Buttons and Bows

I may have mentioned this before... but I'm not a very effective preparer of "simple" dishes... the Great Alison Holst describes the following dish as a "well balanced family dinner which can be cooked in half an hour in one pan"... she neglects to add the bit "unless, of course, you are Kat. In which case this'll probably take an hour and a half several pans a couple of pots and maybe even a little floor-space for good measure. But don't worry! Your flat mates will love it!"

And, inexplicably, they do! This is not my favourite dish ever... but it comes to you highly requested by one of my most favourite people ever... and I aim to please! :)

Even I recognise that this is a very cute dish!

The flavour and sauciness for this dish comes almost entirely from a can of condensed soup - so make sure you pick a flavour you like from a brand you trust! I usually pick mushroom soup and then bulk up the flavour with some combination of; shit-loads of garlic, onion, Worcester sauce, soy sauce, chilli sauce, oregano, mushrooms etc... It's a stone soup type recipe!

The bows are provided by the pasta shape... and the buttons come, ideally from carrots and courgettes... but if, like me you don't have any courgettes to hand make buttons, bows and pearls! Substitute in any veggies you have lying around! Make this dish your own...

You can bulk out the greens with salad, as I did here - but with all the veggies in the dish proper salad isn't a necessary addition to make balanced-ness.

And so Joshee, I have for you (at long last!) the recipe for buttons and bow - enjoy!

Taste & Create: Peanut Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate Peanut Fudge Frosting

Taste & Create is  blogging event I participate in on an (almost) monthly basis... my post a reliably a day or two late... which is a reflection on Life and its tendency to get in the way and my own, blogging laziness - the actual process of reading my partner's blog and planning what I'm going to make is a lot of fun! That's why I keep coming back... that, and I love getting the feedback from someone else trying out my recipes.

So, if you're reading this, and you're a blogger too - you should sign up! The people are really lovely and it's a lot of fun! Also - it forces a person to post at least once a month... encouragement some of us need more than others... *ahem*

This month I was paired with Carol of No Reason Needed... her blog is a combination of food, family and Life - it's a fun and interesting read!

I had planned to make her Chicken Tetrazzini with Crescent Rolls, but I was called into work that day and my mummy made the Tetrazzini sans crescent rolls for me... but I couldn't submit something I didn't make! That would be cheating!

...So I kept on reading... and eventually stumbled across Peanut Butter Cupcakes SOLD!!!

OM NOM NOM!!!

Now, I didn't have any chocolate to melt to make the ganache suggested by Carol's daughter Dakota, so I decided to create my own peanut butter fudge frosting... and wow. Just. Wow. I'll share the recipe for that with you guys too!

Back to the original recipe - I did my best to follow instructions! I did, however make only a third of the recipe which is four cupcakes! The perfect number for two people!

In my thirding - I misread the quantity of baking soda called for and accidentally put in the full amount... I've corrected this for my version down below though... and that is the only factor that spoils these rather delicious cupcakes! I'll be making them again for sure, and I think you should too!

Apple Streusel Inside-Out Cake

This is an amalgamation of two recipes and two ideas... I was asked, by my mother, to make a dessert for a dinner we were having that would use up some apples we had lingering in the fridge. There were only three - so not enough for baked apples... and I didn't feel like making Apple Pie en miniature either... So apple cake? Yeah - I like apple cake. I love the streusel topping! But... I want something more - I want to make it interesting! I know- what about cheesecake/frosting on the inside?!

I combined and played with two recipes to make this one, inside-out cake the first was Catherine Bell's 'Apple Spiced Streusel Coffee Cake' and the second came from a cookbook written by a family friend the recipe was called 'Chocolate Surprise Muffins'. The muffins have a surprise, cheesecakey centre that I recreated for this cake. Which is not, by the way, a diet food. By any stretch of the imagination!

The result was a tasty cake with a delicious, crunchy topping and a surprising, creamy centre - well worth recreating! Though I do say so myself...

Peanut Chocolate Cookies

I looove peanuts! In fact, I looove just about every nut I can think of... :) But peanuts are pretty awesome. Especially because they're affordable even when you're broke. Unlike almonds and macadamias... Snobs.

I wanted to make a really peanut-y peanut and chocolate chip cookie! But I didn't have a recipe that was going to offer what I wanted it to - so I developed my own!

