A Beautiful, Simple, Risotto Bianco

I found this recipe in the 'James does....' cook book in the Italy section and decided to cook it with my mum one night back in June. Having never made a risotto before I was a little apprehensive but decided to give it a go and I have to say, having followed the recipe to the letter it worked out perfectly! A beautifully simple risotto with bags of flavour that can be served as a starter or a main course - yum!

Ingredients (Serves 4)

1 litre vegetable stock

Olive oil

½ an onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 stick of celery, trimmed and finely chopped

300g risotto rice

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

125ml white wine

A knob of butter

A large handful of freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Method

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Pour your stock into a pan and leave on a low heat. Get an appropriately high-sided pot on a low heat and add a good lug of olive oil, the chopped onion and the celery. Cook gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft but not coloured. Turn the heat up to medium, add the rice and a pinch of salt and stir for 2 minutes, so that the rice sucks up all the lovely flavour and develops a nutty taste. 

Pour in the wine and stir until absorbed. Add a ladle full of stock, stir, and wait until it’s been fully absorbed before adding more. Cook for 16 to 17 minutes, adding more stock every minute or so and stirring regularly, until the rice is al dente. This means it should be soft and a pleasure to eat, but still holding its shape. At this stage the risotto should be slightly looser than you want it to be finally, as it will thicken as it sits. 

Take the pan off the heat, stir or beat in the butter and Parmesan, then season to taste. At this point you've got an absolutely delicious risotto bianco, which is simple, lovely, comfort food. You can either tuck in or take it a few steps further by adding different cheeses or vegetables. Once you've taken it as far as you want, pop the lid on and let it sit for 2 minutes before serving. The most important thing to keep in mind is that risotto must always be oozy.

Please note all photographs used in this blog entry are actual pictures of my cooking, not file photos.

Nigella Lawson's Perfect Every Time Lemon Drizzle Cake

I'm starting to realise just how much I love Nigella Lawson's cooking.....I've posted several of her recipes on here now and this cake recipe from How To Be A Domestic Goddess proves she really is the queen of desserts! This lemon drizzle cake was my first venture into proper baking this time last year and having made a dozen of these cakes in the last twelve months, I have to say, it really does work every time. It's an almost foolproof cake to make but the end result would never give that away. It's proved popular with everyone that I've offered a piece and been happily received as a slightly different (but yummy) birthday/Christmas gift by my friends and family. If you love lemons and icing, you will love this cake.

Ingredients

For the Lemon-Syrup Loaf Cake

125g unsalted butter

175g caster sugar

2 large eggs

Zest of 1 lemon

175g self raising flour

Pinch of salt

4 tablespoons milk

23 x 13 x 7cm loaf tin buttered and lined

For the Syrup

Juice of 1 and a half lemons

100g icing sugar

For the Glaze

Juice of half a lemon

150g icing sugar

Method

To Make The Cake:

Preheat your oven to 180°C/356°F/Gas Mark 4. Butter and line your loaf tin well.

Cream together the butter and sugar and add the eggs and lemon zest, beating them in well. Gently fold in the flour and salt, mixing thoroughly and then add the milk. Spoon the batter into your prepared tin and bake for 45 minutes or until a cake tester (I tend to use a wooden kebab stick as a cake tester) comes out clean.

For the Syrup:

Put the lemon juice and icing sugar into a small saucepan and heat gently until the sugar dissolves. As soon as the cake is out of the oven, puncture all over with a skewer and pour over the syrup. Leave the cake to cool completely before removing the cake from the tin.

For the Glaze:

Combine the lemon juice and icing sugar until smooth and white, add a little more icing sugar if needed. Make sure your cake is completely cool before drizzling with the glaze.

Please note all photographs used in this blog entry are actual pictures of my cooking, not file photos.

Thai Chicken Noodle Soup

This dish is one of Nigella Lawson's dishes but as with most things that I make in the kitchen, whilst cooking it I changed a few minor details. The fundamental dish is the same but depending on your tastes, this dish is easily adaptable to suit many a different palate.  

