Christina eats

Pancakes with asparagus and hollandaise sauce

With Pancake Tuesday coming up (actually, I thought it was yesterday) and some hollandaise sauce to use up, this is what I had for dinner on Monday.

I always make pancakes using the really easy mug method:
1 mug flour
1 mug milk
1 egg
A pinch of sugar

All mixed together with a hand blender, although you could use a hand whisk or a even a fork if you didn’t have one.

Pour a little mixture into a hot, oiled pan and leave for a minute or so (you should see a few air bubbles) before flipping over and repeating on the other side.

In the meantime, I put the asparagus in a shallow bowl with a couple of teaspoons of water, covered with cling film and microwaved for 2 minutes.

Finally, the leftover hollandaise sauce – I wasn’t sure who to best warm this up. There wasn’t enough to put in a pan, so I put it in the microwave on defrost for around 15 seconds, checked it and then PANICKED! The sauce had split!

Stirring vigorously didn’t help much, I squeezed some lemon juice in and stirred vigorously a bit more…what do you know, it actually worked!

Sauce saved (and warmish, I didn’t risk heating it any more), I wrapped the asparagus spears in the pancakes, poured the hollandaise liberally on top, and dug in.

ham sandwich with hollandaise sauce

My Sunday treat – a toasted ham sandwich with hollandaise sauce dip.

I love hollandaise sauce, and thought it was so tasty that it takes a lot of skill to make. As it turns out, it’s not too hard and as ever BBC Food have a recipe for it.

Ingredients

3 tbsp white wine vinegar
6 peppercorns
1 dried bay leaf
2 eggs, yolks only
125g/4oz butter
lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste

Preparation method

Put the vinegar in a small pan with the peppercorns and bay leaf. Reduce the vinegar over a high heat until there is only 1 tbsp left. Strain the peppercorns and the bay leaf from this reduction.
Put the egg yolks in a food processor with the vinegar reduction.
Gently melt the butter so that the butter solids fall to the bottom of the saucepan.
Turn the food processor on and slowly pour the butter on to the egg yolks with the motor still running. The sauce will start to thicken. When only the butter solids are left, stop.
If the sauce is too thick, add a little hot water.
Season to taste with salt and pepper and a little lemon juice.

I treated myself to smoked applewood ham between two slices of toasted multigrain farmhouse bread, cut into strips for dipping.

mediterranean vegetable soup

This is a really quick soup to make, its quite thick and chunky, and with a little less water could even make a pasta sauce.

Its basically a few things thrown together, so I the amount of water added is a little vague, but here’s how I made it:
– put some oil in a pan with a pinch of cumin seeds (I love the smell of cooking cumin seeds)
– add an aubergine chopped into cubes (to me, no dish Mediterranean without including aubergines)
– add a courgette, also chopped into cubes
– season with salt and pepper and pour a couple of mm of water in the pan to help cook the veg quicker and stir until getting soft
– add one diced chorizo sausage(the cooking chorizo you can buy from supermarkets, if you buy already diced chorizo its probably around 1/3 of the pack)
– also add around 10 halved cherry tomatoes, or 2 normal tomatoes
– when the tomatoes go a bit mushy, add water until it just covers the vegetables, and a good squeeze of tomato puree and a bay leaf
– season again, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes

If you’ve read this blog before you may already know that I like a bit of spice in my food, so a added a couple of teaspoons of a chilli dipping sauce that my father in law recently brought us from Mexico – I think its made up of olive oil and dried smoky chilli flakes , so gave the soup a really nice heat.

Eat when you are ready!

chicken with 40 cloves of garlic

I first saw this recipe a couple of years ago, but it took me until this weekend to try it out.

40 cloves of garlic is essentially 4 bulbs (I counted the cloves and it was actually more than 40). Apart from copious amounts of garlic, you don’t need many other ingredients – chicken (obvs), a lemon (cut into thick slices), some thyme, oil and seasoning.

