Gingerbread Biscuits

It's getting to that time of year again, when yumminess is all around us.  I find it extremely difficult to diet during the winter, as I love all the Christmassy type foods.  At the moment, I have my dried fruit steeping in brandy for the Christmas cake, and cooking is going to be really hard to do without any snaffling of the exceedingly boozy cake mix!

These Gingerbread Biscuits work really well - be careful not to overcook them though.  They are still nice, but the overcooking diminishes the ginger flavour, and I like that to be really strong.  And don't eat too much raw dough, as you won't have anything left for the biscuits :-)

Chicken Pizza and Chips - but healthy!

Well this was bloody delicious! It started off as a Slimming World recipe but I changed it a smidgen to suit us better. I had the higest praise possible for it from Frazer and Isla. They told me I can make it again! It was a definite hit.

In other news, my lovely iPhone has died. I am so pissed off. The screen just stopped working. I have an appointment at the Apple store on Saturday, but until then I'm phoneless. I feel like my right arm has been cut off! And I have no fitness tracker now either.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Biggar

Korean Beef Mince

We had this for dinner tonight. Isla and I really enjoyed it - Frazer was late home and declined the kind offer of our leftovers as he had a very sneaky McDonalds on the way home!

It's a pretty healthy meal - if you want to make it healthier you can substitute the brown sugar for sweetener, and the soy sauce with low sodium soy sauce.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Symington, Biggar

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

So, my first healthy recipe is for Vietnamese Spring Rolls. These are made with rice paper wraps and not deep fried, so they are pretty much fat free. I have worked out that if you do the recipe without honey/golden syrup/maple syrup then you can make each spring roll for around 65 calories and 1.5 syns. The taste is fresh and lovely, and makes a great guilt free snack.

Edited to add:
I can't seem to get this damn blog to show the recipe large enough to read, so I'll give you the recipe in text until I can figure the bloody thing out!

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

Ingredients

2 Chicken Breasts
Rice Paper Wraps
Fine Rice Noodles
1 Carrot, grated
1/3 Cucumber, grated
1 large stick celery, grated if possible
Finely chopped spring onion (scallion)
Whole leaves mint or basil

Marinade
2 tbsp honey/golden syrup/maple syrup
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tsp ground ginger

Marinade the chicken for at least half an hour in a casserole dish, then place into an over with the lid on, and poach the chicken still in the marinade.

While the chicken is cooking, prepare the vegetables. The ones above are what I use, but you can use others.
Soak the rice noodles in boiling water until soft, then drain and mix in with the grated vegetables.
Once the chicken is cooked, chop it finely, and add it into the mixture.
Put some luke warm water on a large plate to soak the rice paper wraps.
Soak each wrap individually, fill with the mixture, and roll*. Then wrap each one in cling film, and refrigerate.

*To see how to roll the spring rolls, click here.

Ginger Bread / Parkin

My favourite thing at the moment is Ginger bread, otherwise known as Parkin.  There is something deliciously comforting about a warm slab of it with a cup of tea.  I’m not a big tea drinker, but it does go with this well!  It’s also nice heated in the microwave for about 20 seconds, drizzle a little golden syrup over and serve with ice cream.

I like it very gingery, so I use about 2.5 teaspoons of ground ginger, and sometimes add a teaspoon of cinnamon as well.  When you tip the mixture into the loaf tin, sprinkle some sugar over the top before it goes into the oven.  When you take the tin out of the oven, you need to leave it to cool for ten to fifteen minutes before trying to tip it out.

Edited to add - if you run out of bicarbonate of soda, baking powder will NOT work instead! Lesson learnt this morning!

Curried Parsnip Soup

At my cousin’s wedding back in December, the hotel served us all bacon butties and delicious curried parsnip soup half way through the evening.  Since then I have been trying to perfect the recipe myself and I think I have – well, to my taste buds anyway !

The recipe above is a pretty easy way to do it – it does rely on your own taste for the amount of spiciness though, so make sure you taste as you go.  I used fresh chicken stock that I made after a roast dinner, and kept back the leftover meat, diced it finely, and then added it to the soup once it was ready.  Gives a nice chickeny chewiness to each mouthful.

Family Pre Christmas Dinner

As we’re not going to be at home on Christmas Day I thought I would do a nice Christmas meal for us all tomorrow as it’s the last Sunday of Advent.  So, I’ve got a nice beef joint to roast, with all the trimmings including home made Yorkshires.

The beef is in the fridge at the moment, marinading in some red wine with a little pesto and garlic.  When I cook roast potatoes, I always par boil them, and then rattle them around in the pan so that the outsides are nice and fluffy.  If you have sausages for your Sunday breakfast keep the fat, as roast potatoes cooked in sausage fat are absolutely delicious. Cook them until they are golden and crispy on the outside – normally 35-45 minutes.

I have another crumble cooked for dessert – we seem to eat crumbles all the time at Christmas time!

Christmas Crumble

I know I’ve posted my crumble recipe before, but it’s worth posting again.

I make a variation of this recipe every year for Christmas.  None of the family are fans of Christmas cake or Christmas pudding, so I make a Christmas Crumble instead.  Stew some apples, Granny Smiths for preference, and add mincemeat to the mix.  Cook it through and leave to cool.  Add a pinch of ginger and a pinch of cinnamon to the crumble mix.  In fact, this year I had a small amount of oatmeal left over from making oatcakes, and added some of this to the crumble mix as well, giving it a slightly crunchy texture.

