Jamie's 30 Minute Meals - Amazing Sweet Potato Mash with Fish and Pudding

I decided to cook a 30 Minute Meal on Saturday. They always feel like a feast and this one includes a drink and a pudding. As much as I love the '15 Minute Meals' it was nice to go back to where I first got excited about Jamie Oliver books. I chose to do Sea Bass and crispy pancetta with sweet potato mash, Asian greens and a berry ice cream to follow. The drink is sparkling lemon and ginger. This is a great meal, it has the balance that I have come to expect from a Jamie Oliver feast, although it is very difficult to find sea bass in Shetland so I used local haddock from the fishmongers. They had no fillets with the skin on and crispy skin seemed to help with the cooking, so I chose to buy a headless/gutted haddock and fillet it myself. I am really not great at this but I took my time and got the fillets off. It was a little scrappy in places but did the job. It works out a lot cheaper this way but is messy and a sharp knife helps a lot. 

With my fish prepared I sorted my other ingredients and pans and started the clock. With so much more going on than a 15 minute meal you really have to keep your head, and I also had a 2 year old sous-chef which caused some delays! My little girl loves tasting ingredients as I cook which is generally a good thing when it comes to beetroot but more tricky to explain that a chilli is too spicy to eat and not actually pepper at all. She did chew on some lime flesh just to prove she would eat it after I said she wouldn't like it. As a result it took me 38.35 minutes and I did the ice cream after; although I knew we would struggle to eat the ice cream straight away after such a big meal. The fish was very tasty with just some lemon zest, fennel seeds and salty-crispy pancetta to compliment it. The dressed greens with chilli were really tasty and fresh but the best part had to be the sweet potato mash. It was incredibly easy to do and had fresh coriander, spicy chilli and sweet mango chutney running through it. I could just eat bowls of it. I can see me using this with chicken and maybe even pork in the future.

Ingredients

There are no difficult techniques at all. I know some people find cooking fish daunting but it is really straight forward. The use of a microwave to make the mash is great as it doesn't take up a free hob. The only thing I would say is that the recipes seem to use a bigger frying pan than I have so I end up using two quite a lot and this was no exception.

The drink is made of lemonade, sparkling water ginger and mint. Unfortunately we were not able to get any mint. Although I can see what the mint would have contributed it was nice without it. I think if I did it again I would be tempted to strain the pieces of ginger but that is personal preference.

Haddock, pancetta, Asian greens and sweet potato mash with lemon drink

The desert is berry ice cream/frozen yoghurt. It is incredibly simple putting frozen berries and greek yoghurt together in a blender. It made a bright purple very tasty pudding with lots of fresh blueberries to finish it off. This could work with any fruit and would be great for children.

Berry frozen yoghurt with fresh blueberries

Baileys cupcakes

It was a friend's birthday last week and I know that, like me, she is a fan of Baileys cheesecake. I thought that I would try something different so I found a recipe for Baileys cupcakes on a very yummy looking blog. It is a really good recipe and easy to use. The cake was chocolatey and rich and the Baileys kept it moist. The mix itself was amazing but sadly taking somebody a bowl of uncooked cake is just not the done thing. The cakes did not taste overly of Baileys when cooked though there was still a hint there. I found that the recipe made more than it suggests as it says six and I doubled the recipe wanting twelve and got 21. I think that muffin cases were used in the recipe despite saying they were cupcakes, although if using muffin cases I would worry about getting them to cook through evenly.

The icing worked well though I was dubious at first as the alcohol started to split the butter in the butter icing. It tasted good and did deliver a "Baileys kick" and I would not recommend this one for children. If I did them again I would be tempted to make a white chocolate and baileys ganache. I think this could help tie the flavours together. I topped mine off with a chocolate flake. Overall I was pleased with the flavour and everybody seemed to enjoy them.

Baileys Chocolate Cupcakes

Tasty Gnocchi And I Am Sure Jamie Would Forgive Me The 6 Seconds

On Saturday I returned to one of my favourite 15 Minute Meals, sausage gnocchi with warm kale and bean salad. It is tasty and a great meal on a windy day; it also uses lot of vegetables which keeps it from being too heavy. I timed my cooking, so I followed the suggestion in the book of getting all the pots out, the ingredients ready and a kettle boiled. This seems like a bit of a "faff" but I had been shopping so it was easier to unpack to a tray than into, and then out of, cupboards.  I managed to do it in 15 minutes and 6.69 seconds. This is partly down to having done it before and partly down to using sausages. There are loads of 15 minute meals using squashed meat but I spend a  lot of time making sure it is cooked all the way through. This recipe uses the inside of sausages so its really easy to break it up and know it is cooked.