First cut a garlic bulb in half and rub all over the chicken on the open side, then put it inside the chicken. With the other 3 garlic bulbs, seperate the cloves keeping the skin on and place in the roasting tray with the sliced lemon.

Put the chicken on top of the garlic and lemon, rub oil over it, season with salt and pepper, sprinkle on a little thyme and it is ready for roasting in the oven on 190 deg, for 1hr and a half (timings may vary depending on the size of your chicken). Rest for 20 minutes before serving – which gives you time to make a gravy with the juices left in the roasting tray.

For the gravy, put the tray on a medium heat on the cooker, and mix in a tablespoon of flour well for a minute or so. Pour in a glass of white wine and stir, picking up all the bits in the tray until bubbling and beginning to thicken. Add 300ml of water and keep stirring until the gravy is at a consistency that you are happy with – sieve and serve.

Everywhere I have seen this recipe it always says the you’ll be surprised how little the chicken tastes of garlic and I have to admit that its true. The chicken picks up on the garlic’s sweetness but not its pungency, making it a really tasty dish.

Christmas chocolates cookies

What to do after we’ve had enough of roses, quality street, lindt and ferrero rocher after Christmas is well and truly over? How about breaking them all up and mixing with cookie dough?

So that’s what I did, making my usual cooke dough of mixed:
– 125g softened butter
– 100g sugar
– 1 egg
– 110g whole meal flour (you can use white if you prefer)
– half a tsp baking powder
– pinch of salt

I then chopped and mixed in the left over chocolates.

I turned the dough out into cling film, rolled into a sausage shape and chilled for 30mins in the freezer before slicing and baking on 200degrees for 8 minutes.

The results were overly melted – my chocolates to cookie dough ratio was clearly off, also too many of the left over chocolates were toffee based so the cookies were quite sticky.

That said, they were very tasty, with each bite a slightly different flavour from the last – a great way to use up the chocolates, with some tweaks.

veal schnizel

This veal is so quick and easy to make, the veal itself is such a tasty, lean meat and these days we can eat it guilt free since the cows are now well looked after.

Put the veal escalope between a sheet of folded greaseproof paper, leaving plenty of space around and bash the veal with the rolling pin to flatten it out. Once its flatter and thinner, prepare your 3 coatings for battering, each on a different plate:
– flour
– a beaten egg
– breadcrumbs – I season my breadcrumbs with salt, pepper and a pinch of dried chilli flakes

Then, batter – make sure the escalope is covered in flour, shaking off any excess. Then move onto the beaten egg, again ensuring the veal is fully covered in egg before putting it into the breadcrumbs, covering each side.

Now you’re ready to fry – put a frying pan on a medium to high heat with some oil and butter, once hot, fry the schnizel for 2 minutes on each side.

Serve like the Swiss do with a wedge of lemon – it’s so tasty with lemon squeezed over.

Imbuljuta

This a traditional Maltese dish at Christmas time – perfect to warm you up after the winter sun sets. It’s chocolatey, orangey, spicy and earthy all at the same time.

For imbuljuta (im-bull-yew-ta) you need dried chestnuts (a couple of handfuls) which need to be soaked overnight. Once soaked, clean any skin off, give the chestnuts a rinse, and put in a pan with around a litre of water.

Put the pan on the heat and add the following ingredients to make the tasy hot chocolate that the chestnuts are served in:
– 2 tbs of brown sugar
– 2 tbs of cocoa powder
– 50g dark chocolate
– 1 heaped tsp ground cinnamon
– 1/2 tsp ground ginger
– the peel of 1 mandarin (or clementine/orange)

Bring to the boil, ensuring that the sugar and chocolate melt, and simmer for 40mins – 1hr, until the chestnuts are soft and cooked. Serve warm, like a hot chocolate with a spoon for eating the chestnuts.

I settled on a combination of the 2 – peeling and chopping the fruit, adding a squeeze of honey and mixing in to yoghurt to serve with my granola breakfast.