Happy Birthday to Me!

Hello!

I'm still alive... And in India...

I can't upload any photo's at the moment...

But for my 20th Birthday I'm having a dessert day!

I've made fusion Indo-Greek Honey Pie with paneer instead of ricotta. And Frisbee Red Velvet Cake, which will later be re-incarnated as Christmas Frisbee Trifle! We had pancakes and fruit salad for breakfast. And later today I plan to make an Indian favourite - Rose Falooda!

Photo's and recipes on my return...

Merry Christmas all!

Much love, Kat

XO

Sinful Chocolate, Pecan and Bourbon Pie

On the day I turned 16 and a half, my Daddy presented me with a beautiful book by Alice Medrich - it's all about how to cook with higher percentage cocoa/higher quality chocolate while preserving that gorgeous chocolate flavour and enhancing the subtleties of the chocolate or cocoa used... Needless to say, I LOVED it! And still do...

The following recipe for Sinful Chocolate, Pecan and Bourbon Pie is adapted from that gorgeous book...

A disappointingly blurry photo of the pie with a dollop of french vanilla ice-cream...

Unfortunately this photo doesn't do the pie any justice AT ALL... It's amazing - crunchy toasted pecans, smooth chocolate binding and smokey bourbon pastry that somehow manages to retain that alcoholic tang despite baking... Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! This pie is to die for!

-- Just as an aside, I'm off to India in a couple of days... I'm not sure how reliably I'll be able to blog while I'm  away - I'll do my best! But fear not, I'll back in full swing for the New Year... In the mean time, I hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday Season and an exceptional New Year, Love from Kat--

Recipe follows the jump... (trust me, you want to read this one!)

Marvellous Miscellaneous Muesli

I'm not a huge fan of breakfast - I eat it because I have to - energy and metabolism and all that, but I rarely want to eat breakfast first thing in the morning...

As such, I have to "trick" myself into eating - by making the food more interesting! Pancakes or scrambled eggs... Most recently Muesli has been doing the trick for me! In preparation for emptying the cupboards to make room for the housesitter - I suggested that I make muesli to use up some of our left over bits... As such, the following is not so much a recipe as a set of guidelines or suggestions...

Cottage Cheese Loaf

This is a surprisingly tasty little number... I'm never really keen on the idea of Cottage Cheese Loaf, but I'm old enough now to remember that I actually quite enjoy the reality of it...

OM NOM NOM... Oh Shit! Blog! Quick! Photo! Yeeeah... This is the Cottage Cheese Loaf when served with a Spicy Tomato-Mushroom Sauce and Cauliflower/Spinach Cheese...

This is a quick and easy meal full of protein... Originally it was designed to be a "loaf" but I've discovered that loaf cooking is NOT one of my strong points... And so I bake mine as more of a cake-type thing... Still tastes good though!

It tastes better than it looks - I promise!

I'm always promising people that it'll taste better than it looks - and people are always pleasantly surprised to find I'm right (Of Course! I'm always right! Except for when I'm not...)! The best thing about Cottage Cheese Loaf is that it's a blank canvas - You can add to it what ever you like - I haven't gotten any further than my secret ingredient - Nutmeg and a delicious tomato based sauce, but your only limit is your imagination!

Recipe after the jump...

Chicken Parma-Leftovers

Take a photo! Take a photo! Quick! Before I start eating...

I'm at home now... No longer Chef-Extraordinaire for a flat of four... But now the unemployed daughter of two fantastic parents who sometimes allow me into their kitchen to cook tea or bake (see Chocolate Chip Cookies) and create general havoc...

The Family and I are soon off to Auckland, Hong Kong and finally India... I imagine that posts will decrease around that time as I'll be busy relaxing... But with any luck photo's and remembered recipes will be available to occupy me and entertain you in the New Year.

As I said... Off to India we go! But before we can leave the fridge, freezer and pantry all need cleared of their perishables and to create room for the house-sitter and his wares. Thus, with a little imagination you have Chicken Parma-Leftovers it came out fairly well, I thought... Using up a tin of tomato sauce, some chicken breasts from the freezer, and a little left  over parmesan... I crumbed the chicken in corn-meal with visions of a cruchy shell giving way to moist, flavourful chicken... Alas the corn-meal didn't live up to my imagination, but the chicken was beautifully tender and moist! I think, that if I had only fried and never baked the chicken, I'd've got the result I was half-heartedly looking for.

Recipe follows the jump.

Chocolate Oat Spice Cookies

Finally!!! Something I've baked and posted in not just the same year, or just in the same month,  and not only in the same week but one the very same day!!! Yay me!

