Chocolate Dipped Shortbread Biscuits

My boyfriend had a Christmas party at work and was asked to bring in a dessert. I decided this would be a good time to make some shortbread and use some Christmas themed cookie cutters I received last year, and haven't had a chance to use yet. Shortbread is incredibly easy to make, and dipping them in chocolate adds an extra bit of yumminess, though if you are a purist or can't be bothered, you can always omit the chocolate as shortbread tastes great on its own.

Good quality unsalted butter really does make a difference here; I have to admit I always use Lurpak butter - a Danish butter sold here in the UK - when I make shortbread, as it has exactly the right taste for shortbread.. Amazing.

Can you guess what the shapes are below? According to Pete, his work-mates could not make any sense of them and someone even thought one was a.. penguin! This amused me a lot.

Dal Makhani; Spicy Lentils with Kidney Beans

Had one of those days recently when I got home and had nothing in the house except store cupboard ingredients. I felt like cooking some lentils so I had a little look online and found this Pakistani recipe, which as ever I tweaked slightly. It was perfect, and delicious. I had never thought to use kidney beans in a curry recipe, and it made a nice change from the usual dal I make (which I'll have to upload onto here sometime...). You can make it with dried coriander but fresh is better, and I have to admit I sent my boyfriend to the shop down the road to get it, which defeated the point of cooking with what I had in the cupboard, but oh well! I've since found out that the correct name for this is 'Dal Makhani', and it is supposed to be cooked with black lentils. I used red lentils though, and it was amazing. I wanted more but only made two portions, which I regretted afterwards... I've also since seen much more complex recipes for this, but I like the simplicity of this recipe, using very few strong flavours, so I've not tried them.

Leek and Potato Soup

Leek and potato soup is great comfort food now the evenings are long and it's cold out. The combination of milk and cream in this recipe means this soup is not too rich, but retains a lovely creamy texture. You could jazz things up a bit by garnishing with some fresh chives, but I didn't bother. 

Red Onion, Thyme, and Smoked Applewood Cheddar Potato Dauphinoise

Inspiration for this dish comes from my brother Jesse, who a while back told me he'd invented a potato gratin with red onion, thyme, and smoked applewood cheddar and suggested I might want to try it out for this blog. It took me a few attempts to get this right, and what I learnt from these attempts was that the golden rules when it comes to potato dauphinoise are:

1. Slice the potato as thinly as possible (I used a boxed cheese grater).
2. Don't pre-cook the potato - you need the starch to thicken the sauce.
3. Don't try to lower the fat content of the recipe by using milk; it does not work and you end up with a far inferior dish.

After a few attempts, I was able to get this dish down to perfection; my boyfriend's comment after he'd taken his first bite: 'Yep, you've smashed it'. I think that about sums it up. A warning: this is a highly indulgent and rich dish.

Macaroni Peas

A nice, relatively quick and quite unusual pasta sauce recipe. I (slightly) adapted this from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's excellent cookbook 'River Cottage Veg Every Day!'.. which as I have said on a number of occasions, is currently my favourite cookbook, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you don't have macaroni, any other pasta shape will do, really.

Artichoke Pasta Sauce

This is a relatively simply (in terms of flavour) but quite satisfying pasta sauce that I came across in another one of my many, very old, cookbooks that I got second hand from a charity shop at some point. You could use fresh artichokes if you can find them, but I used tinned for ease of cooking, since it makes the dish much quicker to cook. Not many photos on this one (or from now on, in fact) as the days have gotten so short I can't get any decent light in my kitchen when cooking.

Mango and Clementine Tarte Tatin

A while back I had an overly ripe mango and wanted a recipe to do something with it. I found a recipe for mango tarte tatin online, but as I started to cook it, it had all the measurements completely wrong, with too much pastry and too little fruit. So I played it by ear a bit and modified it, adding in a clementine. The result turned out nicely, though you may want to add more fruit. As always, if you prefer to use ready made pastry, go ahead.

Wholewheat Banana Nut Loaf

I credit this recipe with introducing me to the joys of baking. High praise indeed, and worth it. Cake is one of my big weaknesses and this particular cake is, to me, everything a cake should be: moist, tasty, with the walnuts adding a lovely bit of crunch. Back in the 2006/07 academic year, I was studying for my masters and during exam time needed something to do during my revision breaks. That something was baking this cake. Once I perfected this recipe, I started experimenting with other baking recipes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Courgette, Rosemary and Goats Cheese Quiche

One of the things I love about quiche is you can put whatever you fancy in it as a filling. For example, my previous quiche recipe involved beetroot and feta, but I mixed things up a bit here by using courgettes, goats cheese, and rosemary. This recipe comes from one of my many generic 'vegetarian kitchen' cookbooks and is a lovely balance of flavours. As ever, if you don't want to make the pastry, just use packaged stuff. 

