Breakfast Bread
This morning Stephen made breakfast bread, to his mum’s recipe. He used to eat this at home in South Africa when he was small. It was delicous, fruity and cinammony and perfect eaten with butter.
1 cup wholewheat flour
1 cup digestive bran
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves
Pinch salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 medium apples
1/2 cup raisins
1 egg
1/4 cup oil
1/2 cup water
Mix dry ingredients and raisins. Grate apples into flour mixture. Beat together egg, oil and water. Add to other ingredients and stir only until combined. Spread in greased pie plate. Sprinkle top with a little extra sugar and cinnamon. Bake at 200 degrees C for about 30 minutes. Serve warm.
Fish Egg!
Well, an egg that’s shaped like a fish really.
I bought this for Stephen from eBay, it’s a plastic mould that you squish a boiled egg into and leave to cool until it’s shaped like a fish. It’s from a Japanese seller who specialises in Bento box accessories, this is for a child’s lunchbox. Or a Stephen’s breakfast.
It came in a pack of two so watch out for Car Egg.
Thai Skewers
A few days ago, we planned to have Thai lemongrass beef skewers tonight and hadn’t planned much else. Today we decided to have chicken satay as well, to follow the skewer theme. We managed to plan all of this without so much as a thought to anything non-meat related and this lack of thought continued until it was cooked and served.
So we had lemongrass beef skewers and chicken satay with peanut sauce (made in our new Magimix). Both the chicken and the beef were really good; they were under the grill and I reluctantly took them out before they were nicely browned for a photograph but I knew they would be more tender that way. The peanut sauce was good too and we have some left over – we’ll probably be putting it on random things for the rest of the weekend.
Harissa Roasted Salmon
We’ve had a lot of fish this week; clearly we need to be more imaginative when trying to think of healthy things to cook. We roasted some harissa-covered salmon and served it with roasted cherry tomatoes and a salad of spinach, feta, pine nuts and new potatoes. Generally, things worked well together but the salmon didn’t have a lot of flavour (maybe that’s why it was half price) and the potatoes were a bit out of place (would have been better with couscous instead of potatoes but we had some potatoes and didn’t want them to go to waste).
Avocado with Pine Nuts and Fish with Tomatoes
We’ve been eating lots of avocado lately. I’ve always liked it but at the moment I really like it. Not that I get obsessed about food stuffs and eat them until I can’t face eating them anymore or anything… 😉
Tonight, Stephen made a pre-dinner dip of mashed avocado with salt and pepper sprinkled with toasted pine nuts. We served it with brown toast. It was good, but not as good as the unwanted toast crusts I dipped into the Marmite jar when he wasn’t looking 🙂
When we were finished with our starter (starters, on a Tuesday? Oh the extravagance!) we moved on to dealing with our fish.
We used up the leftover tapenade we made last week to stuff and smear the fish which was roasted on some cherry tomatoes, lemon and bay. The fish (sea bream) was wrapped up in foil to poach in the oven with some white wine. We served it with the usual vegetable selection of crushed new potatoes, green beans and brocolli. The tomatoes were a little sour so I quickly finished them in the oven in some harissa.
All good, but sadly not quite enough of it. I have a feeling I might be running back to the Marmite jar before the night is out.
Beef Stirfry
We had a fair amount of beef left over from our roast yesterday, so we decided to make it into a stir fry. Nothing too fancy – just a made up, pseudo-Thai recipe using thinly sliced beef, red pepper, carrot, baby corn and broccoli to which we added chilli, lemongrass, garlic, lime juice, soy sauce and fish sauce in varying quantities. Served with jasmine rice as usual.
Cobnuts
Stephen went to the Hammersmith Farmer’s Market on Thursday and came back with cobnuts! We were both really excited by this as we’d read a lot about them but never seen them before. They’re a bit like hazelnuts and grow mostly in Kent.
I was worried they were destined for the same fate as the onion squash and the chestnuts (both purchased by Stephen and left to languish at the back of the vegetable bowl before they went rotten and I had to dispose of them) but he spent much of the morning researching recipes and found this for ginger and cobnut cake. It’s raining again today and we both thought this sounded perfect for a rainy Sunday afteroon.
Before baking the cake, the cobnuts need to be shelled and roasted in the oven. The nuts puff up during roasting and become sweeter.
We didn’t have enough nuts to make a whole cake so made a smaller one and baked it in the oven for about 20 minutes, then we left it to cool while we got on with roasting our beef.
The cake actually turned out more like a biscuit, it was very dense in texture and flat too. We didn’t have self raising flour and had to improvise with baking powder which may have had something to do with it. It was tasty though, and we had it with custard which I love.
Roast Beef
Did I mention it was raining again today? We started talking about what to have for lunch before breakfast and it took us about 10 seconds to decide on roast beef. Stephen braved the weather to go in search of beef (well, go to the shop…it’s not like we live on a rambling country estate after all) and came back with some topside (the best cut for roasting according to the seller) and a selection of vegetables, all from the local Farmer’s Market.
According to the blog archive, we haven’t had proper roast beef and yourshire puddings since new year’s eve! Seeing as this is one of our favourites it’s a good job we rectified this today.
The beef was sprinkled with a little flour and mustard powder (a Delia tip) and lots of black pepper before being roasted on an onion (another Delia tip I think, it’s a similar technique to using a rack and means the meat doesn’t sit in a lot of fat; it also makes for great gravy) for about 40 minutes. We use a meat thermometer to ensure the meat is cooked the way we like it: pink.
Plenty of roast potaoes and, of course, yorkshire pudding, with lots of Stephen’s brilliant gravy definitely livened up a grey, wintery day.
Barbecue
Yesterday, we went to a friend’s barbecue. We’d been keeping our fingers crossed all week that the weather was going to co-operate and we were lucky, apart from a few spots of rain just as the food went on the grill, it stayed dry.
Darren is famous for his guacamole, and he didn’t let us down yesterday having made a huge bowl full of the avocadoey, garlicy green stuff for us to dip our chips and pitta into.
We took along some more of the tapenade we made on Thursday but this time it was a bit too salty. Not sure why. It got eaten though so it can’t have been too bad.
Then we ate some really fresh mackerel that had marinated in some cumin, coriander, chilli and pepper and stuffed with lime and some chicken legs that were coated in honey and mustard.
Finally, we ate a brilliant homemade greengage cake bought along by another friend of ours. Served with custard, it was sweet and sticky and a perfect way to finish off the day.
Tart’s Tagliatelle
We had various ideas about what to make tonight but ended up deciding that something relatively simple would be good. So we decided on pasta puttanesca. We’ve made this before with spaghetti, but we had somehow run out of spaghetti so had it with tagliatelle instead, which went really well. The sauce was just the right strength for the amount of pasta we had. What little sauce was left in the saucepan, we ended up eating on breadsticks because we enjoyed it so much.
