Eggs Poached in Marinara Sauce

I'm feeling guilty. For being a bad, naughty not-blogging bloger-er...

I'm at home for the summer/(hopefully) next six months now - but I still have some student goodies to pass on to y'all when I can be bothered... :)

Because, it's not as if I being doing nothing since I left you all with Taste and Create in November... I've been doing all sorts of things!

• reading other people's blogs...
• job hunting, wildly unsuccessfully... anybody looking for a Kat to join their work force out there? I'm a nice person, I promise!
• being entirely too successful with a sourdough bug
• organising my 21st Birthday Party (my actual Birthday falls on a Wednesday this year = not so good for parties...)
• sitting my "summer" paper - I've got a 10/12 average thus far - go me! :)
• trying to convince my boyfriend that catching up with me might actually be fun (varying success on that one...)
• moving and stacking firewood (I tell you, when I grow-up-and-get-rich-and-have-six-houses they will ALL have gas fires! No more bloody fire wood for me!)
• not tidying my room...

See? Lots of things! Just... not blogging.

Fear not! I have for you a revolutionary recipe taken direct from Katie the College Culinarian (she's one of my favourites): Eggs Poached in Marinara Sauce!

This recipe, if, indeed one can really call it a recipe, is so simple, delicious and wonderful that you'll wonder to yourself "...and I didn't come up with this all by myself because...?!" and then you will cook it twice in one week. At least, that's what I did.

The first time I "made" my own marinara sauce - the second time (as photographed here) I used shop-bought sauce but threw in some peas and spinach for greens. Any good, shop bought, tomato based sauce that you can stand eating fairly unadorned would work here... I served it all over pasta to ensure that Master Joshee was able to have his fill.

There is an egg in there, see?

As you may have guessed by the "cook[ed] it twice in one week" this will fast become a staple!

Taste & Create: Chocolate Explosion Oatmeal Cookies

This month for Taste & Create I was paired with Alisa Fleming of Alisa Cooks... Alisa's blog is dairy free, not a realm in which I oft' walk so reading her blog was an interesting experience for me... further more many of her recipes are gluten-, soy-, egg- and/or nut-free... I had a great time perusing her recipes!

Eventually though, I found her recipe for Chocolate Explosion Oatmeal Cookies made with rolled oats, they are vegan, egg-, nut-, dairy- and soy free - therefore they MUST be a health food... and BOY! are they the tastiest health food EVER! :)

Beautiful, glossy, dark brown cookies...

Deliciously gooey in the centre - yes that's a broken-in half cookie... they're light enough to sit a-top a rose petal!

I was so proud of me - I was going to tell y'all about how I finally, finally followed a recipe to the letter! And then I thought about it... and how I:

•  halved the recipe...
• and then I didn't have any ground flaxseed (linseed), so I tried to replace it with wheat germ (apparently you can do that...?) but I didn't have any of that either so I used oat bran instead (I made that alternative up myself)... (ironically, if I'd been at the flat making these I would have been able to use flaxseed as directed...)
• and then I doubled the vanilla called for because we only had essence, not extract...
• and I added just the tiniest pinch of cinnamon a la Laura Vitale...
• and used all coconut cream, rather than coconut flavoured dairy-free milk and olive oil...

So, in the end, I baked like the Kat I am - to my own tune! But the cookies truly are delicious!

I do have one question though - I halved the recipe, but I made the large, 2 Tbsp sized cookies Alisa recommended... a whole 14 of them (after I ate, maybe a cookie's worth of batter... hey! it's egg free, it's all good!)... which begs the question: Have I finally found someone who enjoys eating cookie batter even more than I do? :)

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.

Now I'm Just Showing Off: Callum's Computer Board Birthday Cake

My younger brother Callum is, affectionately, a computer nerd.

For his 18th Birthday this past April, I wanted to make him a computer-styled cake... as I'm a total novice cake decorator a fair amount of artistic licence was employed... but the basic idea was there... and the cake tasted good!

