Christmas Cake Ice-Cream

Icing the cake is getting more and more complicated every year - and more competitive, as people post perfectly smooth and detailed cakes on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I attempted a Snow Globe and it didn't work very well. I think I bit off more than I can chew. Still, while I am no icing queen, I do know how to bake a flavoursome, moist and boozy Christmas cake and it does taste a lot better than it looks!

And I do know a bit about basic icing techniques. One of the first things to do is to level off the top of the fruit cake once it has cooled/is ready out of the cupboard, by taking a sharp knife - I use a bread knife - to create a flat base for the marzipan and icing.

This left me with the equivalent of a large slice of fruit cake from the top of the cake. Did I jettison this leftover? Did this anti-waste campaigner throw it away? Mais Non! I kept it to one side. And today I finally did something with the crumbly goodness: Christmas Cake Ice-Cream.

I followed the same recipe that I posted earlier this year - 600g of whipped cream, 1 tin of condensed milk (with a bit of spoon and finger-licking when nobody was watching) and once this was mixed, I crumbled the cake into the mixture. It was enough to permeate the whole ice-cream so that every scoopful, once it has set (approximately 8 hours), will be full of cakey deliciousness.

Of course not everyone has the time or the patience to make their own fruitcake, so I would suggest this is a good way to get rid of the last one or two slices of the shop-bought Christmas cake, rather than throw it out once 1 Jan and its 'good intentions' come in. After all, ice-cream can be stored in the freezer for a few months.

Oh and here's the strange-looking cake... links to my Instagram page

Turkey Troubles

I love a bit of roast turkey at Christmas time. We get it from our local butcher, from a known farm where the animals are treated well, and I think the flavour of a 'happy turkey' really does come through.

However despite asking for a turkey that would serve 3-4 people, I still ended up with quite a large turkey - maybe our appetites in this country have grown too much because mum and I both recollected that turkeys never used to be so big, even the organic ones. Anyway. Like many families in the UK and no doubt any Western country, we have the age-old problem: What to Do with the Leftovers.

Turkey Troubles. Pic credit: wklw.com

Apart from the ubiquitous turkey sandwiches on Boxing Day, how can one maximise the use of all the meat on the turkey without any waste?

Generally I clean the whole of the turkey, cutting the flesh and putting it into a tub to freeze for a later date. I then get the bones, skin, remaining jelly/fats from inside the roasting pan, breaking some of the bones to get to the marrow, and then boil this up in a large pot to create some delicious stock - either to freeze or to use as the base of a soup.

However, even with this tub full of turkey and the pots of stock inside the freezer, I still have a lot of meat leftover. Here are some of my top five easy recipes guaranteed to whet the appetite; also with turkey being a lean meat, and veg being good for you, these are relatively healthy.

1) Turkey broth 
This is a great way of using up leftover veg, turkey etc on Boxing Day, to accompany the sandwiches.
In my broth, I used the following leftovers:
Roast parsnips (chopped up)
Roast carrots (chopped up)
2 pigs in blankets (chopped up)
Some turkey (small pieces)
All the leftover gravy
Leftover sprouts and chestnuts (chopped finely)
Some of the fat and 'jelly' from the Turkey roasting tin
Some cabbage.
Basically, everything except for the roast potatoes (which were all eaten), the stuffing (which went into the sandwiches) and the Yorkshire puddings.

As everything has already been cooked, the broth only needs to be boiled up once and then left to simmer for 5 minutes (while the sandwiches are prepared).

2) Turkey Tagine
This is not strictly a tagine as I don't own the earthenware pot from whence the dish gets its name. But I couldn't think of anything else to describe the dish - 'Turkey in a pot with cous cous' doesn't have the same kind of ring.

Ingredients:
Chopped up carrot
1 chopped onion
1 courgette
Turkey pieces (chopped)
4 tablespoons of Turkey jelly/fat from the roasting pan
1 cup of water
1 cup of cous cous
Seasoning to taste.

Put the chopped onion, carrot and courgette into a hot, deep pan with some olive oil, stirring continuously. Add the turkey and the turkey stock/jelly from the roasting pan. Stir until the vegetables start to soften and brown.
Add the cous-cous, seasoning and water, and stir
Put a lid on and slow-simmer it for about 5-10 minutes or until the cous cous has expanded and there is no more water in the pan.

3) Turkey shepherds pie
This is another great way of using up Christmas leftovers
Chop up remaining veg, some turkey and some of the turkey stock/jelly from inside the roasting pan and stuff into the bottom of a deep dish. Pour on a little gravy - not too much.
Add some mashed potato to cover the lot, and bake for 20 minutes or so until the top of the potato is brown.