For some reason I see quiche as very much a spring/summer dish, so this is probably the last quiche I'll feature on the blog for a while, as my attention turns to soup in the coming months.

French Onion Soup

Another busy week, so squeezing in a blog post before I head off to work (yes I'm working on a Saturday, not for the first time this month, nor, sadly, the last). It's getting colder now and as autumn/winter rolls around  I find myself gravitating towards soup more and more, so expect to see plenty of soup recipes in the coming months. This is a  very straightforward and cheap soup that tastes delicious. It takes a bit of time because the onions are best cooked slowly on a low heat. I had some shallots lurking in the garden I used for this, which gave it an extra special tastyness.

Paneer and Butternut Squash Curry

Mmmm curry. Indian food is my favourite of all cuisine. I could literally just live off curry. As I've said before, I don't pretend to know what I'm doing when it comes to curry. Rather, I experiment with flavours and see if they work. I did this from scratch, but as ever if you don't want to, just use curry paste. My friend Yusuf once gave me an invaluable tip when it comes to making curry: don't use tinned tomatoes, this isn't a rich Italian tomato sauce. You want to use fresh tomatoes and cook for a long time to get the sauce thick. It might sound obvious, but it wasn't ever something I'd thought about, and my curries are so much better for it. 

The peas in this dish are optional; I made this dish twice, once with peas, and once without, and I preferred without, but the peas were a nice variation. Of course, if you don't have the time to use butternut squash or can't get hold of it, sweet potato or carrots will do just fine. You can buy paneer cheese in most supermarkets. It is pretty flavourless by itself, so if you can be bothered, marinate it before hand. I didn't and it still turned out fine.

Note: if you want to print the recipe without pictures, just click 'print friendly' and 'remove images'.

Mushroom and Olive Pizza

Ordinarily, I make pizza dough in my bread maker, but for the purposes of this blog and my dear readers out there who don't have a bread maker, I made the dough by hand and include instructions for this. Obviously, if you have a bread maker, just use that, as it is slightly easier. I borrowed the dough recipe from Delia Smith, but I didn't like her method so I made it the way I used to make pizza dough back in the days when I didn't have a bread maker to do it for me.

One of the (many) great things about pizza is that with one recipe (pizza dough) you can get a lot of variation in your meals out of it, just by changing the toppings. I went for a relatively straightforward pizza topping here but there are so many you could choose from - the only limit is your imagination and budget. I am a big fan of quite saucy pizzas so this has rather a lot of tomato sauce on it and you might want to adjust it to your tastes. 

A final tip: when using mushrooms on pizza you must precook them or when they cook in the oven, they will lose water which will make the pizza soggy, or at best will mean when you serve it up you have liquid all over the place - not ideal. What I did in this recipe was to fry the mushrooms in garlic, and then use the mushroom juice in the tomato sauce, so nothing goes to waste (and you get great tasting sauce).

ALSO: If you want to use this recipe (or any on this site) but don't want the photos - click 'print friendly' at the bottom of the post and 'remove images'. There are a LOT of photos on this post, so you might want to do that...

Vegeree

After a small break from the blog due to moving house, work-related madness, going on holiday and then returning to more work-related madness (it's been an overwhelming three weeks), I present to you: Vegeree. Since becoming vegetarian nearly 5 years ago, I often get asked by my meat eating friends what I miss the most, and I always answer that I don't really miss anything (which often gets a raised eyebrow and a look of disbelief, but there you go). Whilst I don't really miss meat or fish, there are certain dishes which it took me some time to make good 'substitutes' for. I was never a big fan of fish, and kedgeree was pretty much the only fish dish I used to eat, so when I became vegetarian I just assumed there was no substitute and left it at that. Until I got hold of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's 'Veg Everyday' book that is, which I'm sure I've banged on about in previous blog posts. 

He uses aubergines in his recipe, but they happen to be the one vegetable I cannot stand. I will eat aubergine if necessary (i.e. somebody has cooked it for me), but will never cook it for myself. He suggested complementing the aubergines with courgettes, one of my favourite vegetables, so I just used that instead. I imagine peas would work well too. I also added in the tomatoes because when I used to cook kedgeree I always garnished it with tomatoes and they give a nice contrasting coolness to the spicy rice. The egg is ideally almost hard boiled, but with just a touch of soft yoke - though you can of course do the eggs however you prefer.