"Cake" in the broad sense of the word - it was in fact 2 layers of brownie and one layer of blondie... From each layer I cut a circle which I then shoved into another layer so that each was two toned:

Milk Brownie into a Blondie layer...

... Dark Brownie into a Milk Brownie layer...

... and a Blondie circle in a Dark Brownie layer.

Yes... I deliberately off-centred some of the circles - I thought that'd make it all look more awesome! :)

Each layer was sandwiched to the next with chocolate, cream cheese frosting - Callum's favourite....

Then - I coated the whole cake with the chocolate frosting, save for the very top which I used green frosting left over from when I made the carrot cupcake I have yet to upload... Woops!

Did I do a crumb coat? No.
Should I have? Probably.

Did I fridge/freeze the cake before frosting? No.
Should I have? Yeeeah... Probably.

Will I do so in future? If I remember...
Does the world end if you forget these steps? Apparently not.

I wanted the top of the cake to look like a computer chip/board... thing. Hence - the green icing... over the green I drew little yellow lines in square-ish patterns with writing icing, I tried to use buttercream, but I had issues... and I made the "connections" out of little silver cachous.

At the centre top, you can see the failed buttercream... but doesn't it look a little computer chip like...? If you don't know what computer chips actually look like... ;)

The chocolate chips around the edge are to hide the join between the brown and green icings.

Finally, around the vertical edge, I used tempered, white chocolate to make the binary number 0100 0011 which is the combination used to denote the letter 'C'... I tempered the chocolate to stop it blooming, and to give it snap - it's not a particularly difficult process... I might go into detail, one-day... maybe... :)

Mad piping skills right there... Not.

Further reason behind the tempering of the chocolate was - I hoped it'd hold up better when I ferried it from waxed paper to cake surface... All in all, I feel it was a success!

This is was the cake looked like from the inside after all that circling and shoving...

The final product - not bad, in my opinion!

Below, at long last I give you the recipe for the brownies... Each layer was played around with a little... next to no (brown) sugar and less butter than the original for the white layer (with extra vanilla), 1/4 as much sugar as called for for the milk layer, half as much sugar and butter for the dark... etc... For once, though, I'm going to share the original recipe... which came from a recipe book written by a family friend, Rosie Mitchell.

At Last! Nigella's Rizty Chicken Nuggets = Kat's Oaty Chicken Nuggets

Do you remember ages, and ages ago... back when I was trying to post regularly what I ate on Wednesday and I posted about a Nigella Feast that consisted of Blood and Guts potatoes, and Orange Sesame dressed salad and oatmeal chicken nuggets...?

Well. The link to the potatoes is above - but that's as far as I got. Today, I will post for you - the Chicken Nuggets!

Not the most beautiful things, are they?

I attribute the pale-ness of these little babies to their oatie coating, and the fact that they were oven baked, rather than deep fried. The first time I made 'em I used crush cornflakes, Nigella uses crushed savoury crackers - both of these mediums make for excellent crunch... Rolled oats, although not crunchy, will do in a pinch! They feel healthier too...

Nigella says that the buttermilk, or in my case - yoghurt, "marinade" makes for a more succulent, tender nibble - I've never tried without the marinade so I can't validate that - but it sure makes the coating easier!

These are tasty little morsels that are easy to make, and will be made in the future. Valid student food too!

Maca-WRONGs

Back when I first started reading blogs - French Macarons were all the rage...


Macarons (not to be confused with coconutty Macaroons) are almond based meringue cookies sandwiched together with buttercream, cream, ganache, dulce de leche, jam... you get the idea! And they are notoriously difficult... As such they come with a variety of rules of how to make... And while making my "MacaWRONGS" I broke nearly every single one of them! Including a few of my own, personal baking rules...


The result - if not tpyical was a tasty, chewy cookie which I layered with hazelnut yoghurt for a classy(ish) dessert...

They don't look too bad, do they?