Nigella says this herself, saying that although this is the ideal dish to make when you have a little leftover chicken, there are so many tweaks and ideas that you could introduce. Throw in some frozen prawns at the end and use all kinds of different vegetables (pak choi, bok choi, spindly asparagus, Chinese kale, peanut shoots and Chinese chives are some of her suggestions).

It's also a super easy dish to cook. Once you have all the prep work done, it really is a case of just tossing it all together and voilà, you have a beautiful bowl of food in your hands!

Fresh chillies, rice noodles soaking and chopped ginger, chilli and spring onion

Ingredients (serves 2-3 as main, 4-6 as starter)

1 litre chicken stock

150g thin rice noodles

200ml coconut milk

3.5cm piece of fresh root ginger (peeled and sliced thinly then cut into skinny strips)

2 tbsp thai fish sauce

1 fresh red chilli (de-seeded and cut into strips)

1 tsp turmeric

1 tsp tamarind paste

1 tps soft brown sugar

2 tbsp lime juice

Cooked shredded chicken (I shredded two whole chicken breasts because I wanted chicken to be a big feature in the dish)

250g stir fry vegetables (I used thinly sliced red and yellow peppers, white cabbage and finely chopped spring onions)

2-3 tbsp chopped fresh coriander (to serve)

Method

My prep work began with the rice noodles - depending on what kind of noodles you have, there will be different ways in which to ready them for cooking. Mine had to be soaked in water for at least 15 minutes to allow to soften to I did this first.

I start the actual dish by steaming my vegetables. In Nigella's recipe the vegetables are added in for the last few minutes of cooking but I decided to steam mine to make sure they were cooked before being added to the soup. I put the sliced white cabbage and red and yellow peppers into a bamboo steamer and steamed them over hot water for approximately 8 minutes. Remove them from the heat and set them to the side.

Steaming my vegetables and chicken breast

Nigella's recipe also began with the precedent that the chicken is already cooked - for me this was not the case. To ensure that the chicken remained tender and moist, decided to also steam the chicken. I lined the bamboo steamer (after putting my vegetables elsewhere!) with grease proof paper and placed the two whole chicken breasts on top of the paper and set it back on the steam. Add half a lemon or lime to the steamer to add more flavour to the chicken. To fully cook them in this way took about 10 minutes but it depends on the size of the breasts so keep an eye on them to ensure they're not overcooked. Once ready, remove from the heat and allow to cool.

To make the soup, put the chicken stock in a good sized pan to heat up. Add the coconut milk, ginger, fish sauce, red chilli, spring onion, turmeric, tamarind paste, brown sugar and lime juice and bring to the boil.

The soup at different stages during the cooking process

Once the chicken has cooled, shred it and add to the soup, together with the pre-steamed vegetables and the now soft noodles which will cook in the soup in a few minutes.

Serve sprinkled with chopped fresh coriander.

Notes at the Point

This dish also works just as well with only a handful of noodles or even without them at all as a Thai chicken soup if you preferred to have something a little lighter, I've had this dish twice now, once as a soup and once as a full on noodle dish and it was yummy on both occasions.

As a soup and as a noodle dish

Please note all photographs used in this blog entry are actual pictures of my cooking, not file photos.

When Life Gives You Lemons......

I read about this tip a while ago and completely forgot about it until now....who knew the benefits of the frozen lemon?! 

Now we've all heard about the positive effects of lemon juice on the body (drinking a glass of warm water with lemon juice in it every morning aids digestion, balances pH levels in the body, boosts your immune system....the list goes on!) but this tip utilises the whole lemon, not just the juice.

It turns out that lemon peels contain as much as 5 to 10 times more vitamins than the actual lemon juice and lemon peels are also rejuvenators in eradicating toxic elements in the body - and this is the part that we've been throwing out all these years! Now there's only one person I know who actually enjoys eating lemons exactly as they come (yes I'm talking about you Miss Fox!), for the rest of us it's not an idea we immediately warm towards. With this tip though, any worries about munching your way through a pile of lemon peel can be eradicated, all you have to do is freeze your fruit!

