Something simple for a lazy Saturday

Well, well, well I'm back! I have been seriously lakcing in the update department (my last post was shockingly a month ago). This isn't to say I haven't been cooking and baking my little heart out over the past 4 weeks, in fact  I have a whole stack of recipes just queueing up to be shared with you, all of them more eager than the next to have their nummyness (if that wasn't a word before I definitely just made it one) immortalised in picture and word form. I promise these recipes are on their way but first here's one which jumped the queue a little (or a lot) partly because it's flavours are still fresh in my mind (and remnants still fresh on my fingertips) but mainly because it's one of those recipes which I bundled together myself after rummaging around in my fridge for scraps that would make a half decent meal.

I woke up this morning with the overwhelming desire to make a quiche. Don't ask me why, I have never had the desire to make a quiche in my life. In fact I'm not even a huge fan of quiche (egg dishes in general are eaten rather sparingly by me. Eggs are a food I need to really WANT to eat before I can stomach it)., nevertheless there it was. Perhaps it was fuelled by the blue skies and, until the past couple of days, glorious sunshine we've been blessed with here in London. Weather like this always makes me think of picnics and pcnics make me think of quiche. It may also have been the fact that for a few days now I've been eyeing a particular quiche recipe with interest. In fact it's almost definitely for that reason. Unfortunately, for those of you out there who are now salivating at the thought of eggy-baked-quichey goodness, I also woke up quite early this morning after rather a late night which followed an incredibly busy and rather stressful week. All of this combined to leave me struggling to find the will to leave the house and go and buy my ingredients. I will be making the tasty looking quiche at some point soon but now back to the results of my foraging.

This is really a recipe that isn't a recipe... it's a collection of things that taste nice together. But it IS summery, and it IS delicious. On foraging through my fridge for food I stumbled upon one of my favourite things in the world: haloumi. It's salty and meaty and just so damn delicious that the moment I saw it beckoning my from the cheese drawer I knew I had to eat it... but what to put it with? We didn't have any aubergine (and all that slicing and salting seemed like way too much effort for me this afternoon anyhow) or chicken or any other kind of meat. The only thing we had was bacon... bacon? Does haloumi GO with bacon? I've never seen it paired together before... but you see bacon with other cheeses (the brie in my fridge was also beckoning me but I have a feeling thats because it's now so out of date it can actually talk so I ignored it's calls) and both haloumi and bacon are pretty salty... so I thought why not? Add a few veggies and these bacon and haloumi skewers were born. I combined them with a mint and yoghurt dip and some wholemeal pita and the result was an absolutely delicious meal that was ready to eat in a matter of minutes!

Banana Bread to say Bon Voyage!

Firstly I'm sorry. I make a desparate plea for followers in my last post then fail to follow it up with actual posts. I have a tonnne of recipes I've tried out lately which are just waiting to be blogged, and have been waiting for some time now! Still I'm sure they'll get posted on here eventually... in the mean time enjoy this recipe for banana bread found on Lovin' from the Oven. Throughout my time trawling the internet for tasty new recipes I frequently manage to stumble across... then over... then right past a whole number of recipes for banana bread. My reason for wandering past these recipes, usually without a second look? I don't like bananas. In fact I more than don't like them, they are rpoabbly my worst ever food. Everything about them makes me want to be sick, the taste, the smell, the texture and the SOUND. People think I'm crazy when I talk about bananas having a SOUND but they genuinely do. It's a sort of smulchy, squelchy sound that serves to give me goosbumps if ever I hear it. It's so bad that I can't even bear to be around someone eating a banana. And I know, I know, they're full of potassium and yadda yadda but there's nothing on God's earth that will ever make me enjoy a banana. So that said you may wonder why oh why this blogging installment is a recipe which can only be described as... welll... banana-y. My reason being is simple and once again comes down to that rare breed of human known as "a friend". My friend loves bananas and has been pestering me to make her some banana bread for a good while now. Ever since I told her about the relative baking disaster that was my first attempt at the stuff. My mother and I followed a healthy eating recipe for banana bread that just did not cook through and was thick, heavy and frankly for a non-banana lover like myself was like torture to eat. I'm not sure why such a disaster should inspire my dear friend so much but inspire her it did. It also happened that this dear friend decided to emmigrate to Canada to live out her dreams in a distant land. And so it happened, that when i stumbled across this recipe for banana bread I sat up and paid attention where I usually would pass by. This recipe, not being of the healthy eating variety, seemed like it would be a lot less dull for the taste buds and it was simple to boot! What more could you want?