I have not been able to find good chilli sausages so I tend to use good quality sausages and a blob of "easy chilli". This time I used normal broccoli and frozen green beans as the quality of the fresh green beans and tender stem broccoli was not good. Neither made a difference, I just made sure that I use a thin slice setting for the broccoli stalk and cut the florets small. In the past my husband has made fresh gnocchi which takes longer but tastes amazing. If you are not making your own gnocchi I would say that there is no noticeable difference  in taste between the vac packed gnocchi that is found with the dried pasta and the vac packed gnocchi in the chiller, however the stuff in the chiller is more expensive. In my opinion it is better to spend the money on the sausage than the gnocchi.

This is a big rustic dish and in many ways is not a pretty as some of the others, but it is incredibly tasty, the fennel seeds with the chilli heat and tomato bring a lot of flavour. It is meaty and the gnocchi is a welcome change from pasta. The greens are fresh but with a hint of salty bacon, sweet honey and crunchy hazelnuts. Looking at the ingredients I was worried that the bacon and nuts would overpower the greens but they don't at all. This dish is very balanced and didn't generate too much washing up either.

Sausage Gnocchi with Kale and Beans.

A Despicable Cake

For our daughters Birthday we decided to make a Minion cake. It was hard to chose as there is so many things that she likes at the moment. The minion won over as it is colourful, fun and recognisable. I cannot take all of the credit for this as it was a joint effort between myself and my husband. We used a 18cm by 25cm cake tin. My husband drew a template to match the dimensions and cut out the features from greeceproof paper. I made two cakes using a very basic sponge recipe, 4oz self raising flour, 4oz stork and 4oz caster sugar and 2 eggs in each cake. I used the usual method of creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs gradually and then folding in flour.

I made the coloured icing using ready made royal icing kneaded with a paste made from icing sugar and food colouring. It is time consuming and I dyed my hands blue but it allowed me to get the colour I wanted without having to buy a huge quantity or a mixed pack. When the cakes were out and cool we sandwiched them with jam and covered in a thin marzipan layer. I then rolled all of the icing out and cut out the pieces using the templates. My husband then positioned all of the pieces on the cake, sticking them with water and adding finishing touches including the arms and legs. The mouth took a while to get right but the beauty of using a minion is that we could take advantage of there being so many that all look a little different that we were bound to match one. Our daughter loved it and instantly recognised it, we also got some compliments from some hard to impress friends and family. It tasted quite good too.

Extermin-cake

I often make birthday cakes with characters and roll on icing, this year I wanted to do something different for my husbands birthday, I wanted it to double up as a pudding, be a little bit classy but also a lot of fun. I decided to go for a chocolate cake with white chocolate ganache and a coco powder stencil. I had a lot of thoughts about what to stencil, although I will not discuss them now as some may well be used in the future. I decided on a dalek as they lend themselves to an outline and are quite iconic. Not to mention that my husband is a Dr Who fan. I used a chocolate cake recipe I had used before, I found a Mary Berry ganache recipe that looked great and halved it as hers was for a two tier cake. The stencil was a picture I found and put on card - cutting all of the bits out. The circles were hard so I made a series of small slits an pushed them through which was effective. The cake was easy to make but took a lot of whisking so I invested in a hand held electric whisk. The ganache was yummy and easy but you need to leave yourself adequate time between processes to let things cool and set. It is very rich but I found that serving it with fresh raspberries cut through nicely.

Double chocolate Dalek cake.

Tasty Lamb Need Not Kofta Fortune

This is my third save with Jamie meal. It was the most straight forward of the three and took the least amount of time. It took around 45 minutes, but a lot of the time comes down to cooking the lamb. If you wanted it pink it would take less time. Mine were quite well done.

It is another great flavour combination with a lot of basic ingredients. The pistachio and fennel coating with the sweet chilli sauce was really tasty and gave a great texture next to the soft lamb. Lamb mince is not something we use a lot, we are not big fans of shepherds pie and it can sometimes go dry without a lot of sauce or leave an odd after taste. This did neither. Again the home-made cabbage pickle was crunchy with sweet and sour notes. I couldn't get hold of raddish so I used raw carrots which worked well despite not having the peppery heat.