4) Turkey omelette
Fancy brunch? Break 3 eggs, beat them in a bowl with some seasoning - salt, pepper, dried oregano or sage, put into a frying pan. Tear up some turkey and spread over the top of the omelette base. For additional punch, add some of the cooked bacon from the turkey. Grate cheese if you wish. Gently fold in half and cook for a few minutes on one side until golden brown, then flip to the other side and repeat.

5) Turkey pie
There is usually a lot of pastry left over from the mince pies/cheese straws/strudels that are baked up before Christmas.

Take the pastry and roll out to cover the base of a pre-greased pastry dish. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes or so with some ceramic baking beads so it remains flat after being cooked.

Take some turkey, chopped up veg and some of the leftover jelly from the roasting tin. Fill the pastry base with plenty of filling. Roll another thin crust and put the pie back into the oven and bake it for 20 minutes or so, until the top is glazed and brown. Best served hot - but can be cooled and frozen!

March of the Penguins

I LOVE Lakeland.

I often ask for presents from here because there are often good sales on items I'd like, and I can use them again and again to create wonderful food.

One such thing I treated myself to was a set of stacking star-shape cookie cutters, so that I could create a stack of stars that looked something like this. This photo is from Lakeland's own website as I have not yet decorated and stacked my own stars.

Credit: Lakeland. Star cookie cutters. Beautiful!

Another thing I like about Lakeland is that with certain items they also provide basic and easy-to-follow recipes. So the recipe that came with the star cookie cutters can be found here  or I have reproduced it below.

You will need:
300g unsalted butter, softened
300g caster sugar
2 small eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract - I found that this was not enough so used 2 teaspoons in my Penguin batch
a pinch of salt - I did not use salt; I used slightly salted Flora Light
600g plain flour, sifted - Sifting does not really matter much (sifting is a bit of a Women's Institute-style myth. It's the mixing that does it, not the sifting. However don't use self-raising flour, it makes the cookies too puffy and dry.

How To:
Reheat the oven to 180°C (350°F), gas 4.
Cream together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add the beaten eggs, vanilla and salt and mix well. Gradually add the flour and mix until incorporated. Bring together into a dough, divide into 2 balls, wrap and chill for 1 hour.
Roll the dough out on a lightly floured work surface to a thickness of 3-4mm. Dip cookie cutters in flour before each use. You need 2 cookies of each size. Arrange them on prepared baking trays.
Bake the cookies on the middle shelf of the preheated oven for about 12 minutes, or until firm and golden, swapping the trays over if necessary. Leave to cool for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

NOW for the PENGUINS. I do like penguins! I made some last year to adorn the 2014 Christmas Cake  - as can be seen below:

Which way to the South Pole? Penguin alert. Credit: SimoneySunday

Having purchased a cute little penguin cookie cutter from Biscuiteers in Notting Hill a year or so ago, I was keen to try to make iced penguin biscuits this year - but needed a good recipe. I toyed with the idea of gingerbread but I'd already made a gingerbread house and, I liked the basic nature of Lakeland's easy recipe.

So with a few tweaks - as I mentioned - I found it a little too low in flavour for my palate, I added extra vanilla flavouring and a teaspoon of cinnamon to make it a little more punchy. I also reduced the sugar element slightly as the icing itself will be sweet enough.

I used Fondant icing for the black and royal icing for the white, but I think next year I will try to learn liquid icing techniques as this took AGES to shape and cut the icing. I also used a small piping bag of red icing to fill in the beak, and some gold balls for the eyes.

And here are the end results - the march of the penguins.

Hallo mate! @SimoneySunday

Marching onward - the Penguin brigade @SimoneySunday

Tropical fruit cake

One of the (admittedly many) things in life that winds me up is the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables jettisoned routinely in this country.

According to campaign group LoveFoodHateWaste, ordinary households throw away almost 50 per cent of the total amount of food thrown away in the UK.

This approximates to a staggering 7m tonnes of food and drink a year, more than half of which is food and drink we could have eaten.

The group claims that wasting this food costs the average household £470 a year, rising to £700 for a family with children, the equivalent of around £60 a month.

As long ago as 2008, the Institute of Food Research highlighted the appalling waste of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Here are some statistics: 

• 359,000 tonnes of potato goes uneaten every year, including 177,400 tonnes of potatoes thrown away whole and untouched (49%). 
• There are 190,000 tonnes of apples thrown out each year, including 178,800 tonnes thrown away whole and untouched.
• The food that is bought and then thrown away uneaten in the greatest proportion is salad; in the UK 45% by weight of all purchased salad is thrown away (60% by cost). 
• 26% of fresh fruit is thrown away untouched. 

Source: IFR report 2008

With this in mind, I have sought to minimise any waste in my house, going to great lengths to, for example, blanch and freeze vegetables, pulp apples into jams, sauces and puree (which can be frozen) and use up any leftovers to create tasty dishes.

