Parmesan and Herb Crusted Cod with Garlic Vine Tomatoes and Roasted New Potatoes

Parmesan and herb crusted cod served with extra green veg

 

Happy Wednesday eveyone!

- I'm saying that sarcastically. Can you tell?

 

On Monday it seems l set myself up for a bit of a fall. With all the best intentions in the world l said that on Wednesdays l would try to keep posting my recently developed recipes.

 

Low and behold just two days later when l should be writing up my latest post, I'm in the office working late.

 

I'm not going to complain though, l get paid 1.5x my hourly rate AND there's a special cupboard that gets opened at 6:30 full of sweets, fizzy drinks, biscuits and more!

l need to make the most if it because when l'm a trainee many of these perks will disappear.

 

A bit of local history
- Check out the inscription -
"Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Association"
I love Smithfields!

BUT less about work. l may have struggled to get pen to paper but I've still had plenty of time to cook!

 

Some of you will already be familliar with my healthy fish and chips. This is an evolution of that same dish!

 

The idea is that the flavour of the bread crumbs is ramped up with lashings of parmesan and traditionally ltalian herbs. The health factor comes from the oven roasted vine tomatoes cooked with garlic (which is great for your heart) and olive oil, one of the so called good fats.

No meal would be complete - or should l say balanced - without some carbs so the fish is lovingly served up with new potatoes roasted in the oven.

 

Have you noticed the real selling point of this meal yet though? It all just goes in the oven.

 

No pots and pans or complicated techniques!

 

And that's why this is a fab mid-week meal!

Mango and Avocado Salsa

This recipe for me was a really fun one! Just look at the vibrancy and the great mix of colours in that bowl – this mango and avocado salsa just screams joy, fun and laughter. But then again for me, so does Mexican food in general.

In this country most people’s first experiences of Mexican food come in the form of an Old El Paso fajita kit, (or perhaps these days it’s a Discovery pack or your Supermarket’s own brand version...)

When I was growing up Mexican food was really just starting to take off in this country. Old El Paso was seen as a real treat. It was exciting, fun, and all the family could get involved by building their own fajita/taco etc.

We still buy these kits every now and then and ‘fajita night’ is a much loved night in my house. It’s all about getting stuck in, getting a little bit messy and tailoring your food to your mood. Some day’s I’m feeling extra spicy and add mounds of jalapenos. Other day’s I want something creamy and velvety and pile on the sour cream and refried beans.

While there’s nothing wrong with using these kits. It’s really easy to do your own Mexican food at home – without taking these little short cuts. In my second year at university, some friends and I decided to do a “Come Dine with Me” style cooking competition. The idea was that we were all skint and wanted some cheap indoor entertainment. I decided that I wanted to do a Mexican Night. I had a bottle of margarita mix left over from god knows when, and the essential like a pack of chicken, wraps and sour cream could all be brought pretty cheaply. As it was a cookery competition I decided to steer away from the packet mixes and spent hours analysing the back of “fajita spice” packets before raiding my own spice cupboard to come up with my own personalised fajita spice blend.

That spice blend saw me win our little competition (though no prizes unfortunately) and set me up for fajita nights to come!

If you don’t feel like going to the extreme of developing your own spice blend, I don’t blame you! BUT there are other ways you can jazz up a Mexican meal without resorting to packets.

Take the jars of salsa for example. Travel to Mexico and I promise you the slop we buy in a jar that seeps a greyish-red liquid is NOT salsa. In fact they have hundreds of different salsas...none of which look like that!

SO, I propose you make your own salsa to serve alongside tacos, fajitas, enchiladas, or even just a delicious bit of steak as I did here. (But that’s for another day!)

I think the key to making a good salsa is to go for the key colour groups – green, red and yellow.

For example -

Green: coriander (cilantro), lime, avocado, green pepper, jalapenos

Red: tomatoes (fresh not tinned/canned), red pepper, red onion, watermelon, grapefruit, chilli peppers

Yellow: yellow pepper, sweetcorn, lemon, mango

You can mix and match any of these ingredients to make a fab Mexican inspired salsa! One thing I must say, when choosing ingredients from the colour groups above; don’t be afraid to add in fruit. The juice of lemons and limes is an obvious choice to give the salsa a bit of zing, but chunks of watermelon, grapefruit and mango all bring another flavour dimension and texture to the salsa.

I think this salsa works well for that exact reason. Not only does it include fresh mango, but also avocado which adds a creamy texture to the salsa and balances out the sharp lime juice.