A final bunch of Birthday cookies (and a desperate plea)!

It's taken me a while to get round to posting these, I'll confess that my ability to post regular recipes on here leaves something to be desired. Even so I hope that will do nothing to marr the excitement these rocky road cookies create! I made these for the same friend's Birthday that i posted about over a month ago (see I'm terrible). Just like the others these were met with much enjoyment. They weren't opened straight away because one of my friends is allergic to nuts but the response afterward was deifnitely a good one. I had a few left over myself after packaging he nicest of the bunch up and they were definitely tasty although i have to admit not my favourite out of the three types I made. I made few alterations to the original recipe which I found on crepes of wrath, most notably adding cocoa powder into the mix because I didn't feel it was quite chocolatey enough (when I think rocky road i think chocolate, chocolate, chocolate) but you can always leave the cocoa out if you want them to be a little less rich(and boy were they rich!). I also reduced the amount of chocolate chips in it (which probably counterbalanced my addition of cocoa powder) and couldn't find mini marhsmallows so ended up cutting up regular ones. If you can try try try to find mini marhsmallows. I found my chopped up mallows melted a rediculous amount and made a mess all over the baking try. It didn't affect the taste at all but they didnt look as pretty as I'd wanted. Overall these cookies were a lovely mixture of chewy and crunch. As I said before they were quite rich but definitely good as a tea-time treat! I think if you wanted to make them more true to real rocky road you could probably add in a few raisins too....

More Birthday Baking!

It's taken me a little while tyo get around to posting the second installment of my friend's birthday cookies but belive me they are well worth the wait! These were probably one of the first recipes I found on my favourite foodblog  The Crepes of Wrath, I loved the sound of them then but lemon biscuits has never been highest on my agenda to bake (I'm all about the chocolate) plus the recipe called for lemon extract which I didn't own and didn't know where to buy. So I put them to the back of my mind and the back of my recipe book and sort of forgot about them for a few months. Then when it came to my baking extravaganza for my friends Birthday I knew I wanted two chocolate based recipes, the oatmeal cookies from my last post and the rocky road cookies that will be my next post, but I needed something a bit different. That's when I remembered these lemon sugar cookies, they seemed pretty simple to make (aside from the lemon extract) and i thought they would make a nice different kind of biscuit to two the heavy chocolatey ones I'd already decided on.

The Best Chain-Mail I've Ever Recieved

Sometimes recipes can mean nothing at all. Sometimes they are literally words, spilled onto a page that put together make something kind of tasty. But the best recipes of all are those which have a story behind them, a little bit of human interest that tells you why a recipe is important.

It was another friend's Birthday this week so I decided to bake her three types of cookie as a present and the next three blog posts will be dedicated to those cookies. Weeks before the time to bake came I had decided on two of the three cookies but I was stuck for a third. Talking to my boss at work she mentioned the best cookies she'd ever made, some chocolate chip oatmeal cookies apparently from Neiman-Marcus' recipe. She offered to send me the recipe to look over and I said "why not?" I'm always in the market for a new recipe to try out, especially one which comes with such high recommendations. The email she sent me came in the form of a chain-letter. You know the typical send this on to everyone yadda yadda kind. But the recipe itself had an interesting little back-story explaining just how the originator had got hold of Neiman-Marcus' special cookie recipe.

"My daughter and I had just finished lunch at NAiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas. Becuase both of us are such biscuit lovers, we decuded to try the 'Neiman-Marcus cookie'. It was so excellent that I asked if they would give me the recipe. The waitress said with a small frown, 'I'm afraid not, but you can BUY the recipe.' I asked how much, and she repsponded; "only two-fifty - it's a great deal!" I agreed to that and told her to add it to my bill. Thirty days later, I got my VISA statement, and the Neiman-Marcus charge was $285.00. I looked at ti again, and I remembered that I had only spent $9.95 for two sandwiches and about $20.00 for a scarf. At thebottom of the statement, it said, 'Cookie Recipe - $250.00'.