Wasting food costs the average household around £60 a month

Last night, I decided I had seen enough of my remaining top quarter of a pineapple, some sad grapes and sorry-looking figs loitering in my fridge. But instead of throwing them out, I turned them into a delicious Tropical Fruit Cake. A note: I always wash fruit before eating/cooking with it.

Tropical Fruit Cake. Photo credit: SimoneySunday

Ingredients
1/4 slightly less fresh pineapple, finely diced
2 slightly less fresh figs, peeled and then finely chopped
1/2 cup of Raisins (fresh and leftover from the Christmas pudding and Christmas Cake)
Grapes, chopped in half
2 tablespoons of spiced rum
3 cups self-raising flour
250g of Flora Light (slightly salted)
2 cups of Demerara sugar
3 medium eggs
1tbsp of ground ginger

How to
Pre-heat the oven to 180.
Whisk the butter and sugar together until it creates a smooth fluffy paste
Add the eggs and stir well
Add the fruit, rum and ginger and stir thoroughly
Slowly fold in the flour until the batter is mixed well
Put into a pre-greased baking tin (I used a 30cm loaf tin)
Bake on 160-180 (depending on your oven) for 30-40 mins or until a knife inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean*
Leave to cool for 15 minutes, then wrap in silver foil to keep it moist.
Tuck in with a nice cup of tea.

*bear in mind if your knife enters a chunk of pineapple, it will streak, so try stabbing it twice. Go on, it can be quite cathartic. I promise.

The result was a lovely, fruity, spicy cake, soft and moist and crumbly. You can also pretend it is healthy because of the fruit. Ahem. I might also try adding glace cherries next time for some additional lift.

If someone could also please recommend a good camera for food pics, I'd be grateful. I don't currently have a working camera and my Samsung 3S is not great at capturing photos of food or anything remotely close-up. Thanks!

A Lidl Christmas magic

Never underestimate the value of German confectionery at Christmas time!

Having scored this wonderful gingerbread house for FREE, simply because TSB Bank kindly took me to the Biscuiteers last Monday so I could ice and build my own gingerbread house, I needed to adorn the rest of the 'Christmas Snack Table' with some Christmassy goodies.

Biscuiteers Gingerbread House, iced by me @SimoneySunday

Lidl does a wonderful range of coated nuts, soft gingerbread cookies, chocolates, truffles and mini-stollens. The Ferrero Rocher and Pringles also came from Lidl - so it is not just selling brands you do not know, but brands you do know.

I bought a vast array of such goodies for approximately £10.00 on Saturday - including a whole frozen lobster ready for the Christmas Eve lobster bisque (a tradition in our household).

I cannot express how brilliant Lidl is for Christmas goodies - and they make lovely, cheap stocking fillers, too.

Easy Sausage Casserole

Nothing looks sadder than a couple of lonely carrots, half a green pepper or some slightly less crunchy celery left in the fridge. The temptation to ditch is great - but RESIST!

To avoid throwing out vegetables that are still good, even if they are not quite as fresh as they once were, consider turning them into a casserole or hot pot. This is a great way to use up leftover veg.

If you have a slow cooker, you can throw everything in at once and leave it to cook itself while you are out or at work. This can be very cost-effective. However, for people without one of these, creating a casserole can traditionally mean using up a lot of gas or electricity. I therefore created this 30-minute bake as good way of part-roasting the food before turning it into a casserole, so the flavouring is still strong and the vegetables are soft while the meat is well cooked within 25-30 minutes. It might not be traditional, but it is cheap, easy to make, and can be very filling.

Vegetarians can pack out the ingredients by adding two cups of lentils, which will bulk up the dinner so that it is filling. Simply soften the lentils first by boiling for a few minutes in water before adding them to the vegetables. Obviously the vegetable version costs less than the meat version, but for the meat-lovers, here's my recipe for a basic sausage casserole (serves four).

You will need: 
1 pack of sausages. I used Tesco's British Butcher's Cumberland Sausages for £1.50 but you can get cheaper versions. I often buy on a deal and freeze them; defrost them thoroughly before cooking.
2 Carrots
2 Parsnips (or Bell Peppers, Cabbage, Peas, etc)
4 Celery sticks (I buy a whole head/stalk of celery as it lasts longer than pre-cut packaged ones, and it goes further for less money)
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
1 brown onion
Some seasoning - basic/value stock cube, pepper, salt, oregano (I have a huge bag of this from the Greek relatives).
A dash or two of olive oil

How to:
Chop the onion roughly - leave it chunky - and put into a Pyrex or other oven dish with the olive oil. Clean and chop the celery, and add it to the onion.
Clean and cut the carrots and parsnips into thin dials and add to the celery and onion.
Chop up each sausage into half. Add these to the dish.
Add the seasoning.
Put into the oven for about 15 minutes on a 160 heat, so the meat starts to cook and the vegetables start to roast.
After 15 minutes, take out, add the tin of chopped tomatoes, and stir thoroughly. Add two-three tablespoons of water to the mixture, to make sure it is moist and covering all the other ingredients.
Put in for a further 10-15 minutes, depending on your oven, until the sausages are cooked through.

