Irish blog awards - tomorrow!!!!!

Tomorrow night is the night all the winners will be revealed for the Irish blog awards 2007. Rob and I will be there, and I'm so excited, I've no idea what to expect but I'm really looking forward to meeting some fellow bloggers. I'm not expecting to win or anything but how cool to be going to an actual award ceremony!

Daring Baker 1 - French Bread

This was my first month being part of the "Daring Bakers": a group of people who bake the same recipe and if they blog post it on the same day together. I've been very impressed by past recipes from the Daring Bakers and was in awe of their talents. Well I decided maybe I should give it a go and try learning something new and a little out of my comfort zone, so I signed myself up.

When I heard that it was to be French Bread, I felt relieved thinking bread can't be too complicated can it? As soon as I looked at all 17 pages of the recipe I felt nauseous. I read the equipment list and almost cried cos I had very little of it, ingredients were fine though, nothing too complicated there. I asked around people at church for equipment to borrow and gave up on finding things like canvas pastry cloths, thermometers, and cardboard/plywood, so I decided to be creative and use things from around the house like stiff teatowels with books, candles and rolling pins as supports.

Anyways I'm so glad I tried making this in the end because it wasn't as complicated as I first thought, but takes a fair chunk of time to make. they turned out fantastically well and the smell in my kitchen after it all was incredible! If you ever get the chance have a go at making this.

Daring Bakers - Julia Child's French Bread

Makes 3 - baguettes (24” x 2”) or batards (16” x 3”)
or 6 – short loaves, ficelles, 12 – 16” x 2”
or 3 – round loaves, boules, 7 – 8” in diameter
or
 12 – round or oval rolls, petits pains
or 
1 – large round or oval loaf, pain de menage or miche; pain boulot



Ingredients
1 cake (0.6 ounce) (20grams) fresh yeast or 1 package dry active yeast
1/3 cup (75ml) warm water, not over 100 degrees F/38C in a glass measure
3 1/2 cup (about 1 lb) (490 gr) all purpose flour, measured by scooping
dry measure cups into flour and sweeping off excess
2 1/4 tsp (12 gr) salt
1 1/4 cups (280 - 300ml) tepid water @ 70 – 74 degrees/21 - 23C

Recipe
The full 16 page recipe can be found here. This is a very very VERY abbreviated version.

1. Make the dough
2. Knead the dough
3. Leave to rise for 3-5 hours
4. Deflate and leave to rise for 1.5 - 2 hours
5. Split the dough into the amount of loaves you are making and rest for 5 minutes
6. Shape the dough
7. Leave to rise for 1.5 - 2.5 hours
8. Move the dough onto a baking sheet and cut slashes in the top of the bread
9. Bake for 25 mins at 450˚F/230˚C
10. Leave to cool 2-3 hours



This recipe took me 10 hours (not counting cooling time - I went to bed soon after I finished), but it was well worth it.

Thank you to Breadchick Mary at The Sour Dough and Sara from I Like to Cook for this month's challenge!

Have a look at the results of everyone else's bread at The Daring Baker's Blogroll

I'm excited to see the next challenge now.

Monthly Mingle - Chicken Paella

I’ve been wanting to try cooking paella for ages, but thought it best to make a chicken paella seeing as Rob doesn’t like fish and I’m not that keen on shellfish too. When Meeta announced that the Monthly Mingle for this month was “One Dish Dinners” I knew instantly what I would do.

What amazed me about this dish was that Rob was really keen to try this! I was originally planning to do it just for me some night but when I'd told him what I was planning he said he'd love to try it, and getting Rob to try anything is impossible so I took the opportunity to broaden his tastes. His opinion of the paella:"it was nice, but needs a better ratio of chicken to rice and less onions and tomatoes". This doesn't surprise me much seeing as he hates veg and loves a ratio of 1:1 between his meat and rice/potato. So I'll have to give this another go with a few edits. I thought this was lovely and can't wait until I have this next.

I can't remember where I got this recipe from, because I'd saved it as a word file. But I made a few edits to make it my own.


