Bookmarked Recipe #19 and two winners

A little late again, but better late than never.
Bookmarked Recipes Roundup #19

Bookmarked Recipes: a monthly event to encourage food bloggers to revisit the recipes they have bookmarked from magazines, newspapers, cookbooks. websites, blogs, to try them out and post about them.

Read on to see all the entries and my two giveaway winners. If you recreate any bookmarked recipes in December 2012, you can join in by adding them to the linky at the end of this post for the next roundup.

Bookmarked Recipe #19

November Roundup

1. Moroccan Chana Dal Stew with Green Olives and Preserved Lemon

Janet (The Taste Space)

Recipe Bookmarked from Smitten Kitten.

Linguine alla Genovese

ASK Italian (the Italian high street chain) has published an exclusive cookbook in collaboration with the Great Ormond Street Hospital to raise funds for the hospital.

The cookbook features the restaurant’s most popular dishes and anecdotes from their celebrity friends, including Dame Helen Mirren, Gino D’Campo and Claudia Winkleman. The book is filled with authentic Italian recipes to cook at home from hand-made pasta to perfect risottos and indulgent desserts.

The cookbook can be bought from book shops, online and in ASK restaurants. The RRP is £15, but if you buy it from one of the restaurants, the price is only £10 and £4 of that will go straight to the charity.

The aim is to raise £1 million for the hospital. Such a worthy cause!

It's a very appealing book. Lots of tasty Italian recipes teamed up with mouth-watering photos.

Strawberry Spinach Booster

I am always thinking up new smoothie recipes and ways to pack then with nutrients. I have been thinking about using quinoa in smoothies for a while now. Quinoa is known as a superfood, so it seemed an ideal smoothie ingredient.

Quinoa - The Mother Grain

Quinoa (keen-wah). 

I usually make salads with it, but I have started dry grinding it in my Vitamix dry blade jug and adding the fine powder to smoothies and porridge. My next project is to make bread with it.

I love it, even the sound of it and I am trying to incorporate it into more meals. It is known as a superfood and if you read on you will find out why.

Warm Ribbon Courgette & Potato Salad with Pesto

I saw Nigel Slater making a similar dish to this and tucked it away in my head to make sometime. Nigel didn't add potatoes to his, but as we were eating it as a lunch and not a side dish, I decided to add them.

I made a rough pesto to dress the salad with and we enjoyed our salad with some buttered bread. For my vegan husband, I made pesto without parmesan and spread his bread with dairy free margarine.

We all enjoyed our lunch and I will make this again, but I think I will add it to pasta or serve it as a side dish next time.

I used Scotty Brand baby potatoes in my salad. They are Scottish Maris Peer potatoes and are available from October to May.

 Nigel very kindly left a comment on twitter for me.

Clandestine Cake Club - Fall Fancies

Vegetarian Christmas

 

I find my thoughts turning to Christmas. Not the presents as I've finished Christmas shopping. Don't you just hate me? No, my thoughts are turning to Christmas day and my Christmas table. Decorating the table and all the scrummy food that will be placed on it for my family to enjoy.

First the table. I decided to go for tartan as my theme this year and bought a red tartan blanket for a tablecloth. I am using red napkins tied with ribbon and in the middle of the table, I have a clear vase on a woven base holding a white candle and chestnuts. This is surrounded by a wreath, covered in felt hearts and wrapped with twinkly LED blue battery lights, which I got from xmasdirect, who specialise in lovely twinkly lights for all year round.  I am quite pleased  with the effect and it will be even more lovely on Christmas evening with the candle lit. You will notice the table is only set for three. This is just a trial run. There will actually be six of us on Christmas day. A bit of a squeeze, but great fun.  

Giveaway at end of post.

Caramel Apple Coopers

Floral and Hardy garden designers challenged me to come up with a three course meal using seasonal produce that could be grown in a garden. My garden isn't one of those gardens unfortunately, but I was able to come up with a menu for them.

