A freezing cold day on which we both went back to work called for a good home cooked meal this evening, and I think that's exactly what we had. Once again I called upon one of my favourite, every day, cook books; 101 Cheap Eats. This book, and its partner 101 Simple Suppers, is a key part of after work cooking in our house. Both provide some fantastic simple and tasty recipes that are generally easy enough to do after a day at work and provide us with a good hearty meal.Tonight's dinner was bacon and tomato cobbler. Incredibly simple, especially using my Kenwood to make ... read more
Finding fenugreek
Mr C and I decided to do another dish from the M&S curry bible that I bought him for Christmas this weekend after the success of the butter chicken. He chose the lamb with cinnamon-scented fenugreek sauce. This just left us with one, rather major question: what is fenugreek and where can you buy it in St Albans.Wikipedia's fenugreek entry helped us to answer the first question. It seems that you can get either fenugreek leaves, which are used as a herb, or fenugreek seeds, which are a spice. For something that I'd never heard of before it seems to have a huge ... read more
Yummy food
It's been a few days of fantastic food here.Firstly, we've been enjoying the contents of the food platter that my sister and her boyfriend gave us for Christmas. The chocolate truffles are particularly good (if you're reading please send me the recipe H!) and the chutney went perfectly with some ham for lunch on Sunday. I then got my hands very messy helping Mr C to make the tandoori chicken part of a butter chicken recipe that was in a book I gave him for Christmas. I have to say that it was one of the most delicious curries I've ever eaten and tasted amazingly fresh, with a ... read more
Toad in the Hole
I had a strange craving at lunchtime today for Toad in the Hole - so that's what I had to make us for dinner tonight. Shockingly, it something I've not made before and I was there looking through all my cook books for a recipe. Even more embarrassing is that I couldn't find one in any of my books!The Internet saved the day and I found this Delia recipe for Toad in the Hole with Roasted Onion Gravy. (Slight error in the recipe though as it tells you that the gravy part includes one teaspoon of golden caster sugar, yet following the instructions you don't ... read more
Delia’s Frugal Food
At a time when the Credit Crunch is making quite a few of us tighten our belts and the press are full of the doom and gloom of the UK heading towards another recession, many people are looking back to how we coped in the past - both during the days of rationing and also how we coped through past recessions.I see that Delia Smith is no different, and according to this article she's even being green in recycling one of her oldest published cook books; Delia's Frugal Food. Now I have to admit that I haven't seen a copy of this yet, it hasn't even been published as a ... read more
Potato and Cauliflower Dauphinois
Reading this post over on Cornflower's blog all about cauliflower cheese made me realise just how much I enjoy cauliflower and reminded me of one particular recipe that I just had to do over the weekend as a bit of autumn comfort food.Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie features a fantastic recipe for potato and cauliflower dauphinois which we have recreated many times as an accompaniment to a variety of meat dishes and stews. It's quite simply delicious and something a bit different from "straight" cauliflower cheese (no doubt helped by the huge ... read more
Red, red wine
I can't disguise the fact that I am rather partial to a nice glass of wine, especially when curled up with a good book or my knitting. I've done an evening long introduction to wine tasting course at my local independent wine shop which certainly taught me a lot, but I'm still much more of a James May than an Oz Clarke when it comes to knowing about wine. I generally buy things that are on some sort of a special offer in the supermarket and go back to the ones that I discover that I really like.One that I found recently in the Waitrose new world wines offer ... read more
Let’s grow!
I don't normally get drawn in by the various TV adverts that we are bombarded by during most TV programmes, but tonight I did see one that made me go to the internet to look up more.I'm very keen that we teach children more about healthy eating and where food comes from and hence I really like the sound of Morrisons' Let's Grow campaign. It works in a very similar way to the way the other big supermarket chains have their vouchers for schools campaign, but in this one schools can exchange the vouchers they are given for gardening equipment that the children can ... read more
Lots and lots of garlic
I went along to the St Albans' Farmers' Market a couple of weeks ago for my usual Sunday morning amble around looking at all the wonderful food produce available and choosing a few items to take home and use in that week's meals. When I was there last the semi-regular Continental Market was also still on with their stalls at the end of where the regular Farmers' Market ones are.I'm not such a big fan of the continental market, mainly due to some rubbish cheese that I've had from one stall in the past, but this time one particular stall really caught ... read more
Parmesan Bread
I've not been that adventurous yet in my bread making, but I've certainly always wanted to be more so, especially after the tomato bread that I got to eat at a friend's house and so I got out one of my bread making books with the aim of making some sun-dried tomato bread.The lack of sun-dried tomatoes in the store cupboard meant that my plans had to be modified someone and instead I ended up making parmesan bread. I started off with the sun-dried tomato bread recipe from Jennie Shapter's Bread Machine book and followed the instructions for the medium ... read more