10 of my favourite online recipes

I have recipes everywhere. In cookbooks, scribbled on pieces of paper, cut out from magazines and bookmarked online and then there’s the ones that just exist in my head. I subscribe to a ton of food blogs through Google Reader which I look over while I down my morning coffee. My favourite food blogs currently have to be:

– Joy The Baker – the mother of all baking food blogs
– The Pioneer Woman Cooks – delicious cowgirl food
– The Pink Whisk – previous runner-up of Great British Bake Off, step my step recipes and techniques
– Food Stories – makes food you really want to eat. Also has a separate sandwich rating blog
– Domestic Diva M.D – super entertaining with recipes too
– A Cozy Kitchen – awesome food photography and recipes

I’ve just been dribbling over the home pages of these whilst retrieving the links for you. Anyway, I find that subscribing to blogs is a great way of coming across yummy new recipes which you won’t find on websites like BBC food although they are great go to’s for recipes as well. Thanks to satellite television, I can also watch recipes being made at almost any hour of the day. And with the invention of Pinterest I can also be constantly looking at pictures of food. Frankly, it’s enough to make you fat.

Another great online tool is Delicious which is where I keep all my bookmarked recipes. You can tag links as you like and since they’re all stored on the web, you can access your bookmarks anywhere from any device. I have almost 500 recipe links saved and unlike a chef’s cookbook, all of the recipes are things I know I’ve seen and liked. Here are 10 of my favourite recipes which are available online and that I’ve previously bookmarked, cooked, eaten and LOVED then cooked, eaten and LOVED again!

1. Nigella’s Mexican Lasagne

A recent addition that’s already been made and enjoyed a few times! Absolutely scrumptious and innovative recipe which uses flour tortillas to create a Mexican lasagne. I adapt the recipe my adding beef mince before the canned tomatoes but the unadulterated recipe is great for vegetarians.

2. Joy The Baker’s Polenta

I’d never ever heard of adding milk to polenta until I’d seen this and now I always make it this way. Plus I love using American cup measures – so much easier.

3. Heston’s Ultimate Mashed Potato

There aren’t many Heston Blumenthal recipes you can make on a regular basis but here is one! I think I’ve mentioned this recipe at least twice on my blog already but it… is… goooooood! I don’t have a thermometer or a potato ricer (family take note, Christmas is coming :-)) but I can still make this easily. The amount of butter required is a little alarming, but one taste and you know it’s worth it.

4. Ottolenghi’s Vegetable Paella

Another vegetarian recipe which I’ve made meaty by adding fried chorizo in at the end! Great served with some olive bread and a platter of Manchego and Serrano ham.

5. BBC Good Food Chicken Cacciatore

A really quick and inexpensive midweek recipe of chicken in a tomato and mascarpone sauce. The simple sauce is tasty over pasta too.

6. Delia’s Dhal Curry

Super cheap, healthy and vegetarian (I haven’t added meat to this one!) recipe for a dhal curry. Mr B. even liked it despite the lack of meat which means it must be a good recipe. You can add a Nann bread on the side if you want to.

7. Antony Worrall-Thomspon Goat’s Cheese and Roasted Vegetable Terrine 

Unlike Antony I don’t thieve the cheese from my local Tesco to make this! A really nice make-ahead recipe which works well as a dinner-party starter. Looks pretty impressive when served as well.

8. Nigella’s Mustard Pork Chops 

Really easy and cheap midweek meal. I use honey mustard instead of wholegrain as I found that a bit too strong in taste. Goes really well with the gnocchi that Nigella recommends as well as some buttery spinach… which I recommend!

9. Joy The Baker’s Pull Apart Cinnamon Bread

I mean, just look at it! You’re in trouble of eating your laptop screen aren’t you? I’ve made it. It was amazing. When I went to bookmark it on a social media site, I saw that 2 million others had done so before me!

10. Lorraine Pascale’s Honeycomb

Simples. Tasty. Versatile. The recipe works every time.

Happy bookmarking and cooking.