A lack of photos in this post I'm afraid, as it was dark in my kitchen and I struggled to get any decent ones. This recipe is very wordy and sounds complicated, but actually it's very straightforward and I'm simply giving you very detailed instructions on how I cook it - you can play around with this recipe how you want until you get the timings right for however you like to do things.

Beetroot Granola Cake

Me and Pete are moving house and as a result need to use up as much of our food as possible, to save on carrying half opened packets of food 150 miles across the country. This has led to some interesting food over the past week or so (stir fry vegetable curry with peanut butter and mustard anyone? ... surprisingly alright tasting if a bit bizarre), and this cake is the result of having several young-ish beetroot from the garden which needed eating up.

I also had some granola lurking in the back of the cupboard which I put in. If you don't have granola, just use oats and dried fruits, or omit it altogether, and leave out the milk. This recipe was cobbled together from a variety of online ones, and then modified a bit more...  it could have been a disaster but it turned out pretty nice. It's very easy to make, and pretty quick, with one caveat: the beetroot is a bit of a nightmare to grate, so be careful as you will definitely have pink fingers afterwards and will look like you've gone on some kind of murder spree. A final tip: I've found that glass chopping boards don't stain with beetroot, whilst plastic or wooden ones are more likely to.

Lentil, Butternut Squash and Chard Sauce

I haven't cooked with lentils for a while which is a big shame as they are a) delicious and b) very healthy and full of protein. So I decided to have a rummage through my old recipe books, and adapted this from a random vegetarian recipe book from the mid 1980s which I got second hand from a charity shop ages ago (yeh, I have a bit of an addiction to buying vegetarian recipe books in charity shops). The recipe originally called for carrots but I felt like butternut squash so I used that instead, so you could use carrots in you can't be fussed with the hassle of peeling/cooking squash. Also, if you're wondering where to get chard from, I just used a bag of bistro salad from the supermarket, which contained chard (and beetroot, yum!) but you could use spinach instead. In case you haven't realised, my approach to cooking is basically find a recipe and then modify the hell out of it depending on what ingredients I have at my disposal, haha. I had this with pasta, but I'm having the leftovers with cous cous tonight, as I'm confident that'll work too. You could also tart it up a bit by whacking some goats cheese into it too. Yumm.

Carrot Cake with Maple Syrup Butter Icing

I have to confess I was never a big fan of carrot cake.. until I started using this recipe, which I found in one of my old baking books. The butter icing isn't compulsory but it's amazing; if you can get hold of some maple syrup it really adds a bit of extravagance to the cake. The recipe calls for raisins, which is one of the few foods I strongly dislike, so I omitted them; I've included them in the recipe in case anyone wanting to make this has less strong feelings against them. This was actually a recipe for an average sized cake, but my ongoing obsession with fairy cakes meant I just made them instead!

Spicy Cajun Plait

Definitely one for the weekend this as it does take a few hours to make (although actual time in which you actively need to do anything is much shorter). I made this in my bread maker but its reasonably straightforward to make dough without one so I've included alternative instructions for making it by a hand. We ate this still warm from the oven, dipping it in salsa and sour cream dips, and slathering it with cream cheese. It was awesome.

Lemony Avocado Pasta Sauce

A very quick, very simple, very delicious dinner. Imagine whacking guacamole on a pasta sauce and you've got the right idea. When blended, the avocado is very creamy and it -just- works. I found this recipe a while ago here, and have been meaning to cook it ever since. I modified it for my own ends (cooked the garlic rather than using it raw, and added chilli) but it's a pretty simple recipe so not much modification needed. You don't have to add cheese to this  (e.g. if you are vegan or worried about fat content)  but I love cheese so yeh that was always going to be done when I cooked this to be honest...

Beetroot and Feta Quiche

Quiche tends to take quite a bit of time, but I find it is always worth it. I had an urge to cook with beetroot, since I really like it but don't ever cook with it as have never been sure what to do with it. Anyway, I decided quiche would be a good place to start experimenting with it, and it turned out great. I bought ready cooked beetroot from my local supermarket; make sure you don't get pickled beetroot if you also do this. I'd recommend it as it's far easier than cooking the beetroot yourself. A note: beetroot juice leaves the mother of all stains so be careful when chopping it! I had some shallots from the garden which I used, but you could just use a regular onion. If you have any leftovers, it'll make an awesome lunch cold.

