Happy Blogday
It’s one year today since Dinner Diary went live. Stephen and I had the idea for a food blog a while before that but were stuck on a focus and a name. I’m not sure in which order those two things were decided (I have a vague memory of the two of us shouting possible names to each other across the lounge after we’d drunk quite a lot of wine, Dinner Diary was MY idea though 🙂 ) but once they were sorted we quickly set about registering our domain name and creating our first post.
Initially we both wondered if it might be a fad but we soon got used to eating cold food while we wrangled with the poor lighting in our North London flat and embraced the opportunity to buy new dishes and plates; the essential elements of food blogging 🙂 We quickly found that dinner time became an opportunity to cook something new and interesting instead of relying on our old favourites and we both spent a lot more time trawling the web for recipes and obsessively snipping articles from magazines.
We’ve both been interested in food for a long time and have always spent most weekends and many evenings cooking but Dinner Diary gave us the push we needed when we got home from work late and tired and didn’t feel like cooking – if we ate cheese on toast every night then it wouldn’t make very interesting reading.
We decided early on that we wouldn’t be selective with our postings, we’d photograph everything and be honest about how it tasted so, when we spent all day Saturday laying in the sun drinking Pimms and only ate crisps for dinner we posted it. Last Thursday when I was hungover, home alone and too lazy to even slice some cheese for a sandwich I ate a supermarket pizza. It was horrible but I posted it anyway.
Aside from the cold food the blogging benefits far outweigh the negatives, I’ve already mentioned all the shopping we’ve had to do so that the photographs look good but there’s also the opportunity to eat interesting food. No-one wants to read page after page of sausages and mashed potatoes or fish and new potatoes so we try to be creative although it has been noted that we eat a lot of chicken!
Which leads me nicely into one of the negatives: it’s very difficult not to over-eat when you’re cooking interesting, creative food every day. The recipes that interest us the most tend to be the ones with a lot of butter or oil or carbohydrates – pasta, risotto, casseroles and stews – none of which are particularly good for the waistline. Hence the chicken. It’s our quiet nod to healthy eating and of course, it’s reasonably priced and versatile. As much as we’d love to eat rib of beef and langoustines every night because they’re interesting and look good our budget (and our waistlines!) doesn’t stretch that far.
A lot of food bloggers write posts about themselves which is not something Stephen and I have ever done (Stephen and Kerri are not our real names in case you were wondering!), apart from the “we like food and we like taking pictures of food” strapline that we have on our homepage. It seems to say it all though. We do like food and we do like taking photos of food. We did toy with the idea of publishing a photo of ourselves along with a longer biography but we decided against it, both of us are quite attached to our pseudonyms now*.
One of the original reasons for starting Dinner Diary was so that we would have a record of the food we’d eaten and an online repository for storing our recipes, I don’t think we even told anyone apart from our close friends what we doing for the first four of five months. The food record and recipe repository is still one of the most useful things about Dinner Diary for us, we both use it constantly to find our recipes and look for inspiration. Accidentally clicking on one of our favourites like Roast Chicken when there’s two hours before lunch can be painful though.
Having said that, reading the comments left by people is a great thing. It’s still really exciting to log on and see “comment in moderation” waiting and it’s even more interesting when people we don’t “know†leave us a comment although that often leads us to wonder how they found us. We recently added a traffic analyser which is really interesting…we found that “too much chilli†was one of the search comments that led people to us, as was “sluttyâ€. The analyser told us that we get on average 846 hits per day, I think we might need a new analyser…!
I’m confident that we’ll keep going for another year, it’s complete natural for us now to have the camera in the kitchen while we’re cooking and without thinking we both usually have an idea in our heads about how the dish is going to look when finished. Being able to look back at what you’ve eaten over the last year is a brilliant thing too, as is having a permanent, central place to keep your recipes.
In honour of our first anniversary, we cooked game pie today. Game casserole was one of the first dinners to appear on Dinner Diary so it seemed fitting. I got us a new placemat too 🙂
*Stephen and Kerri are our real names, we wrote this when we were still known as Fred and Ginger. Most of that paragraph is irrelevant now but I’ll leave it there for posterity. Thanks, Ethel 🙂
Mackerel Pate
At last! This has been on my “Things To Cook Soon” list for months. We both love smoked mackerel and eat it a lot, we also eat a lot of mackerel pate but never seem to get round to making it ourselves for some reason. Today though we rectified that and I’m glad we did because it was really tasty. And quick to make too thanks to the new Magimix. The mackerel was pulsed in the mixer before some cream cheese was added, salt and cayenne went in next along with some lemon juice. A final blitz and it was ready.
