52 Recipe challenge - week 52 dauphinois potatoes.

So as my last post mentioned I've kind of failed this 52 recipe challenge... but I did actually try a new recipe last week. Honest!

The recipe I tried to make was Dauphinois potatoes from the Marks and Spencer's cooks bible.

To make this I used:

2 small red Onions
25g Butter according to the recipe but I didn't really measure..
900g/ 2 lb Potatoes
A block of Wensleydale cheese
300ml/ 10 fl oz single cream
Salt and pepper

To start off with I chopped up my onions, before washing and peeling my potatoes.

Then I greased my casserole dish with some butter, pre-heated my oven to 190c/ gas mark 5 and started to try and thinly slice the potatoes without slicing my fingers.

This was probably the hardest part of the recipe! Some of the potato slices almost looked like chips or wedges so I remembered there's that slicy bit on the back of the cheese grater and tried to use that but the potatoes were too big for it!

After I'd managed to chop up enough potatoes to create a layer in my casserole dish I took my knife and got some butter and dotted it on to some of the potatoes.

After doing that I sprinkled some of the onion on top of it this layer, then grated some cheese on it and shook a bit of salt and pepper over this potato layer.

I then poured over some cream and realised that the 150ml/ 5 fl oz of single cream the recipe suggested wouldn't be enough so I decided to use the whole tub.

Once I decided this I carried on chopping up the potatoes, making a potato layer, topping it, pouring cream over it and then making another layer for what felt like forever. Obviously it wasn't but I did make another four or five layers...When I eventually got to the top of the casserole dish I finished off by grating all the remaining cheese on to the top layer and poured the last of the cream on top of that before putting it in to the oven.

After about an hour and three quarters I, browned the cheese under the grill and then removed the dish from the oven and served it.  I don't have any pictures of this as I was too hungry...

Once we ate tea I remembered to take a picture of the left overs.

It was tasty and cheesy but there was a lot of it! I also probably over cooked it a little as when I started cooking it I didn't think about what I'd serve with it so I ended up popping to the shop for some peppers to stuff and put with this dish.  It was a good accompaniment to couscous stuffed peppers and to a cheese and spinach bake I had the day after.  I'm not sure if I'll make this again as it felt very time consuming, maybe for a special occasion as my scales aren't thanking me for indulging in this!

52 Recipe Challenge - Week 29.

This week’s recipe is one I made on week 28 but decided to post this week as I have been busy preparing for job interviews this week as well as working on my other blog called: Three Sixty Six Pics where I'm trying to take a picture for every day of the year.

So this week's recipe is another one from the Grandma’s Best Recipes book and is the Corned Beef Hash recipe. I promise I'll do one from another cook book next week! Honest!

To make this recipe you need:

1 tablespoon of vegetable oil

A tin of Corned Beef (I used a 200g one and the recipe suggested using 675g)

A few potatoes cut into small cubes.

1 Onion diced.

¼ teaspoon Paprika

½ teaspoon Garlic

4 tablespoon diced Jalepeno peppers

A sprinkle of Salt and pepper

2 Eggs (The recipe says poached but I just boiled and peeled them as I don’t have a poacher.)

I started off by chopping up the onion, jalepeno peppers and the potatoes first and put them to one side, before chopping up the corned beef into small cubes.

I put a pan of water on to boil for the potatoes and then put the vegetable oil in my wok with the corned beef and onions then cooked them on a medium heat for ten minutes.

When the water in the pan had boiled I added the potatoes and cooked them for about five minutes whilst I stirred the corned beef and onions. 

One the potatoes were cooked I drained them and added them to the wok with the jalepeno  peppers, garlic, paprika, the salt and pepper.

I stirred this together to mix it all in and pressed the mix down to flatten it as directed in the recipe.

I also put another pan of water on the hob to boil and carried on stirring the mixture to ensure it didn’t burn to the bottom of the wok.  Once the water in the pan next to my wok had boiled I lowered two eggs in and set my timer for six minutes.

It was probably around this time that I got distracted and wandered out of the kitchen... I was to pay for this by smelling the unmistakable burning smell shortly after. Distaster! Half the mixture seemed to have burnt but I couldn’t throw it away as it was supposed to be my tea. I got rid of the most burnt parts and added extra paprika,  salt and pepper to try to get rid of the burnt taste. From then on I kept a better eye on the dish trying to ensure that it didn’t burn again.

So I carried on stirring the corned beef hash mix and then took the eggs from the pan when the timer went off. The eggs hadn’t exactly gone to plan either, one of them had cracked itself against the side of the pan whilst cooking and looked somewhat Picasso-esque. I let the eggs cool for a moment as I removed the corned beef hash mix from the hob and dished it on to two plates trying to ensure my boyfriend didn’t get many of the burnt bits.

Hash monster!

I then peeled the boiled eggs and placed them on top of the corned beef hash to try to mimic the poached egg on the picture nest to the recipe.