Serve, and enjoy!

Food Hack #102: An egg-cellent idea

The humble, wonderful egg

I love eggs. They are one of the most versatile foodstuffs that I know. I am saddened when I hear that people have egg allergies or intolerances because there are so many wonderful things, both sweet and savoury, that you can make out of them - from whipped meringues to the humble egg and bacon sandwich; from poached eggs on crumpets to spicy frittatas.

Sadly there is a LOT of food waste because people throw eggs away too soon. IGNORE the date on the eggs. When I was growing up, eggs did not have a use-by date stamped on them or on the box; people could keep them in the fridge for a month or more and simply use a very simple method to see whether the egg was good to eat or not.

Get a pot and fill it nearly to the brim with water. Hot or cold, doesn't matter. If the egg SINKS - it is good to eat.

If the egg floats - it is bad to eat.

This should stop people throwing out millions of good eggs every year.

Bread and Butter Pudding

Another brilliant way to use up leftovers is to make bread-and-butter pudding.

Bread and Butter Pudding. Instagram pic credit: SimoneySunday

Too many people throw away crusts of bread or bread that has started to go slightly dry. This is a terrible waste.

According to a study published in September in The Guardian, 49 per cent of UK adults claim they they eat bread every day, with 38 per cent of them buying two loaves a week.

However, the research, commissioned by the group Love Food Hate Waste, as part of its #UseYourLoaf campaign, also found that 18 per cent often threw away a forgotten loaf before opening it, while a quarter of had discarded the bread before reaching the end of the loaf.

I haven't bought bread for over a year, not since we were given a breadmaker for a wedding present. Instead of keeping this as one of those 'gadgets' that never get used, I decided to use it.

Flour, yeast, milk, oil, water, salt and sugar - these are the basic ingredients to making brown bread or white bread. And as one 1kg bag from Tesco costs about 80p, and I can make 2.5 3lb loaves from one bag of flour, I basically spend £1.60 on five loaves of bread.

I've already shown how to make cheap sauce and jam for gifts or just slathering onto toast in this blog. I will do a post later on how to make Rosemary bread with olive oil. Yum!

With the bread I make, I cut half of it straight away, and one half I wrap up tightly and put in the fridge, where it keeps about a week.

The other half, I slice, and wrap and put into a tupperware tub for making sandwiches in the near-term. Sometimes I freeze slices individually for 'emergencies'. This really reduces waste - which also reduces our yearly food bill!

However, when there's one slice left and some crusts, I take a bread knife, create some thinner slices, lather them in butter... and prepare a bread and butter pudding.

How to:
Take 2 medium eggs
2/3 cup of semi-skimmed milk (or cream if you really like it rich)
Handful of currants or raisins, washed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
Your slices of buttered bread

Cut the bread into small enough pieces to create layers - bread & butter, some raisins, some brown sugar, some of the spices.

Do this as many times as you can. Sprinkle the rest of the raisins over the bread and butter.

Mix the remaining spices up with the eggs (whites and yolks) and the milk, and pour over the bread and butter.

Cook for about 1/2 hour at 160 degrees or until you can see the mixture is no longer runny.

Serve with cream, custard or home made icecream - a recipe for this is also here.

Enjoy!

Salmon and Feta Leftover Pie

Watching television programmes such as The War on Waste about people throwing perfectly good food and clothes away makes me angry.

I have never been a wastrel. I was not brought up to consume without conscience. Moreover I was also blessed with an imagination which has helped me make the most of whatever leftovers and remnants I could find in my home.

It does not take a genius to work out that supermarkets want you to throw good food away instead of pickling it or freezing it, because their business model depends on the relentless spend, spend, spend of the consumer.

So this Sunday I decided to cook a two-course meal using only leftovers or 'out of date' food. The menu was: Salmon and Feta layer pie with filo pastry, and a spicy bread and butter pudding. I'll do the pudding separately because I'm lazy when it comes to posting stuff. Honesty, eh?

The date of eating was Sunday 15 November. It's now Tuesday 17th and we're both still alive and hearty, thank you very much!

Indeed, I have never seen this recipe anywhere before and so I believe what you are about to read is a world exclusive - the finest luxury leftover pie for you to try yourself. It really was tasty - light on the palate yet packed full of punchy flavour.

