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  • Cheat’s Chicken Korma

    Cheat’s Chicken Korma

  • Smoky Chilli Bean

    Smoky Chilli Bean & Bacon Stew

  • Quick Sausage Meat Ragu

    Quick Sausage Meat Ragu

  • Pizzoccheri alla Valtellinese

    Pizzoccheri alla Valtellinese

  • Linguine with Plaice

    Linguine with Plaice

  • Chocolate Orange Baguette

    Chocolate Orange Baguette & Butter Pudding

  • Chorizo and Potato Soup

    Chorizo and Potato Soup

Cheat’s Chicken Korma

Cheat’s Chicken Korma

21 Mar 2017

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The missus is partial to a cheeky chicken korma – a combination of coconut and her sweet tooth make this a firm favourite in her book. If we get a takeaway this is almost always her goto option. The problem with this is I’ve really fallen out of love with takeaway curry.

I could probably talk about this at length but suffice to say the choices near to us vary vastly in quality, consistency and reliability. So much so that the last time we tried to order a takeaway, we ended up in a battle with Just Eat which resulted in them failing our order and us leaping on the 5 bus to get a Lahore Kebab House at 1am. More

By: grobelaar Category: Cheats, Curry

Smoky Chilli Bean & Bacon Stew

Smoky Chilli Bean & Bacon Stew

20 Mar 2017

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OK I have a confession to make –  the ragu sauce I made recently wasn’t made with Italian pancetta. It wasn’t even some British bacon lardons. I bought the 60p cooking bacon from Tesco (I’m sure the other supermarkets have an equivalent). Money is tight at the moment and I thought to myself ‘ lets give this a go’. A housemate of mine way back in the 90s brought this stuff to my attention, with his student friendly throw-it-all-in chilli recipe, where pretty much everything came out of tins and he threw in this cooking bacon. Now I’m sure this is not going to be winning any sustainable farming awards, but at 60p for 500g of bacon, if you’re strapped for cash and looking to add some protein to a meal this can’t really be beaten – it’s cheaper even than liver and this is BACON! More

By: grobelaar Category: Recipes

Quick Sausage Meat Ragu

Quick Sausage Meat Ragu

20 Mar 2017

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This sausage meat ragu is my go to recipe when I want a ragu sauce in a relatively short space of time. Using sausage meat shortcuts the slow cooking process required to get the meat tender and means you can have a finished sauce ready in about an hour or so. Maybe that’s not quick in your book, but I’m never one to rush anything when it comes to cooking. More

By: grobelaar Category: Pasta, Recipes

Pizzoccheri alla Valtellinese

Pizzoccheri alla Valtellinese

7 Mar 2017

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This is a robust dish of buckwheat pasta, potatoes and greens in an oozy sauce of alpine cheese, butter and garlic from the northern Lombardy region. I first saw this on the Alps and Arrangiarsi episode of The Two Greedy Italians. I fell in love with that episode set in the foothills of the alps – something about how rustic the cooking was and how connected the food and the culture was to the land and the mountainous terrain struck of chord with me. When I saw Gennaro cooking the pizzoccheri I knew I was going to try this at home. Over the course of cooking this several times at home and for friends it has become a firm favourite of the house. I can understand how the sheer quantity of butter and cheese might dissuade you, but seriously you need to try this at home. I promise that you won’t regret it (and no you can’t skimp on the butter, or use Flora).

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By: grobelaar Category: Cheese, Meat Free, Pasta, Recipes, Vegetarian

Linguine with Plaice

Linguine with Plaice

28 Nov 2016

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I’ve cooked this dish before with prawns and I’m pretty sure you could whip it up with many different types of fish suitable to be served with pasta. I got the idea of using white fish from a restaurant called Al Tiguri that I visited while on holiday in the town of Alghero in Sardinia. One of their signature pasta dishes is a very distinctive black and white linguine where one side of the pasta is black from the inclusion of squid ink and the other is bright white, presumably made only with egg whites. They serve it with shreds of skate, there’s no chilli or parsley in their dish, just really good extra virgin olive oil, lemon and basil. I went with plaice on this occasions as there was a solitary fillet reduced to clear at the supermarket and looking for a budget conscious meal this fitted the bill nicely. More