A list of the rules I broke to come up with these would include, but not be limited to:

• Don't even START to bake these if the weather is humid... it was raining...
• Use ground almonds, preferably shop bought (it'll be drier/less likely to clump) and for God's sake SIFT IT!... I used hazelnuts. I ground them myself (although I did roast them first to improve flavour/dry them out a little) aaand... I couldn't be bothered sifting my ground hazelnuts.
• Use day- to week-old room temperature egg whites... Well, my eggs whites weren't day-fresh (point to Kat!) but - I pulled them out of the fridge, maybe 5 minutes before I started making these...
• Whisk egg whites in a stainless steel bowl - or strengthen them with creme of tartar... There's a scientific reason for using a stainless steel bowl which Mrs. Humble explains best, long story short the medium you should most avoid beating your egg whites in is glass... guess what I used...?
• Pipe out small blobs of the meringue mixture with a piping bag... or use a spoon to make oversized puddles...
• Allow to rest for 30-60 minutes, or until tacky... that's the same as 20 ish minutes, right?

And then I probably didn't bake them for long enough - because, although my cookies did form feet (another point for Kat!) they stayed sticky inside/stuck to my parchment paper...

My own rules that I broke:

• Never, EVER bake in a bad mood... I thought I had failed a paper I'd worked really hard for (it turns out, I didn't actually fail said paper - my lecturer just forgot to add my exam grade onto my final result - thus I was 30% short! But I didn't know this yet... = very, very upset Kat.
• Never, EVER dye food purple the first time you make it... Yeah... I don't listen to me all that often...

Chewy, purple goodness...

The moral of this, rather long-winded, story is that although so many people say that cooking, and baking in particular is a "science" and you have to follow recipes to the letter - I disagree! Have fun with your cooking! Throw in a bit of this, or a bit of that - and see what happens!

I mean, look at me - I took one of the most rigid and difficult recipes on the internet and BUTCHERED (ALL the RULES!) and the result, although not perfect was edible, tasty, even! And I managed to create with it what was perceived as a rather spectacular dessert - I love my family!

I honestly believe that many thing in Life, as well as cooking, are only as difficult as you make them out to be... One day, I'll have to tell y'all how I've been casually making Baked Alaska since the age of 11-12 simply because no-one told me it was supposed to be really difficult...

In the mean time, here's my adaption of Mrs. Humble's Macarons - if you dare! :)

Another Nigella Meal: Roast Lamb for One (2)

We all know now, Kat loves, loves Nigella with a lot of love! - Here I've taken a recipe from her Nigella Feasts series, and adapted it to what I had in the cupboard... The original recipe is available on the Food Network site - there are a few criticisms with regards to the fact that a shank is a lower-quality cut of meat and therefore *should* require long, slow cooking rather than a roast - and that the marinade tends to burn to a crisp... Now, I've made this twice for Joshee and me, and neither times have we had problems (I don't like to post things I wouldn't eat/don't think are fix-able...)! BUT I have come up with a few possible solutions to the problems - just baring in mind that I have no experience with them myself, this is just what I'd do if things went wrong for me...:

• If you're worried about the quality of the meat - try cooking it at, say 150 degrees C, rather than 200 for a little longer... Maybe 2 hours? Cover it with foil if you're worried about the meat drying out!
• For sticky mess - line your roasting tin with foil - I do this for everything! (it makes Joshee's life much easier! ;) - I do the cooking, he does the cleaning - it's an excellent arrangement!)
• To solve both those problems in one step - try roasting your lamb shank(s?) in a roasting bag, marinade and all - I'm not a huge fan of this option, as it tends to make the meat pale and kinda flabby, but I guess if you took it outta the bag for the last half hour or so, to brown up - I imagine you could avoid that issue...

... And that's the end of my help suggestions! :) Here's a picture of what I made:

Roast lamb shank, with potatoes and pea "puree"

See? No problems here! Both times my lamb turned out juicy and flavourful - and it was so exciting to be able to have something as extravagant as roast lamb for as little cost as two lamb shanks - I can never finish mine in one sitting, cue lamb and quinoa salad for lunch!

I serve mine with pea puree, like Nigella does, and potatoes, to keep my Boy happy!