Chicken Paella

Serves 2-3

Ingredients
1 tbsp olive oil
2 slices of bacon, cut into strips
250g chicken breast or thigh, cut into 1” cubes
1 small onion, cut into wedges
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
1 cup of paella or short grain rice
½ cup of white wine
¼ tsp of chili powder or a few drops of Tabasco sauce to taste
1 tsp of smoked paprika plus extra to garnish
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
1 ½ cup of chicken stock with ¼ tsp of saffron threads added
¼ cup of green peas
1” chorizo sausage, finely sliced , then cut into strips
2 tomatoes, chopped roughly
fresh chopped parsley

Recipe
1. Heat a large frypan, wok or traditional paellera pan. Add half the oil and bacon, fry until golden. Remove from the pan and set aside.
2. In the same pan add the chicken cubes and sauté stirring frequently until they're cooked through and golden. Remove from the pan and set aside.
3. Add the rest of the oil to the pan and sauté the onion until transparent without browning.
4. Add the crushed garlic and rice, and stir to coat with oil.
5. Add the white wine, chili/tabasco, paprika, bay leaf, salt and pepper.
6. Add one ladle of the stock and saffron mix. Continue ladling in the stock one ladle at a time, stirring and simmering until all the liquid is absorbed and the rice is tender. This will take 15 - 20 minutes.

7. Add the peas and chopped tomatoes to gently cook through.

8. Add back the cooked bacon and chicken pieces, stirring through to heat.
9. Add the sliced Chorizo, continue to heat through.

10 . Serve sprinkled with freshly chopped parsley and a little dusting of more smoked paprika, if desired.

My wee Mummy's Scones

A couple of months ago my Mum gave me a book which she had started writing when she had just got married. She wrote lots of recipes in this book, including wheaten bread, Victoria sandwich, pavlova, lemon meringue, choux pastry and much much more. I can't remember ever seeing this book before but I guess she was using it when she was baking with my sister and I when we were little.

i have recently been thinking about my final year at school and the fun times we had in the "Sixth Form Centre". There was a great coffee bar where a lady just showed how much she cared about us all by making fresh scones every morning. I remember racing to the coffee bar straight after assembly when they were just fresh out of the oven. I decided today I wanted a scone after all the reminiscing and thought it would be fun to use my Mum's own recipe.

I divided the dough up and made a little mixture of plain scones, fruit scones and cherry scones. They were fantastic! I had only planned on having one but they were so good I went ahead and had 4!!!! I'll need to walk that off tomorrow.


My wee Mummy's scones

Makes 12 scones

Ingredients
8oz self raising flour
1 oz caster sugar
Pinch of salt
1 oz margarine
1/4 pint milk

Recipe
1. Mix the flour, sugar and salt then rub in the margarine.
2. Mix in the milk to form a dough.
3. Mix in any other ingredients you would like e.g. glacé cherries, raisins, etc
4. Roll out to about 1/4-1/2" thick and cut out scones using a medium cookie cutter.
5. Place on a baking tray and bake in the oven for 10 minutes at 220˚C/425˚F.



Flavour options
Cheese - omit sugar and add 2oz grated cheese
Fruit - add 2oz dried fruit (sultanas, raisins etc)
Cherry - add 1 oz chopped glacé cherries
Wheaten - substitute half the flour with wheaten/wholemeal flour
Treacle - add 1 tbsp treacle mixed with milk
Spice - add 1 tsp mixed spice to the flour and use 1oz soft brown sugar instead of caster sugar
Date - add 1oz chopped dates (especially nice with wheaten scones)

Cook yourself thin brownies

Elly at Elly says opa! has set up a new blog event called "Eat to the Beat" where you create a meal or drink that relates to a song, album, band etc. I got thinking and initially drew a blank, creativity went on holiday for a little while, so I spent some time looking through my itunes music trying to be inspired and nothing really clicked, until i was listening to the radio a few days ago. Leona Lewis was doing a cover of Snow Patrol's song "Run", which in turn made me think of another track of theirs called Chocolate! It all sounded perfect, basing my dish on a song called chocolate by a band from my own country! I had little novel ideas of a chocolate and ice cream dish to combine the idea of the song title and the cold snow idea from the band name. However I was reminded ofan episode of Cook yourself thin that I had seen ages ago where they had made some really yummy looking chocolate brownies, so I decided to give it a go. And topped it off with a litt

The original recipe called for pumpkin, however the only time of year that you would get some here is Halloween, seeing as it's now February I'd be waiting a while to try these so I substituted with 1/2 swede and 1/2 carrot mix of same weight.


