Quick Make: 60th Birthday Card

I suddenly realised it was a male relative's 60th birthday and I hadn't done any card making for a while, but I wanted to send him a handmade card. I turned to my box of pre-printed patterned card blanks and chose one I thought would work as a base, and added a happy birthday banner. I can't read what the sentiment in the silver square at the top is and I can't remember - something along the lines of 'enjoy your day' I think! I also had some number stickers and stars which I stuck in the various circles on the printed card. Not my best card but I still think a handmade card is more meaningful than just grabbing one off the shelf in a shop - though sometimes you can find the perfect card for someone that suits them to a T in the shops!

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Restaurant review: Debenhams Oxford Street

I took my mum shopping for her outfit to wear to my wedding and decided to make personal shopper appointments in Debenhams and John Lewis on Oxford Street. They bring you different clothes to try on and know what style would suit your body shape. It was a pretty exhausting day as my mum must have tried on at least 15 outfits, but eventually found one she really liked.

As I knew it would be a busy day we didn’t want to take too long over lunch and I had a look to see whether Debenhams had a café. They have four!

We stopped for coffee before we started shopping and went to the W1 Bistro on the lower level; it is a very smart café that looks more like a wine bar, with a mixture of types of seating and a small food menu with things like toasted sandwiches, but we only wanted a drink.

Later, we found ourselves on the 5^th floor near the “family restaurant serving British classics” so decided to have lunch here. Most of the dishes on offer are what I would call “main meals” – fish and chips, pizza etc. They had a range of sandwiches and also a small range of ‘snack sized’ hot food choices, so my mum and I both decided to have a jacket potato with prawns. The potato was nice and fluffy with a generous helping of prawns, though the side salad had no dressing which would have been nice. I always find when I have jacket potatoes in cafes or restaurants that they are much smaller than I would have at home – I always search out the largest potato I can find in the supermarket! So I was hungry again before the end of the day but I expect that was partly because dress shopping when you want something very specific is hard work!

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Meal Planning Monday Week 21

Do any of you have ice cream makers? I've wanted one for a while but never had the space - you have to put the whole bowl from the machine into your freezer, and in the past I had quite a small freezer. Now I have a huge American-style fridge-freezer, but it's always full of food! But my fiancé gave me an ice cream maker for Christmas and I haven't used it at all yet - I usually only want ice cream in the summer and to be honest with wedding planning I haven't had the time to figure out how to use new kitchen gadgets. But I'm definitely planning to use the ice cream maker after the wedding next month so I need to start using up food in the freezer so I have space!

Monday

My fiancé has a day off

Lunch: I'll have a chicken salad, which I have been having most days! I'll buy him something nice to have for his lunch

Dinner: He can have chicken goujons and chips and I'll have sweet chilli breaded prawns, also in the freezer. I'd love to have them with chips but am trying not to eat potatoes particularly in the evenings so think I will make it into a stir-fry with spiralized veg.

Tuesday

Lunch: salad

Dinner: will be home late as I have a meeting that runs an hour past my usual finish time, so I want something quick to cook. The forecast is that today will be the hottest day all week (and there will be showers every day from tomorrow) so if my lovely fiancé would like to barbecue so it's ready for when I get home I will suggest he has sausages and I have fish. I quite like the look of this mackerel with ginger, chilli and lime. If the weather isn't so good or I'm really late and he wants to eat before I get home, there are pizzas in the freezer and I can have the rest of my stir fry with Quorn chicken-style pieces from the freezer.

Weds

Lunch: salad

Dinner: just me – my fiancé at his mum’s? I'll have butternut squash stew from the freezer or the rest of my stir-fry.

Thursday

Lunch: with a work colleague before he goes on three months of shared parental leave

Dinner: turkey breast steak for me and chicken breast for him following this piri piri recipe

Friday

I have a day off

Lunch: as I treat, I might have... not salad! But I'm taking my cat to the vet in the morning and won't be home in time to spend a lot of time cooking lunch. I think I'll have a piece of salmon, with cauliflower cheese from the freezer.