Apricot Fairy Cakes

I've gotten a bit obsessed with fairy cakes recently, so expect to see several recipes in the near future... I modified this recipe from a recipe for peach cake, adjusting the amount of apricot and time baking time to suit cup cakes - you could easily just do this in a normal cake tin if you want (just increase baking time to 45 mins). These were very buttery, with the apricot flavour coming through when biting into the apricot chunks. I thought peeling the apricot skins would be hassle, but I was pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it was. 

Potato and Pesto Pasta

Another recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This is a relatively easy, one-pot dish that tastes fabulous.  Hugh suggests you make your own pesto; personally I just can't be bothered and tend to use store bought, but bear in mind (strictly) vegetarian pesto is hard to come by (I can only find organic veggie pesto) so you might want to make your own if you're a strict vegetarian who won't eat non-veggie cheese, like I am. The dish works well without olives (I had to omit them as I didn't have any when cooking this) but I would highly recommend them as they add a lovely final touch to the dish.

Minted Mushy Peas

This recipe comes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittenstall's excellent book 'River Cottage Veg Everyday!' which has the honour of currently being my favourite cook-book (thanks go to my awesome sister for the excellent Christmas present). I used a red onion in this, and also added some dried mint, but other than that it follows his recipe pretty closely. Due to the onions, you need to blend the peas; if you don't have a blender or don't want to use onions, you could omit the onion and just mash the peas up instead. Either way, this is a guaranteed winner, and I very much enjoyed this with some pie and chips.

Slutty Spaghetti (aka Puttanesca)

This is one of my favourite recipes of all time. There are recipes for this all over the place, but I first came across it in one of my favourite vegetarian cookbooks - Linda McCartney's 'Recipes from around the world' which I found in a charity shop a few years ago and was one of the best £1.99 I've ever spent. It's quick and takes around 15 minutes from frying the garlic to serving with pasta. It also happens to taste amazing; not for the faint hearted, it's full of very strong flavours, and I always go massively over the top with the garlic and the chili. Words can't do it justice. This recipe serves 2, but I'll happily admit when I'm home alone and cooking for one, I often just have the whole sauce with my pasta because I can't get enough of it. It's my ultimate comfort food!

Mushroom and Butter Bean Sandwich Filling

As a vegetarian, I too often fall back on the cheese or hummus when it comes to sandwich fillers for lunch. Granted, I vary the cheese/hummus I eat, but you get my drift - it's easy to get stuck in a rut. So I started experimenting with using beans as a low-fat, high-protein sandwich filling. This is one of my favourite creations. It's tasty both hot and cold, and you can even eat it hot as a side for your dinner. I had this in a home made wholemeal roll for my lunch, and it was delicious!

Paprika and Mustard Potato Salad

This is a very easy, tasty, potato salad to make. Beware - I used raw onion in this and the flavour packs quite a punch. If you are less keen on onion and/or have to be out somewhere around people(!), you can easily omit it from the recipe. Or, as Google once again reliably informs me, you can soak the onions in very cold water for around 10 mins before draining and adding to the recipe.

Lemon and Blue Cheese Pasta Sauce

I recently acquired some lemon thyme from my foster mum Jose, who had been growing some in her garden. It smelled amazing but I had no idea what to do with it so I just made something up. I have no idea where you would buy lemon thyme, but google reliably informs me that you can substitute it for regular thyme and lemon juice. This recipe is already pretty lemon-y so if you do substitute just use normal thyme instead and don't increase the amount of lemon juice. If you aren't that fond of lemon you may want to just use the juice or the rind and not both. This recipe give an easy, cheesy pasta sauce. I find that often blue cheese pasta sauce recipes contain heavy cream, which is awesome in taste, but which makes me feel bloated and a bit ill. So I decided to try and make a pasta sauce without cream but with enough liquid. I was very pleased with how this turned out. I used mushrooms but you could easily substitute for some other vegetable such as spinach.

Blueberry Jam Vanilla Cake

Cake, in all it's various forms, is one of my diet weaknesses. I cannot resist a lovely slice of cake with a hot, sweet, cup of tea. Heavenly. 

This particular recipe gives a lovely, sticky and moist cake. I've haven't tried to put jam in a cake before and I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out, but I thought I'd give it a go and wasn't disappointed with the results. The jam flavour doesn't come through so much, but it did give it a lovely consistency, and you could always try to put more jam in if you want (though you might want to reduce the sugar levels accordingly). The cake came out quite small and it doesn't rise that much, so if you want a larger cake you might want to double up the quantities. On the other hand, you could easily make fairy cakes (or cupcakes as they are otherwise known) out of the mixture instead.