Cook Yourself Thin Chocolate Brownies

Makes 9 brownies

Ingredients
100g raw, prepared swede, peeled and cut into smallish chunks
100g raw, prepared carrot, peeled and cut into smallish chunks
75g organic dark cooking chocolate (at least 70 per cent cocoa)
1/2 heaped tsp cinnamon
100g ground almonds
25g organic cocoa powder
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
4 tbsp clear runny honey (equals roughly 160g)
1.5 tbsp medium maple syrup (equals roughly 50g)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 medium organic free range eggs

Recipe
1. Preheat oven to 160˚C. Grease tin (About 7"x7") lightly with vegetable oil.
2. Place the carrot and swede in a microwavable bowl with a small pool of water. Cover with cling film and heat in the microwave for 8 minutes on medium high.
3. Remove from the microwave, drain the liquid and re-cling before microwaving again for 3 minutes on high.
4. Mix your cinnamon, ground almonds, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt.
5. Bash up the chocolate inside its packet so that it is left in biggish chunks.
6. In another bowl, whisk up the eggs, honey, maple syrup and vanilla extract until pale and full of surface bubbles.
7. When the pumpkin is out of the microwave, drain all the water again and whisk until the chunks have turned to a puree. Add the broken chocolate and leave to melt.
8. Once mostly melted, add the egg mixture to the pumpkin and chocolate and beat until fully mixed before adding the almond and cocoa powder mixture. Mix thoroughly.
9. Pour into the prepared tin and place in the middle of the oven for 35 mins exactly. Allow to cool in the tin before serving.

Royal Foodie Joust 1

I've been meaning to take part in the Royal Foodie Joust hosted by The Leftover Queen and finally got around to it!

This month the challenge was to create a dish that included pork, any citrus fruit and pink or white peppercorns. So here's what I came up with:

Pork and Mandarin salad

Serves 1

Ingredients
1 pork chop
Salt
White peppercorn (ground)
Oil
150g tin of mandarin oranges
2 tbsp syrup from mandarin oranges
2 tbsp honey
1 tsp cider vinegar
Handful of spinach, a handful of watercress and a handful of rocket (about 100g in total)
Toasted almond flakes

Recipe
1. Cut the pork into strips, lightly salt and pepper, then fry in an oiled pan for 6-7 minutes until cooked through.
2. Mix the syrup, honey and cider vinegar and heat gently in a pan for 4 minutes.
3. Place the leaves in your dish, top with mandarin segments and pork. Dress with the syrup mix and top with the almond flakes.

Chicken Tempura

I had bought a jar of plum sauce at the oriental supermarket a couple of weeks ago and have been trying to work out what i wanted to do with it. I decided to make a little chicken tempura and use it as a dipping sauce. I love the tempura and doing it got me over my fear of deep fat frying, unfortunately the sauce was extremely sweet but also very vinegary so I ended up getting my sweet chilli dipping sauce out. As well as that this didn't pass the husband test so this will be a dish for when I'm on my own sometime.

Again I researched a few recipes for the tempura batter, most of which were exactly the same, and also researched a few recipes for cooking chicken tempura specifically. I ended up doing the following:

Chicken Tempura

Serves 2

Ingredients
2 chicken breasts, diced
Salt pepper
1 egg, beaten
1 cup of COLD water
1 cup flour
Oil

Recipe
1. Boil the chicken pieces for 5 minutes. Drain thoroughly and season with salt and pepper.
2. Heat oil (about 1.5-2" in depth) in a wok or deep pan.
3. Mix the beaten egg and cold water together. Stir in the flour gently, removing any lumps.
4. Dip each piece of chicken in the batter and cook in the oil for 4-5 minutes until crispy.

