Best Brunch: Herby mushrooms and tomatoes on toast recipe
Danny likes a few sautéed mushrooms and a grilled tomato with his Saturday midday brunch. Although they sound tempting they never really appeal to me – I prefer the more conventional home smoked bacon, organic eggs and buttered toast from a homemade loaf. A couple of weeks ago I found some mushrooms and a tomato knocking about in the fridge and decided to experiment. If I simmered them together with a little olive oil, butter and herbs would they transform into something that I would like to eat alongside my bacon and eggs? They smelt...
read moreBest budget recipes for 50% or less: Sam’s perfect oven chips. Best homemade oven chips recipe
Danny has cut our potato bill from around £4 a week to 80p a week. Our cold dark barn is the perfect place to store spuds. He was horrified when he discovered how much that we were spending on potatoes. The price rose steeply last winter. The past warmer winters meant that most UK spuds were susceptible to blight – harvests were small and prices shot up. Since then he has been looking out for marked down spuds in the supermarkets. Generally he finds them for 40p for 2.5 kilos. They are hung in the dark barn in thick Hessian...
read moreGuest Spot: Sam Raithatha’s veggie lasagna recipe (without pasta!)
Do you remember that I wrote about Sam’s. The best fast food takeaway in Newmarket and maybe all of Britain (back at the end of November?) Sam’s spotless wagon serves only organic food and feeds the hundreds of tradesmen and a lot of other discerning visitors that just drive into Ridgeon’s car park to scoff his food. He also runs Queen’s the event company. Well it turns out that he’s also an enthusiastic vegetarian chef. I just had to have a ‘Sam fix’ yesterday lunchtime. Luckily I needed to buy paint so motored over to...
read moreBraised celery and broccoli (calabrese) recipe
The benefits of celery are enormous. Celery is thought to possibly reduce blood pressure, help combat cholesterol and even cancer. Leving these aside, braised celery can be a superb and delicious vegetable. This recipe makes it easy to include in any well balanced diet. I’m always attracted to the heads of celery in the supermarket and often eat celery and carrot sticks with hummus for a lunch time snack. In the past D would welcome a bowl of winter celery soup and that was it. He woud never, ever ask for celery as a veggie with his...
read moreDelicious cheese, potato and parsley frittata recipe
We left the Pickled Walnuts Challenge evening with a box of beautiful blue and greeny blue eggs laid by Magic Cochin’s Spice Girls. “I think that those eggs are destined for a frittata.” Smiled Danny as we drove away. Our hens have not yet started laying again. I check the nesting box every morning. Our Senior Girls are now into their fifth year, so it will be a slow start. Peace and Hope should be laying by Easter. So a present of fresh, free range eggs is treasured. We haven’t had a frittata for ages. My favourite is the simple...
read moreBest potato cakes with parmesan and smoked paprika recipe
“I’ll cook this evening. We’ll have the pork hock dish from last night. There is loads of mashed potato left over. How about potato cakes?” Mondays are always busy for both of us. A simple meal seemed perfect. But returning home I discovered that we had no eggs. So I pulled out all the stops and made a new potato cake recipe. If you have an egg to coat the cakes before rolling in flour, it would probably be even better as the cakes would retain their shape. Meanwhile our cakes spread a bit in the in the frying pan but they were...
read moreLate morning brunch: Cheesy mushrooms on toast with a dash of spice recipe
To cut our carbon footprint we decided to combine the post run and the weekly shop and travel to Newmarket in the same car. This meant that Danny had to face an experience that he refers to with tight lipped horror. Saturday supermarket queues. In fact he hates any sort of queue. Even the queue for the tote to collect his winnings. I now refer to queues as moving lines. This seems to calm him. As we drove into the Tesco car park we couldn’t find a space. I knew that unusually long moving lines were already threading across his mind as he...
read moreThe slow cooker chef: low fat summer vegetable and bean casserole recipe
So many vegetarian recipes are high in fat with an emphasis on cheese and eggs. These ingredients can pull a flagging recipe round in seconds. We sometimes eat these dishes – the cheese and eggs make tham tasty, I’m cooking for an alpha carnivore foodie after all. Last night I woke at three a.m. and mulled. Surely, with a bit of thought, I could make veggie food that’s low fat and delicious. This morning I opened an eye to the promise of thunderstorms. I was suddenly kitchen bound as I’m working on an outside job at the...
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