Friday nights = Lazy nights

Friday tends to be our take out or random junk in front of the tv/computer night, and tonight was no exception. One of my childhood favourites was mayonnaise with fries from the local fast food van and I've never quite lost my hankering for them so this is loosely based on that.

• half a packet of potato wedges or 4 to 5 large potatos peeled and chopped into junks
• 2 tablespoons mayonaise
• half a teaspoon of a strong English mustard
• either 2 bacon rashers, fried or grilled til crispy and chopped into thin strips OR a good sprinkling of baco bits

Cook your potatos, mix the mayonaise and mustard together in a bowl and then add the cooked potatoes. Divide into two bowls and add the bacon and salt/pepper to taste. It makes perfect comfort food to be shared whilst snuggling up during the winter.

Refreshing Orange Lemonade

Nothing beats an ice cold refreshing glass of this. Although it's slightly lemony aftertaste makes it more of a grownup drink than one for the children.

• 6 oranges, juiced
• 2 lemons, juiced
• 1 quarter of a bottle of plain tonic water

Childhood comfort food - Bratkartoffeln

Outside the snow has been falling for the past week. The world is coated with a thick white blanket so its time for comfort food. The type that transports you straight back to safety of your childhood.

One of my staples for a quick winter supper is based loosely on a childhood favourite, Bratkartoffeln. Every saturday my mother and I would walk into town for some shopping, ending with lunch in the cafe of Hertie's department store. Each week would follow the same pattern, we bought chocolate covered dried apple slices from the deli around the corner. I got a smurfette from the toystore (with hindsight I was a weird child, in all those trips I never once bought a male smurf). Then we climbed up through the store to its restaurent at the top, where we shared fried potatoes mixed with crispy bacon and melted cheese.

As it a quick dish, I tend to "cheat" slightly by using potato wedges rather than peeling my own potatoes (lazy I know).

• half a pack of potato wedges
• 3 rashers of bacon
• 1 red onion
• A chunk of tasty cheese, I like Gruyere

Partially cook the potato wedges either in the oven or in something like a Tefal Actifry. Meanwhile, dice the onion and lightly fry in oil. Grill the bacon in the oven til crispy and grate the cheese.

Transfer the potatoes to the onion pan to finish cooking. Then chop the bacon into mix. Add the grated cheese and pop under the grill until the cheese turns lovely and gooey.

If you want to be a little decadent, you can add a fried egg to the top or if you are really hungry it goes great as an accompaniment to a good steak.

Sopa de Lima

We all link food to memories, the first time we taste something fantastic lingers. Everytime you then create the dish, the smells and flavours send you straight back. For me the first time I had Sopa de Lima, it was love at first mouthful.

It was rainy season in the Yucatan, you could set your watch by the downpour. We were staying in a tiny little hotel just outside Chichen Itza. The restaurent was a patio covered with an awning and the menu choices were limited, yet all the food was delicious. There was something romantic about sitting there with rain pouring off the canopy drinking ice cold beer.

The soup came in chipped china bowls, but its smell was captivating, so fresh and tasty. Now everytime I need a comforting chicken soup, its Sopa de Lima with its healthy burst of vitamin C I crave. Like all great soups there are many variations on the recipe. Every restaurent and family in the Yucatan seems to have their own unique spin on the dish, some use turkey, some use chicken, some add lemons. 

Over the next few dull grey winter months I intend trying a few of the them, plus adding a touch or two of my own, recreating the heat and the feel of those months in Mexico.

Marmite Cheese

Whilst wandering around Asda at 7.30 this morning, (dont ask), I happened to spot some marmite cheese lurking on a shelf. Now the only question is:

Do I need to add more marmite to my cheese on toast now, or will the marmite flavoured cheese be enough? 

My plans for 2009

Its a brand new year and time for brand new resolutions. I admit to having been somewhat slack in writing over the last few months, but this is going to change (fingers crossed). I do have an excuse, which I intend covering at a latter date but I hope that 2009 will be the year in which I actually manage not only to cook a lot more, but to blog about it as well.