Steamed Pak Choi

I've met up with my uncle in London twice in the past couple of years and each time we meet we eat in a fancy chinese restaurant and each time we've ordered a side of pak choi. I had never had pak choi before but loved it instantly. It's been playing on my mind recently and when I saw some in Tesco I had to buy some. Straight after that I had to research pak choi and felt very educated after reading this. Then found a recipe to follow here. I had 200g pak choi whereas the recipe is for 750g, but I didn't reduce the amount of the other ingredients and also used an electric steamer for 5 minutes. Tasty and nutritious! i really have to cook pak choi more often.

Irish apple cake

I bought some cooking apples recently with the idea of making an apple crumble, but then decided to try something different and make a cake instead.

I've researched a whole load of recipes and used different elements to come up with this one:

Irish Apple Cake

Makes 8 servings

Ingredients
220g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
100g cold butter
100g sugar
1 egg
100ml milk
1 cooking apple peeled, cored and diced into 1/2 inch chunks
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sugar

Recipe
1. Mix the flour and baking powder. Add the butter and rub together with your fingers until it looks like bread crumbs.
2. Mix in the 100g of sugar, the egg and the milk.
3. Spread half the mixture into a 7" cake tin that has been lightly greased.
4. Spread the apple chunks on top, then sprinkle on 1 tsp cinnamon and 1 tsp sugar.
5. Spread the rest of the cake mix on top then sprinkle 1 tsp of sugar on top.
6. Bake at 180˚C for 30 mins when the top should be golden.

This was very tasty and passed the husband test. Next time I make this I may throw in a few raisins for a bit of difference. But is tasty warm with some ice cream.

I'm also entering this in the Master Baker blog event seeing as this month's ingredient is cinnamon and there's a lovely bit of cinnamon in this cake.

I've been tagged.

I've been tagged for a "meme" by the loverly Goddess herself, Maria. So here goes:

What were you doing 10 years ago?
I was in 4th year at school, wondering why boys didn't like me.... hormones eh?

What were you doing 1 year ago?
This time last year I was single and about to be married 6 weeks later, so I was sending out invites and making table plans and sorting flowers and other weddingy things.

Five snacks you enjoy:at the minute my favourites are
1) Fruit
2) Biscuits
3) Buttered toast
4) Cheese on toast
5) Chocolate

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:
1) Pay off the mortgage.
2) Put some money aside for a little dream of ours - don't want to share the details yet.
3) Buy a new car for me and keep money aside for petrol, tax, insurance etc
4) Buy a new car for Rob and keep money aside for petrol, tax, insurance etc
5) Go on a real nice holiday and re do our honeymoon

Five bad habits:
1) I'm so disorganised and messy - something I really need to work on if I want to stay happily married.
2) I'm so bad at being on time, as much as I try to plan being on time, it never seems to work.
3) I'm real lazy about doing my hair - I usually end up just tying it back instead of styling it.
4) Like Maria, I'm an impulsive shopper too - especially when I'm food shopping, despite making lists of what we need I'll always end up seeing other little things to buy and try.
5) I get a bit of road rage but I'm working on it.

Five things you like doing:
1) Shopping
2) Cooking and Baking
3) Dancing and singing - mostly on my own, but Rob is one of the privileged few who would get to see me dancing like a fool
4) Going on long walks with Rob and Stewie on dry, sunny days.
5) Catching up with friends and hearing what they've been up to.

Five things you would never wear again:
1) Shell suits - It's just not a good look
2) My old McDonalds uniform - wash as much as you like, the grease just isn't coming out!
3) Adidas trousers with "poppers" up the side so they split right up to your hip. It's not a good look and it's just not practical, especially when you have mates who have a right laugh unpopping them all in 0.5seconds.
4) A leotard - for a start there's no way I'll ever be able to do gymnastics again!
5) My wedding dress :-( well maybe I'll wear it for fun someday, but you'll never know!

Five favorite toys:
1) My iBook
2) My iPhone
3) My car - does that count?
4) My Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker
5) Does a toastie machine count?

