I turned the too-soft butter beans from the other night’s dinner into this impromptu dip. You could easily make it with a tin of butter beans instead. Definitely one to make again – it will be a nice change from the girls’ regular lunch of hummus-olive-pitta sandwiches. Continue reading
I consider this steak salad to be the summer version of a roast beef dinner – grilled meat, roast potatoes, steamed green beans, and a horseradish-based dressing to dollop on top. I often make it with boiled potatoes, but as our stove top was condemned(!) by the gas man a few days ago, that wasn’t an option.
I serve the tomatoes, beans and onions in a large bowl; the meat and potatoes in another; and the dressing on the side. This works visually and also prevents the warm ingredients from making the fresh vegetables limp. It also cuts down on complaints from the girls, who are still “learning to like” horseradish – which is what I always say about those foods they currently shun. Continue reading
I’m very surprised that we’ve made it to August before I made this chilled pea mint soup, especially as we’ve been enjoying such atypically sunny weather. This recipe is usually one of my summer staples.
I love cold soups, but I know they’re not for everybody. Happily, this soup tastes equally good served warm, and garnished with a sprinkling of fried pancetta cubes. Continue reading
These Mexican pork wraps appears in Fern’s Food. As I’ve never come across Cajun seasoning in my local supermarket, I went with a mix of oregano, chilli powder, cumin and garlic instead. I’ve also used jerk seasoning when I have it. Otherwise, I was pretty much true to the original recipe.
I served the pork wraps with a watermelon feta rocket salad. Only when it was on my plate did I notice that both dishes featured the colours of the Mexican flag. Continue reading
This butter bean salad recipe comes from Yotam Ottolenghi’s vegetarian cookbook Plenty. (Apparently, so many Londoners are cooking his food these days, that a columnist in the Financial Times recently suggested that “to ottolengh” should become a verb.)
I’m always on the lookout for recipes that make use of sorrel (and lovage for that matter – I have a entire bush of that stuff…) The combination of feta and sumac sounded intriguing as well. Continue reading
Prawn malai curry (or chingri malaikari) is a classic Bengali dish. Prawns simmered in a coconut milk sauce that is fragrant with cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. It’s meant to be mild, which worked for the girls. My version is based on the recipe I found on the Something Special website.
Sri Wasano’s infamous rice salad featured regularly in my veggie years, when the Moosewood Cookbook was my go-to source of inspiration. The recipe sounded impressive, looked exotic, and tasted great.
I’ve always wondered who Sri Wasano was and whether the salad has any connection whatsoever to Indonesia. A two-minute web search uncovered an interview with author Molly Katzen. She revealed that the recipe was a version of a version of a dish someone she knew once ate in an Indonesian restaurant in the Netherlands – and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with anyone called Sri Wasano.
While the list of ingredients seems long, the salad comes together quickly, the dressing is sensational, and the texture contrast between the chewy rice, juicy pineapple, and crisp vegetables is interesting (in a good way). If you’re concerned about eating raw beansprouts, blanch them in boiling water for a minute or so, then drain and refresh under cold water before adding to the salad. Continue reading
Done well, nachos are a wonderful thing. And when it’s so easy to do them well, it’s frustrating how often they are a disappointment.
Here are some tips, based on my experience of making nachos at home:
The smell of grilling yakitori takes me straight back to Tokyo, and late nights spent in izakaya bars with friends and colleagues. Plate after plate of skewers would arrive – not always identifiable, always delicious. But however many I’d eat, it never seemed enough to absorb the amount of sake I managed to drink…
I usually make my yakitori with chicken thighs, but breast meat works too – especially if you allow a bit of time to marinate the meat before grilling. Continue reading
While I’d never let ketchup anywhere near my eggs, I do love the combination of eggs and spicy ranchero sauce. I always poach my eggs in those little poaching pods – my ‘open water’ poaching results are pretty variable – while Adam and the girls prefer their eggs fried. Continue reading
Once I’d decided to make nachos, knocking up a batch of margaritas was a no-brainer. For the first round, I followed the family recipe in Fern’s Food – 3 parts tequila, 2 parts Triple Sec, and 1 part Roses lime cordial. Drinkable, but too sweet for my palate – and didn’t quite tick the margarita box either.
