Mushrooms on Toast
Stephen’s off to play cricket today so for breakfast he had sausages, mushrooms and a fried egg on toast. I just had mushrooms, sauteed in butter and thyme.
Chicken Fajitas
We decided to make guacamole today in order to use up the avocados in the fridge, thinking about guacamole led me to crave chicken fajitas so Stephen kindly made some while I put the shopping away. They were tasty but not as hot as we usually make them.
Picnic
Last night we met some friends at Kew Gardens for a picnic. Since we had all been too busy to cook, I went via Marks and Spencer on the way and picked up some food. The ham hock terrine was particularly good but no-one was impressed with the crab pate.
Pasta Disaster
As is the norm on a Wednesday, Stephen was out and I was left alone wondering what to eat for dinner. The two rashers of bacon I found during Monday’s freezer audit were crying out to be used and since I’ve been wanting to perfect the Pasta Amatriciana I cooked a couple of weeks ago, tonight seemed the perfect opportunity. At least it would have been if the bacon was actually bacon and not in fact two very small pork chops.
Figuring the two weren’t that different I soldiered on and set about cooking the dish anyway. Last time the dish was too sweet and I remembered that I’d used cherry tomatoes so this time I used tinned. I’d forgotten to buy basil and so used dried oregano (as per Lizzie’s comment) and left the sauce to simmer for 20 minutes while I went and had a bath. When it came to tasting it, it was horrible. The tinned tomatoes seemed to have given the sauce a thick, gloopy consistency. The “bacon” was dry and chewy and the whole thing went in the bin.
In order to satisfy my pasta craving, I quickly made a version of Stephen’s spaghetti which I served with those funny little trofie shapes. It wasn’t as good as his but I suppose that’s why it’s not called Kerri’s spaghetti.
Beef Stir-Fry
We went through a phase of eating stir-fry at least once a week, lately we’ve not been as concerned as we should have been with healthy eating which would explain why there’s been more variety in our cooking and therefore less stir-fries.
We decided tonight to re-visit the stir-fry, partly from a health conscious point of view and partly because I found some steak lurking in the freezer during yesterday’s freezer audit.
When I got home I put some rice on to boil and chopped the steak, peppers, baby corns, onions, lemongrass, chilli and garlic. I also grated some ginger and tore up some lime leaves. When Stephen got home he started the process of turning this into something resembling dinner.
Fry the onion for a couple of minutes and then add the garlic, ginger and chilli. Add the steak and after that’s seared throw in the rest of the vegetables. Cook these for another couple of minutes and then add some fish stock and some soy sauce. Turn the temperature down and put a lid on for another couple of minutes. Serve with jasmine rice.
It was really tasty and probably took about 20 minutes, including the chopping. We ate it in about five 🙂
Roman Chicken
Kerri had a day’s holiday today, and prepared this for when I got home, which was really nice 🙂 She’d fancied something with chicken and looked back through Dinner Diary to see what she could find. This post looked tasty, so she bought the ingredients and got to work.
The result was very good indeed; the sauce was rich with tomatoes and had a subtle capery edge. We had it with crushed potatoes and cabbage. Bread would have been good to mop up the rest of the sauce, but we would have eaten loads of it.
Birthday Barbecue
It was my Mum’s birthday on Friday (Happy Birthday Mum!) so yesterday we had a barbecue to celebrate. As well as the usual sausages and hamburgers, Stephen expertly cooked some garlic and rosemary lamb chops and some chicken which we’d marinated in a sticky barbecue sauce:
We served this with tabbouleh and flatbreads and a mixed salad:
For dessert, Stephen and I made Eton Mess which was lovely but we’d made it too far in advance and the meringues had gone a little squishy.
Pizza
Seems like we’ve been all about the pizza and pasta lately. If either of us had a personal trainer, I’m sure that he/she would be shouting at us right now. Anyway, that’s not the case so here we go… 🙂
When we’ve made pizza dough before, we’ve made it with what is supposedly the Pizza Express recipe. This time we decided to try another recipe as that one requires lots of waiting for it to rise, then kneading more, then rising again, etc. We found a Jamie recipe and decided to give it a go.
Jamie is great on television with his rustic bish-bash-bosh, but trying to emulate his apparently easy-going hands-on approach in your own kitchen without the aid of numerous retakes and staff to clean up after you, is of course another story. This is a case in point:
The recipe said to mix your yeast with some sugar in a bowl with some lukewarm water and leave it to stand for a while. Easy enough. Then it says to pile up your flour on a clean work surface, make a well in the middle and pour in the liquid. Okay, a little precarious but we’re still managing. Next he says to start mixing the flour into the liquid with a fork, slowly, starting from the inside. Sounds easy enough, and for a few seconds it went well. But then the liquid started to breach the wall of flour and run out onto the work surface. Trying to plug that breach just caused another, and soon we had yeasty water all over the work surface, down the fronts of the cupboards and on the floor. Great, thanks Jamie. Next time we’ll use a bowl and dough hook.
Anyway, once we’d managed to salvage what we could of the dough, knead it for ten minutes and leave it for another 15 to rise, we topped it with some garlic, basil and cherry tomato sauce that we’d made, along with parma ham, sundried tomatoes, some lovely marinated olives and of course mozarella. Quick bake in the oven on our pizza stone, then topped it with rocket and it was ready!
Lasagne
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I often crave spaghetti bolognaise; lasagne is another thing that regularly finds it’s way into my subconscious and shouts “eat me, eat me”…not that unusual I suppose given that it’s essentially the same as bolognaise, just slightly differently arranged.
I use the same recipe for bolognaise as I do for the meat sauce that goes into lasagne. I don’t think that’s traditional but I like it so that’s all that really matters.
Stephen is out tonight so when I started to think about dinner I quickly went from Marmite toast, to spaghetti bolognaise to lasagne. I knew I had some leftover sauce in the freezer and as we’re trying desperately to clear some of the food in there it seemed a sensible choice. It does require a fair amount of effort despite the fact the sauce was already made but once the craving takes hold there’s really no escape.
I made a quick all-in-one bechamel sauce and used that to layer up a mixture of plain and spinach lasagne sheets, topped with Parmesan cheese (and a little cheddar) and baked it in the oven for 25 minutes.
I also made some garlic bread to go with it and a small salad to atone for the double carbs.
I’m glad the craving won out, it was so much satisfying than Marmite toast.
Smoked Salmon Fishcakes and Salad
This evening we had some fish cakes that we’d made previously and frozen. They were very good – the fish was hot-smoked salmon and the potatoes had been baked in the oven. The smoked salmon gave the fish cakes a wonderful flavour; sometimes poached fish gets lots amongst the potatoes.
