Monthly Archives: April 2017

Tarragone

Perhaps I should plan my post titles in advance — that would cut down on the corny, hastily conceived puns

In any case, I made a rather lovely little dish calling itself ‘creamy chicken and tarragon pots with rosemary potato wedges’ (though I just used one big ramekin instead) on Sunday. It mostly went pretty well, apart from some slight inattention on my part causing the leek to get a little burned — not nearly enough to ruin the dish, thankfully 🙂 In spite of this, it turned out pretty darn well — creamy and chickeny and herby and savoury and delicious! I had a fair bit of crème fraiche left over, so I stirred in a good dollop of dried rosemary and a few generous gratings of black pepper and used it up as spread in cheese sandwiches for lunch the next day 🙂

Next up on my to-cook list is spaghetti with prawns and bacon. The recipe in the book calls for tinned clams but after an unfortunate reaction to some tinned mussels a few years ago (maybe allergy, maybe it was just a bad batch) I’m inclined to stick with a known-safe equivalent — in this case, 200g of Co-op frozen prawns ^^ Should be good 🙂

Chicken hunter

That’s what I got when I ran ‘chicken chasseur’ through Google Translate. That’s the name of the recipe I made yesterday — it’s basically a tomato-y chicken stew. I made mine in the slow cooker rather than on the hob, because I wasn’t sure that any of my saucepans would fit all the ingredients. The recipe in the book is pretty veg-heavy, and my making of it was even more so, because I used 2 hefty onions (couldn’t find any shallots) and about 8 sticks of celery that I had left over from last week — yum yum!

I also left out the celeriac mash, because celeriac is pretty high on my list of ‘NOPE’ foods (flavour+texture). I soak up the juices with a decent slice or two of brown bread instead 🙂 Yum yum ^^

Love in a Transit

Geddit? XD

Ehehe…

Okay, so ‘transit’ is a reference to the Ford Transit, also known in various places as a ‘transit van’, and ‘love’… well… ^_^;

Suffice it to say, the title of this post is a slightly raunchy pun on ‘coq au vin’, which I made yesterday in my slow cooker (pun not mine, by the way — it appears in the recipe intro for the recipe I used in HD3, and a very definitely non-diet version under the ‘Love…’ title also appears in the Hairy Bikers’ Twelve Days Of Christmas).

It turned out pretty darn well, even though I goofed at the meat-buying stage. Y’see, the recipe calls for 4 chicken thighs and 4 chicken drumsticks, and my brain decided that drumsticks=legs, forgetting that what my local butcher sells as ‘chicken legs’ is 1 thigh attached to 1 drumstick. This meant that I ended up with, essentially, 8 thighs and 4 drumsticks. I only just managed to fit everything into the slow cooker! It turned out deliciously, though, and I have 5 or 6 portions squirrelled away in my freezer for emergencies ^^

Piri piri prawns

I made some yesterday, except I used ordinary small prawns rather than tiger prawns, and instead of grilling them I mixed them in with noodles and treated the marinade as a sauce. Yum yum! 😀 I also used the zest as well as the juice of two lemons in the marinade, and balsamic vinegar instead of white wine vinegar (for some reason my local Sainsburys doesn’t seem to stock any vinegar at all…)

Apologies for short post, it’s been a fairly chaotic week so I’m low on blog-type inspiration. Better luck next week, eh?

Modena is one of Italy’s wealthiest cities, with a rich cultural heritage. It is easily reached from Emilia Romagna’s food Meccas, Bologna and Parma, and its central cathedral, bell tower, Torre della Ghirlandina, and Piazza Grande have been Unesco World Heritage sites since 1997. It was the birthplace of tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and home to […]

via Modena, city of fast cars, Unesco sites and balsamic vinegar — Diane Seed