Dinner: I've got some cubed beef in the freezer which my fiancé isn't a huge fan of but he does like curry (as long as he gets a big naan bread!) so I'll do a Thai green beef curry in the slow cooker, using this recipe. I might go easy on the rice, or not have any at all (and certainly won't have a naan).
I haven't made a dessert in a while so I think I will try the 'choc berry mud' from I Quit Sugar.

Saturday

Lunch: I've got a wedding dress fitting in the morning so nothing that will take too long to cook. Maybe just beans on toast - and I can have macaroni cheese. Providing I remember to buy sliced bread as it isn't something we actually have in the house that often!

Dinner: at a friend’s BBQ. I will take some food with us. If time I'd also like to bake something as I haven't been making a lot of cakes lately! I quite fancy making the Eton Mess cupcakes from the Hummingbird book.

Sunday

Lunch: something quick as I have a doctor's appointment and we won't be home until at least 1.30. Might actually do brunch before we go of sausage, bacon, scrambled eggs. And when we get back, crumpets that are in the freezer.

Dinner: I'll have the tequila marinated chicken wings I was going to do if my bridesmaids were staying overnight, which they didn't, as the wings are taking up a lot of freezer space; my fiancé doesn't like wings so he can have the same flavours on chicken breast, with potato wedges/salad.

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Spiralized Vegetables with Broccoli Pesto

The lengths I go to for dieting… I wasn’t looking forward to my dinner recently as I’d decided to make pesto out of broccoli and serve it over spiralized veg, while my fiancé was tucking in to a pizza. Though as he correctly pointed out, it was a frozen pizza and he could have ordered Domino’s but didn’t as he knew it would make it harder for me - and I was the one who cooked him the pizza!

 

But when I actually started to eat my dinner I was surprised at how good it actually tasted, and I really enjoyed it. Which is not to say I wouldn’t rather have had a pizza but I have a wedding dress to get in to!

 

The recipe comes from I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson which has become a book I turn to a lot at the moment!

  

To serve one, you need:

Spiralized veg: I used half a tub of spiralized carrot from Tesco (it’s hard to put a carrot through a spiralizer unless it’s a really thick one), and I spiralized half a butternut squash to go with it.

For the pesto:

1 cup broccoli florets, steamed until tender

1 spring onion, peeled

1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed

2 tbsp olive oil

Juice of ½ lemon

15g grated parmesan or 30g cashews, soaked in water for 1-4 hours and drained – but I didn’t have time to do this and used them without soaking and it worked pretty much fine I think. I also cheated and used both the parmesan and the cashews which made the pesto more substantial and gave it a lovely flavour.

Salt and pepper to taste

Basically I put all the ingredients in a food processor

 

Pulse until you have a thick green paste

Serve over spiralized veg, which I find best gently steamed or stir fried so it isn't raw but it doesn't take much cooking:

I'm sending this to Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes. Also this recipe would be vegan if you left out the parmesan.

 

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Chicken en Papilotte with Orange Veg

Chicken breasts are a great stand-by for dinners during the week; both my fiancé and I like them, they are quick to cook, pretty healthy and you can do a lot of different things with them. I found this recipe for spiced baked chicken parcels – chicken en papilotte – on Serious Eats, and decided to make my own variation on it.

 

I already had za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice, I’d bought when we had the letter Z for Alphabakes, but I don’t like to eat peppers or tomatoes so instead decided to use a little bit of pepper and a portion of spiralized butternut squash. A squash is really easy to spiralize if you have a robust enough machine (mine is the Lurch one from Lakeland that you can buy on Amazon here:

 

 

I tossed the chicken breast, which I had butterflied out, with the spices, oil and herbs and then placed it on a square of foil with the peppers, onion, spring onion and butternut squash on top. I wrapped up the parcel and baked it in the oven; it only took 20 minutes as I had sliced the chicken relatively thin. When you unwrap the parcel you have a very tasty meal, which can be served with extra veg or perhaps with new or mashed potatoes for a more substantial dinner.

