Time for a coffee

February 2, 2011

Cakes

These cupcakes (or fairy cakes) are based on a recipe for a traybake cake.

Ingredients

250g softened butter , plus extra for greasing
280g self-raising flour
250g golden caster sugar
½ tsp baking powder
4 eggs
150ml creme frache – the recipe calls for yoghurt, but I didn’t have any.
1 tsp vanilla extract
handful of choc chips

To make the sponge batter, beat the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, creme frache and the vanilla in a large bowl with an electric whisk until lump-free. Stir in the choc chips. Spoon into the tin, then bake for 15-20 mins until golden and risen and a skewer poked in comes out clean.

February 1, 2011

Salad for Lunch

I know that a lot of people have salad for lunch as they perceive it to be a healthy option. I generally have salad for lunch as I enjoy eating a nice salad. It’s nice at work that we have salad bars that I can get one from. Sometimes I get one from the local supermarket. Some of the best salads I have had are from small deli type places who make them fresh to order. They’re generally my first choice.

I do like variety in my salad, however I generally draw the line at dried fruit or celery.

From a health perspective a salad such as the one pictured above has a fair bit of fat and salt in it. You can of course avoid all the mayonnaise, dressings and salty stuff and have a much healthier salad, but where’s the fun in that then?

January 31, 2011

Is this the supermarket of the future?

From BBC News.

Though I have the Tesco App on my iPhone I don’t really use it, even though I do the online shopping. I think this is more down to a behaviour thing over not wanting to use the technology.

January 30, 2011

Noodles in a Thai Basil and Lemongrass Sauce

Okay hands up, I “cheated” by using the Blue Dragon Thai Basil and Lemongrass Sauce. Though the vegetables were all fresh. I took some onions, pepper, courgettes, green beans, broccolli, mushrooms and baby sweetcorn. I stir fried these in a hot pan for a few minutes, before adding the sauce and a handful of cashew nuts. I then added the noodles that I had cooked earlier in boiling water for a couple of minutes.

I served the noodles alongside my spiced pork belly.

January 29, 2011

Chicken and Prawn Paella

Tonight I took the time to make a paella using a slightly different recipe to the one I normally do.

This time I took some chicken thighs (for flavour, they generally have more flavour then chicken breasts). These I tossed in olive oil and an Italian spicy herb mix. These were browned in a hot frying pan and then removed.

To the hot pan I then added diced onion, red and green pepper and courgette. When these were softened I added the paella rice. Do use paella rice or rice suitable for paella and not the rice at the back of the cupboard. The rice needs to both take on the flavours in the pan, but also soak up the stock and cook. Using other types of rice usually results in a wet paella with undercooked rice.

Having coated the rice in the oil, pepper and onion mix, I added a large splash of white wine and some chicken stock. As the rice cooks I stir the paella and add more stock as required.

After ten minutes of cooking I added the previously browned chicken. Ten minutes after that I added a handful of frozen peas.

Meanwhile in a separate pan I cook off some thick slices of cooking chorizo sausage. If you are using dried chorizo then just add them as they are to the pan when you add the peas. On my griddle I also cooked some large prawns.

Ten minutes after adding the peas, I added the cooked chorizo sausage, the grilled prawns and some slices of lemon.

January 28, 2011

Spiced Pork Belly

Usually I like to cook pork belly for a long slow time in the oven.

I also use a faster technique with squares or cubes of pork belly. It was a variation of this technique that I used to cook a oriential inspired spiced pork belly.

The key factor for me was time, I would like have marinated the pork, but didn’t have the time. So I took the slab of pork belly and cut it into squares about two inches.

These I then placed in a hot oven and roasted for about twenty minutes.

Meanwhile I created a sauce for the pork, mine consisted of a splash of sunflower oil, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup (though you could use honey) black pepper, spices and I also added a Knorr stock pot.

I took the pork out of the oven and tossed it in the sauce before spooning the reminder over the pork.

The pork was then placed back in the oven for another 15-20 minutes.

Removing the pork from the oven, I cut each “square” into three slices and served with stir fried vegetables and noodles.

January 27, 2011

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts

So there I was at Paddington waiting for my train when I thought I would get a coffee, well I’m not that much of a fan of the coffee on the train and decided that I quite fancied a doughnut too.

I was slightly sceptical of Krispy Kreme though I did quite like the look of the doughnuts and so falling to temptation bought a small americano and two doughnuts, a simple glazed ring and a lemon meringue filled doughnut.

Now they were slightly too sweet for me, but they were fresh and tasted quite nice.

The simple glazed ring doughtnut had too much glaze as there was a fair bit of sticky glaze on the underneath.

The lemon meringue filled doughnut came filled with a lemon custard and was topped with a thin meringue. This was better than the glazed doughnut and was, well let’s say it was an interesting experience.

Would I get them again?

Probably not unless I was really fancying something really sweet!

What about the coffee? Well the coffee wasn’t that bad, certainly better than the coffee you get on the train.

January 26, 2011

More Lemon Slices

These are my lemon slices just after they come out of the oven.

Having now made them a few times, I can make them quite fast, though still have to follow the recipe carefully.

I am thinking next time of trying to make them with oranges instead.

January 25, 2011

Tunnocks Teacakes

You know when you shouldn’t but you still do. Well it’s like that for me and Tunnocks.

Whether it be Chocolate Caramel Wafers or as it was tonight with a Teacake, there is something very nice, but also guilty about eating these very sweet delights.

The Teacake is a crumbly biscuit, covered in marshmallow and covered in a thin layer of milk chocolate. No matter how careful you are crumbs and flakes of chocolate drop over you.

Tasty, yet not quite delicious.

January 24, 2011

Bananas

Like a lot of children, my children love bananas and eat a lot of them. They are very much a staple at home and we take a bunch of them when we are out and about.

I am not averse to them myself. However unlike when I was young, my children do not like bananas and custard. This was a staple pudding of mine when I was a kid. Reminds me that I haven’t had a banana split in a while either, probably not had one of those either since I was a child.

Interestingly they don’t really like banana flavoured stuff either, you know that banana milk or banana flavoured sweets. I would suspect that’s because they don’t really taste of bananas!

Recently buying bananas has been a little fraught with some purchased bunches going black very quickly, or very bruised already. So much so that I have been buying them loose rather than buying them pre-packed. It wasn’t unique to a single supermarket either, regardless of where I was buying them, pre-packed seemed to be bruised or ripened too much. I wonder if it was anything to do with the recent weather?