Dear Diary

All the ingredients for a year of successful cooking!

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Not cookery but it's certainly yummy. Went to Cloud 23 for fancy (expensive) cocktails last week. This was called Tart in the City. It's a sophisticated take on the very unsophisticated pudding of my school days - Manchester tart. The little thing on top was a lovely little custard-y miniature tart.

For the uninitiated, a Manchester tart is a pastry case with a layer of jam covered with a thick baked custard and topped with coconut. When I was at school, they didn't put any coconut on it, they substituted it with chocolate sprinkles. And the custard was really bright yellow. I didn't like it then but I'd definitely have this cocktail again.

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Back to the Biting Biting book today. This is a super-quick and easy Store Cupboard Tin Shaak. Took less than 20 minutes to prepare and is designed to work with whatever tins you have in the cupboard. I used Kidney beans, baked beans and coconut milk but other suggestions include chickpeas, chopped tomatoes, flageolet beans, as well as frozen spinach or sweetcorn.

Despite plenty of spices, it's got a very mild flavour but I've got leftovers to keep for lunch tomorrow so hopefully the flavour will improve overnight. Overall it's a good recipe to have in your back-pocket for when you've not got much in, plus it's filling and low fat so that's definitely a win.

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The other new cookery book that I got for Christmas was Nadiya Hussain's Everyday Baking. Today I made what she calls "Sicilian meatloaf".

There's nothing Sicilian about it though. The sauce is created by tomato soup with seasoning and a couple of tins of butter beans and the topping is a mixture of ketchup and brown sauce.

It's... eh, okay I guess. I'll finish it up but I won't make it again. Needs so much more seasoning I think and to use passata instead of soup!

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This blog is seven years old today. It's been rather neglected but due to things going on in my life I've the past 3 years, I rather lost enthusiasm for cooking. But Xmas brought me a couple of new cookery books so here we are again with an attempt to get cooking again.

One of the books is "Biting Biting" by Urvashi Roe - snacking Gujerati-style. Lots of delicious things to try. I've started out with something easy that takes minimal prep and uses mostly everyday items. This is Bhel. It's a chickpea and potato salad with a tamarind dressing. It's topped with a handful of bombay mix for crunch and a drizzle of fresh coriander and green chilli chutney.

I was worried that the chilli would be too much in the chutney but actually that's what lifts the whole dish with its freshness whilst the chickpeas and potato add substance so I'm eating it as my main meal, not just a snack. Definitely one to make again.

[weirdchristmas]

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I don't know why but so many of these Christmas cards make me want to cry a bit.

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I made a no-knead loaf today. Super quick to make and the texture was much better than I expected. A bit more spongy than a usual loaf but not at all dense which is what I was worried about. The recipe was for a Grant loaf if you want to look it up.

I usually buy a nice seedy wholegrain loaf but I was so stressed with shopping under the distancing rules that I forgot to pick one up and I certainly wasn't going to pop out to pick one up 😐

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Bought a candy bento kit from the Japan Centre. You mix the powders with water to create the different coloured candy. And then you're ultimately disappointed by your lack of artistic ability. Tastes exactly as you'd expect.

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Christmas day leftovers. Mash, sprouts, carrots and stuffing fried together with a lot of homemade cranberry sauce. Doesn't look pretty but tastes very good.

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So I made Mango Pudding yesterday. I adore mangos but I've never made the pudding. There are heaps of recipes online but after having a look through them I kind of busked it to make use of the ingredients I'd got. The leaf gelatine packet said 4 sheets would set a pint so I let the sheets soften in 200ml of cold water. I measured the amount of puree from my 2 mangos and that also came to roughly 200ml (yes I'm mixing my metric and imperial but the packet was in imperial and I work in metric). Then I made up the rest of the liquid using half a pot of leftover double cream and an old tube of condensed milk from the back of the cupboard. The rest of the difference was made up with normal semi-skimmed milk. Warmed the milk/cream mixture to get the condensed milk to combine and then added the warmed and dissolved gelatine before finally mixing in the puree. Couple of hours in the fridge and hey presto I've got yummy Mango Pudding. And best of all nobody else in the house likes mango so I get to eat it all myself. It filled 7 ramekins!