For the second round, I went 2:1 tequila to Triple Sec and replaced the lime cordial with freshly squeezed lime juice… and it was just right. Salud! Continue reading
Laksas always go down well around here, as long as I don’t overdo the chilli. I usually make this recipe with prawns, but occasionally do a chicken version instead. After frying the paste, I sauté pieces of chicken for several minutes, before simmering it in the stock. Continue reading
This lemon ice cream is a stunner. It’s unanimously our favourite ice cream around here – and that’s including chocolate. The salt is absolutely key to this dish – creating a perfect balance between sugary sweet and lemony sour.
I was given this recipe by a friend, after she served it at a dinner party, so have no idea who to credit for this marvellous creation. It’s delicious with fresh strawberries. Continue reading
I was going to steam some mange tout to accompany the salmon phyllo parcels, but decided to shred them into an Asian-style slaw instead. I just go with whatever vegetables I have on hand – cabbage, carrots, peppers, bean sprouts, celery, and daikon radish are all options.
I usually add grated ginger to the dressing as well, but I thought the fish had that base covered. Continue reading
I make these baked peaches every summer without fail. They take only ten minutes to prep, smell wonderful while cooking, and are delicious warm or cold. I also enjoy the cleverness of adding an edible “pit”. Elizabeth David includes this dish in Italian Food, but my version is based on the recipe in Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. Continue reading
Tzatziki is something I’ve made ever since I left home for university – and something I’ve never tired of eating. My tzatziki is pretty stripped back – just Greek yogurt, cucumber, garlic, olive oil and salt, with maybe a squeeze of lemon juice if it needs brightening up. I have no interest in adding dill, mint, parsley, vinegar, sour cream, mayonnaise… or anything else I’ve seen in other tzatziki recipes.
Now that our cucumber vines are bearing fruit, I expect we’ll be eating a lot more tzatziki in the weeks ahead… Continue reading
We’ve been making these muffins pretty much every weekend since I included them in Fern’s Food more than ten years ago.These are known as Margo muffins around here – after the family friend who provided the original recipe.
The fruit varies with what’s in the house. Banana walnut with a slug of maple syrup is good, as is grated apple and cinnamon, chopped pear and ground ginger, or even a couple of handfuls of raisins.
We make a serious dent in them the morning they’re baked, then add any that are left over to packed lunches over the week. Continue reading
This is a lovely way to prepare salmon. The fish steams in its pastry wrapping, and is soft and full of flavour, contrasting beautifully with the crispy phyllo.
The recipe comes from Delia Smith’s Summer Collection. The biggest change I have made to the recipe is the name. Delia calls them “Thai salmon filo parcels”, but I don’t see how adding lime juice and coriander makes something “Thai”. And I prefer “phyllo” to “filo” (which always makes me think of Filofaxes…) Continue reading
At the supermarket yesterday, I saw a pack of twenty cherries on sale for £3.99. That’s 20p a cherry! Growing up in British Columbia, we ate delicious Okanagan produce all summer long – especially Bing cherries, peaches and tomatoes. My grandmother’s cherry tree produced so much fruit she could scarcely keep up with it, and she dried bucketfuls of cherries each year.
Stopped at the Iranian grocers on the way home and picked up two kilos of cherries for £7 – a much more reasonable price. We scoffed half of them straightaway, after which I made this cherry sorbet. The recipe comes from David Liebowitz’s cookbook, The Perfect Scoop. Continue reading
This is the sort of dish I feel a teeny bit guilty posting about. Does tossing rocket, avocado, prawns and a couple of other ingredients in a bowl count as a recipe? Or is a recipe something that is more than the sum of its parts – ingredients that create an alchemy when brought together? If so, this is definitely a recipe.
It also scores high on the effort-to-reward ratio – another very good reason I eat it regularly. Continue reading
I think Adam must be the only person who eats bananas around here. Or at least who eats bananas that have a single bruise or brown spot. Which is why I always end up with overripe bananas sitting sadly in the fruit bowl, while the nectarines, flat peaches, grapes and kiwis disappeared around them.