Aaand it's sweet... Aaand it's chocolately!! And it's so totally amazing that I'm all but going to refer to this little creation of mine as the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Everrr... But I'm not going to say that. 'Cause you have crisp cookie people and cakey cookies people and bite-sized cookie people and GINORMOUS cookie people and it's simply impossible to please them all! I fall into the "Dude, if it's got chocolate - it's gonna be AWESOME" catergory... We're easy to please.

This cookie is sort of an adaption from a family friend's recipe... But by the time I've halved the sugar, reduced the butter, increased the vanilla, removed the salt (I use salted butter...), changed the type of flour called for (and the oats), and added cocoa and a substansial amount of nutmeg... I think I can just about call it my own... Don't you?

I secretly feel that these cookies are almost healthy what with the dark chocolate, rolled oats, wholemeal flour and  reduced sugar/butter content... But that might just be wishful thinking!

Here the are:

The Best-Ever Chocolate Chip Cookies, According to Kat

Don't they just look gorgeous?

Recipie follows the jump...

Greek: Cheat

Back to online shopping fiascos... This one week I'd orderd a half kilo of pork steak so that I could make beautiful souvlaki for my flatmates... But they only showed up with 200 grams! Gah! Luckily I had a little pork schnitzel left over... Enter:

 Greek Marinated "Stir-Fry" on Cheat's "Greek Spinach Rice"...

Complete with Lemon Pip...

The original recipe comes from AboutFood.com - a brilliant website, everyone should have it bookmarked! And the rice recipe is inspired by a book we have at home, but this particular Cheat is all me!

Recipes follow the jump...

Kat Style Oven Fries

I'll be the first to admit that my homemade oven fries need a little work... I can never make them just the way I want! But... other people seem to enjoy them and you can tweak the recipe until it works for you... Although when it does you simply MUST let me know!

I serve my fries with burgers, chicken-fried steak, beef steak, cheese and chilli, fish... They're super useful! :)

Until then... the recipe for Kat Style Oven Fries follows the jump...You'll need:

"Tandoori" Chicken Burgers

What ended up being dinner for two!

When I started writing this blog - all of a month ago, I'd planned on it being full of gorgeous dessert-y things... The yummy sweets that I love! As it turns out, students have neither the time nor the funding to bake goodies and prepare dessert. That and I live with a house load of salt-cravers... Only my gorgeous boyfriend is a sugar lover like me... And even then he's mostly exclusive to chocolate! :)

What students do eat, however is dinner... Lots and lots of dinner! Believe it or not, this was another cupboard scraping recipe... With the tandoori paste left over from a vegan curry I like to make, and the yoghurt I didn't use in the tzatziki! The chicken surfaced from the freezer...

The recipe for Kat's Tandoori Burgers follows the jump...

Spanokopita - Kat's FAVOURITE!!!

OM NOM NOM!!! Spinach is my favourite food! This recipe is not a traditional Greek recipe, as it uses Savoury Short Crust pastry instead of the more difficult, traditional Filo (Phyllo) pastry... Furthermore this time 'round I was short on Feta - so I've added a little salted cottage cheese to make it go further! Note the reference to salted cottage cheese - I once tried to make Spanokopita with cottage cheese and no added salt, it was BLAND! I think that, in theory, cottage cheese should work as a Feta substitute



Clockwise from top left: steamed spinach and asparagus, last night's left over veggies (not shown: aioli for veggies), dinner plate soon to be filled, classy Spanokopita with a bow tie, tzatziki - Greek, garlic and cucumber yoghurt sauce...

The recipe for Kat-Esque Spanokopita follows the jump...

Orange, Coconut, Evapourated Milk Cake

So the trimester is coming to an end... Exams are looming, study is being avoided and Kat is inventory-ing the cupboards trying to work out how to use what's left lingering without having to buy in more...

Hmmm... now, I have a tin of evaporated milk. I can remember that I bought it for a recipe but that I never got around to using it... But now, not only can I not remember which recipe it was for, but looking through my books I can even work out which recipe it might be.

Pair this with some yummy home-grown oranges that my Mummy sent me back to Wellington with at the beginning of this term... They were delicious until they got to the point where they were too rip for Kats to eat... I'm real picky about fruit, unfortunately!

Chuck in some Google searching and this is what you get...

The finished product: a four layer Orange, Coconut and Evaporated Milk Cake with Orange Curd Cream filling/frosting drizzled with 85% Cocoa Solid Chocolate to cut the sweetness.

There wasn't anything out there that exactly replicated what I wanted, so I had to do some creative developing of my own... But the results were pretty spectacular, if I do say so myself...

Not bad for a cake made out of cupboard scrapings!

Recipe after the jump...

