Vongole
This is one of my favourite pasta dishes but oddly, we’ve never cooked it. I’ve been thinking a lot about quick dishes lately as we both often get home late and this seemed ideal; and ideal it was – quick and tasty which is exactly what we were trying to achieve.
Fry some garlic and chilli until the garlic starts to brown – we used one whole chilli and one large clove of garlic (next time we’ll use two cloves). Add the clams (400g) and a glass of white wine. Put a lid on the pan and cook until the clams open. Serve with spaghetti and some fresh parsley.
This is the first entry into our new category: Dinner Diary Express. I’ve slightly stolen the name from Nigella’s recent TV series but don’t worry, we won’t be buying jars of curry paste or canapes from the deli and passing them off as our own 🙂
Thai Steamed Seabass
While we were in China Town recently we picked up some fresh green peppercorns, Stephen bought some on a previous trip and used them to make steamed fish. We thought we’d do the same again last night as for some reason I didn’t eat the previous dish.
We used sea bass fillets and coated them in a marinade of soy sauce, oyster sauce, black pepper and garlic. The fish was placed in the steamer and topped with sliced onion, sliced spring-onions, julienned ginger and the fresh peppercorns. We then added some shredded cabbage on top and steamed the whole lot for about 20 minutes.
It worked very well, the flavours of the ginger and onions managed to penetrate both the fish and the cabbage on top. We steamed the noodles seperately as we didn’t have space for them in the steamer but the recipe said to add those on top of the cabbage. Perhaps we can do that next time.
Chicken Breasts stuffed with Haggis
We’ve been planning to cook this ever since Burns Night last year. Every Burns Night we become determined to eat more haggis and try to think of things to do with it instead of just having it plain. So the time finally came and we made it.
When shopping for chicken breasts, there was only one package of free range chicken breasts left in the shop and they were looking rather sad. So I bought a whole chicken and jointed it, which worked out rather well as I was able to get the breasts off in one piece with our shiny new filleting knife. I covered them with cling film and bashed them with a rolling pin to flatten them out.
We had cooked the haggis beforehand, then spooned some of the filling onto the flattened chicken breasts. We rolled them up and tied them up to keep them together. Quick browning in a frying pan and then into the oven for about 20 minutes. We were considering making whisky sauce to go with them, but ended up skipping that.
Served with crushed new potatoes, green beans and cabbage. The haggis worked well in the chicken; the gooey spiciness of the haggis going well with the chicken which was also well seasoned and slightly crisped on the outside.
Jambalaya and Wild Rice
Yesterday, Kerri suggested this Jambalaya recipe for dinner and when we read it we realised that we already had all the ingredients at home, either in the fridge and needing to be used up, or in the freezer and waiting to be useful. We skipped the prawns though, used some chorizo as our “Spicy Mediterranean Pork Sausages” and put some wild rice in with some plain brown rice.
The preparation and cooking times are both quite short and the longest part of it was waiting for the wild rice to cook. The result had promise, but not a great depth of flavour and some of the component parts hadn’t combined that well. We’ll definitely make it again, but we’ll look for a more traditional recipe with a longer cooking time rather than a quick-and-easy one.
Pancake
The obligatory pancake post! We didn’t do anything complicated having had quite an elaborate dinner, pancakes don’t lend themselves to healthy eating either unfortunately so we stuck to the traditional lemon and sugar. Stephen had cinnamon on his though, quite a lot as it turned out due to a mis-shake of the jar.
Had we been able to indulge our wildest pancake fantasies though I would have had Dulce Du Leche and ice-cream or Nutella and hazelnuts. I quite like maple syrup pancakes too so they may have featured and now that I think about it I quite like the idea of raspberries and hot chocolate sauce. Mmm, I didn’t think I really liked pancakes but clearly I do!
Harissa Lamb, Tabbouleh and Tzatziki
I’m not sure where the inspiration for this came from but last night’s Masterchef contestants worked in the kitchen of a Middle-Eastern restaurant so it may have been that.
I marinated the lamb pieces (from two leg steaks) in harissa for about an hour before assembling them on skewers and grilling them for about three minutes either side.
We served the lamb with tabbouleh and tzatziki which I forgot to take a picture of. The tzatziki was just Greek yogurt, lemon juice, garlic, grated cucumber and mint. The tabbouleh was just our usual recipe.
It was a good dish, the heat of the harissa was well balanced by the coolness of the tzatziki and the tabbouleh added another level of freshness. I think the lamb would work well barbecued so the outside could char slightly.
Thai Green Curry
We cooked green curry almost every week for a while, but haven’t done so for some time and decided to end the green curry drought today. We had bought the ingredients when we were in Chinatown on Saturday, so this evening when I got home from work I started preparing the paste.