Butternut Squash and Ricotta stuffed Cannelloni topped with Chestnuts

Leaves on the ground. Check. Temptation to put the heating on. Check. Getting darker earlier. Check. Urgent need for comfort food. Check. Yep, it’s autumn.

As the nights draw in, I love filling my cupboards with pasta, chocolate and cans of soup whilst also making sure there’s plenty of red wine in the rack too. Oreo cookies washed down with Malbec is a great supper when it’s too cold to venture out for supplies! :-)

Seriously though, here’s a scrummy autumnal recipe that will hopefully make you feel all warm inside… and full as well!

Butternut Squash and Ricotta stuffed Cannelloni topped with Chestnuts 
Serves 2

Ingredients
– 1 butternut squash
– 2 tablespoons olive oil
– 1 tablespoon of thyme leaves picked
– 100g Ricotta cheese
– 2 large handfuls of finely grated Parmesan
– ¼ whole nutmeg, finely grated
– Cannelloni (8-10 tubes)
– 150ml white wine
– 150ml double cream
– 1 clove of garlic, crushed
– Packet of vac-packed Chestnuts

Method
1. Preheat oven to 200°/Gas Mark 6/400°F. Peel and dice the butternut squash. Put into a bowl with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and a tablespoon of picked thyme leaves. Season and mix well before turning out onto an oven tray. Roast for 35 minutes or until tender and golden. Remove from the oven and mash up with a potato masher.  Leave your oven on for baking the pasta later.

2. Mix together 100g of ricotta, 1 large handful of grated Parmesan and ¼ whole nutmeg grated in a bowl. Add the mashed butternut squash, mix everything really well and season to taste.

3. Now get the cannelloni and stuff it with the butternut squash mixture. I used a piping bag without a nozzle to do mine. If you haven’t got a piping bag you can do the old Jamie Oliver trick of using a large sandwich bag with one of the corners snipped off. Any leftover mix can be spread along the sides of your ovenproof dish.

4. To make a creamy sauce to top the pasta, mix the double cream, white wine and garlic together on a low heat. Heat until it has reduced by about half. Season and pour over the filled pasta. Finally scatter over the other handful of Parmesan along with a large handful of roughly chopped vac-packed chestnuts. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the pasta is cooked. Serve with some buttered spinach to compliment the sweetness of the pasta dish. Eat before finding yourself a duvet and hitting the sofa.

Food Miles: Amalfi Coast

I was super excited to be visiting Italy again this summer after a gluttonous weekend in Milan in February.  This time we packed our bags for the Amalfi Coast where the food, people and scenery are completely different from that of Northern Italy. We had already been to Sorrento a whole 7 years ago – eugh getting old – and eaten our weight in Neopolitan pizza, downed with shots of limoncello. This time we stayed in the smaller town of Positano, a little further down the coast.

Soon after arriving we went in search of a lemon granita to cool us down. Amalfi lemons grow all over the coastline and up to the size of footballs. As well as making their way into granita and limoncello there’s also a tasty local dish of grilled mozzarella with lemon leaves where the gooey cheese is perfumed with the lemon from the leaves. Absolutely delicious. After our granita (we liked the stall at the top of the pedestrianised part of town), it was time for a light lunch at La Pergola – a little restaurant on the seafront. We had a great insalata caprese and some arancini filled with a Milanese risotto and served with a rich tomato sauce. Not a bad start to a week away!