Salmon and Feta pie. Made with love - and leftovers

Ingredients:

Loch Fyne Smoked Salmon - Frozen on day of purchase (August). Consumed: November

1/2 pack of Feta cheese - use by date 30 October. Consumed: November

1/3 pack of mushrooms - use by date 6 November

1/2 tin Heinz Mushroom soup - October 2015 use by date 

One onion, use-by date 30 October. Still hard, dry and firm thanks to a good fridge.

6 sheets of Filo pastry, found secreted in the back of the freezer since March 2015

Teaspoon of dried Saffron, found in my husband's possession, dated June 2012. Yes, 2012.

Salt

Pepper

Home-grown chives and parsley (obviously these were in-date)

Well, I have NEVER seen a recipe for this, and I have never made this before so I was basically making this recipe up out of my own head. So it was complete trial and error. 

NOTE: I am sure the smoked salmon can be swapped for a tin of salmon. So give it a go.

How to: 

Prepare the pastry

Defrost the pastry slowly (DO NOT MICROWAVE IT INTO FROSTLESS SUBMISSION)

Carefully peel the layers and fold a first layer into a lightly oiled square pyrex cooking dish. Mine is a square 13'inch by 5inch deep pan.

Brush lightly with oil.

Make the filling

Chop the onion finely and add to a pan with some olive oil. Stir until a little brown.

Clean and chop the mushrooms, add these to the pan along with the seasoning. Add garlic to taste.

Add the salmon, making sure to stir well for three minutes. 

Add the mushroom soup, stir well for another minute.

Chop and add the feta cheese, stir gently and remove from the heat.

Layer a little of the salmon and feta filling onto the bottom sheet of filo pastry.

Add another layer of pastry on top of this as if it were a lasagna, repeat the process until all the filling has been used up.

Layer the remaining filo pastry over the top, brush with olive oil and a little paprika or herbs of your choice, and bake for c.20 minutes at 180 degrees.

And there you have it. It served four (so we ate the rest on Monday). We served it the first day with a Greek Salad made by hubby and the following day with carrots (which were also two days past the use by date!) and peas. For hints on how to keep carrots crispy and crunchy, see here.

Let me know how your version turned out - and if you swapped any ingredients with great success! 

Applesauce

I have found two things to be true with regard to shop-bought apple sauce

1) The good, natural, stuff is expensive
2) The cheap, preservative-laden stuff tastes of sugar and had the
texture of mush

I wanted to make my own but I did not have a recipe to hand. So I did what anyone would do - ask a former Army corporal, aged 75 years, what he put into his own version.

'Lemon and spices' he said. 'And boil it properly without too much water'. So I took Rodger's advice when I came to preparing an apple sauce made with a bag full of Julia's lovely Bramleys. I love it when friends give you freebies! This is such a good way to save money and eat healthily! These apples were still not quite ripe although were windfalls, so had that extra crispness and tang.

Ingredients
200g of Bramley apples, peeled, cored and chopped
1 cup of water
1/2 cup brown sugar tablespoons of brown sugar, to taste (add more if you like sweet sauce)
3 tablespoons of lemon juice
1 tablespoon of malt vinegar
1 teaspoon of mixed spices (cinnamon, mace, ginger, crushed cloves)
1/4 teaspoon of salt

How to
Clean the apple chunks. We do not like mushy food so left the chunks quite large, but you can dice or slice more thinly

Boil these in a pan with the water, vinegar, lemon juice, sugar and salt until it reduces. It should look similar to chunky babyfood.

Immediately put the pan on a low heat, and stir in the spices for 1 minute.
Taste it. It should be quite tangy and not too salty or bitter. If you need to, add 1-2 tablespoons more of sugar and stir for a couple of minutes. 

We do not like sugary tasting sauces in our house but I appreciate that everyone's tastebuds are different.

When it suits your palate, remove from heat and let it cool.
Wait until it cools before putting into clean jars.

The finished product - in interesting jars!

I keep old jam jars for this purpose, as it saves money buying new ones. However I do relabel them with the date of manufacture on it. This helps me to work out how long it will keep in the fridge, which is approximately 3-4 weeks, and stops hungry visitors from mistaking it for jam (recipe to come soon).

So far we have used this with 'posh' bangers and mash (recipe for 'posh' mash can be found here) and as an accompaniment to my hubby's ham and cheese sandwiches for work, which he said were 'really nice'. 

This is a compliment indeed; his usual response to 'how do I look' or 'what do you think' is 'fine'. will try it on Pork Roast for a Sunday lunch soon.

Thank you, Julia, for the apples and thank you, Rodger, for preventing me from drowning my apples in too much water!