I managed to resist the urge to start bashing things in the mortar and pestle immediately and took my time to measure and chop all the ingredients beforehand so that they would be ready to bash when their turn came. As a result, they were all laid out on a couple of plates, so I took a picture. Next time I’ll try to get some of those little glass bowls and bottom-heavy shot glasses that seem so popular for ingredients on shows such as Saturday Kitchen.
The ingredients are, sort of from left to right, front to back: lemongrass, galangal, lime zest, shallots, coriander root, garlic, cumin, coriander seed, black pepper, salt, green chilli. These were all bashed into a paste of course, and then we started cooking the curry. Traditionally, these curries don’t contain much in the way of vegetables; maybe some small aubergines if you’re feeling adventurous, but we always put in loads of vegetables. Today we had baby corn (a staple of ours), sliced red and yellow peppers and purple sprouting broccoli.
The result had a lovely deep flavour with just enough chilli kick without completely setting our mouths on fire. Needed a dash of salt, but that was minor. Served with jasmine rice.
Slow-Roasted Shoulder of Lamb
Yesterday, we had decided that today we should have some roast lamb. We were in the market for half a leg of lamb when we arrived at our local butcher yesterday, but we ended up taking half a shoulder instead because there was one on display and we couldn’t remember having cooked shoulder before.
So when we got home, we had a look for some recipes. Most of the recipes for shoulder of lamb required the shoulder to be boned and cut up: these weren’t the recipes that we were looking for. Eventually, we came across a Jamie recipe that involved roasting the lamb for four hours with garlic and rosemary and then making sauce out of the juices by adding stock, mint and capers. This sounded very good indeed, so this is what we did.
The recipe said to put the joint in a roasting dish and then cover it with foil. The sounded rather like a faux-rustic Jamieism, so instead we opted to cook it properly, in a casserole dish with a lid, which worked out rather well. The fattiness of the shoulder cut combined with the length of cooking time resulted in lamb that tasted a bit like lamb confit: rich and fully flavoured. Some of the lamb had gone crispy on the outside while the inside remained succulent, giving a lovely contrast.
We served this with lemony leeks, mashed swede, mashed potato and steamed cabbage. It all went together brilliantly; the minty-and-capery sauce was just the thing to accompany the succulent, rich lamb and went well with the vegetables too.
Five Things About Us
First off, let me talk about this picture. Having finished writing this post I realised that I didn’t have a picture to go with it and I’m not keen on posts without pictures, they look out-of-place compared to all the other posts and less interesting. I thought I’d have a hunt around for an interesting picture that we hadn’t used before and remembered that we took lots of photographs for our Christmas cards this year. As I was searching for those I came across this picture and I have absolutely no idea what it is. It’s dated 03.12.07 so I looked back at our post from that day to check but we didn’t publish this picture or make any reference to it. I can only imagine it was something that went wrong and we decided not to mention it (we don’t do that often as we’re keen on being warts-and-all) so I’m stumped. Answers on a postcard if you have any idea!
Ok, back to the matter in hand. We’ve been tagged three times for this meme by:
Su-Lin at Tamarind and Thyme
Donald at Mr Orph’s Kitchen
Pixie at You Say Tomahto, I Say Tomayto.
The rules are:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them)
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their Blogs
1. We chose our pseudonyms because in the same week we started Dinner Diary I realised one of my life’s ambitions: to own a Stephen flour shaker. Kerri makes up the other half of the very famous dancing couple and is also a commonly used spice. Genius!
2. Stephen holds the WSET Advanced Certificate in Wines and Spirits and is soon to embark on the diploma.
3. My earliest food memory is eating cold baked beans from a tin in the first house I ever lived in, I think I was two years old. Baked beans are probably my most hated food now and I can’t even be in the same room as someone who’s eating them.
4. Stephen is strongly considering entering Masterchef next year (I’m too scared).
5. We regularly dream of opening a pub/restaurant so that the many hours we spend thinking and talking about food can one day become our real jobs. In reality, we’re both worried about getting fat and drinking too much so will stick to our day jobs of marketing (me) and programming (Stephen).
I tag:
Claire at Claire’s Cake Bake
Jules at Domestic Goddess In Training
Penny at Penelope’s Pantry
Antonia at Food, Glorious Food
Niamh at Eat Like A Girl
Cheesecake
Two of my colleagues had birthdays this weekend which coincided nicely with my discovery of Pixie’s cheesecake recipe. As regular readers will know, baking isn’t really my forte but this year I’m determined to master at least one good dessert. We don’t have a food mixer but I checked with Pixie and she confirmed that this should be simple enough to do by hand. I gathered all my ingredients (after exhaustingly checking the quality of the ginger biscuits) and set to work. She was right, combining the sugar with the other ingredients was simple to do by hand and everything seemed to go well.
I mentioned to Stephen this morning that I’d planned on making this to take to work and he seemed disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to try it so I made a smaller version for us to eat after dinner. We haven’t tried it yet but boy was the filling good!