Cocoa Fudge Cake

Here's a recipe from Joanne Fluke's murder mystery The Carrot Cake Murder. I whipped this up the other night during a "study" break. All I changed was to halve the amount of sugar called for and increase the cooking time a little while preserving the cake's fudgy goodness!

Best served warm, and reheats brilliantly. I haven't tried it, but I can see this cake working brilliantly with a little Greek yoghurt to cut the sweetness.

Sitting in a puddle of liquid cream.

Recipe after the jump...

04/08/14: Edit, clarified mixing instructions!

A Bit About Me...

^^ This is me! :)

Hi...

So, no food this time per se... But a little bit about me, and my plans for this here blog...

First off...

Kat + food = LOVE!

That said, I'm more interested in preparing and presenting food than I am in eating it...

However, the following are my favourite flavours:

SWEET

1. Lemon
2. Chocolate
3. Vanilla

SAVOURY

1. Lemon
2. Basil
3. Nutmeg

Saturday Roast...

OM NOM NOM... Roasted anything is among my flat mate's favourite food!

This is my Greek-Style Roast Chicken! I sorta developed the recipe myself - using Greek-ish flavours... :) Lemon, oregano, olive oil and salt!

Before Carving!

After cooking, and eating... You can boil up the carcass to make stock. I didn't to that this time, because I'm (hopefully) moving out soon...

I cook the chicken in water to keep it moist, and then the gravy is easy!

Recipe after the jump...

Bruffins - Breakfast Muffins

Hey y'all... So I'm still typing up recipes for which I have photo's (ie recipes that I didn't exactly make recently... *looks guilty*) BUT I prototyped a recipe for fish pancakes the other night - to use up some of that frozen fish... And it worked out pretty Okay. So, I'm a gonna make 'em again to make sure it wasn't a fluke, then I'll post the recipe!

Between now and then - here's another recipe Modified By Kat:

Bruffins!

 Yeah, sorry for the world's brurriest photo...

These are blueberry, banana, peach muffins. I cooked 'em for breakfast 'cause I'm not a big fan of eating in the morning... However, it is real good for you! I've since discovered - through experimentation that protein keeps me going better than carbs... but for those of you who just need to eat SOMETHING these'll work out fine! Now, these are modified - the original recipe is here to give credit where credit is due! :)

Recipe after the jump...

Something Fishy This Way Comes

Right. So. I do my shopping online. I do this because we don't have a flat car (and I can't drive anyways) and carrying a week's worth of food for five people ANYWHERE is totally beyond me! Usually this works out fine. Sometimes though, it doesn't. The latest adventure in Kat's Shopping Online Saga involves fish. Lots and LOTS of fish. I ordered 500g... They show up with 1.5kg. WTH am I supposed to do with 1.5kg of fish?! So... I phone the most knowledgeable person on Earth (that I know) my Mother. (aka "Mummy") She says I can freeze it. Yay! But that it'll go dry... Bother. Oh well! That's a something for Future Kat to worry about... For now though, I'll scrap my  plans for "Home-Burgers" (homemade hamburgers) and make Kat-Style Fish Burgers and Chips instead!

(Yes, I know... You totally can't see it... But there IS a piece of fish in there! I was hungry... This is the only photo I took...)

Right, so the recipe for Kat-Style Fish Burgers is fairly similar to that of my previous post for Fish Pitas... Only with bigger bits of fish... Onwards and Upwards!

Recipe after the jump...

An Introduction to a Blog and to Dinner

Right, so... I feed my flat of three boys and two girls... That means I've gotta try and find a balance between that which is filling, and sustaining for the boys and that is also tasty and healthy for us girls! Further more, I've recently been going to this BodySense workshop (check 'em! http://sites.yellow.co.nz/site/oceanhealth/) which is helping to clear up some common misconceptions about women's health and their bodies...

SO baring all this in mind, I present to you my first ever recipe. Lemon, Rice and Fish in Pita Pockets. This is adapted from  Jo Seagar's recipe as printed in her book Lip Smackin' (http://joseagar.com/store/books/lip-smackin).



Here goes:

Kat-ified Lemon, Fish and Rice Pita Pockets

Recipe after the jump...

Study Food...?

Hi, so I'm Kat... 19 year old Psychology student, and flat chef extraordinaire... That's right, I feed four of my flat mates, 3 boys and a girl. And me. It can be a MISSION... But I really do love 'em...


Anyhow I'm hoping to write my food oriented blog about food for students, affordable for students, by a student. Accompanied (in theory) by hopelessly amateur photo's... We shall see. Knowing my record, this may well be a short lived fad... =S


Time now, for this student to hit the sack... Beauty sleep and brain rest etc...


Tata!