Things go wrong... before they go right

In the halcyon days of summer '15, namely the couple of summery days that actually graced the UK this August, I decided to make some healthy salady accompaniments to dinner.

Having had at work a mango salad one day to go with (if you can believe this), a roast squash samosa and way too much rice, I thought I would replicate the salad with some light, poached salmon and vegetables for dinner at home.

I knew I had a mango in the fridge getting a little sorry for itself, I had plenty of spring onions and a brown onion leftover and I had some tomatoes and peppers that I needed to use up. Never throw anything away!

So all I had to buy was a cucumber.

I dutifully washed and diced all the vegetables and started to compose the salad.

Alas it was not to be. The mango was far too soft and it made the whole salad look as if it had been left out all day in the sunshine to melt.

This was the result - still colourful but pretty sorry for itself.

All by myseeelllllf, 

With just 20 mins until the hubby was due home I wanted to perfect it, but how? Sure it tasted okay, but it looked weird and it had a floppy texture.

And then I remembered that a friend of mine in Canada had made a salsa salad with peaches in it. Peaches - I had none of these.

However, I did have a couple of nectarines in the fridge.

So I put the offending salad into a little tub for me to take to work for lunch the next day, and began again with the leftovers - or leftovers of the leftovers that I had been using initially, and swapping the nectarines for the Mango.

The result: much more solid, much firmer.

Ingredients
One FIRM Mango (or 2 Nectarines)
1 brown or red onion, diced
1/2 cucumber, chopped finely
1 yellow pepper, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
Lemon juice (freshly squeezed or from a bottle)
One small chopped red chili pepper
1/2 teaspoon of dried parsley

How to: 
Wash everything carefully
Chop it all up, mix it up, chill and serve
Time: about 10 minutes to prepare

It really is a great way to combine a range of fruit and veg leftovers, perhaps bits that might be too small to use as side-dishes in their own right, so it cuts down on food waste.

As it is a slightly more 'exotic' kind of salad, it looks very swish when presented on the table along with whatever else you are serving, as well as being a healthy alternative to many accompaniments.

The Nectarines Saved the Day. Pic: SimoneySunday

It goes very well with fish, chilli, couscous or fishcakes and is very simple to make.

Bad Boy Mac 'n' Cheese

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, oh my days, yes. Photo: Simoney Sunday

This is a classic, comfort food dish and most people have their own way of making macaroni cheese. 

But I like mine extra, extra cheesy, with minimum effort, stuffed with zing and flavour.

Obviously the fewer ingredients you have to buy, the better. But I like to use leftovers - either shreds of roast chicken from the Sunday dinner - or, in this case, two hot dog frankfurters that had failed to make it into a soft white roll and smothered in mustard and ketchup at a barbecue a few days before. They were so lonely, sitting there in my fridge... until Bad Boy came along.

Ingredients (Serves four)

1/2 pack macaroni; 250g of a 500g bag. I used Tesco's own label but a basics or budget one works just as well.

1/3 (roughly 150g) of a 450g block of mature cheddar. Again we used Tesco's own label.

3 tablespoons of flour

1 cup of milk

Small knob of butter

Spinach

1 brown onion

1 clove of garlic

Frankfurters

In fact, everything here was Tesco's own label apart from the Frankfurters. Why pay through the nose for brand name food when you're cooking on a budget?

To taste:

I grow my own mini chillies and chives on my kitchen windowsill, then dry and store the chillies for later. For this, I used just one.

Paprika

Salt and Pepper

Parsley

Feeling Extra?

Lightly shaved parmesan and breadcrumbs for a topping. (TESCO!)

How To

Put the macaroni in a saucepan and cover with water. Set it to boil and stir frequently to prevent it sticking.

Dice the onion, crush the clove of garlic, finely cut up the chilli and put these to brown a little in a frying pan with a little cooking oil. Remove from heat and set aside.

Chop up the frankfurters and set these aside.

Grate the cheese and set aside in a bowl.

In a separate saucepan, drop in the butter, then the flour and stir into a smooth paste. Quickly add the milk and stir vigorously and continuously on a low heat to remove all lumps and bumps.

When it looks like it is starting to thicken, scoop a handful of grated cheese, the salt, pepper, parsley and paprika and stir together.

Once it has thickened into a yellow cheese sauce, take it off the heat and make sure it is not sticking to the pan.

When the macaroni has softened, drain immediately, and mix it into a casserole dish together with the onions, garlic, chilli, frankfurter and spinach.

Add the cheese sauce and make sure it is stirred in well.

Toss the remaining cheese all over the top of the mixture and put into a pre-heated oven at 160 degrees Celcius (gas mark 3) for about 8 minutes.

If you want to be extra, add a little grated parmesan to some breadcrumbs, then toss this over the cheese on top of the food before it goes in the oven.