Here's what to do....give your lemons a good wash and place the washed lemon in the freezer whole. Once the lemon is frozen, get your grater and shred the WHOLE lemon (peel and all) and you're ready to sprinkle this powdered wonder food on top of your foods!

Now, health benefits aside, you might ask why would you want to shower your food with frozen lemon crumbs? The answer is simple - outside the world of the culinary elite, it's a little known fact that lemons are as crucial a flavour enhancer as salt. While salt is a mainstay in even the worst stocked pantries, lemons are often overlooked. Lee Havlivek, a food writer on www.slate.com recently noted that the best way to use lemons in the kitchen is to use them in, well, everything. She describes how salty and sour flavours work much the same way on the tongue, and both draw out the natural flavours of food. She said,

"Lemons brighten up a tomato sauce and add more complexity to baked goods. They can turn a plain yoghurt into a sauce for pork or chicken and turn an average summer berry pie into a true stunner."

Lemons draw out the natural flavour of produce, making a meal you've eaten a hundred times taste completely different, taking flavour to a new level. Sprinkle the frozen lemon onto your yoghurt in the morning, on your salads, straight into your glass of water! It can be put onto ice cream, salads, soups, cereals, desserts, noodles, spaghetti sauces, rice, fish dishes...the list is endless!

One thing to bear in mind at this point is the importance of using un-waxed lemons for this tip. There's no point freezing your lemons to then sprinkle a mouthful of wax over your salad! You can obviously buy organic lemons that come without the spray on coating of wax that fruit producers tend to spray on the skin of citrus fruits to keep them looking fresh and protecting the skin during transit after harvesting. Although the wax is considered safe for consumption, most people would prefer not to ingest it if possible. But there is an easy way to remove the wax coating if you don't mind doing it yourself (a big thank you to Nigella Lawson for this tip!)

Put the fruit in a colander and pour over water from a recently boiled kettle or rinse the fruit under a hot running tap. Scrub the fruit all over with a stiff brush, such as a vegetable brush, under a cool running tap but try not to use a brush or scrubbing sponge that you use for dishes as this could cause some soap residue to get on to the fruit. Rinse the fruit thoroughly with cold water and leave to dry. Now you're ready to freeze!!

I plan on doing all of this today and embarking on a frozen lemon adventure to see if all this chatter about frozen lemons really is what it's made out to be. Who's with me?!

Ex fussy eater. Cookery show addict. Recipe collector. Wannabe cook.

I was an extremely fussy eater growing up. We're talking potato shapes and M&S potted beef sandwiches with the occasional packet of crisps being the only foods that would cross my lips. Fish? No way. Meat that wasn't cremated? Absolutely not. Even something as simple as mashed potato was more than I could bear. It's only since I've become an adult that I've really started to experience and appreciate food in all its glory.

Most of the women in my family are obsessed with cooking programmes (we could literally sit together and watch the cooking channel all day, every day, if we had the option!) and everyone in my family can cook. Members of my family are living all over the world so I've been exposed to all kinds of different cuisine and find myself eating all kinds of interesting meals whenever I'm dining with my family. 

Last year I bought myself a recipe binder and decided to wade through dozens of cookbooks that belong to my parents and grandmother to start building my own collection of recipes and I'm proud to say it's filling up fast! I realised however that looking through cook books was not the only way to find new and innovative recipes - why not invite people to send me theirs too and create one huge online recipe binder full of different peoples tastes and ideas?

And so this blog was born. I'll be picking the brains of my family for their favourite recipes and invite you to send me your recipes, photos, cooking tips, anything at all that you can contribute to the recipe book that's for everyone out there who like me, just wants to be a better cook.

And the name by the way? It's from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which happens to be my favourite book.

"The taste of chutney was more than just an echo of that long-ago taste - it was the old taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away... Once again an abracadabra, an open-sesame: words printed on a chutney-jar, opening the last door of my life."

I have no idea why but it seemed appropriate!