I am addicted to buying cookery books and magazines. Our house groans under their weight, they prop up tables, balance under chairs and lurk in dark places. Every type of cuisine is covered and I spend hours gazing at their pictures, whispering the recipes to myself as if they were a spell (sorry to report I've failed to conjure up any three course meals yet). Cookery books are my secret pleasure, but this year, I want to work my way through them. No more bookmarking pages and thinking about it, now its time to cook and to taste rather than imagining. The plan is to pick something at random each week from a random cookery book and make it.

I still hate sprouts, even though I managed 3 for Christmas Dinner which albeit 3 more than last year still was rather unpleasant. So thats 12 months to discover why I dislike them and importantly is there anything I can do to make them taste good. Expect lots of sprout recipes, which begs the question, why does no one make sprout soup?

Im also interested in healthy eating (which has something to do with why my posting got so bad last year) as well as producing decent food when you are in a hurry. A few years ago I used to work 10 hour days and my eating habits really suffered due to that, whilst now I don't work anything close to that, I still want to work on some fast, tasty and healthy recipes for those days when you can't avoid trying to do 15 things at once.

The blog is called Frosting and Fairycakes for a reason but I haven't posted a single desert or cake recipe yet. 2009 will the year of the fairycake, lots of gooey sugary icing, chocolate cakes in a variety of guises and all the things my mother used to make on sunday afternoons when I was a little girl.

Finally my Mother gave me a Rumtopf jar that she hadn't used for years. I can already taste the sweet fruity rum which will make a delicious deserts come next winter. It takes me straight back to my childhood sitting on our balcony in Germany eating rumsoaked fruit over fresh vanilla icecream fetched from the local icecream parlour. I want to blog about both making it and my favourite childhood recipes for eating it.

Happy Halloween

Lemon salty chicken

Following on with the theme of simplicity, I love this recipe. It hardly takes any time at all, its easy to make and it tastes delicious.

Half a lemon (use the other half to make an icy cold gin and tonic)

Two pinches of sea salt

2 chicken breasts

Olive Oil 

Green Salad

Chop the chicken into a smallish chunks, add to a hot pan with the olive oil. As it cooks, squeeze the lemon juice all over the chicken. Then add the salt.

In the meantime, make a quick plain salad, I like a combination of lettuce, rocket and basil personally. Once the chicken is cooked, add to the salad and enjoy with a nice cold drink.

Simplicity = Heaven

Tonight was lazy food night. The night where you use up whatever is lurking in the larder to make fast but tasty food. We had sweet tomatoes chopped with chunks of feta cheese with french bread. Simple but heavenly. The salty cheese provided the perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of the tomatoes. 

Red Cabbage - Storecupboard

Whilst you SHOULD make your own, I admit to cheating these days. Given the amount of Polish goods being sold in the supermarkets, its far easier to buy it by the jar, especially if you eat as much of it as we do.

• Cheese and red cabbage toasties
  
• As a quick splash of colour and texture to a plate of roast meat
  
• As a topping for soups, particularly things like Borscht (the colours go perfectly together)
  
• Mixed into crunchy salads/salsas
  

I also admit to eating it out of the jar late at night when i need a snack.

Roasted Pork Belly with garlicky potatoes and red cabbage

Autumnal weather calls for autumnal food. Its been raining here for the last couple of days and the fog is hardly lifting. Seems as if the weather is practising for a haunting halloween.

Pork belly

2 heads of garlic

3 to 4 large potatoes

Red Cabbage

Salt

Olive Oil 

Preheat the oven to 160 °C (320 °F). Cover the pork in olive oil and rub with a good handful of salt. Place in a roasting dish with your potatoes and the garlic and pop into the oven.  Cook for an hour and a half, the pork skin down on the garlic.

Increase the heat to 180 °C (355 °F), turn the pork over and cook for a further 30 minutes or until the skin is golden and crunchy.

Peel the roasted garlic, chop into slivers and serve with the roasted potatoes. Serve with a large helping of red cabbage.

Beware beware there is beetroot everywhere (Drover's Inn)

Went out last night for dinner to a nice little spot near Kirriemuir that was recommended by friends (Drover's Inn) and guess what was on the menu... yep thats right beetroot cured smoked salmon with horseradish. It seems there is no escaping from the beet.

That said, dinner was delicious and we will definitely going back. Food aside, its a really pretty spot with a lovely walk through the orchard from the carpark to the Inn and a warm sunny day sitting in the garden to eat would be lovely (guess ill just have to wait for spring for that).