There were some good tips in the recipe including using two kebab sticks so it stops the koftas spinning. I would recommend that you use tongs to turn them while cooking it as that will stop the sticks splitting the meat. I would also recommend using a food processor for the nuts and fennel seeds as 50g of pistachios is a lot of nuts for a pestle and mortar, unless you have a much bigger pestle and mortar than I do. It was easy and tasty and a great thing to do with lamb mince.

Paella

This is a really easy recipe from the Save with Jamie book. It is helped by the fact that it can all be cooked in one pan. What I will say is that needs to be a big pan! It should be a lidded pan but in the end I used a large pan with no lid and topped up the water where needed which was fine. All in all it took about 45 minutes. This feels like a long time if you are used to 15 minute and 30 minute meals. It is slightly deceptive though as the last 15- 20 minutes of this recipe is to get the rice cooked through which means you have chance to clean up or make lunch for the next day while you stir. If I did a 30 minute meal I found myself taking a lot of time afterwards to clean the very messy kitchen.

Paella

My husband is not keen on prawns so I used extra chicken. The flavour from the chicken thigh was really good and they stayed really moist. The chorizo gave a good smoky flavour and the peas kept it fresh. The garnish of parsley and lemon was more than decoration as it really added to the flavour of the dish.  This was a really basic cupboard recipe with nothing special needed. Using the frozen peas is great as they stay fresh and are easy to get. It was really tasty and warming especially on a windy day, I can see it being the sort of thing we cook quite often. 

The battle of the carrot soup

I grew up eating very yummy soup made from seemingly nothing by my Mum and my Gran. They both make huge pots out of all the bits in the cupboard and vegetable rack. As a result I can make an acceptable Scotch Broth or lentil soup. The only problem is despite a few master classes it never tastes quite as good to me. My Mum always said the same thing about my Gran's but I never believed her.

Because of this I have a tendency to look for new soup recipes that I have nothing to compare to. At the moment I am enjoying carrots. I have made three carrot soups in the last two weeks with varying success.

The first was carrot and coriander, I roasted the carrots to get a good flavour and mixed them with chopped onion, coriander and beef stock (it should have been chicken stock but I was out). I mixed it in a blender, seasoned and added extra coriander. It was tasty although looked a little muddy because of the stock. I liked the little fresh coriander leaves as a garnish but felt that the soup itself needed more. 

The second soup was from the Save with Jamie book and was carrot, orange and ginger. I was intrigued as I liked all of the flavours but had not thought of putting them together. In all honesty I wish I hadn’t. The carrots were cooked for a while in a pan with the ingredients before adding water and cooking down.  I think that there may have been an issue with my carrots as they took a very long time to cook and didn’t add much to the taste. I then put it through the blender. It looked bright and vibrant but I was unhappy with the taste. It was like a warm sludgy health drink, the kick of ginger was okay but the orange just did not work in my opinion. Had the carrot taste been stronger and maybe sweeter it may have helped the balance but overall it was a disaster.

Soup number three was roasted sweet potato and carrot with thyme. This one won for me as it was sweet and earthy with a good hit of thyme. I roasted chunks of carrot and sweet potato with thyme, softened onion and garlic and put it all together with some chicken stock. Again I put it through the blender and it made the perfect lunch on a wet and windy day. This is all personal preference but I found it easy and tasty and the sweet potato brought something to the recipe.

Yummy dinner and no Purple Pickle

Tonight I tried the second Save with Jamie recipe with my big piece of pork and it was even better than yesterdays. It looked interesting enough to give a go but there were a few parts that worried me. It is a baguette that is spread with a home-made pate, then topped with pickled vegetables, sweet chilli pork and fresh chilli and coriander. I was slightly dubious as I like pate but not liver and I was worried that with just onion, liver and coriander, and being warm, that it would be overpowering. I am also not a fan of a strong vinegar taste and didn't want the pickles to take over. I should have had more faith as it was all balanced. The pickles were more sweet and sour than just "vinegar" and the pate was subtle and meaty. The pork was amazing and would not have been out of place on noodles or stir fry. It was easy to make but was a little time consuming. I was unable to get white cabbage and despite much discussion in our house decided that a red cabbage was the way forward rather than a savoy as I decided it needed to be nice and firm to pickle. After the "blue buns" I did pickle my cabbage separate to the cucumber and carrot so I did not have a purple pickle.

