Taste & Create: Ginger Cake Cookies

Hmmm... I'm just a tad late with this month's Taste & Create... But, better late than never, right?

This month I was paired with Debbi of Debbi Does Dinner... Many of her recipes are aimed at being low-calorie - with a few naughty treats thrown in! :)

After much thought, I settled on Debbi's recipe for Ginger Cookies... and, after a little tinkering of my own - this is what I came out with:

Ginger Cake Cookies

Now, I named these ginger cake cookies because I substituted Debbi's 3/4 cup of vegetable oil for 150g of melted butter - this resulted in a cake-ish textured cookie - if you'd prefer more of a ginger snap go ahead and use the original oil.

The porous hardness of these cookies makes
them great for dunking!

Further alterations I made were to halve the amount of sugar called for - and to use brown, rather than white sugar. It'd be interesting, I think to experiment with relying only on the treacle/molasses for sweetness in these cookies... Another change was to substitute Debbi's molasses for treacle - because I didn't have any... To make these more student store-cupboard friendly, you could probably further substitute the treacle for the more common golden syrup...? Maybe. My final alteration was to the spicage used... Debbi recommends 1 tsp of ground ginger and 1 tsp of ground cinnamon within the cookie... I put 2 tsps of ground ginger into the cookie and used the cinnamon to spice the sugar the cookies were sprinkled with/rolled in before baking. But spice is such a personal thing - I encourage you to do with it what best suits your tastes! Oh! And I also chucked in a cup of wholemeal flour and one white instead of two white...

Overall - these were tasty little morsels they remind me somewhat of my favourite "Honey Biscuits" which I must post some time... Even if I don't make them again (my love of ginger has yet to completely mature...) I'm sure my Mummy, who was quite taken with them, will...

Below is my tinkered with recipe - for the original see Debbi's site!

Student Food: Beef Wellington?!

I've done it. I'm a genius. I deserve a medal. And a million dollars. Or, at least to have my student loan paid off... But then again, that's kinda the same thing as a million dollars anyway... (not to blow my own trumpet, or anything... I am, of course very, very modest - I take after my mother!)

"My gosh!" you say... "What has she done?!" you ask...

Well. Well. I've taken that gorgeous, delicious, expensive Beef Wellington and made it affordable! Without losing any of the taste!!! (Yes. Three exclamation marks are necessary...)

The issue behind real Beef Wellington, by and large is that beautiful, expensive cut of beef fillet... Ouch! Here, I've replaced it with Bolar Beef. Now, because Bolar Beef has a reputation of being somewhat temperamental: sometimes tender, sometimes tough - I cooked it all the way through in a low oven before wrapping it in pastry. This resulted in a slightly drier Beef Wellington than truly ideal - but the theory now is: trade rump for bolar and cook as per normal, should be fine! :) Yum!

Joshee's: with hassel backed potatoes and carrots...

and from the inside:

Mine: with steamed broccoli and cauliflower...

Not super juicy, but real tender and tasty!

Read on for the revolutionary recipe.... :)

Kat/Nigella's Blood and Guts Potatoes

As a follow on from my last night's post, and as requested by my friend Stevo... My version of Nigella's Blood and Guts Potatoes...

Mine are a little different't from Nigella's because "three ghost white balls of mozzarella" just ain't happenin' in this Kiwi student's flat! But small cubes of ordinary Edam do sort of afford you a "kind of intestinal goo" although, I imagine, to a lesser degree than good ol' mozza would... Oh well! Marines Kiwis make do!

BooYah! I totally loaded this @ Uni, y'all!
Sooo... it's not the world's prettiest food item, but it sure is tasty!

Despite the desperate lack of mozzarella, these make a tasty potato side with an unfortunate tendency to distract me from the fact that I'm technically avoiding starchy carbs right now... Still, half a potato never hurt anyone, right?

Any left over filling can be mixed with an egg and baked in a tinfoil cup for your boyfriend's lunch the next day - just be sure to write his initials in tomato sauce on the top!

RWW: A Nigella Meal!

(Wednesday, Sunday... same diff, right?)

So... It was coming up to tea-time and I was watching my Nigella DVDs. More specifically, I was watching my 'Nigella Feasts' DVD - Fun Food where she discusses making awesome food for children and then naming said food items "Blood and Guts Potatoes" or "Slime Soup" - how's a girl to resist, I ask you?!

Being that I had no specific plans for tea yet (woops...) I allowed Nigella to guide me - and I created a delicious (though I do say so myself...) Nigella inspired meal. There were three components to this meal, and I'm rather proud of them - so I'm going to post the recipes separately but for now here's an image:

Clockwise from top: Blood and Guts Potato, Oatmealy Chicken Nuggets and Sesame Orange Salad...

Real World Wednesdays:Chicken Soup

There are two reasons that this post is currently going image-less and neither of them is "because Kat was too hungry/lazy/forgot to take a photo" they are a) I'm at Uni and Uni doesn't like uploading photo's for me... and b) my flat internet is down to dial up speed. This, in NZ is not a rare occasion, unfortunately. In New Zealand the interwebs SUCK!!!

Also. Google Chrome can't spell "Zealand" just FYI...

So, in honour of RWW (and just to prove that I can stick with something for more than one week) I took a photo of my dinner even though it was made in a rush and is not particularly exciting... Real, honest student food then!

Chicken Soup. I blended mine with a stick-blended because clear broth with floaties freaks me out no end! I also chucked some bacon in - because it was there. The bacon gave the soup a faintly smokey smell and after tasted. Joshee (boyfriend) said it tasted like "soup" but that he was please with me for making him eat soup because it's not so bad after all... Or words to that effect!

There was also a chilli in this soup. Gave the soup some bite. And a litre of store-bought chicken stock because a) it was on special when I bought it and b) I hadn't gotten around to stripping the chicken carcass of meat yet (and by "I", I mean Joshee...) because I wanted to put that meat into my soup!

Steamy, hot, and screaming "Delicious!"

So read on for a set of guidelines to make your own 60-Minute Chicken Soup...