Wholemeal Bread Machine Bagels

It is no exaggeration to say that when I bought my bread maker 4 years ago, it revolutionised my life. No. Exaggeration. Seriously. This bagel recipe is very simple, and borrows heavily from this BBC recipe; the only modification I made was that I made these wholemeal rather than plain. The use of a bread machine also greatly simplifies things as it will do most of the hard work. If you don't have a bread making machine, I'd suggesting heading over to the BBC recipe and following those instructions instead. I always thought bagels would be too 'hard' or difficult to make, since they are briefly boiled before oven baked, but in fact I found them incredibly easy to make (though yes, they take a bit more time). These were not quite as dense as I like bagels, so I've reduced the quantity of water slightly in this recipe (from 300ml to 275ml).

If you aren't eating them all at once, they can be frozen. I recommend this highly as they lose their freshness pretty quickly if left out for a day or two; if frozen you get that 'just baked' taste every time.

Indian Inspired Chickpea Coconut Curry

I LOVE Indian food. It is my favourite cuisine, hands down. I call this recipe 'Indian Inspired' because whilst I love Indian cuisine, this recipe is not based on any particular recipe and so is not 'authentic'. Over the years I've tried out many curry recipes so have got a feel for what I like in a curry and what I don't and so this is very much based on my personal preference. This particular attempt was quite off-the-cuff and tasted amazing; I was really pleased with how it turned out.

If you don't have the time or the inclination to faff about with spices etc, just use curry paste. It's not essential for the recipe that you do it all from scratch; as I've said I have a particular passion for Indian food and spices so I happen to have all the spices in my cupboard; you may well not. The key thing about this recipe is really the roasting of the tomatoes and vegetables together. Doing this means you don't have to keep much of an eye on it and you can leave it in the oven for 40 minutes or so. Also, the roasted tomatoes really make the sauce what it is.

Serves 4

Ingredients:
750 grams tomatoes
600 grams mixed veg suitable for roasting (I used a mixture of butternut squash and carrots)
2 red onions
4 cloves garlic
3 tsp garam masala
2 - 3 chilli peppers
2 cm fresh ginger
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon dried coriander
1 teaspoon dried cumin
1 teaspoon fenugreek
1 tin chickpeas
100g fresh spinach (though frozen will also do fine)
1 stock cube
100g creamed coconut (or 1 tin coconut cream if you prefer your curries to have a thinner consistency)
Fresh coriander

Instructions:
1. Peel and chop the mixed vegetables and the onions and TWO of the garlic cloves, and add to a roasting dish.

2. Chop the tomatoes into eighths and add to the pan. It will look like a lot of tomatoes, but they reduce down considerably

3. Coat the vegetable mixture in some vegetable oil, along with TWO tsp of the garam masala, shake to coat the veg as much as possible.

4. Roast at 200 degrees celsius for around 40 minutes, or until everything is soft, shaking occasionally.

5. Once the vegetables are ready, slice the remaining two garlic cloves, two of the chilies and the ginger, and fry in oil along with the cumin and mustard seeds for a couple of minutes.

6. Add the roasted vegetable mix to the pan. The tomatoes should still have some shape to them, but if you stir thoroughly they will begin to break up.

7. Add the remaining spices (turmeric, ground coriander, ground cumin, fenugreek, paprika), and crumble the stock cube into the curry, stirring to mix.

8. Drain the chick peas and add them to the pan, along with the spinach.

9. Add the creamed coconut in chunks and stir thoroughly to break it up. It will considerably thicken the sauce, so add hot water to the curry to get the consistency you prefer.

10. Continue to cook until heated through and the consistency you desire, adding the remaining tsp of garam masala and fresh coriander towards the end, stirring so combined thoroughly.

11. Serve with rice or naan bread, garnishing with some fresh coriander, and the remaining chili pepper.

Butternut Squash Puff Pasty Pie

Ok, this is my first post ever so please bear with me, especially for the pictures... :)

I modelled this pie on an old Readers Digest recipe I had from my boyfriend's mother, which was a cottage cheese and chive pie. I substituted the cottage cheese for mashed up butternut squash, and the chives for red onions. It turned out pretty well. Mine was almost overfilled, so I've reduced the quantities slightly. This recipe is pretty time intensive, but the end result is worth it, and it tastes great cold too. Remember to take the pastry out of the fridge 20 minutes before you want to roll it out!