Repeat the criss-cross pattern with a knife and splash over some more Worcestershire sauce – you need that fruity heat to cut through the overpowering cheesiness.
They were scrummy, and would have probably made a lovely meal accompanied by a crisp green garden salad…but this was Friday night and we were craving comfort food, so we ate them just as they were in front of the telly.
This is my perfect lazy Saturday (or Sunday!) brunch.
Lightly toasted bread smeared with butter. Crisp salty bacon. Sweet cherry tomatoes. Deep earthy mushrooms. And golden yolked eggs. Oh, and a big mug of hot chocolate.
How to create my perfect brunch
For me, creating the perfect brunch is about excellent ingredients and careful planning of how and when you cook each item.
Firstly, turn you oven onto a low heat and pop in two plates to warm.
In one, large cast iron frying pan I start off the bacon first. Meanwhile, I chopped my mushrooms and cut the cherry tomatoes in half.
Once the bacon starts to crisp, I add the mushrooms and let them start to cook. When the bacon is to cooked to your taste, remove and place in the oven.
Move the mushrooms to one side of the pan, drizzle a little olive oil onto the other side of the pan and add the cherry tomatoes – they should sizzle and spit. Season both the mushrooms and cherry tomatoes with salt and pepper.
Heat another smaller frying pan and add some oil – this will be your egg pan. As you crack in your eggs and start to fry them, instruct your boyfriend to pop some bread into the toast.
Just before your eggs are ready, remove the warmed plates and bacon from the oven. Butter your toast, divide the bacon between your plates, slide the fried eggs onto the toast, and spoon over some mushrooms and tomatoes.
Eat!
My ingredients:
- Polish Black Bread from Barbakan Deli in Manchester
- Back Bacon from Sue at Little Heath Farm
- Organic Eggs from Abbey Leys Farm
- Goats Butter
- Vine Cherry Tomatoes
- Chestnut Mushrooms
Last night N and I tried out a fellow bloggers recipe for dinner. I am an avid follower of The Pioneer Woman, especially her cookery section, and loved the simplicity of her Simple Sesame Noodles and knew I would try it out.
Although – as normal – I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter, I did use almost all of the ingredients she suggested for the sesame dressing, just not measured carefully. She uses a lovely combination of soy sauce, sugar, minced garlic, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and a hit of chilli.
You simply whisk all the dressing ingredients together – we didn’t have chilli oil so I substituted some dried chilli flakes and a dash of Tabasco. Cook the noodles – we used Japanese soba noodles. Mix in the dressing. And add some sliced spring onions.
We also included our own addition of some teriyaki mushrooms – a mixture chopped oyster and chestnut mushrooms, fried with a little teriyaki and soy sauce added towards the end, then turn up the heat so the mushrooms go golden and slightly caramelised at the edges.
Simply scrummy. For the full recipe and directions go here. And for other delicious dishes from Ree head over to The Pioneer Woman.
Oh, and I haven’t forgotten the follow-up parts to our Italy holiday, more on that coming soon!
What do we cook for dinner when we don’t have much in the cupboards? A frittata.
We always seem to have eggs in our house, and like most people by the end of the week there are always an assortment of leftovers. Making a frittata is our failsafe recipe for cooking a wholesome and quick meal that uses everything up.
Really, this isn’t a recipe, because you can use any ingredients or leftovers that you like. It’s really a short set of instructions on how to make a basic frittata and some pointers on when to add certain ingredients to the pan.
Frying pan: To make a frittata you need a frying pan, one that can be put in the oven is even better, but if not this isn’t the end of the world! I use a medium-sized heavy cast iron frying pan with a metal handle – I have discovered that this is the perfect size for us, it makes just the right amount of frittata for the two of us. If you don’t have an oven-proof frying pan, pop your frittata under the grill rather than in the over to cook it.
Eggs: Next, you need eggs – beaten and seasoned with salt and pepper. For two of us, in my medium-sized frying pan I use about four eggs. You need enough beaten eggs to cover the other ingredients in your pan, so start with a good guess of how many you need – you can always beat up another if you need a bit more.
My key frittata ingredients would be potato, onion and cheese.
Potatoes: We often have a few leftover boiled potatoes, and these are perfect in a frittata. If you don’t have leftover potatoes, just boil up a couple of new potatoes and use those instead. Simply slice the potatoes into thick-ish chunks, and they are ready to be added.
