How to make *amazing* jacket potatoes...

... if you like your potatoes soft and fluffy on the outside, and super crispy on the outside, that is :) No soft and wrinkly potatoes skins to be found here.

You might be wondering what the point is in writing a blog post like this, since jacket potatoes are easy right? Right, it's easy to make a jacket potato that tastes nice (it's also quite easy to mess up jacket potatoes and have some under cooked thing, but that's another story). But I'm talking about a jacket potato that tastes amazing.

The secret to making amazing jacket potatoes:

1. Time/Patience - this recipe does not involve any sort of microwave shortcut!
2. Oil (yes, I know it makes the meal less healthy but I don't care, oil really crisps up the outside nicely)
3. Kitchen foil to wrap, to avoid the skin getting too burnt (though I have cooked without when desperate)

This is not a 'get back from work and rustle up a meal quickly' kind of recipe. This is a 'I have a couple of hours before I need to eat' kind of recipe. Having said that, it involves the bare minimum of effort. Once you do the prep and put the potatoes in the oven, you pretty much leave them be. The recipe instructions may look long but only because I'm making them very precise.

Jacket potatoes are a perfect Sunday-kicking-around-the-house meal. Top with whatever you fancy, though my personal favourite is baked beans with cheese, and some mayonnaise and Encona hot pepper sauce on the side. Yum!

Feta Cheese Summer Frittata

This is my first attempt at making a frittata, and it turned out really well. I used feta cheese in this, but any cheese you fancy will do; goats cheese would also work well, I think.

For best results, you want to use a dish which can be used on the hob as well as in the oven (such as a cast iron ceramic dish), and I've written the instructions with this in mind. Don't panic if you don't though, as I actually didn't have one to hand when I cooked this, so I fried everything in a pan and transferred it to an oven dish. It turned out fine, but the bottom of the frittata was not as well set as I would have liked.

Goats Cheese, Courgette (Zucchini) and Cherry Tomato Pasta

This month will see a drop in the frequency of my blog posts as I wait for my house purchase to go through and live in temporary accommodation for the foreseeable future, but I'm hoping to be back on track with one blog post a week by the time August rolls around...

This is a relatively straightforward and quick pasta recipe; the vegetables are cooked at the same time as the pasta is cooking, so the whole thing only takes around half an hour. Soft goats cheese which has the consistency of cream cheese is best for this as it coats the pasta more evenly than goats cheese with a rind.

Peanut Butter Cookies

I'm moving house at the moment and trying to use up all my store cupboard ingredients, and these cookies were a perfect way to use up some leftover peanut butter. I took them to a BBQ and they seemed to go down quite well. The mixture is quite soft so they are cookies (chewy) rather than biscuits (crunchy).

Tomato and Cheese Rice

This is a relatively simple recipe from one of my random vegetarian cookbooks. It is basically a pasta bake but with rice, so nice if you're gluten free and fancy a comforting dish. The original recipe called for peppers, but I didn't have any so I substituted for green beans and sweetcorn; the dish would work with any mixed veg you prefer. The original recipe called for half a tin of tomatoes, which annoyed me, so I adjusted it and tried to adjust the stock as well. It came out ok, so my conversions must have been fine...

Spicy Roasted Chickpeas and Feta

This is a quite simple, throw some stuff together and roast it recipe, so it's minimal effort. I modified this recipe from a chicken based dish I found over on the BBC's good food site. I quite liked the idea of trying out roasted chickpeas and I would definitely recommend it as it turned out great. They become quite crunchy on the outside but are soft in the middle which adds an unusual (in a good way!) consistency to the meal. The recipe called for harissa pasta which I didn't have, so I found a substitute recipe online. It was very spicy however so if you like things less spice, tone down the chilli content. Finally, props go to Pete as on the day I planned to cook this, I was very ill, and he cooked it for me and even let me annoy him half way through to take a picture for the blog.

 

Penne all'Arriabbiata

A simple, quick, and tasty dinner. The trick to this sauce is to cook the chillies whole in the sauce as it imparts both heat and a lovely flavour of chilli. You can then either remove them once the spice has reached your desired level or - if you want it even spicier - you can remove from the sauce and slice before adding back to the sauce. I used regular medium chillies from the supermarket and it wasn't spicey enough for me, but you might want to keep an eye on the sauce if using other hotter chillies e.g. birds eye. I also made this sauce for two portions and it was very sauce-y, so you could always use this amount for four portions (for example).