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

Homemade birthday card

I've been getting into my papercrafts this year and have already made a few bits and bobs - for Valentine's Day I made a nice card with buttons and red ribbon, as well as the book I made for Tom (see my post on Valentine's ideas), and I've had a lot of fun getting creative.

I had a friend's birthday party yesterday so I'd decided I wanted to make her a card rather than buy one. Now before anyone gets the wrong idea, I'm not a compete stingy miser, I'm just trying to be a bit more careful with my money right now, and I personally think the greeting cards that you can buy in the shops are a complete rip off, and I don't know many people who actually keep them, so it's not very environmentally friendly either.

I'd had a couple of ideas in my head of what I wanted the card to look like roughly - quite simple but vintage colours and style as my friend is quite stylish and artistic (her and her partner run a photography business and she is also a trained make-up artist).

This is what the final product looked like and here's how I made it.

After having a quick look at some magazines for references, I decided to use up some of the book pages leftover from the book I made for Tom (there's a reason I can't throw anything away), to create a nice background on top of some nice black card, which I made by cutting strips of text out of a couple of pages, and then glueing them down with pritt stick. I didn't want them to look too straight and tidy, so I just used scissors rather than the stanley knife. When I stuck them down I didn't glue all the way to the edges as I wanted the edges to curl up slightly to give the  effect of being aged.

I then made some paper flowers to sit on top of the book page strips - I did this by cutting out a medium sized flower outline in some dusky pink paper, and then used that cut out as a template to cut one exactly the same in the same paper. I then used some patterned reddish paper and cut out individual petal shapes (with tabs on the bottom so I could stick them down) and glued them on top of the pink flower outlines with pritt stuck.

After that I sewed on a nice pearlized button in the centre of each flower. To get it right in the centre I placed the button on the reverse of the flower and pushed a pencil through the holes to mark where the needle needed to go through the paper.

I had some more patterned paper which I cut into strips to make the flower stems, and once I'd decided where I wanted to stick the flowers I stuck down the strips and glued the flowers on top. Once they were stuck on I used my fingernails to bend the petals into a more 3D shape.

To finish it all off, I just sewed a border around the front of the card with plain white thread (running stitch) which looked really nice against the black card. The whole things was a little rushed because I hadn't left myself much time and I needed to get on with baking for the birthday party, but I actually don't think it would have looked much better if I'd had the time to complicate it by adding in more elements - I think the vintage feel patterns and colours contrasted nicely with the simple black background and overall it had a nice collage effect.

Most importantly my friend really liked it so overall it was a success - I just wish I'd made two cos I want one now!!

Food & Drink update 13.05.12

I know I haven't updated this in a while but I have been doing a fair bit of cooking lately (not always things from my Cooking Challenge list).

Ones I have managed to tick off the list are (I'll update the totals on the Cooking Challenge post):

Jamie Oliver's Chicken Korma which I made completely from scratch including the curry paste - ended up being a bit hotter than a normal korma (had to add loads of yoghurt to cool it down) but still very tasty. I did serve it with plain rice and naan bread but I couldn't get a decent picture of it sorry.

I didn't make those biscuits!

Rhubarb fool from Annie Bell's Gorgeous Desserts book which I made for my friend Helena's birthday yesterday - didn't look much like the picture as the lovely homegrown rhubarb from my friend Amy was more green than pink, and I used Courvoisier rather than Cointreau in the cream, but it still tasted really nice! I did make some poppy seed biscuits to go with it, but didn't manage to get a decent pic last night so here's one I put together today (with yummy French gallettes, I can't claim to have made those!). I've got a load of the fool leftover in the fridge now, so I'll most likely have some for lunch!

I also made a paella with roasted veg a couple of weeks ago - based on a recipe from Ravinder Bhogal's book Cook in Boots which again wasn't on the list, but tasted delicious. Surprisingly easy, although makes a real mess of the wok, and it's just as nice reheated as lunch for work. I'll definitely be trying that one again!

To continue my efforts to actually use the meat in our freezer, I tried my hand at slow cooking with a recipe for breast of lamb with baked onion, which I was pretty pleased with. The lamb was really tender, and the onions were delicious. I probably should have served it with potatoes, but didn't have any in, so made a ratatouille and added some plain pasta to the side.

Ratatouille with melted cheese

The leftover onions and ratatouille I added to grilled bread with melted cheese on top and that was delicious (and frugal!).

Baked onions with melted gloucs cheese and chives

Butterflied Toffee Cupcakes

As well as the Rhubarb Fool, I also attempted Toffee Cupcakes for Helena's party (again not on my list), which ended up being delicious even though we had to digress from the recipe slightly when the toffee cream I'd slaved over curdled (damn it!) while we were whipping it. The toffee sauce was amazing though!
Really glad I've learned how to make toffee sauce now - it'll be a good one on ice cream in the summer! Yum!

I love how this simple card turned out

 As well as the baking I also decided to make a card for Helena's birthday since I'm trying to be good and get out of my overdraft by restricting my 'spending money' to just £10 a week. Given I didn't give myself enough time to properly plan anything, I'm super happy with how his turned out. I'll post separately about how I created it.




That's it for food updates for now - I'm making myself hungry thinking about it, so I better get something cooking!

Bye for now,
Lettie xx