Onions: Onions are a staple in most people’s cupboards, cooked slowly in your frying pan in a little oil and maybe a knob of butter until they are softened they will add a lovely sweetness to your frittata. You can cut them up in anyway you wish – roughly chopped, thinly sliced, diced – just as long as they are cooked until soft you can’t go wrong.
Cheese:Adding cheese just before you bung your frittata into a hot oven gives it that added luxury. Now you can use any kind of cheese you fancy or have available in your fridge – make sure it doesn’t clash with any of your other chosen ingredients. It could be grated, diced, sliced or crumbled. Tasty options include mozzarella, cheddar, feta, goat’s cheese, or gorgonzola.
Other ingredients: You could add – olives…roasted red peppers…shredded spinach…diced ham…artichoke hearts…shreds of cooked chicken…sweet roasted carrots…smoked salmon…broccoli florets…salami…flaked fish…garden herbs…
Key steps for making a frittata:
1. Heat oil and/or butter in a frying pan and add the onion – cook until soft.
2. Add any other ingredients – add those things first that will take longer to cook.
3. Once your ingredients are cooked, add your sliced potatoes.
4. Pour over your beaten egg.
5. Sprinkle over your cheese and bung in the oven for about 15-20 minutes until cooked.
6. Leave to cool a little for about 5 minutes before eating.
Last night we cooked a meal that we’d never had before, and it was delicious. Over the summer I bought a recipe book called Freshly Pickedby Jojo Tulloh after reading a lovely excerpt from her book in a magazine on how to make the perfect salad.
One recipe I have been wanting to try from the book, is Sorrel dhal. My favourite grocery, Unicorn Groceryin Manchester currently has big bundles of sorrel, so I thought this the perfect time to try this dish. They also have a nice deli counter, with olives and hummous and all kinds of goodies (often an incredibly delicious homemade dhal!) and amongst all these I spotted a ‘channa salad.’ It comprised of a spicy chickpea salad – fantastically, Unicorn have a recipe for it on their website.
So along with some pitta bread (this was what we had in the freezer) rather than naan, we set about creating ourselves an Indian inspired feast. The dhal recipe itself was not difficult to make, but I did have a few teething problems – nothing too difficult to fix though. This was my first foray into dhal making, so it was bound to have a few hiccups.
Once the dhal was made, we served it up on plates with warm pitta bread and the channa salad. It was more delicious than I was expecting, incredibly comforting, a wonderful blend of gentle spices and hot chilli, and all vegetarian. Even N was pleasantly surprised and wolfed the lot down.
Below is the original recipe from Freshly Picked, with a few tweaks that I made whilst cooking it.
Sorrel dhal
Feeds 4
450g chana dhal or split yellow lentils (we used yellow split peas)
3 thick slices of ginger, unpeeled, smashed with the handle of a knife
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 – 1 tsp salt (use this as a guideline, I seasoned it until it tasted the way we liked it)
a pinch of garam masala (I used a generous pinch)
a knob of butter
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and flattened with the flat side of your chopping knife
2 green chillies, deseeded and finely sliced (I used one small green chilli as we don’t like too much heat)
a bunch of sorrel leaves, sliced into ribbons
Put the chana dhal into a saucepan and cover with about a litre of water. Bring to the boil and remove any scum. Add the ginger and turmeric and cook for at least 1 1/2 hours.
Caution, if you are not experienced in using pulses, like me, check on your pan regularly. I set my timer for 30 minutes as the cooking time on the packet of split peas said 40 minutes – I didn’t check on it during those 30 minutes and it boiled dry – an almost disaster! I simply added more water and carried on cooking it until it was the ‘thick puree with the pulses very soft to the touch’ that Jojo describes later.
If you are following Jojo’s recipe…
Keep your eye on it during the last 30 minutes and add a little more water if it is too dry, stirring occasionally. You are aiming for a thick puree with the pulses very soft to the touch. Add the salt and garam masala.
Just before you are ready to serve the dhal, heat a knob of buter in a heavy frying pan. Add the garlic and the chillies, quickly followed by the sorrel.
Cook the sorrel down gently for 5 minutes until it starts to disintegrate. Tip the whole mixture into the pan with the cooked dhal.
At this point, I tasted the dhal and adjusted the seasoning to our taste. This involved adding some more salt, and a couple of other ingredients: a little lemon juice to enhance the lemony flavour from the sorrel (perhaps I didn’t add enough) and some Tabasco sauce to increase the heat a little.
Add a little hot water from the kettle if it looks too thick. Stir well and set aside until you are ready to eat it.
