Tuesday 28 February 2012

Egg and lentil curry


As it happened, we had this one scheduled, and then #vegetarianstudent and his friend decided to come for lunch. Perfect!

This is out of one of the Delia Smith books, and it's kind of delightful how it gives you every single instruction right down to "peel the onions". I'm not going to do that. ;)

Then roast the spices: cardamom, cumin, fennel and coriander, all whole seeds. Roast 'em, and then grind them up in a mortar/pestle and crush 'em up.

Add oil to the same pan (no need to miss out on all those lovely spices), throw in some onion, chili, ginger, garlic and lime pickle*, some turmeric and some fenugreek. Throw in the crushed, roasted spices.

The recipe called for a convoluted coconut thing, I just used tinned coconut cream, and it was great. Throw that in.

Stir in the lentils, add some grated lime zest. Bring to a simmer, and then turn it down and let it cook away for 45 mins.

Boil some eggs (we did four, iirc), to whatever stage you like them. (I actually did this right at the beginning, so that they were cool and ready for peeling when I got to this stage, but you do whatever you wish.)

Season sauce with lime juice and salt, and serve with the halved eggs perched on top, and on a bed of rice. We also had various pickles and chutneys, cos that's how we roll.


It's a really good curry, though I ended up adding more liquid because it kind of dried up. That may have been because I used dried lentils instead of tinned ones. But REALLY tasty.

Ratings:
Thumbs up all round really. :)

I had actually made some lemon and lime pickle a while back, and I used that. Boil up some vinegar, throw in some sugar and some pickling spice. Put into a sanitised bottle with slices of lemon and lime. Leave for at least three weeks. NOM.

Friday 24 February 2012

Coconut Chicken Nuggets

I'll say right at the outset that I was very sceptical about this one. To say I am not a fan of commercial chicken nuggets would be grossly understating things. I think they're pretty disgusting things. (A friend of mine insists on bringing them to our fortnightly gatherings, and every time I try them, and every time I regret it. But that's a whole different post.)

So I was pretty sceptical about this recipe from the outset.

It's from a book of "finger food", which is something of which I *am* a fan. I love eating with my fingers. Tapas is like my favourite kind of food ever.

It's a pretty straightforward recipe. Cut chicken into bite size pieces. Dip into a combination of flour and chicken stock powder, and then into a milk and egg mixture, and finally into coconut. Deep fry.

As usual, I did not follow the instructions, and instead of deep frying, I shallow fried them, turning till they were golden brown all over. (This was a logistics thing - I was already using the pot we normally use for deep frying to make chips (aka, french fries).)

They're... okay. Not as vile as I expected, though I wasn't a huge fan of the coconut. Compared to commercial chicken nuggets they were ambrosia! But not a recipe I would want to pull out on a super regular basis. We ate them with sweet chilli sauce, and they kind of took on a vaguely Thai sense (what with the coconut). They were nice enough.

But not amazing.

Ratings:
Husband: I think he liked them. I seem to recall he liked them more than I did.
Me: Meh tending towards thumbs up, but only really because their fastfood knockoffs are so dire.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Homemade muesli

One of the greatest collections I have is a series of low GI cookbooks from SA called "Eating for Sustained Energy". I own several of them, and they are a godsend for my wonky sugar levels.

This is the first recipe out of the very first of these books.

It consists mostly of rolled oats and hi fibre bran. From memory, it was about 3 cups of each. And then a cup of chopped mixed dried fruit and about 3 tablespoons of chopped dried nuts. Mix together. Consume.

I will admit that I probably skewed the low GIness of it by putting less oats and bran and more fruit and nuts.

About a million times better than the store bought stuff. YUM.

Ratings:
Me: Thumbs up
Husband: Thumbs up.

Peach Tart

This was one of simplest recipes I think I have ever encountered. And I still had to change it!

It boiled down to the following:

Roll out some puff pastry and place it on a greased baking tray, pinching up the edges to form a shallow base. Cover with peach halves. (Peaches are not in season, so we used apricots.) Bake for about 25mins or until the pastry starts going golden. Take out the oven and baste in melted apricot jam. Bake for another ten mins. Eat with fresh whipped cream.

Easy, and really very delicious.

OK, disclaimer: I adore apricots. I love the tart sweetness. I eat them in handfuls. So I was predisposed to enjoy this one.

However, people agreed!

I used this to experiment on guests, and they agreed it was yummy. Even the teen liked it! Success all round.

Ratings:

Me: Thumbs up!
Husband: Thumbs up!
Teen: Thumbs up! (Though I feel honour bound to reveal that he ate it with nutella.
Experimented upon guest: Thumbs up!