That was outrageous! I called Neiman's accountign department andn told them the waitress had said it was two-fifty, which clearly does not mean two hundred and fifty dollars by any reasonable interpretation of the phrase. Neiman-Marcus refused to budge. They would not refund my money because, according to them; 'what the waitress told you is not our problem. You have already seen the recipe. We absolutely will not refund your money.'

I explained to Accounting Department the criminal statutes whcihc govern fraud in the State of Texas. I threadtened to report them to the Better Business Bureau and the Texas Attorney General's Office. I was basically told: do what you want. Don't bother thinking of how you can get even, and don't bother trying to get any of your money back'. I said, ok, you've got my $250, and now I'm going to have $250 worth of fun. I told her that I was going to see to it that every cookie lover in the world with an email account gets a $250  cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus, for free! She replied 'I wish you wouldn't do that.' I said, 'well you should have thoguht of that before you RIPPED ME OFF!' and slammed down the phone."

Jessica's Birthday Cupcakes, a lesson in baking!

Last week it was my very good friend Jessica's birthday and I wanted to make her something really special to celebrate. All my friends know I love to bake so I decided what better way to wish her a Happy Birthday than to bake her some cupcakes... cupcakes from a recipe I made up myself, for once! I'm not a big one for creating my own recipes from scratch, I'm more of a find it and tweak it to my liking kinda gal but, in flicking through my vast array of baking recipes I discovered I don't have single one for just good ole fashioned choc-chip cupcakes. I'm not sure how this happened, I'm sure it can't be because there is a lack of chocolate-chip cupcake recipes out there... I mean chocolate chips and cakes go together like... well like two really go-y together-y things (mmmhmm go-y together-y, I said it). I'm pretty sure I must just have passed every single choclate chip cupcake recipe out there thinking "oh, chocolate chip cupcakes. How simple can you get? I won't bother writing those down." How wrong could one girl be? Very rarely do I fail in a baking endeavour (not counting the disasterous sinking banana bread incident which I fullly blamed my mother and some seriously out of date baking powder for) mainly because I stick fairly rigidly to a recipe. So perhaps with the pressure of my friend's birthday looming and the desire to make some seriously tasty cupcakes it wasn't the best time to start making things up. But I summoned up memories of my uni days when baking was a rather slap-dash what have I got lurkng in the cupboard that's no more than a month out of date affair and carried on regardless.

More fool me. They say pride comes before a fall and my first batch of cupcakes did exactly that. They fell hard. I mean we are talking on a scale of sinking larger than the Titanic here. There were many reasons for this sinking feeling. I surmised afterwards that my measurements were all out. I had added a little milk to thin the mixture down a little, it's my tried and tested trick for making cupcakes light and fluffy: replace one egg for a little milk. I forgot the bit about replacing the egg though. Consequentially my cupcakes were too light, the chcocolate chips didn't hold up, sunk to the bottom and burned. The cakes themselves tasted eggy and my addition of a little baking soda alongside the baking powder mixed with that extra egg meant they were anything but enjoyable. I also didn't cook them for long enough, (my oven is partly to blame for this, it's old and it's decided it doesn't want to heat evenly throughout anymore) so the cakes in the middle of the tray were raw in the middle. In short anything that could go wrong with these cupcakes did go wrong. However, I was down but not out. And with steely determination I soldiered on, adjusted my recipe (basically a little less of everything) and evetually managed to bake these chocolate-chip cupcakes with chocolate butter cream icing.

An unexpected haitus that really took the biscuit

Hello sports  food fans, apologies for my unexpected disappearance from the blogverse. I have no excuse other than being generally quite rubbish at keeping journals. It has been nearly a month since my last blog, and I'd love to come back saying I had been on all kinds of fun-filled crazy adventures which kept me from writing here but if I said that I would be lying. So rather than bore people to death with a drivvly excuse as to why I disappeared, something which will no doubt be made up completely on the spot and not exhonorate my crapness in any way, I'll cut this one short and get straight down posting this recipe for home made Jammy Dodgers.