The Food Diary - Wednesday 18th November - Scrummy goujons and Madeira cake

Morning all!

How are you all doing on this blustery day? It seems to be brightening up here though, which is good as I was worried about our bin blowing away! 
So I didn't manage to get back to you all r.e what I ate last night, but I will tell you now, it was scrum. Fabio and I went to our local pub quiz night (The Cheese Rollers in Shurdington). The food there is homemade, so I really enjoy it. I chose the chicken goujons, much to Fabio's delight! Usually I find these to be either the frozen kind, or that the batter/breadcrumbs are too hard. These were perfect however. The batter was crisp and light; the chicken was fresh and succulent. They'd obviously just deep fried them (not the most healthiest, I know). I will MOST definitely be coming back for more!

Today I am currently baking my weekly cakes to sell at our local farm shop: Sticky gingerbread loaf and mincemeat loaf. I change the cakes monthly, however the mincemeat one will be here to stay through the months of December too, what with it being Christmas and all (our house knows it - currently I am blasting out the Michael Buble tunes already!)I will share this recipe with you in the days to come. 

So this morning I started off with my usual morning caffe latte with a slice of Madeira cake that I baked on Monday; one of the recipes I was testing for the business. It's proving to be a winner in our house, especially with the coffee! I will leave the recipe down below again for you all (it's a Mary Berry one from her book Mary Berry's Baking Bible. In case you are wondering, yesterdays curry came from her book Mary Berry Cooks.)

I've also eaten so far, a banana. I'm trying not to snack on so many sweet things, as I am always instantly drawn to the chocolate biscuits in our cupboard, but since I've already eaten cake this morning, I was like no. Although I know bananas are full of sugar, but it's good sugar right? 

Tonight I am cooking Tom Kha Gai soup to warm up the cockles of our hearts! It's Fabio's favourite, so he's excited. We will be having it with sticky rice, the only obvious accompaniment! I will be sharing this with you tomorrow, for sure. 

Merry November! (Secretly wishing it was December!)

Madeira Cake

Ingredients 

175g unsalted butter (softened)
175g caster sugar
225g self-raising flour
50g ground almonds
2 large eggs
1 lemon, finely grated

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 180c/fan 160c/gas 4. Grease a 7inch (18cm) deep cake tin and line base with baking paper.

2. Measure the butter, flour (no need to sieve), ground almonds, eggs and grated lemon into a bowl. Beat for 1 minute and then turn into your tin and level. 

3. Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes, or until golden brown and skewer inserted comes out clean. My oven took about an hour, but mine is a VERY hot oven, so I always have to be careful.

4. Leave to cool for 10 minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack.

Don't worry if it cracks - it only adds more character. I added a dusting of icing sugar in a star design on top. Why not try this but with a different design?

New series - The Food Diary - Tuesday 17th November

So here I go again. Back to blogging! You can probably tell that the Le Cordon Bleu training took up A LOT of my time..hence why there's a post on my first day and then the writing stops! So sorry. I'm very excited, however, to be starting this blog again, as I do feel that it's good to have some sort of outlet to just talk about how you are feeling and most importantly, what you are eating! 

I hope my new 'series' of blog posts, in amongst others, hopefully, will encourage you to share what you eat in your daily life, as I find this the most interesting. The choices we make, be it a quick snack because you can't be bothered or a full gourmet meal. I tend to hop between those two quite often! I would love to say that I'm one of those who makes healthy choices on a daily basis, but I just don't. I'm human. I like sweet things. I do however try and be conscious of what I eat, and tend to pick at food a little un-often. 

I'm not going to put pressure on myself to post here, as I know when I do, I tend to not do it. I hope to write some other posts on more detailed topics, to provide more of a background to my diary posts, and also to provide you guys with more content to read, if you'd prefer not to listen to me rambling on about my day!

Here goes!

Okay so today I am feeling very hungry. Like constantly. I've so far drunk my morning caffe latte (a mug of milk heated up in the microwave with a spot of brewed lavazza or Ily coffee from the cafetiere). I drunk this a long with a piece of my homemade madeira cake that I made yesterday, when I was testing recipes for my new potential cake business. 

