Cheese and onion chutney scones

My big problem, food-wise, is that I get so hungry! I need lots of snacks, and if I don’t manage to make healthy stuff in advance I end up with unhealthy stuff. Hence all the cooking tonight! These scones are a brilliant snack. I’ll freeze a few, so I can just get one out when we need a snack. We’ve already tried one and they are truly delicious! (178 cals and 9g fat, is you make 10. I made 6 humungous ones because the dough was a bit sticky to work with, so we’ll have half at a time!

Ingredients

225g SR flour

1tsp cream of tartar

1/2 tsp bicarb

50g diced butter

100g grated cheddar

75g onion chutney (I used tomato, as Chris doesn’t like onions, so in fact I made cheese and tomato scones!)

150ml full-fat milk (in the pre-Panther days I always used semi/skimmed and results were fine with everything- it’s just we have to have full-fat for her nowadays!)

 

Method

1. Heat oven to 220 . Line a baking tray with baking parchment.
2. Put flour, cream of tartar, bicarb and pinch of salt in food processor. Add butter and blitz. Check it’s done, mine didn’t do first time- had to leave it quite a while. Reckons to look like breadcrumbs.
3. Tip into bowl and add grated cheese and chutney. Slowly add milk. Mix to make dough.
4. Knead for 20 secs (this is somewhat tricky because it is sticky)
5. The recipe now talks about rolling it out and using a cutter. I have never managed to do this with scones, plus it strikes me as pointless because scones look good when they are imperfect and homemade-looking. I just pick up handfulls and put it on the tray!
6. The recipe suggests brushing the tops with egg yolk and sprinkling on the cheese. Again, I don’t do stuff like this! I just put them in the oven.
7. Bake for 12-14 minutes until golden.

ENJOY!

Hmmm soup!

I’ve done a good job on my Tuesday mega-cooking tonight! Tuesday is mine and Panther’s shopping night, so we buy loads of delicious food and then when she’s gone to bed I cook loads of delicious stuff with it! Tonight I made minced beef and Yorkshires (frozen I’m afraid- I know it’s stupid but I don’t know how to make Yorkshires still- well I could easily make them to be fair, but Chris does it so I never end up doing it!), curried squash, lentil and coconut soup, cheese and chutney scones, and apple and oat muffins. I’m proud of myself.

So, the soup… I’ve only tried a tiny bit because this is for tomorrow’s lunch. It was tasty. A little in need of seasoning but I used low-salt OXO cubes for the first time and don’t season stuff now until it’s on the plate, to avoid giving Panther too much salt. It was easy to make, especially because I used one of Morrison’s pre-prepared packs of butternut squash which cuts down a lot on the prep. Good for you too. 6 servings- 178 cals, 7g fat and 9g sugar. Plus 2 portions of veg. (I sound like I know what I’m on about here, but most of you will have spotted that in fact it’s just straight from Good Food magazine!)

 

Ingredients

olive oil (I used veg oil)

1 butternut squash (approx, I used 2 small pre-packed packets)- diced

200g carrots- diced

1 tbsp curry powder (didn’t have this so used rogan josh paste. The magazine said to use powder that included turmeric so I added some of this separately)

100g red lentils

700ml veg stock

1 can reduced-fat coconut milk (I used a carton of coconut cream because it’s half the price. Unfortunately this probably increased the fat!)

 

Method

1. Heat oil and fry squash and carrots for 1 min
2. Add curry powder and fry for 1 more min
3. Add lentils, stock and coconut milk. Stir
4. Turn down and simmer for 15-18 mins until tender
5. Blitz with hand blender
6. Eat with bread/ naan/ coriander (although beware if you have naan, it’ll probably triple the calories!)

I’ll comment to let you know if it really is nice!

 

Warning: may contain nuts

I have never made Nut Brittle before, but I will again. It is tremendously easy.

I used cashews as my mum had given me her leftovers from Christmas. I’m sure it would work with peanuts too. Or other nuts – let me know.

Ingredients
50g cashew nuts
50g sugar (I used golden caster)

Method

1. Put nuts and sugar into a pan.
2. Heat until the sugar caramelises.
3. Pour onto a sheet of greaseproof paper.
4. Let it set.

You might have noticed me struggling to string out the instructions. Really it’s just “mix, heat, cool”. You should wash your pan straight away though – if it cakes on it could be challenging.

To be fair there are probably better pans to use – I used a 30cm IKEA wok as we hadn’t done the washing up for a few days. I’m such a pro.

Red lentil and sweet potato pate

This is going quite well at the minute isn’t it? This pate is totally delicious. I was gutted this evening to find it was finished! Will hopefully be making it again next week because it’s a) delicious b) 1 of your 5 a day and c) low-calorie! Yum yum!

Ingredients
Oil
1/2 onion (I used a small one)
1 small sweet potato
140g red lentils
Thyme
Paprika
500ml stock
Red wine vinegar

Method

1. Heat the oil, add onion and cook until golden.
2. Add paprika and cook for 2 more mins.
3. Add sweet potato, lentils, thyme and stock. Cook for 20 mins and all tender.
4. Add vinegar and season. Mash/ blend. Add paprika/ olive oil/ thyme as wanted, then chill.

Another Julietbec special- easy and delicious. Whoop Whoop!

Weird prawn fingers

They say the key to a successful recipe is in the naming.