Well there ya go.
I'm supposed to tag 5 people to do this, but instead I'll leave it open for anyone to do if you want to. If you do, leave a comment here for me to check it out

An excellent award

Dear sweet lovely Rosie from rosie Bakes a Peace of Cake has given me a wee award! The "Excellent Award": I feel so privileged and humbled.

So the five people I'm awarding this to are:
Dell from Cooking and the City who has been blogging what she's been cooking for just three months but already has loads of great recipes posted! I always feel inspired when I read her recipes and always look forward to reading her next post.

Jeena at Jeena's kitchen who works very hard at her blog. She has some truly incredible recipes which I've tried before and loved. A lot of work goes in to this blog as she has photos for each stage of the recipes she blogs about. And they're all her own recipes! If that's not excellent I don't know what is!

Maryann in Finding La Dolce Vita is an incredible food blog and not only teaches great Italian recipes, it also teaches a lot about Italian culture and traditions. I love this blog and just wish my hubby liked Italian food more so I could make some of these!

Kate at Paved with Good Intentions writes a fascinating blog, not only about cooking but the events that happen around cooking and more. I love this girl! She has some fantastic recipes here that leave me feeling hungry just looking at the photos.

Elly in Elly says Opa! is yet another fantastic cook with more photos that leave me drooling. She's such an inspiration and does really incredible things with food.

Phew!

Last week was hectic and left me cooking regular dishes or just grilling some tasty burgers from the butcher, so i've lost track of my actual cooking and tonight was a little attempt at gettin back into the swing of cooking from scratch. Well I went back to Balsamic chicken and after I had followed that process places the chicken in an oven dish, used about 1 cup of BBQ sauce (1/3 cup bbq glaze, 1/3 cup honey, 1/3 cup ketchup) and poured it over the chicken. I then left it in the oven for about 10-15 minutes at 180˚C. Tasty, simple (again) and I'm ready for a new challenge tomorrow!

"Indian style" Cottage Pie

People often think our routine is rather odd, and it is because our work hours are odd. I mean I work a lot of random hours, mostly afternoons, evenings and weekends, and Rob works til 9 every week night. The result of this is that we don't usually sit down to eat dinner until about 10pm.

However, Tuesday nights are the most awkward night of the week for getting dinner sorted recently seeing as I've been at the local radio station - Shine FM - until 10pm then I'm running some of the teenagers home after that so I'm not home until 10.30/11pm really. Starting to cook at this time of night is just not good, so I've been trying to make things that morning or afternoon that Rob can heat up for us to eat by the time I get home. We had cottage pie a couple of weeks ago, and last week I left out some bolognese to defrost which just needed heating. This week I went back to the cottage pie but decided to give it an Indian twist seeing as we love Indian food. It turned out real nice, and I loved that this was a dish we had recently only very different too.

I had taken photos of this but this has really not been my week: not only could I not use my computer for a few days, my iphone also decided to quit on me needing to be restarted thus loosing my photos.... grrrrrr. So you'll have to take my word for it on how yummy this looks too.

"Indian Style" cottage pie

Serves 2-3

Ingredients
6 or 7 medium sized potatoes, peeled
1/2 cup milk
1 tbsp butter

Oil
1 small onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 inch fresh ginger, peeled and grated
500g minced beef
1 medium-hot red chili, deseeded and finely sliced
1 tsp tumeric
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp tomato puree
200ml chopped tomatoes/passata
Handful of fresh coriander leaves.

Recipe
1. Boil the potatoes for 20-25 minutes. In the meantime prepare the mince:
2. Heat a little oil in a pot. Add the onion, garlic and ginger and fry over a medium heat for 2-3 minutes.
3. Add the mince, chilli, tumeric, coriander and cumin. Stir occasionally and cook until the meat is browned.
4. Stir in the tomato puree, chopped tomatoes/passata and coriander leaves and cook for 3-4 minutes.
5. Pour the mince into an oven dish and set to the side.
6. Drain the potatoes and mash. Stir in the butter and milk to make them creamy, then spread over the mince in the oven dish.
7. Heat the oven to 180˚C and bake the pie in the oven for 25-30 mins until golden brown on top.


Also the lovely Rosie gave me a Red Rose today for Valentines

Thank Rosie!