Starter

Kale & Cheddar Bubble and Squeak, topped with a Soft Poached Egg

Main Course

Rich Mushroom & Onion Pie topped with creamy Neeps and Mashed Tatties

Dessert

Caramel Apple Coopers - a sweet treat named after my sweet child Cooper

These caramel apple coopers are the easiest pastries to make. A fluffy puff pastry case, topped with a type of almond crème patissière, which conceals a gooey dollop of toffee, finished off with a slice of apple and dusted with icing sugar.

Bookmarked Recipes #18

Whoops, I was so busy at the end of the month that I completely forgot about Bookmarked Recipes. How could I, I hear you ask. Well, quite easily it seems. I have such a bad memory. I do use a calendar, to keep me organised, but that is for family and work, what I really need is a lovely big book to keep my blog organised. I see a trip to Paperchase coming on! Anyway, onto the roundup.

Bookmarked Recipes: a monthly event to encourage food bloggers to revisit the recipes they have bookmarked from magazines, newspapers, cookbooks. websites, blogs, to try them out and post about them.



Read on to see all the entries. If you recreate any bookmarked recipes in November 2012, you can join in by adding them to the linky at the end of this post for the next roundup.

Rich Mushroom & Neep Pie

Floral and Hardy garden designers challenged me to come up with a three course meal using seasonal produce that could be grown in a garden. My garden isn't one of those gardens unfortunately, but I was able to come up with a menu for them.

The seasonal produce I decided to showcase:

1. Cabbage
2. Kale
3. Mushrooms
4. Swede (or neeps as we call it in Scotland)
5. Apples

Starter

Kale & Cheddar Bubble and Squeak, topped with a Soft Poached Egg

Main Course

Rich Mushroom & Onion Pie topped with creamy Neeps and Mashed Tatties

Dessert

Caramel Apple Coopers (a sweet treat named after my sweet child)

Three Course Garden Feast

Contemporary garden design specialist, Floral & Hardy, is interested in how British gardens can be used to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs, allowing the owners to save money on their weekly shop while enjoying their gardens. 

Now, I am not the best person to ask about this, as I am pretty rubbish when it comes to gardening. I like to fill my planters with flowers and herbs and nudge my husband to cut the grass and trim the bushes and trees. In fact we recently had a bit of purge of our garden and got rid of a lot of the bushes and put chips down, so we could spend more time playing with Cooper in the garden and less time gardening. 

I would like to grow more than herbs. Maybe next year will be the year. I already have a rhubarb crown to plant (I had to google that, I was about to write root), see I am useless!

Anyway, back to the task in hand and more familiar territory, my kitchen.

Floral & Hardy challenged me to use seasonal fruit and veg to create a 3 course feast. Now that I can do!

Perfect Pizza Dough

I have been on the search for the perfect pizza dough for some time and I think I have it. It is the best I have made so far. Let me share it with you.

Before I do, I would like to apologise. I stupidly scribbled down this recipe without any credits, so I don't have a clue where I picked it up, which isn't like me at all. So to the unknown author, I thank and salute you!

Hearty Aubergine Pizza Sauce

When I make pizza, I usually make a very simple pizza sauce made from tomato puree, garlic and herbs, but this time I wanted something a bit more gutsy, especially as Graham wouldn't be having any cheese on his pizza.

Così Com'è sent me some of their wonderful Italian jarred tomatoes to try, so I decided to put them to good use. I teamed red datterino tomatoes, which are sweet, with aubergine, garlic and thyme to make the most flavourful sauce for my pizzas.

Coconut Truffles for World Vegan Day

The first of November 2012 is World Vegan Day, the start of World Vegan Month. The first of November was chosen  for celebrating , as the coining of the term, ‘vegan’ and the founding of The Vegan Society was in November 1944.

As I now have a vegan husband, it seemed fitting that I create a recipe for World Vegan Day. 

The truffles were chocoaltey, coconutty and sumptuous. Everything you want from a truffle. Both my husband and little by Cooper loved these truffles and they were gone in a flash. Job well done!!

Note to self, make a much bigger batch next time!