I sliced up two and stored them in the freezer to add to smoothies or make banana “ice cream” with. The other two I mashed up and made into banana bread. This is the banana bread my mum made. The recipe comes from The All New Purity Cookbook, the bible of Canadian cooking – at least when I was growing up.
Now that school’s out for summer, I don’t have to worry about adding nuts to my baking. Like the nuts, the rum is optional. I like the way it works against the sweetness of the banana, and the kids don’t seem to mind… Continue reading
To my mind, the egg McMuffin is the best thing McDonalds has to offer. Even so, I’d far rather make one at home with a crispy fried egg, vintage cheddar, good quality ham and some chopped green onion. Now that I think of it, I’m not even sure that the girls have ever eaten a “real” one… Continue reading
When I went to make Lyra’s packed lunch for her multisport club this morning, I found we were out of bread. Not even a freezer-burnt pitta or bagel that I could call into service… Instead of getting dressed and walking to the corner shop, I decided to bake something.
This basic white loaf is dead easy to make. It uses instant yeast, has a single rise in the pan while the oven preheats, and bakes in about half an hour. From a 7am start, I was able to pack her off with her sandwiches at ten to nine. Continue reading
Of the three or four potato salads I make regularly, this pared-back French version is my favourite. With only five ingredients, quality matters – small salad potatoes, a grassy olive oil, fresh herbs, and tarragon vinegar (though a nice white wine vinegar works too). The original recipe comes from Nigel Slater’s Real Food. Continue reading
Martini, mɑːˈtiːni/, noun. A cocktail made from gin (or vodka) and dry vermouth, typically garnished with an olive or a twist of lemon. (Oxford Online Dictionary)
So strictly speaking, this isn’t a martini at all, but a frosty glass of vodka-spiced fruit pulp. It is also delicious, and just the thing to mark the start of the school holidays. (For me, that is – Lyra had a J2O…) Continue reading
Goi ga – Vietnamese chicken and cabbage salad – features pretty regularly around here, especially in the summer. Both girls eat it happily, as long as I don’t make it too hot. Learning from experience, I now add about half the chilli when I prepare the salad, and keep the rest aside for Adam and I to add at the table.
I grow Vietnamese coriander (also called Vietnamese mint) in the summer, so added a few leaves with the regular mint. The dressing is closely based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe in Nigella Bites. Continue reading
This unaccustomed spell of hot weather has my basil plants growing like they’re in Italy. And with Adam and Nova both away, I had another good reason to make Lyra’s all-time favourite supper of pesto pasta.
Fresh pesto is so much nicer than the stuff in jars, and takes only a few minutes to make. I don’t bother measuring the ingredients. If I don’t have pinenuts, I’ll use almonds or hazelnuts, and am equally happy with pecorino or parmesan cheese.
The quantities below should make enough pesto for a pasta dinner for four. If you have pesto left over, store it in the fridge with a thin layer of olive oil poured over the surface to keep it from oxidising. Continue reading
Considering what to do with the peppers left over from our Brazilian World Cup meal, I remembered a recipe for Piedmont peppers I used to make regularly. I served the peppers along with the linguine pesto I’d promised Lyra for dinner. The recipe is from Elizabeth David’s Italian Food, with a few adjustments. Continue reading
It always makes me happy to find a culinary use for things – like strawberry tops – that would otherwise be wasted. And when you read that more than 500 British children a week are admitted to hospital to have teeth extracted as a result of too many sugary drinks and fruit juices, it makes me even happier that my girls seem satisfied to drink this strawberry water. I wouldn’t call it a recipe – I’m pretty sure I just saw a picture of this on Pinterest and worked things out from there… Continue reading
This is what I feel like having for dinner tonight – but I’ll probably have some World Cup food leftovers first… I always make this ice cream when strawberries are in season. The recipe is David Lebovitz’s strawberry sorbet from The Perfect Scoop – I just add some cream before churning. Continue reading
…Colombia with their unbeatable barras de limón! Group C was the group of death in our tournament – both the Ivory Coast and Greece would have gone through from almost any other group.