Irish Blog Awards - yeo!

The short lists have been announced for the Irish Blog Awards and I've made it through to the food and drink shortlist! How cool eh?!?!?! I can't believe it! It's given me a big smile for the day.

Congrats to all the other shortlisters! Hopefully I'll be meeting you at the awards in Dublin.

I've also got the use of my computer back so I'll be adding the pics for my Valentine's "ice cream cake" later today or early tomorrow. As well as that adding the recipe I made last night for dinner: Indian Style Cottage Pie. yummmmmmmm

Addition: The shortlist is comprised of 11, whittled down from the 15 on the longlist:

Little bird eats…

Eat Drink Live

iFoods Blog

English Mum in Ireland

The Humble Housewife

Italian Foodies

Sour Grapes

Just add eggs

Well done fillet

Val’s Kitchen

Martin Dwyer

Valentine's prep

Rob and I have never celebrated Valentines: we just don't see the need and just think its a commercial thing. Well I decided that i really wanted to take the opportunity this year to wind up Rob and have fun making something new. I'm not too worried about posting it here seeing as our power cable for our macs died leaving us without use of our computers. As well as that Rob doesn't read this blog anyway.

I had spotted a pair of heart shaped food rings when I was getting our groceries and couldn't resist buying them. As I was getting the rest of my shopping I was planning what I was going to do with them. And here it is:

Heart shaped Cheese Ice-cream cake

Ingredients
2oz crushed digestives (or Graham crackers)
1oz butter
1 litre vanilla ice cream
3 small merigue nests, crushed
5 crunchie bars, crushed (Cadbury)

Recipe
1. Melt the butter in a small pot then mix in the biscuits.
2. Heat the oven to 145 degrees C. Set the rings in a baking tray and press the biscuit/butter mix into the rings. Bake for 10 minutes then leave to cool.
3. Defrost the ice cream a little.
4. Mix the crushed merigue and almost all of the crushed crunchie into the ice cream.
5. Top off the heart rings with the ice cream mix then keep in the freezer to set then remove from freezer 15 minutes before serving. Remove rings and top with leftover crunchie to serve.

I can't wait to eat this now! I'll add the final picture of it being served on the 14th.

I've submitted this in the Heart for your Valentine event seeing as it's an edible heart. You can see all the other edible hearts here.

Spaghetti Bolognese

In the past I've been so lazy when it comes to bolognese and just used a jar (except this time) despite knowing how to make it. Well I finally decided to take the time and make it from scratch, despite it being a busy night for me.

Anyways, it's such a basic thing really but I may as well share how I made it:

Bolognese

Serves 3-4

Ingredients
Olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 slices of back bacon, cut into strips
400g mince (usually I use beef, but decided to use turkey this time)
500ml passata
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp basil
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
2 bay leaves
1/2 cup of red wine
Parmesan
1 tsp freshly chopped basil
Salt and pepper

Recipe
1. Heat the oil in a pot on a medium heat then add the onion and garlic. Cook gently for 2-3 minutes.
2. Add the back bacon and cook for a couple of minutes.
3. Add in the mince and cook for 5-6 minutes, stirring.
4. Stir in the passata, tomato puree, basil, oregano, worcestershire sauce, bay leaves and red wine. Allow to simmer for 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
5. Remove the bay leaves and serve with pasta (or if you're anything like my husband, mashed potato!) and ciabatta and top with the parmesan and basil.

I love a bit of veg in my bolognese, however carnivore hubby doesn't so I stir fried some mushroom and red pepper and added it to mine.
1.

Change of look

I've just been changing some of the colours of this blog. I decided the blue and grey was a little dull and seeing as the days are getting brighter for longer, I may as well reflect that on the blog and anticipate lovely summery food!

Let me know what you think!

Coconut and chili pan fried haddock

I've never really had a lot of fish in my diet, when I was young fish fingers was all the fish I had and even then it wasn't that often. The past few months I've felt more conscious about the lack of fish in my diet, so I recently bought and froze a portion of haddock waiting for another night when I'd be dining solo. Tonight was the night, so I researched a few recipes for white fish and found what sounded delicious and very simple in a book my sister had bought me for Christmas, Anjum Anand's Indian Food Made Easy.

