Cooking with Pinterest

I'm happy to admit to being a Pinterest addict, but one of the things I find it truly useful for is recipes. I meal plan, sort of, and I'm always looking for something new, quick and easy to try out. When I find it I pin it, and sometimes I just search Pinterest itself.

This week I picked two new recipes from Pinterest, Brown Rice Greek Salad and Cauliflower Macaroni and Cheese.

The Brown Rice Greek Salad is originally from The Lemon Bowl. I left out the corn, and I'd do that next time too. This one is a definite keeper though. Delicious. And will suffice as a vegetarian meal on a hot day! When it's hot I only want to eat salads, but it's a matter of keeping the whole crew happy too. Which is where the next dish comes in. Pasta.

The Cauliflower Macaroni and Cheese is from Not Quite Nigella. I added a grated carrot and zucchini, to up the veg factor as I couldn't be bothered with a separate salad. Looked fantastic and went down really well with the boys.

 It got a little rich for me towards the end, but it was a warm night, not the best for a hot creamy pasta dish. Probably a crisp green side salad would have stopped that! Silly me. The funny thing was Jamie Oliver was on the television that night cooking the same dish! I'm going to compare versions. I can't help myself, do you do that too?

Enjoy!

Just remember - no corn in the salad, and don't forget the bacon in the mac and cheese!

A week of food

One of the delicious new bakery treats I made this week!

I use a menu planner to keep the week from becoming just too absolutely hectic, and I'm sure many of you do too! However I do just throw the menu out at the end of each week, which is a shame really. It'd be useful to know which weeks worked well, which new recipes were a hit or a miss, and old menus could be useful when I'm having a total mental blank when faced with a new menu plan to fill in!

So here is this weeks plan. I only plan dinners, with the occasional new weekend breakfast or bit of baking thrown in.

Dinners

Monday: Meatballs and pasta
Monday nights I'm exhausted, so this will be an easy dinner, with pre-made meatballs. I'll probably use a pre-made pasta sauce or tinned tomatoes and add some finely diced or grated vegetables to it.

Tuesday: Risotto or barley with chicken, red capsicum, onion and peas
This meal was planned to use up some bits and bobs left over from the week before! Tuesday is our shopping day.

Wednesday: Kedgeree
Cooked by the Mr, recipe from 'Slow Cookers' by Jane Price

Thursday: Pizza, homemade dough
Cooked by the Mr (I know, I'm a lucky girl!), he used our new pizza stone for the first time, I highly recommend getting one! He used the pizza dough recipe that came with the stone. Was fab.

Friday: Baked tuna casserole
I found the recipe here, pinned it here. See I do use the recipes I pin in Pinterest!

Saturday: Black bean tacos

Sunday: Chilli con carne sweet potato cottage pie
This is an adaptation of this recipe. I'm just turning it into a pie by adding sweet potato mash on top.

Other stuff

Bacon and fresh herb muffins, from 'Baking Day' by the Woman's Weekly, see photo above!

For breakfast this week I'm going to try this porridge recipe on the Healthy Chef website. No oats! Not that I have anything against oats, I love them, but looked interesting.

I'm also hoping to make another Pear cake, to refine my recipe, and I'm working on an adaptation of a muesli bar style slice that I hope to share soon.


So that's my week in food! Do you do a weekly menu plan? If you've blogged it please share!

Pear and Oat Cake

Today I was in a baking mood, and had some lovely pears needing to be eaten. Pear cake! Perfect! We love a fruit based dessert here, and I knew a freshly baked dessert would make everybody here happy.

This recipe was based on my strawberry cake recipe, with slight modifications because I wanted to use pears, and have it be more of a dessert cake than a tea cake. Plus I love sticking rolled oats in things. It's an ad hoc recipe, and has only been tested once, if you decide to try it let me know how it goes!



Pear and Oat Dessert Cake

• 100g of butter
•  half cup of brown sugar
• a quarter cup of golden syrup
• half a cup of rolled oats
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 egg
• one and a half cups of self raising flour
• about third a cup of milk - as needed
• two ripe william bartlett style pears
• an extra tablespoon of rolled oats
• raw sugar for sprinkling on top of cake before baking

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees, fan forced. Line a standard loaf tin with baking paper.

Soften the butter, mix it with the sugar. Add remaining ingredients except the milk and pear. Mix to combine, gradually start adding milk, until the consistency seems right. (Sorry about the vague instructions!)

Peel and roughly chop the pears into inch dice. Gently fold the pear through the mix, and tip into loaf tin, smooth the top and sprinkle with extra rolled oats and a sprinkle of raw sugar. Bake for about 60minutes, but keep an eye on it and check with skewer when it appears done. The skewer may not come out clean if you pierce a lump of pear! So check a couple of spots.

I intended this cake to be quite dense with fruit, quite 'desserty' so it was lovely served warm with a dollop of plain yoghurt.

how sweet it is!