Yep, it is delicious x

Magic Soup

You know the old adage: feed a cold,starve a fever? This is a truth that most people do not understand. They think that it means feed someone if they have a cold, and starve them if they have a fever. They think wrong, based on an ignorance of English proverbs and medicine. It means 'if you have a cold, eat well to prevent a fever from taking hold'. Effectively, you starve off the fever from taking over from someone with a cold.

I do believe that natural cures are the best: fresh fruit and vegetables, hot lemon and honey, ginger, garlic and so forth. For any cold a powerful blend of herbs in a hot chicken broth is part of the solution. This is my own recipe for a herby soup that will help effect an 8-hour turnaround in the event of a cold.

It is also a lot cheaper than buying a host of ever-expensive medicines at high-street stores, and is a great way of using up leftovers. Healthy and on a budget!

Therefore I call it Magic Soup.

You will need:
5-6 small chicken breast strips
3-4 cloves of garlic
1 small onion
1 cup of peas
1 cup of sweetcorn
1-2 tablespoons of honey
1 small chilli pepper
2 chicken stock cubes
1 teaspoon of mint
1 teaspoon of rosemary
1 teaspoon of saffron (optional)
Pinch salt
Pinch celery salt
Ground black pepper
Dash of paprika

Take a large saucepan and put in a little oil, the herbs, finely chopped garlic and a finely diced onion. Heat this up with the honey, stirring continually.

Add the diced chicken, the peas, the stock cubes and the sweetcorn. Stir until the chicken is part-cooked and covered with the seasoning.

Cover with 1.5 pints to 2 pints of water and leave to boil for 20 minutes.

Add salt, celery salt, pepper and paprika to taste.

It should look like a clearish, sparkling broth and have a good kick to the back of the throat with every spoonful.

Serve generously, it is a powerful, good, tasty soup with a chilli, garlicky hit that will get to work immediately.

It cured man-flu, it can cure any cold.

I scream for Ice Cream!

Left-over Blueberry Crumble Icecream. Photo credit: SimoneySunday

Ice cream should be a food group all by itself. I absolutely love it, but I do not love the fuss and expense of an ice cream maker. Too many kitchens have too many unused gadgets and, according to friends who do have and use their ice-cream makers, they have to put so many ingredients in, and it takes time.

Personally, I love this recipe for ice-cream using just two base ingredients and whatever you choose for the flavouring. All you need is a bowl and a hand-held blender (or infinite patience with an old-fashioned whisk).

This ice-cream takes 10 minutes maximum to make with a blender and freezes within eight hours - perfect for an evening meal or to prepare several days before a big dinner with friends and family.

How To: 
Simply buy 500g of whipping cream and 1 300g tin of condensed milk (get the normal one as the light version crystallises too much and takes longer to set).

Whip the cream in a cool bowl (I put mine in the fridge for a few mins beforehand so it is not room temperature). Once the cream is thickly whipped into stiff peaks, fold in the condensed milk. Stir it together (do not worry if the mixture starts to look a little runny). Then add your chosen flavouring.

Fold your flavour into the cream - do not completely mix it in but allow for veins and chunks and swirls of flavour throughout. Then freeze and forget about it for eight hours.

To serve, just let it stand at room temperature for about five minutes, scoop and enjoy. My problem is I am too impatient to let it stand for 5 minutes, so I whack it about with a knife, hence the slightly square-ish image in the above photo.

My favourite flavours so far are:

• Honey and honeycomb pieces (see my hack on how to liquefy honey that is crystallising in your cupboard)
• Left-over blueberry crumble (as pictured)
• Strawberries and cream.

For the strawberry flavour, I simply washed and de-greened the tops off some strawberries I had frozen a few weeks earlier, defrosted them slightly in the microwave for two minutes and then blitzed into a sorbet with the blender.

However you can make what you want: chocolate, cookies 'n' cream, raspberry swirl, apple and cinnamon - the list could be endless!

Utter Peanut Butter Nutter Cookies

Peanut Butter Cookies. Picture Credit: Simoney Sunday

Ever had that urge to eat some amazing, home-made cookies just before you settle down to watch a film at night, but realise with only 20 minutes to go that you don't have any? I get that feeling a lot!

Do not panic, and do not rush out to the local gas station to buy an overpriced pack of preservative-laden biscuits.

Check your food cupboard and fridge first. If you have one medium egg, one cup of white (granulated) sugar and one tub of peanut butter, you're in luck.

This is also gluten-free so is perfect for people who have an intolerance to gluten. However it might not be so good for people who are allergic to peanuts. Well, you cannot have it all. And they do look delicious, oui?