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I've moved onto a savoury cookery book because that last one was just too much sweetness. I picked this book up off my mother's shelf some months ago because I was looking for easy meals for tea. I think she got this when I was a teenager - and there are some rather old-skool dishes. So I decided to go with that and made a soufflé. Ham and cheese soufflé. It really puffed up so hey I've achieved it but it's still just cheesy fluffy goo with ham in it... I'll be making another one pot of stodge later this week...

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Peanut butter ice cream! It's scrummy! And what's even better is that it's no-churn so you don't need an ice-cream maker. And it's super simple and quick to make. Just don't consider the calories... Mix 400g tin of condensed milk with 150g of smooth peanut butter (I also added 100g bag of chocolate chips for texture but you could add some chopped salted peanuts for that sweet-salty vibe). Then whip 500ml double cream until stiff and fold into the peanut butter mixture. Pop into a tub and freeze for at least 6 hours and enjoy 😍

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By the way, anybody want some marmalade? I've still got a couple of jars left from earlier in the year....

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Well a week of Nigella has led me to the conclusion that there is a gulf between how tasty a dish looks on a TV show and how tasty it is when you make it for yourself 😕 I did also make some banana muffins yesterday but I haven't taken a photo because I changed the recipe so much that I couldn't really claim it was Nigella's anymore. They were really nice though! This week's cookery book is one that I bought over a year ago because I was intrigued by the no-cook premise but I've never made anything in it. A lot of the recipes use bought biscuits or sponge that you put together with chocolate, butter-cream etc to make something fancy but they don't really appeal and a lot of the recipes look over-sweet and sickly. We'll see how it goes this week and then I'll probably put it to the back of the shelf and never look at it again!

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Although I've been lukewarm about the first couple of dishes I cooked from Simply Nigella, I didn't think anything could go wrong with my next choice - Sweet Potato Macaroni Cheese....but the problems were mostly my fault. Firstly the supermarket only had white sweet potato (why? who knows) so it didn't get the nice orange colour and the flavour wasn't as strong. Secondly I don't think I seasoned it enough. I'm not a huge fan of Mac'n'Cheese because I find it bland usually and this wasn't much more exciting. But the rest of the family ate it happily so that's a win. Will probably make again but season more thoroughly. It's a good way to sneak veg into food.

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Today I made Nigella's Thai noodles with prawns and cinnamon. Bit of an oddity this. Just a bit too cinnamon-y really. A bit more soy, ginger and garlic flavour and a bit less warm spice needed (star anise and ground cloves also added). Also, the portions weren't huge - we used extra noodles and prawns compared to the recipe and it still wasn't filling. Not one to make again. Photo looks odd because it was steaming hot!

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Not posted for a while. Strictly following recipes starts to turn into a chore but I was sat here last week looking at all my many recipe books and to be honest I've hardly made anything from most of them. So to keep my interest I'm going to cook from a different book each week. This week is Simply Nigella. I decided to really go with the simple idea and made myself Strapatsada - a Greek dish of tomatoes and eggs, scrambled together and finished with some sharp crumbly cheese (Wensleydale in this case). My tomatoes were orange, not red, hence the odd colour. And it didn't make as much as I expected but enough for me on a couple of slices of toast. It didn't wow me at first but it grew on me so I might make it again.

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Been making myself some healthy low-sugar snacks today. As you can see I've just finished roasting some chickpeas with spices and I also made bread soldiers spread with marmite and sprinkled with parmesan, baked until crisp. I've prepared my lunch for the next couple of days at work as well so I'm all sorted. I've managed to avoid sugar mostly this week although I slipped up slightly. I was congratulating myself on not having one of the doughnuts for the birthday celebrations when I realised I was blithely coating my pizza crusts with a sugar-laden garlic and herb dip... it's sneaky stuff that sugar.