I usually just have coffee, so I can't really explain why I am so hungry at this hour, when I've eaten extra already: I also had a petis filous yoghurt (strawberry) and a paprika rice cracker. It is 12:10 I guess.. which means It's time for lunch! Lunch for me today will be the leftovers of our spiced vegetable casserole from last night. I used a Mary Berry recipe, which I can leave down below for you all, as it was rather nice and lovely and warming on a wintery eve.

Tonight we will be eating at our local pub at the end of our lane, as it's quiz night and we want to make more effort to meet the neigbours! Perhaps I will be back later to document what I had.

Hope you've enjoyed this rather long post. I also hope you are as interested as I am in what other people eat! I just want to know, what did you eat today?

Spiced Vegetable Casserole
Serves 4

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil (the book states vegetable but I much prefer olive)
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed (I didn't have any for mine!)
1 tsp turmeric
1 can of 400g plum tomatoes
1 bag of the Waitrose butternut soup mix (I used this as a substitute for a whole butternut squash, as I hate cutting them)
Half a cauliflower, broken into small pieces
1 yellow pepper, deseeded and cut small
1 can of 400g chickpeas, drained
600ml of vegetable stock (I use unsalted versions)
2 tbsp of Harissa paste (2 tbsp is more than enough for this quantity. The book's recipe serves 10 and uses this amount. I added 2 as I like spice, although it was particularly spicey).
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

I omitted the coriander, as I despise it!

1. Heat oven to 160c/140c fan/ gas 3.

2. Heat oil in a large flameproof casserole dish. Fry the onions until transparent. Add the garlic and turmeric and fry for 30 seconds.

3. Add the tomatoes, squash soup mix, cauliflower and peppers. Stir and then add chickpeas and stock. 

4. Boil and then cover with a lid and cook in oven for an hour.

5. Remove a couple of tbsp of the juice to blend in with the harissa paste. Stir back into the casserole and adjust with seasoning.

6. Serve with rice, and also a couple of slices of buttery sourdough. Perfect!

The beginning of the journey

So the day has finally come. I'm on my way from Canterbury to enrol in one of the finest culinary schools in the world, Le Cordon Bleu. 

The whole of yesterday all I could think about was the anticipation of tomorrow arriving. Now I can't it's here and It's all beginning! Today!! 

I'm currently sat on the train, hoping I have everything with me. I've packed my kitchen shoes, a notebook (actually I packed two) and a few pens, which was required of us. Pictures of these to come later, along with the other goodies I'm hoping to collect today. I've also packed a bottle of water as I don't want to die of thirst, and some memo sticky note things, 'cause you never know! I have my weighing scales with me, because even though they didn't mention to bring them today, I thought I might just incase. I'd hate to be the only one who hasn't! I can always keep them in the locker so I don't have to bring them again, if we are allowed. 

One thing I'm trying not to worry about, after reading blogs about other people's experience of LCB, is public transportation. I know you may think I'm crazy, but I'm totally relying on it to get me to class on time everyday. The reason for my worrying is that if you are 15 mins late, you are not allowed in. If you miss4, you get kicked off! Eek. I hope I'm not ye only one. I expect most people will be living in London and just getting the tube. Although I know that can be unreliable too, but I hope not as I will. need to take it! My journey consists of one high speed train (thank God!) from Canterbury West station to St Pancras International, and then the Picadilly line to Holborn, which is only the second stop, luckily. It's only a 5 min walk from there. I'm glad the high speed train is fast and reasonably reliable as a lot of commuters take in to London, as it only takes 56 mins! 

Today is the day of orientation which starts at 10:30, with first class starting at 3:00pm until 6:00pm. I'll arrive early at St Pancras at 9:20, so I have plenty of time to mull around and get there. 

I'm going to leave it here for now as id love to eat my Bircher muesli yoghurt, which is my attempt to eat breakfast as I normally only drink a cafe latte in the morning! Expect pictures later! And more updates of my day to come! 

Jess x 

Dinner #3

This post is going to be short, so I apologise. I'm very tired, and have already written one blog post tonight! 

I confess I may have not cooked tonight's dinner in the best way possible, as I was too busy talking to my fiancé about his day, and left the pan simmering for too long. But it sure was tasty with a fiery kick of chilli!