I thought about substituting all the butter from an original recipe for peanut butter - but Google suggested that that wouldn't work... So I subbed half. I also halved the quantity of sugar (surprise!) and made the chocolate chip measurement half chocolate chunks/half salted, roasted peanuts, added in some refrigeration time... and then I made the cookies HUGE!!!

I don't know why I do this. I like crunchy cookies. And I like gooey cookies. But I do not like cakey cookies. I know this. And I also know that taking a "should be" crunchy cookie and making it HUGE will result in a cakey cookie... and therefore I won't looove it... but I find the allure of a ginormous cookie too strong! And have yet to learn to listen to my inner voice which says "Kat. No."... but that voice does seem to know only those two words... so I've learned (learnt?) to drown it out!

In an effort to combat the huge cookies = cakey cookies equation I did refrigerate the dough for about an hour before baking them. Apparently something to do with the butter melting from scratch inside the cookies helps ensure fudginess? Or something... I can't quite remember the mechanics of it all! I think if I hadn't subbed half the butter for peanut butter this may have worked... but as peanut butter isn't famous for its melting properties... gooeyness was not achieved.

The flavour was great, though - so I'd recommend that future cookies are made normal sized and enjoyed two at a time. With milk. All cookies should be enjoyed with milk. :)

P.S. My favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe makes HUGE and gooey cookies... but the amount of butter required is astronomical... and convincing my Mother that making them is a good idea is not an easy task... but watch this space!

Jenny's Famous Chocolate Cake

When I was little... Like 12/13ish I "wrote" a cook book. By "wrote" I mean typed out all my favourite recipes, attached clip art images, printed them off and bound them into books which I proceeded to present to my family and friends as gifts. Copyright infringements were, no doubt, abound - but I never sold the cookbooks nor did I claim to have developed the recipes myself. They were just my tweenage favourites.

Served with chocolate sauce and yoghurt.

Featured in that book was my recipe for Jenny's Famous Chocolate Cake(s) - a delicious cake recipe made in a food processor (or by hand if, as a student, you don't own a food processor) that makes two dark, moist chocolate cakes. Which you can then layer or freeze one for later...

In the photographed image provided I've made the cake with 50% wholemeal flour and some rolled oats for extra fibre/texture but this is not necessary. The chocolate sauce I made is a recipe which comes from Edmonds Food For Flatters.

In my cookbook Katies Kool Kooking (don't ask...), when writing out the recipe I neglected to include sugar at all - instead suggesting that an auxiliary 2 cups of flour would be needed... and I left the cocoa out in it's entirety. The following version of this recipe has only one cup of sugar but it does include that all important half cup cocoa required to make the cake chocolatey...

Sesame Orange Salad

To round off my Nigella Feast... of Chicken Nuggets and Baked, Stuffed Potatoes I now present the accompanying Orange Sesame Salad...

Mesclun  salad leaves with an orange, sesame dressing.

Now this one, is based, very very loosely on Nigella's Garlicky Spinach Tomato Salad, in that I borrowed the idea of using the tomato, or in this case, orange as part of the dressing rather than as part of the salad... beyond that the flavouring, although not an original combination are all mine!

See, when in comes to fruit, I am a fussy bugger, and will only ever really eat it just as it comes into ripeness... drives my mother, and the occasional flatmate, up the wall! As such, I had these oranges that my loving mother had sent me, but I had yet to get around to eating them... when... DUN DUN DUN!!! They became far to ripe for human (read: Kat-line) consumption... but I didn't want to just throw them away - that would be rude! So I decided to take a leaf out of Nigella's... DVD collection?... and use it them to make a salad dressing. But rather than using just the juice - I wanted to use the whole of the flesh - as Nigella did with her tomatoes... mixed with some sesame seeds and oil, and just a hint of fresh grated ginger (*ahem* fromatube) to create a rather tasty salad dressing, though I do say so myself.

Tamy's Beef and "Broccoli" Stir Fry

I love stir-fry! I like all the crunchy veggies, the spiky Asian flavours and the noodles or rice with a hint of dressing... What I don't love about stir-fry is my complete inability to make them! I always... well, to be perfectly honest I'm not sure exactly what it is that I "always" do... but I can promise you that "do a fantastic job" will rarely, if ever, follow when I'm talking about stir-fry...