The best restaurants are slightly out of town in the hillside village of Montepertuso. Don’t let the out-of-town location put you off though because the restaurants will come and collect you in a minibus and drop you back… for free! You do have to endure the slightly hair-raising ride up the winding mountain roads, swerving Vespas, but it’s worth it for the food at the top. By far the best place we went to was La Tagliata. There’s no menu, just a set price of 35 Euros for an absolute feast. Everything is home grown and so the menu is adapted to what’s in season and to what Mamma and Nonna feel like cooking! After we were seated we were served a welcome bruschetta topped with home grown tomatoes, basil and olive oil. Such a simple dish but with Italian grown tomatoes and basil and local extra virgin olive oil, it’s raised to new delicious heights. Next came an antipasti platter filled with more goodies from the garden – a dish of fagioli beans, chickpeas and peas covered in herbs and oil along with some melanzane parmigiana, a dish of spinach, potatoes and rapa and a plate of homemade ricotta and mozzarella with parma ham. And then comes the obligatory pasta course! We were treated to an assortment of “Nonna’s special pasta”, porcini fusilli, ricotta ravioli and gnocchi. All delicious though naturally very filling and we hadn’t even got to our main course. Eeeek!

The name La Tagliata means ‘cut of meat’ so it’s no surprise that the main course is a full-on meat feast which would probably feed 4, not 2 people! Accompanied by crispy fries and a lovely dressed salad the meat platter overflowed with grilled pork, rabbit, steak, chicken and spicy sausage. It’s a serious case of the meat sweats by the time you’ve finished. The dessert was squeezed in just before we burst – another selection of homemade goodies – an almond cake, profiteer rolls and “Mamma’s cake”. With just enough space for a complimentary limoncello shot, we waddled out and bundled back onto the now very heavy minibus back down to Positano.

Melanzane Parmigiana
Serves 2

Sorry that this is fast becoming an aubergine blog but I can’t help being crazy-obsessed with them. But so are the Italians, so I’m in good company. The Amalfi coast is home to melanzane parmigiana, a layered dish of fried aubergines, passata and cheese which is baked until gooey. Tasty hot or cold, I can’t get enough of it.

Ingredients
– 4 aubergines
– Salt
– 2 tbsps good olive oil or extra virgin olive oil
– 1 clove of garlic, crushed
– 1 anchovy fillet, chopped
– 3 cans peeled plum tomatoes
– Handful of fresh basil
– 12-16 tbsps olive oil
– 150g Parmesan, finely grated
– 1 ball of Mozzarella, chopped thinly
– Small handful of soft breadcrumbs

Method
1. Trim the aubergines and slice them lengthways into 1cm slices.

2. Sprinkle the slices of aubergine fairly generously with table salt on both sides. Place into a colander and leave for 1 hour. This should take the bitterness out of the aubergines and will help them not to absorb too much olive oil when fried later on. After an hour, rinse the aubergines well so they won’t taste salty and pat dry with kitchen towel. Cover and leave to one side.

3. Now it’s time to make the tomato sauce for the Parmigiana. Heat 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil on a medium to high heat. When warm, add in the chopped garlic. Fry for a minute or so which will allow the garlic to give off an aroma but won’t be enough to burn it (which tastes gross). Add in the chopped anchovy along with the tomatoes. Break the tomatoes up best you can with a wooden spoon. When the sauce starts to bubble, turn the heat down to a simmer. Cook like this for 30 minutes. A few minutes before the end of the cooking time, season with pepper (the anchovy will make the sauce salty enough) and tear in most of the basil leaves.

4. While the sauce is cooking, you can start frying the aubergine slices. Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to a frying pan on a medium-high heat. Fry the aubergine slices in batches until soft and golden on both sides. Although salted, the slices will soak up a lot of the oil so you’ll need to add a splash when the pan gets dry and another couple of tablespoons at the start of each batch you are frying. When cooked, set aside on some kitchen towel to drain.

5. Now comes the big build! First, preheat your oven to 190°/Gas Mark 5/375°F. Take an ovenproof dish and place a couple of big spoonfuls of sauce at the bottom. Give a generous scatter of Parmesan on top followed by a layer of aubergines. Keep repeating until the sauce, aubergines and cheese are finished. Arrange the Mozzarella slices on the top of the dish with some remaining basil leaves. Finally scatter over the breadcrumbs and then bake for 30 minutes.

6. If you can, leave it to rest for 15 minutes before serving. I managed to wait for just 5.

The Luther Burger

Never too much, never too much, never too much.