This is what we made today. The little guy helped with the mixing, spooning the mix onto the tray, and the eating. They taste as good as they look! I can highly recommend the recipe (yes, I followed the recipe and yes, it worked!) that I found over on Taste here. Buttery choc chip deliciousness, they beat store bought cookies hands down. Now I'm tempted to add other things next time round, like some rolled oats? Mmmm, choc chip oatmeal cookies! Or maybe I should just follow a recipe!

What are you up to this Sunday afternoon?

Recipe schmecipe

Well I just can't help myself, I hate following a pattern, working on someone else's design, or concentrating on a recipe beyond the general ingredients. Although I must admit that following a recipe or a pattern can give you the most excellent results! I must have the concentration span of a small highly excitable dog or something. So back to the kitchen, with strawberries and a list of ingredients for a 'basic cake'. Back to the computer to find a basic cake recipe with only one egg... then back to the kitchen with a new list... rifle through the pantry to discover flaked almonds - awesome! And we get this.

Looking good! I quatered the strawberries and covered the top of the cake mix, sprinkled the flakes almonds and some of that yummy sugar meant for putting in your coffee. A little while later and out popped this, smelling like warm strawberry jam!

Needless to say the first half was eaten before it even cooled down. I highly recommend this approach.

Now just in case you feel the urge to bake this sweetie yourself I did make a note of the ingredients. Imagine this with blueberries! YUM!

1/4 cup of butter (or butter-like substance)
1/2 cup of sugar - I don't think it matters what kind
1 tsp of vanilla essence
1 egg
1.5 cups of self raising flour
1/2 cup of milk - I ended up adding more at the end when I thought the mix wasn't fluid enough

I put all the ingredients in a bowl and used the electric beater til it was smooth, added the extra milk to get a nice dropping consistency, then into the pan lined with baking paper. Add your choice of toppings! Then bake, and sorry for the vague-ness here, but I think about 180 degrees, until it is done.

Do you like to wing it in the kitchen?

testing recipes

I just bought (another) recipe book - Kids Cooking by the Woman's Weekly, and can I just say yum? I decided to make the Vegetable and Feta Tart for lunch today, I don't think the toddler will be quite up to chopping eggplant for a while yet, but there are lots of how-to's and explanations and descriptions of things for the budding chef.

The thing I really liked about this recipe is that it worked even though I only sort of followed the recipe. My cooking style is haphazard because I don't plan, so I never have the right ingredients. This is why the Corn, Cheese and Bacon Muffins became Oatmeal Coconut Sultana muffins this afternoon. They still worked!

I made minor alterations to the tart recipe - no pesto, used pasta sauce, no zucchini, used pumpkin I roasted off first with nutmeg sprinkled on them. I added some coriander, cumin and paprika when I cooked off the eggplant, because that's just the way I like it. And totally forgot to measure anything. And they turned out so well, I was quite chuffed because pastry (yes even the pre-made sheets, as used here) and I don't always get on well.

And as you can see - toddler thought the tart wasn't bad either...

cinnamon pancakes

I love pancakes. Really I do. Every now and then I alter the basic recipe my Grandma gave me (see below), adding banana or blueberries, grated apple and oats, but I always come back to just a hint of cinnamon. We like to make little ones and soak them in real maple syrup, and then dunk them in greek yoghurt. Oh boy!



And now to make the process even more entertaining, I have this totally adorable measuring cup set in the form of nested babushka dolls. I love them! I don't lose measuring cups anymore, because they sit on the bench looking cute all the time. There is a 3/4 cup measure in the set. You don't need to measure a quarter cup three times anymore! These babies make baking even better. If that is possible. Do you have any kitchen gadgets that make you happy?


My Grandma's Pancake Recipe:

1 cup of self raising flour
1 tablespoon of sugar (I prefer brown sugar)
1 egg
add milk to dropping consistency

Recipes from my Grandma tend to be this simple, and vague! I'm always adding different amounts of milk! A runnier mix gives you more of a pikelet, a thicker mix makes the puffier version shown above. It's a great recipe to experiment with. Have fun!

blast off!

How yummy does this look? Homemade rocket ship icy poles! This one was made with drinking yoghurt, full cream milk and fresh blueberries. The little guy loved it, but oh the mess.

Berry'd Treasure Trifle

I keep thinking about these yummy little trifles I made for Christmas day lunch. Delish. I've promised my Grandma I'll make her some when I go to visit, I hope she likes it!

I knocked them together based on general trifle theory - sponge soaked in sherry, jelly, fruit and custard. First I lined the glasses with Italian sponge finger biscuits and drizzled them in sherry (or apple juice for kiddies). Then I lightly cooked some blueberries and strawberries, using the juice to make a jelly with Aeroplane Jelly 'Create your own flavour'. I scooped some berries into the cup, then some jelly once it had set, and topped the glasses up with a cooled panna cotta mix. The jelly poked through the top a little, so I topped the glasses with the sliced strawberries and leftover blueberries.

Then I named them, with a really bad pun. Arrr, hope yer Christmas was jolly me hearties!