 

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Quinoa Cheese Tartlets

I’ve been following a low sugar diet for the last few weeks and bought the book I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson, which is full of healthy recipes. Weekend lunches are probably the meals where I struggle most to come up with dishes – my fiancé would have a bacon sandwich every Saturday and every Sunday if he could, but I prefer to cook different things and at the moment I’m not really eating bread so that doesn’t work for me at all.

 

I found a recipe in I Quit Sugar for quinoa and pumpkin tarts which I knew my fiancé would never eat, so I decided to do him a cheese and bacon tart on a pastry base to use up some shortcrust pastry I had in the freezer. For myself, I followed the recipe but scaled it down as I didn’t need it to serve 4. I also used butternut squash instead of pumpkin, and agave nectar instead of rice malt syrup. I also realised I didn’t have any parmesan so used a little gruyere instead, along with the blue cheese and ricotta.

 

It was a bit fiddly to make as you have to rinse the quinoa first then cook it, then let it cool and form a ‘pie crust’ and then bake it blind, while cooking the butternut squash at the same time. The quinoa created a surprisingly good base for the tart and it was really tasty – butternut squash and blue cheese is a nice flavour combination and the creaminess of the ricotta was a lovely addition. I don’t know whether I’d go to the lengths of making these again but I think if I was soaking and cooking quinoa for a couple of recipes at the same time, eg a salad for lunch at work and then these tarts the next day, then it would be well worth the effort.

Mixing the quinoa with the cheese and egg:

I used a mixture of loose-bottomed tart tins and, because I couldn't find where my cleaner had put the bottoms to the other ones, some mini foil pie dishes. Here they are about to go in the oven.

The base is baked, so adding the topping

Just out of the oven

Serve with lots of green salad

 

I'm sharing this with Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes

 

 

 

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Lorraine Pascale's Blueberry and Limoncello Drizzle Cake

 

I have a great relationship with my personal trainer. She pushes me hard, but not too hard; she's encouraging, we have a good chat while I'm working out and she isn't draconian when it comes to diet. To prove th point, she hinted that since I like baking I could make her a cake for her birthday, which was the day after mine.

She'd told me she liked loaf cakes and I decided I wanted to make something that wasn't too unhealthy, so would involve less sugar than some cakes, not have piles of frosting, and include fruit but have an indulgent quality at the same time - it was her 40th birthday so a special occasion after all.

I turned to Lorraine Pascale's book A Lighter Way to Bake and found a recipe for a blueberry and limoncello drizzle cake, which ticked all those boxes - it wasn't a loaf cake but as it wasn't filled I decided there was no reason why I couldn't bake it in a loaf tin.

The recipe can be found online here; I had some blueberries in the freezer from a previous recipe and since I don't like them this was a good opportunity to use them up; I already had about a quarter of a bottle of limoncello left, I think from the Christmas before last, so the only ingredients I therefore had to buy was a little tub of yogurt and two lemons.

Making the batter

Adding the blueberries

ready to go in the oven

Here's the cake!

about to make the icing

drizzling over the icing

The cake took a bit longer to bake than the time given in the recipe; if you do it in a loaf tin the best thing is to keep testing it with a skewer.

I gave it to my personal trainer the day before her birthday when we had a gym session (actually on my birthday, I'm that dedicated!) and she said afterwards she and her friends really enjoyed it.

This isn't the cheapest recipe to make but for me it was pretty frugal as I was using up blueberries and limoncello I already had, which is quite a thrifty approach, so I'm sending this to Credit Crunch Munch. This month the challenge is hosted by Michelle at Utterly Scrummy and was devised by Helen and Camilla.

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