Dinner tonight was Toulouse sausage cassoulet with a kick of chilli. It proved very easy to make by frying the onions and garlic, and then adding the tomato puree, cannelloni beans, thyme, bay leaf, seasoning, a whole chilli, chicken stock and cherry tomatoes. The grilled Toulouse sausages with their rough fibery texture and herby taste, are served ontop of the simmered cassoulet. This is where I went wrong, the simmer time was 20 mins, and I must have simmered for 30 mins. Anywhos, it was delish but very spicy (I shouldn't have stabbed the chilli too many times and pushed the seeds out into the pan because I thought I could handle it..oops!)

I got in!

Today is a day for celebration. I've been keeping this a secret for the past week, but I can now tell you, since I found out today, that I've been accepted at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in London! It's a dream come true. I can't believe I am actually going. The shock hasn't really hit me yet, especially the fact of what's to come next January! It's going to be intense. The Patisserie Diplome is what I have enrolled into, and since i've chosen the fast-track route, the first three months is going to be 30 hours a week, and the last 3 months 15 hours a week. But I can't wait to get stuck in, meet the chefs and the rest of the students. I'm sure you'll here me talking about my journey on here, as I really appreciate and love reading blogs such as http://theaspiringbaker.wordpress.com/page/3/ and https://sinmatok.wordpress.com for writing our their time at LCB, which really helped with my decision and has given me a great insight already. 

Eek! So here's to the start of a new, potentially scary, hard-working, life enhancing, dream-come-true (cheesy I know) path in life!!

Cheers! 

Dinner #2

Tonight's dinner from Hello Fresh was the absolutely succulent Vietnamese Chicken Skewers with Ginger Rice.

After a hectic day, I came home to preparing this dinner, which proved to be very simple; cutting everything (garlic, ginger, onion, kaffir lime leaf) and then marinating the chicken, which I did for half an hour instead of ten minutes, as I was waiting for my fiancé to arrive home before I started cooking. The meat ended up melting in the mouth (chicken thigh is definitely better than breast), once cooked on skewers under the grill. 

The ginger rice was interesting. I'd never added chicken stock to my rice before, and nor had I fried the rice in oil and ginger before adding the water - what a cool idea that I may have to adapt and try with other recipes/ingredients.
The only thing was that the rice was meant to be cooked for ten mins and then left to stand for ten mins, however I felt it needed an extra 15 mins as mine wasn't fully cooked. When it was it still had a bite, which we like anyway. 
All in all, we thoroughly enjoyed this dish - top marks i'd say (it was definitely the added broccoli that swung it!)

Starting a 'Fresh'... dinner #1

Last week I discovered something that has turned out to be really a great thing. I was browsing through my November copy of The Simple Things, and out dropped a £25 off voucher card for Hello Fresh, another one of those recipe box schemes I thought. However, tempted by the money off, I decided to try it out. A box of 5 meals for £49, and then £25 off, making it £24 for 5 meals, is a bargain! 
The only downfall is delivery, as you they could come anytime between 8am and 5pm, so you kinda have to be in, or ask someone else to pick it up for you, like a neighbour. I was in, so all was okay. 
It arrived, and the joyous moment of opening the box was so exciting! I ripped it open and what stared at me was a bundle of fresh ingredients, all neat and organised in little sections, all the right quantities (the spices were in their own little pots, all weighed out ready!)

It's not that I don't like cooking, as it's obvious I do! It's just a brilliant thing if you are busy and don't have the time to sort out what you are eating. 
So this week I'm going to aim to show you what I've been eating from my box, and what my thoughts are after 5 days.

Last night we ate Mediterranean Hake with Pommes Mousselines (basically posh mash potato!) It was scrumptious. The hake was apparently supplied by the same supplier that the Queen uses...ohlala. And couldn't I tell!! It was yummy, and the portions of hake given were very generous! The Mediterranean sauce consisted of onion, garlic and yellow pepper, then passata and thyme. It was then poured onto the fish and popped into the oven to bake. I don't think I need to explain how to make the mash! 

If you like the sound of Hello Fresh, check them out here: wwww.hellofresh.co.uk

I also have been given a code for a friend to have £20 off their first box, so if you are interested, let me know! First come first serve basis, obviously.