By: grobelaar Category: Recipes Tags: homecooking, linguine, pasta, plaice, recipe

Chocolate Orange Baguette & Butter Pudding

Chocolate Orange Baguette & Butter Pudding

2 Nov 2016

2 Comments

I had this half baguette hanging around for about a week. One advantage of good bread is that it goes stale, rather than mouldy and the more stale the bread, the better it is at soaking up the custard.

Dried fruit can be a bit of a marmite thing for some people, but catering to those tastes wasn’t my reason for doing a chocolate bread and butter pudding, I just fancied a change, particularly as I done the traditional bread and butter pudding for the house a few weeks earlier. More

By: grobelaar Category: Recipes

Chorizo and Potato Soup

Chorizo and Potato Soup

11 Oct 2016

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I came across this simple Spanish dish, Patatas Riojanas, the week that Jamie Oliver blew up on social media for committing crimes again Spanish cooking by adding chorizo to a paella. I was mooching about on the internet having a laugh at all the outrage when I discovered that Jamie Oliver’s own Food Tube channel has a video of an authentic Valencian paella, the same chef, Omar Allibhoy also has a video for this simple Riojan dish of chorizo and potatoes and I felt like it would be appropriate to cook a Spanish dish that is supposed to have chorizo in it. More

By: grobelaar Category: Recipes

Gigantic Stuffed Courgettes

Gigantic Stuffed Courgettes

8 Oct 2016

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Everyone in the house got one of these absolutely gargantuan courgettes from a friend’s allotment, seriously they were the size of my forearm. It seemed a shame if they weren’t made the centre of their own dish, so a good stuffing was on the cards.

There wasn’t really a plan with this one. At first I pondered going Middle Eastern but that would involve getting more spices for the cupboard, so in the interest of keeping it cheap and simple I stuck to Italian flavours. I didn’t want to just make a ragu as I’d done that quite a lot recently.

The idea of meatballs appealed a lot, and with the courgettes being so big, several meatballs would be able to nestle in the scooped out middle no problem. I went for some sausagemeat meatballs and fried aubergine, covered in tomato sauce and topped with mozzarella. More

By: grobelaar Category: Recipes

Mary Berry’s Coffee Cake

Mary Berry’s Coffee Cake

30 Sep 2016

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You know when you find a recipe and it’s like bingo, that’s a great recipe? This is one of those recipes. I volunteered to bake something for the Macmillan coffee morning in our office and I wanted to try something new so plumped for trying a coffee cake. A google search revealed this Mary Berry recipe in the Telegraph. Mary, along with Delia and James Martin are names I trust most when it comes to cake and pud recipes, you can always count on them to keep it traditional with no reliance on pimping and trendy little twists. More

By: grobelaar Category: Baking, Cooking the Books

Memories of Spaghetti Bolognese

Memories of Spaghetti Bolognese

14 Sep 2016

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Dolmio has been in the news recently (well it was when I started writing this many months ago) after making a public declaration that due to high sugar and salt content, their pasta sauces should be eaten only occasionally. My first experience of spaghetti Bolognese was with these ready made jars of pasta sauce and this news triggers memories of cooking as a teenager and how I discovered you could ditch the jars and cook spaghetti Bolognese from scratch.

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By: grobelaar Category: Cooking Diaries, Recipes
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Recent Posts

  • Cheat’s Chicken KormaCheat’s Chicken Korma
    March 21, 2017
  • Smoky Chilli Bean & Bacon StewSmoky Chilli Bean & Bacon Stew
    March 20, 2017
  • Quick Sausage Meat RaguQuick Sausage Meat Ragu
    March 20, 2017
  • Pizzoccheri alla ValtellinesePizzoccheri alla Valtellinese
    March 7, 2017
  • Linguine with PlaiceLinguine with Plaice
    November 28, 2016

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