Stir-fry (if you can do it, which - let's face it, most people can!) is an idea student food - quick, flavourful, healthy and, above all cheap! Very little protein is needed to make stir-fry feel like a meal - even an egg will do in a pinch!

However, I do have some schnitzel kicking around in my freezer, and Tamy of Always Eat On the Good China (who is, once again my partner for Taste & Create this month...) has a recipe for Beef & Broccoli Stir Fry... I haven't got any broccoli, but I do have some beef and a bagful of frozen, mixed veggies... So here goes nothing!

It's ALIIIVE!!! *ahem* I mean, it worked!!!

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!

Real World Wednesdays: Easy Cheesy Breakfast Pizza

So. I've decided to create my very own blog event/challenge for myself. I'm calling it "Real World Wednesdays" (RWW) wherein every Wednesday I will photograph and blog about (@ least) one meal!

The idea behind this is so that I can ensure that a reasonable portion of what eventually ends up here is actually student food! And, so that I actually post once a week or more... because a regularly updated blog is an interesting blog! In theory.

Tonight I'm planning on having Cottage Cheese Loaf so, unless I make the Swedish Cabbage Casserole I'm considering serving as a side - I won't have anything to post on my first ever RWW! And that would be very, very lame. LAME!!!

Yes, yes, I know that if I hadn't told you about my evil-genius plan until next week when I'm probs gonna be eating something I haven't posted before... you'd never know any different. But I would! And I have so many evil genius plans that it's very difficult to remember them all!

LAME!!!

Now I'm just yelling because it's fun... And the high level of italics in this post was/is freaking me out... Yelling seemed like a good way to distract you (me) from it all...

Now I'm confused. Are you confused? Or is it just me...? Oh dear!

*breathe*

Right. So. Easy Cheesy Breakfast Pizza - I eat two eggs for breakfast. EVERYDAY. Except for when I'm at home. Because my Mummy says that two eggs for breakfast everyday is too many and if I want sufficient protein I can have muesli or peanut butter toast. "But Muuummmyyy" I moan "muesli and toast have tooo maaannnyyy caaarbs!" And then I feel bad for being a whingey daughter. But when I'm in my flat I have two eggs. After a while though two plain eggs for breakfast everyday can get a little boring even if they're sometimes cooked differently...

Enter: Easy Cheesy Breakfast Pizza:

Complete with BBQ Swirl!

(Yes, yes I know... BBQ sauce kinda defeats the "healthy" purpose... But it's yummy...

Recipe follows!!!

Indo-Greek Honey Pie

Now, late last year my family and I went to India... Now that the whole trip is just memories. photographs and some pretty awesome souvieners the whole experience seems a little surreal...

Anywho - while I was there it was my Birthday - and I wanted to have a dessert day with all my favourite things... Which, in hindsight is not the greatest idea when you're in a country with amazing local cuisine, but that  you're totally unfamiliar with and doesn't cater too well to adapting western recipes... Hey, hindsight is 20/20...

As testimony to that, I have previously mentioned the Red Velvet Frisbee... We won't go there... On the plus side, I also got out of my dessert day Birthday the amazing Rose Falooda which  is basically one of the yummiest drinks ever and was introduced to me by our host/hostess Geoff and Joanna - Hi! Geoff and Joanna!!! :) Thank-you for having me! Right. Now. Back to point.

Pictured above is my third dessert, and second successful one of the day. I first made this Greek Honey Pie, or melopita last year for a pot luck dinner with my family in my flat - It. Is. AMAZING! I want for it to become my "signature pie"! The recipe, of course, comes from about.com! Naturally, I wanted to make my "signature" pie for my Brthday dessert... Enter: Problem. Ricotta, in India (or at least in Goa) is expensive. Enter: Daddy. Who suggested that I use the Indian cheese paneer, which is readily available, cheap and of a similarish texture...GENIUS! (Hi! Daddy!!!)

This pie is amazing whether you make it with ricotta, paneer or cottage cheese (the student's ricotta)... I haven't really changed the original recipe much, so I'm only going to link y'all to it - because credit where credit's due, and all that - also I think the original blogger gets points every time someone goes to her page, and that's important too.

But I did make two other changes besides the cheese swap. And those are/were to halve the amount of sugar and to use all alcohol in the pastry instead of water as I do...

Aaand that's it!

Yummy! Try it. You know you want to.