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

John Keats

October is here and its most definately misty, the haar is edging off the sea most nights leaving a chill in the air. My food thoughts are turning towards pumpkin pie and thick gravy covering huge slabs of beef with yorkshire pudding. Autumn and winter are my two most favourite seasons, perhaps because they house my two most favourite festivals, halloween and christmas. Nothing beats hurrying home in the cold, wrapped up warm and being greeted by delicious hot food. In fact the only depressing food related thought  on the horizon is the dreaded sprout. Still need to find a way of making them palatable before december the 25th.

Beetroot Blues

The Bf's parents grow everything and in huge quantities to boot.

Red and yellow and PINK

Pink for beetroot in fact.

http://www.lovebeetroot.co.uk/

This is just to say

I succeeded with day 1 of the healthy eating regime, oh and

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
William Carlos Williams

Ok, I admit to eating the plums primarily to post that poem, I could have had an apple or banana instead. Surprisingly enough, despite studying Literature for 4 years at University, thats the only Wiliam Carlos Williams poem Ive read. Luckily there are still a few plums left to eat whilst I google him.

I love the unrepentent tone of the poem, sure hes admitting to eating your breakfast and asking for forgiveness but at the same time he's painting you a picture of just what you missed, rubbing it in so to speak. "Forgive me" but this is what you missed out on, the softness, the sweetness, the deliciousness, which implies that he isnt particularly sorry in the slightest.

5 Alive

I keep reading about various campaigns to make us eat more fruit and vegetables. Its something Ive always taken for granted, after all eating healthly makes perfect sense. The other night however, I got a bit distracted and actually started thinking about how much I eat, or rather dont eat a day.

Suddenly 5 pieces a day seemed like a lot, maybe 4 and in some cases 5 pieces more than I was consuming. So obviously I need to fix this, but how...

When Im busy with work related stuff, we eat really badly. One meal a day kind of badly and fitting that much fruit and veg into one meal is pretty tricky. But then if Im being strictly honest with myself, even when Im not busy we tend to only eat one meal a day. Ive skipped breakfast ever since my secondary school days when my mother could no longer force ready brek down me in the morning. Lunch tended to be an optional extra that again usually ended up missed (so many more useful things to spend your dinner money on when you are sixteen). Then I went to University and lived on cigarettes, tomato cuppa soup and red wine for four years and by that stage my eating habits were pretty much set in stone.

So now I need to find a way to sneak those fruits and vegetables into my diet.

Marmite Monster

Im a bit of a grazer, I like to snack, small meals offering different tastes are far better than one large plate of food. This in part is why I love tapas and mezes, the whole concept appeals to my snackling side.

Which brings me to Marmite, whilst I realise its an acquired taste and you could argue its colour and texture, not to mention the smell could be classed as offputting, to me, its childhood in a jar. Even when we lived in Germany, there was always marmite in the larder. When we traveled anywhere marmite sandwichs was always on the menu, not to mention the marmite and buttered toast before we even left home.

One of my favourite comfort come snackling food is a very simple marmite on toast with a fried egg splatted on top. When you cut into the egg and the yolk spills out intermingling with the marmite and the buttered toast, Im five again and sometimes thats no bad thing.

Pesto flavoured everythings

Another of the foodstuffs I can not live without is Pesto. I like to have at least 2 different flavours in the house at all times.

• Use it instead of butter, smeared on crusty bread either as a snack on its own or to hold sandwich fillings together. It goes particularly well with salami and brie.
• A dollop of it makes a great garnish for soups
• When you feel lazy, toss some pasta in a couple of spoonfuls of pesto and grate some cheese over the top.

Which raises the question, savoury pesto and sundried tomato muffins, possibly with a touch of blue cheese? Hmmm.

Dundee Food and Flower Festival

The great thing about Food festivals is the chance to try and buy stuff from local producers. So with a lunch consisting of multiple courses, from Falafal to chocolate coated strawberries we explored and ate our way around Scotland. Eating strawberries and marshmellows off a skewer whilst thick warm melting chocolate is dripping everywhere is not a job for the fainthearted by the way, in the end to protect my cream sweater I had to abandon mine. Luckily the bf had no such issues and fell on it.

To burn off all the calories we consumed, we (the bf, his best friend and I) headed off to Dunkeld for a healthy walk in the woods.