Well, in all honesty, 1 of these kind of was for me! And I blame my good friend Rich. You see Rich is doing something new every day in 2012 for charity and then blogging the results. Some of my favourites over the past 6 ½ months have got to be:

– Chased a duck
– Got chased my geese
– Crossed a ford (and lost his socks)
– Took a bath in a suit
– Ran around his garden, naked, in a snow storm (his wife told me he then caught man flu)

He’s also tried and cooked many new foods and dishes, a couple of which I’ve helped with:

– Made a Herman the German Friendship Cake
– Tried a stinging nettle curry
– Took on the cinnamon challenge (and failed!)
– Made a Celebrations toastie
– Cooked American pancakes with bacon and maple syrup
– Ate a curry cooked in a pineapple

You can read more about his exploits on his blog and make a donation here. You can also suggest something new and crazy for him to do!

A colleague of Rich’s suggested The Luther Burger as something new. The Luther Burger originates from Georgia, USA. It’s so called after Luther Vandross. The interweb doesn’t really confirm why, but it’s thought that he had one. Coming in at a massive 800-1,500 calories a Luther Burger is your standard burger, served in a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Oh Yes. Traditionally, the doughnut is opened and grilled on the inside, then eaten with the glazed side touching the meat, but we preferred ours the other way around.

When Rich suggested this to me, I was up for it. In my mind, it worked. After all, bacon and maple syrup work wonderfully together. Same goes for caramelised onions and barbequed meat. And the Luther Burger does work! It’s very tasty. But I just couldn’t eat a whole one again!

The Luther Burger 
Serves 1 (or 2 if sharing – recommended!)

Ingredients
-1 good quality beef burger
– A slice of burger cheese
– 1 rasher of smoky bacon
– 1 original glazed Krispy Kreme

Method
1. Simply barbeque your burger and stack the cheese and bacon on top.

2. Open the Krispy Kreme and lightly toast the inside on the barbeque.

3. Serve the burger inside the doughnut with the glazed side on top or on the meat, as you prefer. Find someone to share it with you!

Frittata

It’s finally summer in London but as usual it’s too hot. Muggy is an understatement! We can never win, if it’s not muggy it’s raining and often when it is muggy, it does rain and then London becomes one big steam room. Meh.

Anyway, this does actually bring me nicely onto frittata – an Italian omelette that manages to be filling but not heavy and so perfect for eating in the heat with a crispy dressed salad.

The possibilities for frittata fillings are endless and they’re a great go-to when you have vegetables that need to be used up.

Red pepper, Tomato, Spinach and Goats Cheese Frittata 
Serves 2 as a main meal or up to 6 for a lunch/picnic/snack

Ingredients
– 2 tbsps olive oil
– 2 red peppers thinly sliced
– 10-12 cooked new potatoes
– Handful of cherry tomatoes
– 6 eggs
– Handful of spinach
– 8 basil leaves
– 150g tub of mild soft goats cheese
– Salt and freshly ground black pepper
– Rocket dressed in extra virgin olive oil to serve

Method
1. Heat the olive oil in a deep frying pan (I had to resort to my wok as my frying pan is very shallow!). Add the sliced red pepper and fry on a medium heat, stirring occasionally, until it starts to colour nicely.

2. While the peppers are cooking, slice the new potatoes and halve the cherry tomatoes. When the pepper has coloured, add the potatoes and cherry tomatoes to the pan.

3. Crack the 6 eggs into a bowl and whisk really well. Season well before chopping the spinach finely and adding to the eggs. Give it a final good whisk and then add the egg mixture to the pan.

4. Flex the pan around to distribute the egg and spinach evenly. Turn the heat down to low and cook for 10 minutes. Put your grill on.

5. While the frittata is cooking on the hob, scatter your basil leaves onto the top, spoon out goats cheese and dollop that on top as well. Give it another season.

6. After 10 minutes, transfer your pan to the grill in order for the frittata to cook on top. Leave under the grill for 10 minutes. Take out and skewer through the center to check that it’s not overly gooey in the middle. Slice and serve!