Lamb Rogan Josh

Indian is by far one of my favourite cuisines and I know I’m not alone! The Indian often gives Chinese a run for its money in the country’s favourite take-away food.

When I was younger I didn’t ever eat Indian food. We’ve always been the kind of family that orders a takeaway for special occasions (like birthdays) or evenings where the routines gone out of the window (like parents evening for example). BUT the Indian takeaway leaflets were always left in the drawer until Mum and Dad were home alone.

I remember trying my first piece of Chicken Tikka. I had never tasted anything like it before! It was so new and different that I genuinely couldn’t tell if I liked it or not. I wanted to try more, but I was scared that my parents would order me a dish and I wouldn’t be able to finish it. After all, trying one piece of Chicken Tikka isn’t quite the same as sitting down to a plate of keema naan, pilau rice and a creamy curry.

It turns out my sister HATED her taste so that was that...I never really got a chance to try curry again properly until I was in my early teens. To this day I maintain I fell in love with Jon (AND cooking) because he cooked the best curries! Ok...we both know they were out of a jar, but I had never had a homemade curry until I started going for dinner at Jon’s house. They were always vegetarian (sometimes which extra quorn pieces) and served with fluffy basmati rice. That was it...I was hooked!

When I passed this news on to my parents it was decided we’d start ordering Indian take-aways as a family. No more Dominoes or Chinese. The Indian was king. By this point my sister was always round her boyfriends, so once a month on a Saturday night, I started working my way through the local curry house's menu.

As it turns out, I like ALL types of curries – from creamy Kormas and butter chickens, to spicy Jalfrezis. I also love garlic naans, peshwari naans, keema naans, chapattis, parathas, pilau rice, lemon rice...basically there isn’t ONE thing on the menu I don’t like. Sometimes I’ll order lamb, sometimes chicken, sometime prawn and sometimes veggie. No curry is off limits.

Despite saying this, one curry has had a special place in my heart all these years. The Rogan Josh.

I don’t actually remember when this became my “go-to” curry but if we were ordering in a hurry or weren’t ordering a giant Indian feast, I’d simply order a Rogan Josh. I loved the rich sauce with tomatoes and green peppers mopped up with a keema naan – to me it was heaven!

Until my post on a Low Fat Chicken Korma I hadn’t tried recreating my take-away favourites at home. I have no friends or family from India who could teach me all their secrets, and I just can’t justify using ghee in my home cooking (I swear I would weigh a tonne overnight!) So I’ve always steered clear.

But, in my pursuit of delicious tasting healthy foods I decided it was time I tried to crack the Rogan Josh.

Rogan Josh is the signature dish of the Kashmir region and is traditionally cooked with lamb. The sauce or gravy is based on browned onions yoghurt, garlic, ginger and spices such as cloves, bay leaves, cardamom and cinnamon all of which you'll find in my recipe. The red colour of the sauce traditionally comes from dried Kashmiri chilies. These can be replaced by paprika which has a similar flavour - again you'll find this in my recipe below. It is not a really hot dish, but instead should be fragrant with a slight chilli heat rather than a kick.

Indian take-aways in countries such as England also include the addition of tomatoes. This gives it a less traditional flavour but also helps bring out the red colour found in the Kashmiri dish.

My recipe falls somewhere in between the two. It has the tomatoes and green peppers that I know so well from my local take-away, but the spices used are very traditional. I’ve also cut down on much of the oil needed to cook the lamb and baked it in the oven for a tender texture so it’s not as unhealthy for you as the take-away variety.

If you have never tried cooking “take-away style” curries at home before, this is a great recipe to start with! You will get a smoother gravy or sauce if you have a blender to hand but it’s not essential, and this can be served with rice or traditional breads.

Here’s the recipe:

Chicken and Tomato Risotto

I overheard my parents talking the other day...they were wondering what they’re going to do when I leave home for good. Food-wise that is! I’m sure they’d love to have their house back; it would be clean, tidy and quiet. But they can’t deny one thing – they eat much better when I’m around!
We’ve nicknamed Mum’s cooking cordon bleu because it couldn’t be further from the truth! She’s well aware that she only has a few recipes in her repertoire that don’t involve packets of frozen food but having said that what she can cook isn’t half bad. When she's not cooking fish fingers it's probably a Chicken Supreme or a Bolognase!

Dad’s a much better cook and he’s probably where I get my cooking skills from. Every now and then he’ll decide to cook a Chinese feast from scratch, or whip up a curry. He’s also not half bad at puddings! It’s just a shame he’s not in the kitchen more often when I’m not around.

