vegetables

Get him to the Greek!

Today is all about my favourite Greek dish! We have to confess, we didn’t make this one, but it did emerge in our kitchen, so it is blog worthy! Last Wednesday some friends came over to watch the football match with us and they decided to make Bouyiourdi, which is the simplest, most delicious recipe ever! Naturally being cheese-based I’d say that, but trust me, this is heaven! True and simple foodporn, that can be made in less than half an hour with only a handful of ingredients.

So, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty as looking at yesterday’s post, I realised that lately I do tend to write a bit too much off-topic. What you need to get this amazing, easy dish:

500 gr of tomatoes
1 bell pepper
300 gr of white cheese (we used 150 gr of simple white cheese and 150 gr of herb white cheese)
350 gr of Mozzarella
250 gr of Gouda cheese
1 tsp gried oregano
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

That’s about all we used but you can add chilly peppers, onions and whatever other type of cheese you like, making this a versatile and perfect-for-anyone dish. Besides the fact that you need only a few ingredients, making it is actually easy as 1-2-3!

Preheat the oven at 175 degrees and take all sorts of angled photos of the lovely cheesy ingredients.
Slice the tomatoes and the cheese, and dice the bell pepper.
Arrange all the sliced/diced ingredients into identical bowls and take 100 photos.
Toss all the ingredients finishing with the oregano and olive oil into a clay vessel and put it into the oven for about 20 minutes.
After those what seemed like forever, 20 minutes, take it out of the oven and, if you had any Mozzarella that didn’t fit into the vessel the first time (like we did), now’s the time to add it and stir the whole content with a wooden spoon.
Put it back into the oven for another five minutes and that’s it! You’ve got yourself the most delicious dish on the planet!

Considering just how amazing this was, I would’ve expected it to be the most unhealthy dish ever, but my UP app surprised me, giving it a score of 7.9 and only drew attention to the elevated amount of saturated fat. One serving from this heavenly dish gets you about 350 kcal which is actually way better than expected on my part and I decided that if I ever want to get fat, this is the one thing I’d like to get fat on!

June 19, 2016

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Never say never…

I’m going to start with a quick reminder that I’m extremely picky when it comes to food. Aside from never eating anything that comes out of the water, I never eat lamb because I hate the smell and I never eat rabbit because I used to have two pet bunnies that I loved very much.

However, on Sunday when we went grocery shopping, I spotted lamb racks. Let’s be clear on something, I never eat lamb racks either, but I love the way they look in photos. Basically, you could say that we bought lamb racks for blog purposes and because D loves them. After putting a lot of thought into the issue, I came up with the idea that maybe, just maybe, there is a way to neutralise that awful smell. After much research done online, I came up with a solution to my problem. Just to be safe, we also cooked a vegetable side.

Monday came and here I was, ready to put my non-smelly theory to the test. Here’s what we used for the entire dinner:
– 375 gr lamb racks (8 lamb racks)
– 100 gr raw honey
– 60 gr hot mustard
– 800 gr new potatoes (we just love them!)
– 2 medium onions
– 1 garlic clove
– 35 gr fresh dill (always use fresh greens)
– 20 gr fresh rosemary
– 10 gr fresh thyme
– 10 gr fresh chives
– 250 gr cherry tomatoes
– A little butter for coating the tray and the pan

At this point, the recipe is going to go two ways: the meat part and the vegetable side. As per usual, and I’m not going to mention this step as an official step, you should arrange the ingredients and take some lovely food photos.
The meat:
1. Mice half of the garlic clove and cut the rosemary into medium pieces, just to help the flavour get out more easily.
2. Mix together the honey, the mustard, the minced garlic and the rosemary until you get a creamy texture.
3. Cover the lamb racks with this creamy sauce, then cover the bowl and let it chill into the freezer for 30 minutes.
4. Preheat the cast iron pan (yes, D‘s favourite), put a small amount of butter in it and let it melt.
5. Fry the lamb racks for 3-4 minutes on each side (medium-rare) and then pour the remaining sauce over them, cover the pan, set the fire to a minimum and let it cook for another 5 minutes.

Now, you are done with the meat. I suggest you do like us, and start with the vegetable side as it will take longer. The reason I started the text with the meat is because you can have any side dish and the meat was the central piece of the recipe. The vegetable side:
1. Preheat the oven at 175 degrees C and butter the tray you want to use.
2. Slice the onions and the remaining garlic, and cut the potatoes into halves.
3. Finely mince all the greens (dill, rosemary, thyme and chives).
4. Put half of the onion slices on the bottom of the tray, cover with a lot of the minced greens and then put half of the potatoes on top.
5. Another layer of greens comes on top of the potatoes, followed by the sliced garlic. After that, redo step 4, finishing everything with the remaining greens.
6. Cook into the oven for about 40 minutes and that’s about it.

After carefully arranging everything on the plates, take lots of pictures to have proof in case someone doesn’t believe you cooked on a Monday. Plate photoshoot done and I actually worked the courage to taste the lamb. It was amazing! Not a hint of that annoying lamb smell! In all honesty, this was probably in my top 5 meats I’ve ever eaten, and no, I’m not biased by the fact that we cooked it.

The whole meal (side included) ranked an 8.8 grade on my Up app, so this is actually a very healthy dinner option. Also, the nutritional information is for four servings, which means that one serving packs about 300 kcals and it provides you a large amount of fibre and unsaturated fats, while also keeping the cholesterol and saturated fat in healthy limits.
I hope you enjoy this wonderful recipe!