The original recipe has 8 fenugreek seeds in the marinade but I don't have any and left them out. The original recipe also uses halibut but I used my haddock.

It was incredibly simple! And fantastically delicious! A great way to kick off on getting more fish into my diet.

Coconut and chili pan fried haddock

Serves 1

Ingredients
1 Haddock steak (or any other firm white fish), skinned
1 tbsp dessicated coconut
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Marinade
1/2 a large red chili, deseeded and finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped or grated
1/2 inch of ginger root, peeled and grated
1 tsp white wine vinegar (I substituted rice wine vinegar)
1 tsp ground coriander
salt to taste
1/4 tsp ground pepper
1 tsp vegetable oil

Recipe
1. Mix the marinade ingredients well, and pour over the fish. Leave to marinate for 30 minutes.
2. Mix the flour and coconut. Coat the fish in the mixture.
3. Heat the oil in the pan to a low medium heat and place the fish in the pan.
4. Cook on 1 side for 4 minutes, turn and cook a further 3-4 minutes.

The recipe book suggests serving with a warm salad, I decided I wanted chips instead!

PS sorry about the slightly blurred photo. I promise looked amazing and tasted better.

Pancake Tuesday

It's Pancake Tuesday today! We've already had our pancakes for breakfast this morning but if you're looking for a recipe for later today you could try some French Crepes or good ol' chunky American pancakes!

Enjoy. We certainly did!

Malteser buns!!!!

This is my 100th post on Ruth's Kitchen Experiments!!!!! And what better way to celebrate than with Malteser buns?!?!?!?!

I love getting these from coffee shops, they're just incredible! And bound to be jam packed with calories, but hey you have to indulge every now and again right?

There's no real baking involved making them extremely simple and filled with chocolately flavour


Malteser buns

Makes 16 "buns"

Ingredients
75g butter
2 tbsp golden syrup
2 tbsp cocoa powder
175g Rich tea biscuits
175g Maltesers
200g milk chocolate
200g white chocolate

Recipe
1. Place the biscuits into a ziplock bag and crush into crumbs using a rolling pin ( a great way to vent any stress!)
2. Melt the butter and golden syrup together, stir in the cocoa.
3. Stir in the crushed biscuits.
4. Melt the milk chocolate and stir into the mixture
5. Crush half the maltesers then add to mixture.
6. Spread the mixture on a baking tray pressing it down to compact.
7. Spread the remaining whole maltesers on top and press them into the mixture slightly.
8. Melt the white chocolate. Pour over the top of the biscuits and spread.
9. Allow to set in the fridge for 2-3 hours, then remove and cut into 16

Chocolatey chocolateness! No better way to celebrate 100 posts :o)


EDIT: See here for a new and improved version

French crepes

After our Pancakes a couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted some crepes, so for breakfast (well lunch by the time we both got up today!) I made some crepes. Rob hadn't really had crepes before and wasn't all that impressed, however I thought they were delicious! I had mine with sliced strawberries and nutella. And now quite fancy making some for something savoury later.

The first one or two didn't turn out too well in shape as I hadn't got the technique right for flipping the thin crepe, but they still tasted great.


But I soon got the hang of it and was making great crepes.


French Crepes

Makes 8-10 crepes

Ingredients
1 cup plain flour
1 tsp white sugar
1/4 tsp salt
3 eggs
2 cups milk
2 tbsp butter, melted

Recipe
1. Sift together the flour, sugar and salt, mix and set to the side.
2. In a large bowl, beat the eggs and milk together with an electric mixer.
3. Beat in the flour mixture until smooth.
4. Stir in the melted butter.
5. Heat a frying pan over medium high heat and spray on a little cooking spray.
6. Pour a ladle of the batter into the pan, tip and rotate the pan to spread the batter as thinly as possible.
7. Cook for 1 minute and flip. Cook for one minute then remove from the pan. Keep it warm until you have cooked all your crepes (remember to add a little cooking spray for each crepe).

It should take about 15-20 minutes to prepare and cook your whole batch.