Sea Bass with Fennel and Lemon
Last night Kerri was out, so I was just cooking for myself. I decided on some sort of fish with fennel and found a recipe that included lemons too. Armed with a wild sea bass, one large fennel bulb, a few small fennel bulbs and a lemon, I went to work. I chopped up the tops of the fennel and stuffed the fish with them. Then I sliced the bulbs in half and fried them in a hot frying pan until they were slightly charred. I did the same with the lemon and then put the fish into an oven dish with the fennel and lemon and roasted it until it was done.
The bass was good and I enjoyed the fennel but not much of the lemony flavour made it into the fish. So I squeezed some lemon juice over the fish, which came out a rather brownish colour due to the charring.
With (and before) it I drank a Grüner Veltliner from Austria (most of it is from Austria), which complemented it rather well.
Foodie Blogroll
We’ve joined the Foodie Blogroll – a huge list of food blogs check it out here.
Pizza…
…from the supermarket. They were mean with the cheese, the tomato sauce tasted like tomato puree and the base was soggy. Don’t try this at home.
Chicken Casserole
Yesterday Kerri made chicken casserole with stock that we’d made on Saturday. Today we reheated it and had it for dinner and it was really good. It had a lovely depth of very chickeny flavour and it was just the thing to have on a rather chilly evening. Winter appears to be arriving and we might have to make more of this sort of thing out of necessity.
This is Kerri’s recipe, adapted from a few sources and tailored to what we like:
Chicken Casserole
Serves four
2lb chicken pieces with bones
2 tablespoons flour
Salt and pepper
Oil
125g lardons
2 medium onions, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
One large carrot, chunked
225g mushrooms, chopped
500ml chicken stock
300ml white wine
Sprig thyme, chopped
Six sage leaves, chopped
Bay leaf
Two medium potatoes, chunked
Coat the chicken in the seasoned flour.
Heat oil and brown chicken on all sides – about ten minutes.
Remove the chicken and add more oil if necessary.
Add the bacon, celery, onions, garlic, carrots and mushrooms and saute for five minutes or until the onions are translucent.
Return the chicken to the pan, stir in the excess flour, add the stock, wine and herbs.
Check for seasoning and cook for one hour on a low heat.
Check for seasoning, add diced potato.
Cook for a further hour (without lid if necessary to reduce liquid).
Check for seasoning and serve with extra vegetables and/or bread.
*Chopped parsley will make the water green, add this just before serving
*Shallots could be used instead of onions
Rib of Beef
We’ve been trying to think of things to go with horseradish since we bought a huge root of the stuff last weekend. Stephen seems to only be able to think of beef and specifically rib of beef when we have the “what goes with horseradish” conversation so, today, that’s what he had. We seared it before cooking in the oven but it was a little too large for our frying pan:
No matter, it worked fine and we then roasted in the oven before serving it with individual yorkshire puddings (look at the new Le Creuset!), green vegetables, slow roasted tomatoes and garlicky mushrooms. And horseradish, obviously!
Chicken Cacciatora
This has been on the to-do list for a while and seemed perfect for the Autumn weather we’ve been having recently but was actually a bit disappointing. It’s similar to the chicken basque that we both love so much and just not as good really. We served it with green vegetables and lots of bread to mop up the leftover juices – that bit was really good!
Fajitas
Neither of us were feelng particularly inspired about dinner tonight, but a couple of days ago we’d discussed fajitas so had them tonight. We had them in a bit of a hurry too, which meant that I forgot to marinate the chicken before cooking it and they didn’t have a lot of flavour. Something to remember for next time – even though they’re quick to make, don’t try to make them too quickly!
Salmon Fishcakes with Horseradish
Last time we made salmon fishcakes, they were a great success and we were keen to repeat that success. We had bought some horseradish on the weekend and were keen to use that too, so we grated some into the fishcakes and also made some creamed horseradish sauce. I’m sad to report that the fishcakes were not that great this time; not much taste despite our dutiful baking of the potatoes and salmon. They tasted salmony enough, but not of much else; the horseradish had mellowed down into insignificance during cooking and they needed more seasoning. Even the photograph looks rather bland.
Hopefully they’ll return to form next time we try. For now, we have loads of horseradish sauce to use up and we’re planning roast beef for the weekend. Mmmmmm roast beef.
