Breakfast for dinner

Nothing healthier (I believe) than having a breakfast dish for dinner. Few days ago I bought Grape Tomatoes, which are slightly smaller than Cherry Tomatoes (shown below),

Tortellini...

Still in winter food mood, making sure I ate pasta's, creams, sauces, etc... (I blame the weather). Is there a direct relationship between the outside temperature and appetite?
Midnight snack? yes it was the perfect time for a snack, it was very cold, reality TV was on, why not make something? Tortellini? why not? I just bought some few days ago..

Coming from a country that respects comfort and laziness, we buy our own fresh pasta's. Not that there is anything wrong with making them from scratch, it's just that the available ready made version is really good, so why go through the hassle?...

Winter Food

The cold month, or should I say the cold week, usually introduces a number of hearty dishes. Soups, hot sauces, pasta, potatoes, casseroles & lots of them, beans, pies, etc...

Winter-warming cooking seems like the best option to celebrate the 14hrs of non-stop rain. I wanted pasta...cream..something I could see the smoke coming out from when serving and that is the perfect time to put cheese over it and enjoy the melted texture over the soft pasta...yummm That was it! to the kitchen I go!!

Chicken Parmigiana

When making something new, I normally read through a number of recipes to see what are the common ingredients, cooking times, additons people introduce and reviews. And by doing so, and when making the same dish over and over again, you can begin to put you own personal touches without disturbing the original taste. Today, I went by the book. The process of making Chicken Parmigiana was very long. The preperation time is longer than cooking and eating times together.

Eggs

So excited about the date, I'm writing 2 entries!

Eggs will be a popular ingredient in this blog for the boys here consider it a post dinner snack. For me, breakfast has to have eggs in order for it to be a complete breakfast. Some of the books that I have contain eggs recipes, it might sound funny, like how creative can you get making eggs? the answer: very...

Boys, this is for you...

Spaghettie Loaf

This is your basic spaghetti bolognese recipe, the only difference being the presentation.

In a saucepan brown 4 chopped onions & 8 chopped garlic cloves (season with salt, black peppers, anything else you like - I put a teaspoon of red chili powder), to it incorporate 500g of minced lamb until brown. Add 2 chopped tomatoes, tomato paste and 1cup of water, cover and leave o cook for 15 minutes.

In the meantime, boil the spaghetti, drain and put a spoon of butter. Then mix with one beaten egg.

How to assemble: in a greased loaf tin, put a layer of the pasta, a layer of the sauce, a bit of grated cheese, then repeat. Bake for 20/25 minutes and flip onto your serving dish.



it looks good enough for me!

 And there you have it, a Spaghetti Loaf.

Personally, I prefer the old school spaghetti, but I guess this is good when you have people over to minimise the mess (and looks presentable as well).

Hope you enjoyed.

Cheers!

Eggplants? no problem

After a long day at work (which came after a long holiday), coming back home was the happiest thing to do.
It's almost 6 pm now and I'm not ready to cook anything....let me go to the gym then, I had plans to use gym as an excuse and come back and write about it but unforunately I was way too tired (in other words took a nap/or fainted).

By the time I managed to get myself together the time was nearing 8 o'clock, everyone had eaten already but I was hungry. With no time to defrost or to do anything complicated, the internal voice said: go vegetarian. I look over to inspect the farm my mom bought and all I could see was the shiny eggplants. So eggplants dinner it was.

First Attempt

Promising to commit isn't easy. Especially straight after new year's weekend.

I was tired, bored, home with everyone here feeling the same....then I thought, let me start today, it's only the 2nd (I kind of gave up when I didn't do anything on the 1st Jan). Close to 7 pm I searched through the books I have for something I can make using the very little stuff we had at home, no one was willing to volunteer to go to the supermarket and I definitely wasn't willing to drive either, I found a very simple chicken recipe that didn't require a lot of ingredients, Chicken Arayes Wraps. By reading the method it sounded easy, actually it was, apart from the time-consuming chicken boiling part during which I managed to make my usual Banana Cake (which I got from a Kids Cookbook I was given when I was 11).

decoration as per the picture in the book