A Weekend of Food

I know I'm not a recipe blog, I know that my food photos aren't perfectly shot on lovely plates with bright lighting, I know you might not care, but we've been trying really hard to eat delicious and homemade food recently so I've been sharing some photos on my Instagram. I thought I'd share them here too with some basic recipes.

Salmon and broccoli pasta - this is one of my favourite meals but we hadn't had it in a few weeks. I never used to like broccoli but used to force myself to eat it because the iron was good for me, and now I've got used to it and quite like it. This is a simple dish. We sautee onion in a pan until it's translucent, and add a fillet of salmon and some water. We usually just put garlic and salt in, but you could add paprika or something too. Add the broccoli because you want to cook it slightly, even if it stays quite al dente. Cook the pasta and then add it to the pan with the salmon and the vegetables, and mix all through. Add some single cream and toss around. We eat it with garlic bread. 

I really fancied a whole Sunday dinner on Sunday. Lee makes an excellent roast dinner so I just leave him to it. We roasted a whole chicken, and also roasted all the vegetables - parsnips, potatoes, and carrots. I remembered we had stuffing which was great - we roast that in the oven too. Lee's Yorkshire puddings are so good, really fluffy and never soggy. This whole meal was so good for a cold Sunday evening!

When I was young my mum would quite often make chocolate upside down pudding for pudding after Sunday dinner, so I decided I'd quite like to make some and asked her for the recipe. I think she got it off a Bero packet of flour some time in the early 80s. It's really simple but effective:

For the batter:

4oz self raising flour

2oz castor sugar

2tbsp cocoa

2oz melted butter

Half a pint of milk

For the sauce:

5oz brown sugar

2tbsp cocoa

1/4 pint plus 2tbsp boiling water

For the batter, mix the butter and milk together and then add this liquid to all the dry ingredients. Mix into a smooth batter. Then for the sauce, boil the kettle, put the sugar and cocoa powder into a jug and add the boiling water. Stir until smooth.

Pour the batter into an ovenproof dish, like a lasagne dish or something. Then pour the sauce on top. Bake on gas mark 4 for about 40 minutes, until the sponge is baked on top. While baking, the sponge rises to the top and the sauce ends up underneath, all sticky and delicious. Serve with vanilla ice cream or alternatively custard (I don't like custard).

I mad up this recipe for curried cold chicken rice salad and it turned out really deliciously so I think we'll be making it again. We used packet chicken tikka, the type that comes from near the sliced ham in the supermarket and which you'd put in a sandwich. We cut it up into little bits and added it to a bowl with some cold cooked rice, some bell pepper, and half an apple. I stirred into some mayonnaise, some turmeric, and some curry powder, to taste. We served it with lettuce, mini poppadums and mango chutney. It was really simple but effective and I bet it'll be even nicer in the summer! 

I wonder what new recipes February has in store for us!