I must admit it was an ok dish but I couldn’t help thinking that it was completely burnt and charred. My boyfriend told me that he enjoyed his portion, so maybe I had the misfortune of getting the lousy half.We're still in debate as to what a corned beef has acutally is as what he calls a corned beef hash is what I know as hotpot... which also isn't this! I'll have to try this again one day with more concentration and see if it can be added to my repetoire of meals.

Leftover lunches.

Last week I didn't delve into my cookbooks and pull out a recipe to try or take pictures of the new things I cooked on Christmas day. There was a spreadsheet, followed by a list and a few advisors on hand but it never occurred to me to stop for a second and take step by step pictures. I was just concerned about all the food. Mainly not dropping or burning it. Looking back that was a missed opportunity... maybe next year?! I'd have to be quite foolhardy to do that again! The food itself was great Turkey, Gammon, Salmon, Yorkshire Puddings... all the trimmings! (Except sprouts.) The only problem was there was so much of it! We had the left over roast potatoes with the remaining salmon and some of the gammon the next day, then we had to work out with the other half of the turkey we still had left.

In the end we used a quarter of it in a turkey curry, this wasn't some fancy recipe from my new Indian food cook book. Alas this was me frying off onions and  peppers, then cooking off some turkey before adding some Saag sauce from a sachet and frozen spinach. Suffice to say this didn't go very far so I added some more water in and it just diluted the flavours further. It was around this point my boyfriend came along and tried to rectify the situation by adding the last of the tomato puree and a tin of mulligatawny soup.  This made an ok curry but it still wasn't amazing.  So we covered up the copious amounts of leftovers, then the next day I stocked up on tins of chopped tomatoes and added a couple to the mix as well as another pepper and a few more spices.

This is what it looked like.  At the time we finished it I couldn't face more turkey curry so froze the lot and I had this lot for my lunch today.

Despite making the curry we still had a lot of turkey left so I ended up chopping this up and cooking it off with some chopped onion, carrots and potatoes.  I then added a gravy sauce and cooked this mixture until the carrots and potatoes were done before rolling out some ready prepared pastry and making them into pies.

These are two of them, which took us three days to eat! There is one last pie sat waiting in the freezer, it's time will come just not this week.

What did you do with all your leftovers? Or do you have any tips for preventing the accumulation of leftovers?

52 Recipe Challenge - Week 4.

This week I ended up tried a couple of recipes although I didn't manage to blog about them as I got over excited about the free music festival happening in my city.... I have a bit of a soft spot for live music which got in the way of my blogging. I tried part of a recipe from another blog I enjoyed reading called Domestic Sluttery, this is the link to that recipe.  I haven't included my attempts to make that recipe as I interpreted part of it and ignored the other half... I didn't attempt to spatchcock a chicken I just made Jalepeno  butter and put it on some chicken thighs. This made a lot of mess and didn’t look very appetising but tasted quite good.

The recipe I decided to blog about this week was another spicy one from a Spice Box I received as part of a Christmas gift earlier in the year. This recipe is one for Aloo Gobi a spicy potatoes and cauliflower dish which I haven’t tried before as the chocolate thief doesn’t like cauliflower.

To Make this recipe you need:
1 Small Cauliflower
3 or 4 Medium Potatoes
1 Onion
1 ½ teaspoons of Mustard Seeds
1 ½ spoons of Cumin Seeds
1 teaspoon of ground Corriander
1 teaspoon of Tumeric
½ a teaspoon of Garam Masala
½ teaspoon Ground Cumin
2 Long Chillis
200ml Water

When I started this recipe the first thing I did was start to chop up the Cauliflower into florets as advised in the Spice Box recipe before putting it to one side. Then I put the Mustard and Cumin seeds in my pan and started to cook them.

Whilst they were cooking I sliced up the onion. When the Mustard and Cumin seeds started to pop and jump I added  the recommended glug of oil and the onions and started to fry them off.

As the onion fried I cut up the potato, the recipe said to peel the potato first but I didn’t because I was tired and I don’t mind potato skins.

Once this was done and the onion had turned golden brown I added the spices, chilli’s, cauliflower and potatoes to the pan.  I stirred the cauliflowers and potatoes in the spice mix so they were covered in the spices before adding the water.After I poured in the water I turned up the heat to boil the water; however, there didn’t seem to be enough water so I added enough to cover the potatoes and most of the cauliflower.

Next I brought it to the boil, put the lid on the pan and let it simmer for about half an hour and then let it simmer with the lid off for another then minutes. The recipe I have for Aloo Gobi didn’t say how long I should cook it for so I turned it off when the mix potatoes had become mushy and the cauliflower had broken up into pieces.When I went to try it I worked out that I had made loads.

It tasted like a spicy, slightly mushy mash potato.

Not a standalone dish but it will go great with other curries!  Now, who's got a good Naan bread recipe?