Apologies dear food-blog followers for my slackness of posting. It has been an incredibly hard year personally, and I kind of lost my mojo for a while there. I have been busy with uni and other stressors, but I'm back to experimenting now! I have another chicken and lentil recipe I'm going to try soon too, so keep an eye out for that!
Anyway, down to business. We visited my mum's family last week, and my grandfather is a farmer by trade, who now lives in town. This means he has a prolific vege garden, as he can't quite give up the land work! He thus gave us a bag of leeks he'd grown, and I needed to do something with them.
Insert genius idea here for leek and potato soup (which my parents incidentally also ate last night from the restaurant whose catering business I work for...). I wanted to add in bacon too because we have some in the freezer and I love bacon (who doesn't!)... and here is the recipe!
INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp oil
1/2 tsp paprika
200g bacon
2 large leeks, white/light green parts, sliced thinly and rinsed
2 cloves garlic
4 cups chicken stock, plus 2 cups water
2 medium potatoes, diced small
pepper and salt
1/2 cup cream
1 & 1/2 cups frozen peas (don't worry about thawing them)
1 tsp onion salt
METHOD
- Cook bacon in a large pan, until beginning to brown, then remove bacon onto a plate lined with a paper towel
- Add 1 tbsp oil to pan, and toss in leeks and garlic
- Cover and cook until soft (around 5 min)
- Add stock plus water, potatoes, onion salt, salt and pepper to taste
- Cover and bring to a boil over high heat
- Lower heat and simmer until potatoes are cooked, (around 10 min)
- (optional step) Puree half the soup in blender (leave out centre piece to allow steam to escape) then combine back in the pan
- Mash the soup gently (which I did because blending was a pain in the butt)
- Add cream and bring to a simmer
- Add peas and cook through, around 3 min
- Add bacon back in and serve
This was actually so easy to make! It only took half an hour to cook (not counting prep). The most time consuming part was cutting up the leek!! And it turned out super delicious, so I'm really happy with it. The peas and bacon just made it extra amazing!!!
Of course, you can alter it to make it vegetarian, just use vegetable stock instead of chicken stock, and no bacon! :)
We had it with grainy bread and butter. A good meal on a cold spring night (YES it's the second day of spring already! CRAZY!)
Recipe Inspiration: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/potato-leek-soup-with-bacon-recipe/index.html
We won a hamper thing in a raffle, and in it were some things my family doesn't ordinarily keep in our pantry... including a can of pink salmon, and some cannelini beans. I used up the pink salmon by mixing it with cream cheese and spreading it on crackers, which was nice for the first few mouthfuls but then go too creamy and sickly for me.
But the beans stumped me. I didn't know what to do with them. Then I saw Rachael Ray put them in a soup. And I was like "hey, minestrone!" So following Jamie Olivers basic minestrone recipe, I kind of altered it to include the random ingredients in our pantry.
Unfortunately I was slack on this one and didn't take photos (because I didn't intend to write about it really) so you'll just have to use your imagination... picture a tomatoey soup with lots of bits in it including potato, beans and pasta.... om nom nom...
INGREDIENTS
1 x400g can whole or chopped tomatoes
1 x400g can rinsed cannelini beans
4 cups chicken stock
diced ham (around 200g)
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1/2 capsicum (bell pepper), diced
1 potato, diced
2 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 cup small pasta
1 small tsp crushed garlic
1 bay leaf
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp basil
salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp onion salt (if you have it)
1 tbsp BBQ sauce
2 tbsp tomato sauce
2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce (more or less depending on your tolerance)
1/2 cup grated cheese (ideally parmesan, but I didn't have any, so used Edam & Tasty - just as yum!)
sliced fresh bread to mop up soupyness
METHOD
- Heat pan with oil, and add ham, onion, garlic, carrot, capsicum, bay leaf and oregano
- Cook until veges are soft
- Add everything else except the pasta
- Bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes
- 10 minutes before serving, add in the pasta
- Test the pasta to make sure it's cooked before serving, and taste constantly to adjust seasoning
- If the soup is too thick after the pasta is cooked, it can be thinned out with some more stock, or water
- Serve immediately with fresh bread
Seriously, I know it seems like a lot of ingredients, but it's so delicious, and really quite easy because most things all go in together. Was delicious on a cold autumn night! :)
Just a quick, delicious recipe for biscuits that I love. It's really easy, and I've been meaning to make another batch for my blog, since I haven't made these since I was about 11 years old. They are so messy to make but that's the fun of them!!
INGREDIENTS
250g butter
2 eggs
2 cups self-raising flour
2 cups cornflakes
1 cup castor sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup sultanas (optional)
1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)
2 extra cups of cornflakes
METHOD
- Preheat oven to 180 deg C
- Cream butter and sugar well
- Add eggs, one at a time
- Fold in vanilla, sifted flour, (sultanas, chocolate chips) and 2 cups of cornflakes
- Take teaspoonfuls of mixture and roll in extra cornflakes
- Bake for 15 to 20 min
Be warned, they go golden, but are soft when they come out of the oven, so use a flat spatula to lift them off the tray/baking paper, otherwise they'll just fall apart.
THESE ARE SO YUMMY. 'Nuff said. (Oh, and light and chewy and just ... om nom nom)
Thought I'd better get a recipe in before October is over! Gotta have at least one entry per month! ;) No, actually this month has been insane with uni work, haven't had time to try anything new (much) or write about it.
But now I'm on study leave, which gives me a little flexibility to do stuff like this, so here is today's lunch!
INGREDIENTS
4 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup self raising flour
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salt and pepper
1/2 cup cheese (grated)
1 fried onion
Ham or cooked bacon
Veges - I used grated carrot and seasonal asparagus
METHOD
- Preheat oven to 180 deg C
- Whisk eggs, milk, flour and seasoning together
- Add everything else to the mix
- Spread in a silicone quiche/flan dish (silicone makes it so much easier to remove at the end)
- Bake for 45 mins, until gold on top and puffed up
- Let sit for a couple of minutes (to make it even easier to remove from silicone)
- Cut up and serve hot, or cold, with relish and sour cream (optional, but delicious)
So this was a super easy recipe to make, and my mum loved it. I'm not a super egg fan myself (as I probably said when I wrote about the crustless broccoli quiches I made back when I began this blog!) but it was pretty nice. Would be great for lunches too.
Shout out to Jeremy, one of my best friends, who I've known since we were 7. This was his recipe/idea.
Recipe Inspiration: http://www.grownups.co.nz/read/lifestyle/food_and_wine/crustless-quiche-recipie
200g bacon
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