Jojo recommends that this dish goes well with sour chickpeas and chapattis (both recipes included in her book, Freshly Picked) for a simple Indian supper. This is an utterly lovely book and I would recommend you go out and buy it and add it to your collection – it will become a family favourite!
A quick interlude from Italy food adventures, and a bid to get back into blogging after a week away and a busy week last week preparing for the little sister’s 16th Mexican Fiesta Party.
I adore bagels, especially those from the Barbakan Deli in Manchester, and love their versatility. They taste great with so many different toppings and fillings.
Some of my favourites include a toasted bagel with a generous helping of salted butter, or a mashed avocado spread over bagel halves and topped with sea salt and black pepper. Oh, and a bacon and egg bagel is a whole new level to bacon and egg in a bread bap.
This bagel was lightly toasted so that the edges just started to go golden, then smeared with gooey brie that just started to melt from the warmth of the bagel. Finally, it was topped with onion marmalade, this one was shop bought by onion marmalade or caramelised onion is really simple to make.
Over the bank holiday we had a delicious meal with my family with trout caught by my little brother. You may remember this post back in May when he caught me a trout for my birthday which we barbecued on one of the only warm summer evenings we’ve had this year! Well, my mom had three that he’d caught when we went to visit for the weekend.
My mom and I served the trout with a herb butter, garlic roasted smashed potatoes, grilled tomatoes and green beans. The locally caught trout were cooked simply in the oven covered in foil. I disappeared into my mom’s garden to gather up a selection of herbs to make the herb butter – chives, thyme, sorrel, oregano, mint – you could use any mixture you wanted. I also picked a couple of calendula flowers and snipped the petals into the mixture, this flecked the herb butter with vibrant orange streaks.
The butter is easy to make – simple whip up some softened butter, add in the chopped up herbs and optional edible flowers, add a good amount of black pepper and salt. Add a dollop of the herb butter to your cooked trout and watch as it melts and oozes down over the delicate pink flesh.
My mom’s garlic roasted smashed potatoes were delicious – the softness of crushed potatoes, the crispy bits that had been roasted, and all of it infused with a yummy mild garlic flavour. Simply parboil your peeled potatoes. Drain and roughly mash up – just to break them up a bit. Pop the smashed potatoes into an ovenproof dish, sprinkle over some minced garlic, a couple of sprigs of rosemary, and drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Bung in the oven and cook for about 30 minutes until the potatoes are cooked and slightly crispy on top.
Following on from yesterday’s post, mom cracked open a jar of the freshly made plum jam for breakfast today. She spread a slice of organic white bread with some butter and topped it with a dollop of plum jam.
It was a gorgeous amber jelly, just holding together enough to be great for spreading.
We all had a nibble. It was just sweet enough, with a soft and subtle plum taste. Not too overpowering, with a lovely smooth, slippery texture.
My recommendation: find some local plums and get making your own homemade plum jam. Perfect for Christmas presents, and in the depths of winter you’ll be pleased of a little slice of summer for breakfast.
I thought it was about time for a cake recipe (a little later than planned). I love cake. Most of all chocolate cake, but also lemon drizzle cake, Victoria sponge, pound cakes and cupcakes.
What better way to cheer oneself up than with a delicious homemade cake. That mouthwatering smell that wafts from the oven as it bakes away. It’s almost too much to bear. And then there’s the difficult decision about what to ice it with, if anything – melted chocolate or chocolate butter icing, or just as it is, warm from the oven.
Whatever you decide, it will be scrumptious. You will come down the next morning to find your boyfriend/husband/child has taken a HUGE chunk and run off to work with it. You will then eat an equally large chunk. For breakfast.
Use the best quality cocoa powder you can find – Green’s & Black is pretty nice. Usually I cook cakes in round tins, but this time I chose to bake it in a tray so it could be cut into chunks which are much easier to fit into lunchboxes.
Chocolate Cake
80z caster sugar
8oz butter (room temperature)
4 eggs
4 tbsp milk
8oz self raising flour
2oz cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
Preheat your oven to 180°C.
Line and/or grease your cake tin with a smear of butter and some greaseproof paper.
In a bowl cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.
Slowly add the eggs one at a time.
In a separate small bowl, mix together the cocoa powder and milk to form a paste – add a little more milk if needed.
Mix the cocoa paste into the cake batter.
Sieve the flour and baking powder into the batter and gently fold in.
Pour the mixture into your cake tin and pop in the oven for about 30 minutes. You can test to see if it’s cooked by inserting a skewer – it should come out clean.
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