Cooking Challenge update 10.06.12

Hi there,
hope everyone's having an enjoyable Sunday. Once again I've been a bit lax updating my blog so apologies. I have been ticking a few recipes off my list though as well as learning some new recipes that weren't originally included on my 'to cook' list...

Inspired by Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day on 19th May I cooked a couple of meals from his Ministry of Food cookbook, including this chicken and leek stroganoff which is just delicious. I also made my very first mince beef and onion pie (in fact my very first savory pie full stop) which also turned out very nicely.

Mmmm, pie and chips...

Apart from those digressions from the cooking challenge list I have also managed to cross off a few more recipes from the list:

In complete disregard for the hot weather I decided to have a go at the beef and ale stew recipe in Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food book, accompanied by dumplings and creamy baked leeks - I actually made this over two days as the stew was going to take a long time to cook - and since it was actually really, really warm the day I had planned on cooking the stew we decided to have an impromptu bbq with some friends instead and delay the stew until the following day.  It was worth the wait though!

I had fun learning how to make dumplings though (I'd only ever made them once before, many years ago when I was living in Germany so I doubt the recipe would have been the same anyway).

What else...? Oh I also made some brown bread ice cream for my best friend Amy's birthday - now don't pull any faces, it's a genuine dessert made from toasted breadcrumbs and muscovado sugar with is mixed in with whipped cream and egg whites to make the ice cream, and I used to have it probably every month with dinners at uni so I've been desperate to lean how to make it to have a little reminder of my years at Trinity College.

Now that pretty much all my friends from college have now moved on to new pastures there's hardly anyone I could visit nowadays, so opportunities for sampling that delicious creamy sweet ice cream again are diminishing rapidly, which makes me very, very sad... So you can imagine how happy I was to find a recipe for it! When I decided to start the cooking challenge that was one of the first ones on the list I can tell you!

And recently Amy and I made Parmesan Chicken with Proscuitto while the men went out to the climbing wall in town - I think the original plan was to prep the food (which involved a lot of 'breast bashing' - chicken breast that is - great if you've had a frustrating day at work!) and get on the Wii Fit / Just Dance to get a bit of exercise in ourselves, but unsurprisingly a couple of cups of tea led to a long girly chat, which just about left us enough time to get the food cooked by the time the boys got home.

I should have taken more photos of the cooking process as it was a lot of fun, and I'm afraid the photos I do have aren't great as I decided to cut the cooked chicken into strips just to make extra sure that it was cooked all the way through. It was absolutely mouth-wateringly delicious though, so next time I have a few extra pennies to spend on the food shop I shall definitely get some prosciutto to make this again.

So that's it in terms of the cooking update. I'm hoping to make a Thai green chicken curry this coming week (I already have the spring onion, mangetout and asparagus in the fridge so I don't want to waste them!), and since it's Tom's birthday and Father's Day next Sunday then I'm anticipating making a couple of the sweets from the list for the two main men in my life, although I haven't yet made up my mind which ones (desserts, not men!). Perhaps the Tiramisu, or maybe the apple pie... who knows!

Bye for now!
xx