It’s delicious served with either vanilla ice cream or custard.

Domestic Goddess Strikes Again

With all this being off work, I'm bored.  I had a bit of a cooking day yesterday - I made some more oatcakes (I seem to be addicted to them at the moment - try adding some marmite to the recipe for marmitey oatcakes mmm) and a big pot of chicken soup to put in the freezer for my daily lunches.  Nice and healthy!

Tonight's dinner is Punjabi Butter Chicken, which i haven't made for ages, so looking forward to that :-)

Kat's Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

I've been dreadful at blogging recently, and I do mean to get better at it, as I have so much to tell you!

In the meantime though, I have a new recipe for you for delicious oatcakes.  If you want to jazz them up a little, you could add cracked black peppercorns or grated cheese, but they are excellent just as they are.

Lemon Cheesecake

Really delicious, fresh lemony cheesecake - obviously recipe can be modified to whatever flavour you fancy.  Last year, for Burns Night, I did a Drambuie Cheesecake (be generous with the alcohol!), tops with raspberries and grated chocolate - delicious!

Beef Stroganoff

On Wednesday this week it will be exactly 9 years since Frazer's kidney transplant from his dad.  They celebrate this anniversary every year, and this year his parent's came to our house for it.  I cooked Beef Stroganoff which is one of Frazer's favourite meals, and one that I used to cook a lot of years ago, but had forgotten about.

The above recipe is the one that I use, but to make it slightly healthier I use half fat crème fraiche.  Serve with long grain white rice and some garlic bread and salad on the side and it's delicious!

Isobel's Coconut Slice

I made this today for the first time in years. My dad's cousin Aunty Isobel used to make it, and she would always bring a big tin full of it every time she came to see us. Yummy :-) A word of warning though - blind bake the pastry first otherwise the botom ends up soggy, as I've discovered today!

Cranachan

This is not the most diet friendly of desserts, but oh my god it is delicious!! Save it for a special occasion!

Honey & Lime Marinated Pork Chops

We seem to have a big of a pork chop theme going today!! This one is truly delicious!

Pork Chops With Mustard Sauce

Banana Bread

Lemon Meringue Pie

This is the best Lemon Meringue Pie that I've come across. The biscuit base instead of pastry makes it a lot lighter, and I always do three times the amount of meringue that it says, because, as everyone knows, that's the best bit!

Can't claim it's my own recipe I'm afraid, but it's a goodie! Enjoy!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

I know I'm a bit early! In fact, my Christmas tree went up before December even began! But...I have an excuse for it! Throughout December everyone has things planned, that have generally been planned for ages, so there was only one weekend that I could do a full Christmas dinner for me, F, Joocey and her bloke A before I go back to France for a week over Christmas. And I really wanted to do a proper Christmas dinner, mainly because I really miss cooking for other people! It's no fun cooking for yourself.

So, we didn't have turkey, but I did a big roast chicken with all the trimmings, and it was delicious, followed by homemade apple crumble because I hate Christmas pudding, and I don't cook things I don't like! Also there are all these things that I keep telling F that I can cook, and apparently my excuse is generally that I can't because the ingredients/utensils/pots etc are in France! So it was apple crumble - with a Christmassy twist though, with ground cinammon and ginger in the crumble.
We all had small presents for each other to make it feel like Christmas, and ended up a bit pissed playing Trivial Pursuit! Joocey wasn't drinking because she had to drive, but the rest of us did!

So, apart from that, not a lot has been happening. I was off work for a week with gastroenteritis and only went back a week ago. On the plus side though, I did get all my Christmas shopping done while I was off - I love Amazon! I've got everyone sorted out, and my suitcase will have more presents in than clothes when I go to France!

Very little else has been happening in my life, mainly because I have spent a lot of time decorating my hall, stairs and landing! It no longer has a green ceiling and peach walls, and looks great! It is about 100 times brighter in there now!

Will try to blog before I go away, but the next post will, in all likelihood, be either from France or be after I get back! I've not been great at it recently!

So, if I don't get back to you before then, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This is my current favourite recipe! In Dumfries we have a great Chinese restaurant called The Pearl Palace (lovingly known as the Pearl Necklace!). I've eaten there a couple of times with F, and they do a great Sweet and Sour chicken. I decided to research the recipe to try to come up with the one most like it. This is it in it's entirety.

However...I have made certain time saving alterations!

In my head I have totally dispensed with all that time wasting chicken tenderising and battering - to be honest who can be arsed when Cap'n Birdseye does lovely Chicken Dippers! So, what I do is to make the sauce up first thing in the morning (without cooking it or adding cornflour) so all the flavours can intensify throughout the day. Then, when it gets to dinner time, I stick the chicken dippers in the oven - about six each - until they are nice and crispy. I then stick the sauce on the heat, add the pineapple, carrot (which I use a cheese slice to cut so you get nice slivers), and bit of onion and a few bits of green pepper. I use arrowroot istead of cornflour (two teaspoons to a bit of water, mix it up and chuck it in while stirring). When it's nice and thick, take out the crispy chicken dippers and put them in a bowl, put the sauce over and serve immediately with rice. If you're really lazy you can get microwave rice! The taste is great - it's like that really sweet sweet and sour sauce you get in crappy chinese restaurants whch we all scoff at but secretly love! By the way, F loved it!

Make and enjoy!