Ingredients
1 Egg (medium or large)
1 Jar of peanut butter (crunchy or smooth)
1 cup of white (granulated sugar)

How to
Mix the egg, peanut butter and sugar in a bowl until you form a paste. I particularly like crunchy peanut butter, but smooth will do.

Get a dessert spoon and use one scoop per cookie on a sheet of greaseproof paper (or a very lightly greased baking sheet). Using a fork, pat the cookies flat first one way, then the other to create a chequered effect (see picture).

All the above takes a maximum of five minutes.

Whack them into the oven at 190 degrees Celcius (or 180 for fan-assisted ovens. This will be gas mark four to five for conventional gas ovens.

Leave for six to eight mins - no more - and take them out. Leave them somewhere out of the reach of smaller people/animals and cool. It takes approximately 10 mins for them to cool enough for you to have a plate of delicious, crunchy on outside, chewy on the inside, cookies.

You could...
For an additional twist, add a spoonful or two of chocolate spread, or chocolate chips for an extra kick.

Rocky Road Easter Cake

Rocky Road Easter Cake. Photo: SimoneySunday

My hubby is not a great fan of chocolate eggs or bunnies. Nor does he rave over marzipan and dried fruit, which means making him Easter eggs and Simnel cakes, while ostensibly appreciated, is futile (I have to eat them myself).

Therefore as he does love eating chocolates and chocolate cakes that are stuffed full with bits, such as brownie squares, cookies and fridge squares, I decided this year to make him a Rocky Road Easter cake. The question was, how should this best be done to look professional enough as a gift?

I did have a round cake mould, plenty of chocolate and plenty of digestives. I always keep stacks of chocolate and digestive biscuits for baking, as well as marshmallows for entertaining the youth group. Sure enough I also had glacé cherries in my cupboard so I set about my fiendish plan.

Preparation time: 30m
Keeps: two weeks in a cool, dry and sealed environment.
Serves: 12 easily, 14 if you are stingy. 2 if you are dedicated to eating it every day for two weeks.

Ingredients
Chocolate (I used Sainsbury's Basics range of chocolate bars, three dark and three milk. This came to about £2.10 worth of chocolate)
1 bag large marshmallows
Half a tub of glace cherries
1 pack of Basics digestive biscuits
1 pack Sainsbury's white chocolate
Various leftover icing decorations from the previous Easter (they keep mostly forever)
A cake mould (ring looks cool but I am sure you could do this with a loaf tin)

How to
I melted all the milk and dark chocolate in a large saucepan on the lowest possible heat.
Once the chocolate was stirred and melted the pot was removed from the heat and I then mashed nearly all the digestives into it using the end of a rounded rolling pin.
Some biscuits fell into my mouth by accident. It was great.
Don't mash the digestives up too much - leave some fairly chunky to give texture and crunch to the finished product.
Cut each cherry into half and stir into the mix.
Cut the marshmallows up (if they are large) into quarters. I found that I had to keep bathing the knife in warm water as it was getting sticky, so I gave up, washed my hands and tore the marshmallows up myself. Some may have fallen into my mouth by accident. I plead the fifth.
Stir the marshmallows into the mix.

Once it is all stirred, spoon into your cake mould. I should have put greaseproof paper in first but I didn't.

Leave to set in the fridge overnight.

Now the next day, if you have sensibly used greaseproof, simply lift it out of the mould. If you didn't, then like me you will have to warm it up a tiny, tiny bit so it melts enough to slide out without being a mess. To do this i left it sitting in a bowl of warm water for five minutes.

Once it is out and on a plate, decorate with melted white chocolate. I drizzled this over using a honey stirrer, from a fair height, and then dotted last year's sugar icing decorations around it in a fairly even pattern, and left it to set.

For the finishing touches, I wrapped it in clear polythene. I had bought a huge roll of this years ago from Woolworths for sweets I was making to put into little teacups for beautiful, unusual birthday presents (I will hunt for pictures and write up the recipe soon) and I still have plenty of this left.

Ready for Easter Morning. Photo credit: Simoney Sunday

A tiny scroll of shiny gold ribbon, an Easter verse from the Bible and some colourful Easter paper cut-outs and voila! A professional looking Easter Rocky Road cake.

And it was delicious.

Food hack #101: Getting Honey Runny

Honey honey honey... It's a rich man's world

Honey does not come cheap - good honey that is. So when a fair bit remains in the jar in the cupboard and is approaching or even a little after the use by date, you may see that it has started to crystallise or solidify.

Do not throw it out!

Put a little lemon juice - either a squeeze or three of a real lemon or one of those bottled lemon juices used for flavouring - into the jar, and warm it up in the microwave for about two minutes. Let it cool slightly before using it!

Tip: Do not try this with plastic bottles. Learn from my fail.