The four of us rated each dish or meal out of ten, which I then averaged. If I cooked more than one dish from a particular country, I averaged all the dishes into one score. This tended to give single dessert countries like Colombia an advantage. Portugal’s pasteis de nata outscored the barras de limón – in fact, they earned the only 10 in the tournament – but scored lower overall, due to averaging with the more wholesome caldo verde.
Where two countries tied, I used Facebook likes as a penalty shoot-out. (This allowed Russia to pip Algeria for second place in Group H, and gave Japan the edge over Italy in the second round.)
Still, Colombia was a worthy winner with an impressive 9.8, and Portugal did win a well-deserved third place.
And with this caipirinha recipe, we bring 2014’s World Cup food project to an end. The whole family has enjoyed the variety it has introduced to our family meals – without it, we may never have shared a communal bowl of pounded yam for our lunch, or discovered the amazing deliciousness of those peanut-coated Nigerian suya or Colombian barras de limón.
That’s why we’ve decided that we are going to continue trying new recipes from around the world. Not at the same pace as the last month – more like once or twice a week. I’ll post them here for anyone that’s interested, and maybe by the time World Cup 2018 rolls around, we’ll have eaten something from every country that has competed in the qualifying rounds… Continue reading
We opened our World Cup food project with this Brazilian meal of panqueqas de carne and cabbage salad on 12 June, and it seems fitting to end on the same note. Actually, the main reason I’ve cooked it again is because I had no intention of creating a blog, and didn’t bother taking any photos. Plus, we had a gas leak that afternoon, which meant unexpectedly cooking dinner on a hot plate, and I started drinking caiparinhas before I’d done any cooking… The recipe is from the Latin Kitchen website, but this time round I modified it a bit and added more spice to the sauce and filling, as we all found it a bit bland. Continue reading
I served this cabbage salad along with the panqueqas de carne for our Brazilian World Cup dinner – something fresh and healthy to balance out all that meat and cheese. I found the recipe on the Two Little Chefs website. Continue reading
Brigadeiros are little balls of chocolatey deliciousness rolled in sprinkles or shredded coconut. The girls were very happy indeed when I produced these a second time in just over a month. I followed a recipe I found in the June 2014 Waitrose magazine. Continue reading
Made baleadas for lunch to represent Honduras in our World Cup cooking challenge. This dish was right up our alley – the tortillas were soft and fluffy, and delicious filled with refried beans, cheese, slices of avocado and topped with chismol – a fresh vegetable salsa. I followed the flour tortilla recipe on the This is Honduras website, but just made my usual refried beans. Continue reading
I was surprised to notice that the recipe I’d found for chismol didn’t contain any chilli. But when I looked at a few others they had little or none, so I stuck with the version on the This is Honduras website. Nova loved this salsa, and polished off the leftovers with a spoon after we’d finished the baleadas. Continue reading
Dinner tonight was what we call a “blini bar” (a meal we usually eat over the Christmas holidays) to mark Russia’s presence in the World Cup. I fry up a batch of blini, which I serve with a range of toppings: smoked salmon, creme fraiche, mackerel paté, chopped egg, pantzarosalata, and maybe some lumpfish caviar (which weirdly, Lyra seems to love). If we get tired of savoury toppings, we eat the rest with jam. They also freeze well. Most blini recipes seem to have yeast in them, but I’ve always been happy with this recipe: Continue reading
This puréed beetroot salad is another recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian cookbook that I’ve been making for years. We eat it with blini, and with oatcakes as an appetizer before our Burns Night haggis. Continue reading
We celebrated Mexico’s appearance in the World Cup with fish tacos and Coronas. We had this dinner the first time Mexico played on 13 June, but I didn’t take any photos so decided to feature them again.
Actually, we have fish tacos pretty regularly — it being one of the few ways that Lyra will eat fish. I pretty much follow this recipe I found on the Love and Lemons website. Continue reading
Ten More Bites 