I wanted to make some fish fingers to go with the square potatoes but we didn’t have any fish in. No salmon, no cod, not even a tin of tuna. But we did have some prawns in.

And so, a legend was born. The legend of the slightly shit prawn fingers.

They didn't look like this. But these are in a very neat stack! Bonus points!

Ingredients
A handful of prawns (there is a recession on)
A couple of sticks of celery
A chilli (red)
Some leftover sweet potato.
An egg
Flour
A couple of slices of bread

Special equipment
A stick blender/whizzer/wand/whatever you like to call it

Method

1. Chop the celery and chilli into small pieces.
2. Mix the prawn, celery, chilli and potato. Season.
3. Beat the egg in a separate bowl and add a tiny bit to the prawn mix. I said a tiny bit!* Save the rest of the egg.
4. Shape this mix into fingers. I got six out of it, but it will depend on all the obvious things like how much of each ingredient you used and how big your fingers are. Your prawn fingers, I mean, not your actual fingers, although I suppose if you had really big fingers you might not be able to make very small shapes…
5. Whizz the bread into breadcrumbs using the blender thingy.
6. Set out the flour, egg and breadcrumbs into plates or bowls and dip the prawn fingers into the flour, followed by the egg (not for too long or they’ll fall apart) and then roll them in the breadcrumbs.
7. Lie them on a baking tray and oven for 20ish minutes or until they look good.
8. Serve in a stack! Always serve in a stack! I also earnt extra cringe points by doing a circle of tomato ketchup round the outside of the plates. This is optional. Lemon wedges could also work.

I rated this as medium because it is a little fiddly to coat in breadcrumbs without them falling apart, but it’s not hard.

Let me know how you get on! If you don’t have any of the ingredients, pretty much anything else similar will also work.

NOTE: If you have arrived here via Google looking for “weird prawn fingers” for some other reason than you were looking for this recipe then I can only offer you my sympathy.

 

* The problem with egg is that even when you have beaten it all together it still has a tendency to “clump”. If you pour it out of the bowl it is very difficult to just get a small bit, as the remaining egg tries very hard to join it in your fish fingers. Perhaps spooning a small bit of egg into the mix is the answer? Anyway, be aware!

Lemony chorizo and prawn rice pot

Hello!

I am not as poncey as Chris, and as a result will be sharing only delicious and easy recipes which do not require the use of fancy biscuit cutters. Unless I make biscuits, in which case fancy biscuit cutters are OK, especially if baking with Panther (our small baby- she is only 11 months and therefore pre-cooking age, although in a future post I will share the story of when we made Halloween biscuits with her!)

This one comes from my good food magazine and it’s really delicious. So delicious we’re having it again this week. Keeping every new recipe on the menu will not be practical for very long so we’ll need to be careful, otherwise if we keep them all on we’ll be eating 50 meals a week after the year, which would really be too many!

Anyway, here goes (from memory):

Ingredients
200g prawns (recipe calls for raw, which you’d heat through at the end, I used cooked and left over from Christmas)
50g chorizo (for cooking, about 3 small ones, but could happily take more, sliced)
1 sliced onion
2 sliced peppers
2 crushed garlic cloves
1 red chilli, chopped
1/2 tsp turmeric
250g long grain rice (I’m not really one for measuring that much, and the scales don’t work, but this amount is quite important so it boils down to the right consistency!)
100g frozen peas
Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Method

1. boil kettle. Fry onion, peppers, chorizo, garlic and chilli for 3 mins
2. Add turmeric and rice. Stir. Add 500ml boiling water and cook for 12 mins, covered
3. Uncover and stir, should be nearly cooked. Add prawn and peas, and more water if not needed. Cook for 1 min until prawns are cooked (obviously this doesn’t apply if you use cooked prawns like me – they can be added later or even at the table!)
4. Stir in lemon zest and juice and eat. Serves 4 and is yummy!

Square potatoes

Let’s start off with something simple! This isn’t an exact-quantities recipe, it’s more of a make-use-of-what-you’ve-got-lying-around one.

Ingredients
Some potatoes
A bit of egg
Whatever else is in your fridge/cupboard

Special equipment
Biscuit cutter

Method

1. Boil potatoes in plenty of salted water.
2. Drain and mash when cooked through.
3. Add other things – I added a bit of sweet potato, you could add some sautéed spring onion or something (I don’t like them but I can see they would work), maybe a bit of cheese. I always recommend a knob of butter and some (not too much!) milk. And salt and black pepper of course!
4. Make shapes on a baking sheet (astute readers will have guessed that I boringly used squares) using your biscuit cutter. Brush with the egg and bake for about 15 minutes or until they are crisping up and going brown.

Cookery books never say “going brown” do they? I think I mean “turning a delicate golden colour”. Yes, that’s better.

Use more adventurous shapes and give your children some home-made smiley faces/alphabites!

New blog!

Now I am married I don’t make my own new year’s resolutions, my wife does it for the both of us. Recent years have seen me increase my intake of sprouts and tidy the house more, prompted (gently) by Julietbec, the wife in question. I go to the gym more too, it’s not all bad!

Her idea for this year is that we will make our dinnertimes more exciting by cooking one new recipe each week. Or more, who knows? And we will record our endeavours here.

Come back in June and see if it has fizzled out!