I don’t think my Mum is half as bad as we make her out to be. I think a lot of being a good cook is about having the confidence to try new things and the imagination to create something different when faced with the same old ingredients in the cupboard. A couple of weeks ago I cooked a sausage and asparagus risotto for the first time. It was completely unplanned and was based on what I could find in the fridge, but it worked so well we’ve tried it a few times and it now has pride of place on my blog. This recipe isn’t too dissimilar. Not only is it a risotto recipe, but it uses up all of those ingredients you usually have lurking at the back of the fridge; chicken breasts, tomatoes, stock, tomato puree and rice. Nothing here – bar the basil if you don’t grow your own – is special or fancy, they are every day flavours that when combined together make something really quite special!

Stuffed Marrow with Cheese Sauce

Updated: 26 August 2013

 

 

 

Every now and then I like to go back and revisit a recipe.

The majority of recipes on my blog (perhaps the cakes excluded) get cooked on a regular basis in my house.

Of course some things are seasonal – in fact this recipe in particular is one that only really comes out at the end of the summer. But when August is here and our veg patch is heaving with marrows we’ll have this dinner once a week.

But, because I cook these recipes so often it’s nice to go back and look at my original post and work out what about that recipe still works well, or how I might have tweaked it to make it EVEN better.

 

Check out my giant marrow!!!

 

You won’t find any changes to this recipe here. Really they fall into two categories - #1 is presentation. Instead of cutting the marrow in half, scooping out the seeds and filling with the mince, I now Cut the marrow into chunky disks, scoop out the seeds and fill the centre with the mince. Don’t worry – it’s still smothered in cheese sauce post-oven.

Change #2 is the mince sauce. It still tastes fab whether you choose to use meat or a meat substitute such as quorn, but we’ve recently moved away from a tomato based sauce and instead use stock and gravy for a truly savoury filling.

Check out the full recipe below to see the upgraded version!
 

  

Keep scrolling down to find the original post:

 

Originaly posted: October 2012

 

Just over a week ago now, my church held a harvest festival lunch. First, they collected in tins and other preserved goods to give out to people in the community, and then everyone shared in a feast made up of dishes that each different family bought to the table. There included salads, quiches, and cold meats, as well as some authentic African and Indian cooking from different groups within the congregation. And, of course there were plenty of yummy cakes on offer too!

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend as I was working. Gutting I know!

Nonetheless, harvest festival is one of my favourite times of the year as it marks the begging of autumn (or fall from my American friends), YAY!

Now, what’s not to love about autumn? First of all there are knitwear, and snugly boots, big socks and scarves. Plenty of fun food related festivals, such as Halloween with toffee apples and other candy-related goodness, bonfire night (or Guy Fawkes night) with soup, burgers, hot dogs, cinder toffee and candy floss (what’s not to love) and last but not least, the event we’ve all been waiting for...CHRISTMAS! Now there’s just too much food related goodness to mention for Christmas.

But do you know another thing I love about harvest time? Giant...vegetables...

For some bizarre reason, harvest always reminds me of giant, prize winning vegetables, from giant pumpkins, squashes, marrows and more!

We’ve had our fair share of giant veg in our vegetable patch this year. Our marrow plant has not only taken over the vegetable patch, but the lawn and the patio – with its 4 large arms reaching out to grow even more marrows.

So what’s the best way to cook a giant vegetable?! In my opinion, you’ve got to STUFF it!

In the past, I’ve stuffed aubergines and a butternut squash but this year it was the turn of the marrow

The idea is simple, these giant marrows have such a delicate, almost sweet and creamy flavour that nothing could match it better than a savoury mince topped with a creamy cheese sauce.

What makes this meal such a family favourite, is just how easy it is to prepare, how easy it is to get veg into fussy eaters, and how a giant marrow can easily make 4 perfect portions.

Top Tip: this recipe can easily be made vegetarian by replacing the beef mince with either a veggie substitue or lentil, like in my lentil lasagna. 

Warm Salad Series: Chicory and Fennel Salad with Balsamic Glaze

This is the fourth warm salad in this series. The first week of the series I posted a recipe for a Grilled Nectarine and Goats Cheese Salad, the second saw my honeyed figs with mozzarella and cured ham salad.

Three weeks after this series started, I’m posting a salad where all of the ingredients are griddled together, including the leaves – the warmest of all of the salads yet.

The salad leaves used in this recipe are chicory. This can be bought in most good supermarkets. Its leaves are firm and crisp which means it stands up to the heat of a griddle-pan really well!

For the best results, this salad should be griddled on a high heat, so that the ingredients begin to blacken adding extra flavour!

For the full recipe see below.