Bahn Mi 

In terms of cost this was a cheap meal for us, I say "for us" because we have been cooking a lot of Jamie Oliver meals so our cupboard contains a lot of the ingredients he frequently uses. This sticks with the policy of the book but if you were starting out with this type of food then forking out for the base ingredients will feel expensive. Saying that, however, it will let you then cook a lot of the recipes from the book cheaply after the initial cost.

I also made a pudding tonight from the book. 300g of frozen pineapple, 300g of natural yoghurt and half a teaspoon of honey mixed in a blender. It made an amazing creamy icecream/frozen yoghurt. I think I will be trying this with lots of different fruit in the future - next up frozen berries or banana!

Save with Jamie and cook like Bridget Jones

The most used cookery book in out house is Jamie Olivers 30 minute meals. We have made so many of them and carried techniques over. I then took the 15 minute meal book quite seriously armed with stopwatch and desperate to get in the "zone". It therefore made sense to give the Save with Jamie book a go. We don't tend to waste food and try to plan meals to use leftovers. Roast Chicken followed by risotto the next day etc. I do love a tip about freezing whole chillis though.

We bought the book to come up with extra recipes and to see if it was as useful as the books before. I purchased a massive piece of pork at a good price, roasted it and divided it into the amounts needed. I froze some of the bits for later in the month and planned this weekend. I decided to start with the Chinese pork buns. The pace was slower and with other things going on and without the pressure of the stop watch. It required more precision than the 30 and 15 minute meals recipes but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

The recipe was clear and well set out. I normally leave dough and pastry to my husband as its tends to involve too much intuition and not enough science. I did however find that the dough was so basic that even I managed it. The flavours worked well and I love the little garnishes as it makes it feel like more of a platter. I made one mistake and that was to think that blue muffin cases would be okay as they are designed for cooking. Seemingly they are not okay for steaming which resulted in the edges of my buns being blue! It was not a big issue as they had expanded a lot and we just took the blue bits off. It did however make me giggle and think of Bridget Jones with the blue string in her soup. I should also add that I used a metal steamer not a bamboo one and they worked fine. I am sure we will eat it again; next time I will shred the pork when it is warm, use white muffin cases, have lots and lots of flour for the worktop and my hands and maybe add some cucumber batons.

Pork Buns with yummy garnish

In Pursuit of Good Granola

I like granola but I often stand in the cereal aisle thinking that the cheap stuff is a bit saw-dusty and the expensive stuff is overpriced. I often think that it would be better with this or that added and that there is no need to add the sugar they do... I started looking at recipes and found the principles were all similar. I decided to use a co-op recipe as a base. I tried it just over a week ago and it was good but not quite right (we still ate it all) so I made some more modifications and set to it again. I am even happier now. I think it will be one of those recipes that turns out different every time and there is a lot of trail and error. I love cashews, dried cranberries and sunflower seeds so I made sure there was more of all 3 of these. I used mixed seeds, nuts and a berry mix as a base and then added more of the things I like best. This made it more economical and gave good variety. The cooking time varied and there was a lot of time spent checking. I think this will depend on how crunchy you like it and your oven.

Yummy home-made granola

All in Good Hummus

I really like Hummus, it is one of those foods I always think I should eat more often. I normally mix in roasted butter-nut squash which makes it smooth and slightly sweet - it is however, a lot of work. I saw this on Pinterest and thought it was a great idea. (I have put the full link below the guide as well).

 http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/healthy-recipes/13-different-ways-make-hummus

I sometimes have difficulty finding tahini and in the past I've had to use sesame oil, or found out that the tahini was past its best after the first use, so I was really keen on using the peanut butter and cheat. I decided to mix the 'pesto' and 'cheats' recipes.

So ingredients ready to go I put them it in the blender. I found it a bit thick so I thinned it down with water. I also decided it could be smoother so I passed it through a sieve.









Really pleased with the result, the tahini is not missed at all and the pesto worked so well I added a bit of a pesto swirl. With a tub of chopped veg tomorrow's lunch should be good. I have been convinced I should try more of these and I am intrigued by the beet one :)