May 18, 2016

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Quick dinner

Last Friday D came home with a bag full of groceries because he wanted to cook dinner (hence all the ingredients for our egg feast on Sunday). We usually are too tired to go out on Friday so we either order food or we cook something. This time he came home very hungry, therefore, before I even started unpacking all the groceries, I knew we had enough for at least eight people. Since most of our go-to quick meals consist of some sort of steak (for him) and a mixture of vegetables (for me), I knew what this dinner was going to be about. What I didn’t get was the fact that D knew that we were in the middle of our rose wine competition and he should’ve bought some sort of white meat (turkey mostly), but no, he bought two rib-eye steaks…

This recipe is not actually a recipe, but more like a quick hunger-fix that everybody does from time to time. Mainly I’m talking about steak and vegetables. I wanted to share it with you because D uses some tricks to make a steak appealing even to myself. One of his secret weapons is the cast iron pan he always uses for meat. I’ve talked about his precious pan in an earlier post. Another thing that he does for beef steak is the fact that he fries it with a bit of butter which makes it extremely tender and tasty. He rarely ever seasons the meat as in his opinion, you should do that after it is cooked.

Here’s what he bought:

8 spears of asparagus (he bought more – frittata – but that’s all he used for the side)
6 mushrooms
2 red onions
1 bell pepper (he bought three different coloured ones, chopped them all up and we got both a colourful frittata and a colourful side for the beef steak)
2 rib-eye beef steaks

What he did:

He chopped all the vegetables, put a bit of butter into a teflon pan and poured the onion first.
When the onion was a bit fried he added the asparagus and the bell pepper.
The mushrooms joined the party last as they do tend to leave a lot of water and he didn’t really want to make a vegetable stew.
On to the meat. He heated a bit of butter into his (by now) infamous cast iron pan and then he put in both steaks.
The secret with beef steak is to also put a bit of butter on top of it and when that butter is half melted you should start the dance of turning them from side to side every minute, that way you’ll get the perfect medium-rare colour that you usually only get at the restaurant (where a thermometer is used).
That’s about it! Arrange everything nicely on the plate a snap some pics in order to have proof of the whole cooking experience. These plate photos aren’t the nicest simply because D was starving and he couldn’t wait to eat.

Yes, as you can see from the pics, since we were in an ongoing rose wine contest, we had beef steak with rose instead of red, but as you know we don’t really value those kind of rigidities.

This was a light (for me) and healthy dinner. The nutritional info is for two servings considering that there are two meat-lovers eating. I only had some vegetables that evening, and D was left with a nice lunch the next day.

April 30, 2016

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We messed up! Badly!

Yup, we did it! Me messed up! Well, not the food, that turned out great, but we did mess up the quantities! We forgot to weight them and write everything down. I guess we were quite enthusiastic and hungry. As I’ve mentioned in other food posts, we don’t really follow any recipe, for us cooking is more about buying whatever we like and combining them, so no Masterchef experience here. We like to call it instinctive cooking.

Every since we started this blog we ended up in the kitchen a lot more often and we always try and measure everything and write down all the details. Well, this time we forgot all about these little details (read: we were extremely hungry!), however, considering the fact that D loves taking photos, we didn’t forget about that! Basically this post is written following the photos we took, so if you’re going to want to try and recreate this recipe, it’s going to be a bit more complicated. Here it goes!

What we bought:

1 turkey breast (I’m actually amazed we only bought one-guess we’re getting used to cooking just for the two of us)
2 broccoli heads
2 red onions
A bunch of new potatoes (maybe about 500gr, but we overdid it in this departement, so you should buy less)
3 coloured bell-peppers (they looked great both in the pics and in the food, however, we only used about half of each)
2 garlic cloves
One chunk of red cheddar (about a cup grated)
One chunk of gouda (again, about a cup grated)
2 eggs (for the home-made mayonnaise)
Mustard (about a teaspoon, again for the mayo)
Olive oil (another mayo ingredient)
Jamie Oliver’s BBQ seasoning
Ground curry (add to taste)
Butter (for the tray)
Some oven-baked bread (to make the breadcrumbs for the crust-we bought some ready made bruschetta)

Well, that’s about it. Here goes writing the steps following the pics… I hope I won’t forget anything!

We started by using the hand blender on the baked bread to make breadcrumbs. I have no idea why we started with this, as you’ll need the breadcrumbs right at the end, before putting everything into the oven.
Preheat the oven at 205 degrees C. I think this one is the actual logical first step.
Wash all the vegetables, grate the cheese and cut the meat into approximately equal pieces.
Make the mayo or buy it ready-made, but I prefer to make it myself:

put two yolks into a bowl
Add one tsp of mustard
1/2 lemon juice
Mix slowly adding oil until you have as much may as you need, in this case, about a cup

Butter the tray you’re going to use. We suggest a teflon one as the vegetables taste best baked in that type of tray.
Add a lot of seasoning to the mayo. I think D must’ve ground for about 15 minutes – you should just try and find some sort of BBQ seasoning that is already ground.
Add all the cheese and half of the sliced garlic into the mayo and mix it really good.
Put the broccoli, potatoes, bell peppers, sliced onions and the remaining garlic slices into a bowl, mix them up evenly and add half of the cheese-mayo mix over them. Mix them all together until the mayo is distributed equally over the vegetables.
Pour all the mayo-vegetables into the tray.
Arrange the turkey pieces nicely over the vegetables. Prior to this step (I know i’d screw up some steps with this ‘following pics’ method) you should cover the turkey with curry and seasoning.
After you’ve arranged them on the tray, cover them with the remaining mayo-garlic-cheese and add the breadcrumbs allover the tray.
Put it into the oven and 45 minutes later you’re going to end up with the best oven cooked turkey and vegetables you’ve ever had!

We ended up with about 6 servings, so as per usual you should divide all the numbers on the nutritional info by six. We actually are very proud that we didn’t end up with at least ten servings!