Recipe - Rose Petal Couscous Salad

Eating flowers? Am I crazy? Yes, a little bit I guess - but not in this case. There is a large number of flowers that you can eat the whole flower or parts of it.

Roses have a long tradition of being used in foods. Today you can find it in rose harissa and rose water for example.

If you are going to try this recipe, make sure that you wash the petals very carefully. Various roses have different strength of flavour so try a petal to try and judge how many you'll need in your salad.

This dish works just as well as a standalone salad served indvidually as it does as a larger shared salad at a barbecue for example. It compliments barbecued lamb really well.

Many thanks to Mrs T. for letting me use some of her beloved roses in the making of this dish. Update: I have been told that this particular rose is called Warm Welcome.

Let's hit the recipe and see how to cook this.

Ingredients (serves 4 - 6)
Couscous for 4
Vegetable stock
1 tbsp dried mint
1 can of chickpeas, drained and heated as per the tin
10 cm piece of cucumber - halved, deseeded and diced
4 medium tomatoes, deseeded and diced
6 dried apricots, diced
Rose petals, to taste
Rose bulbs, to decorate (optional)

Method
Cook the couscous as per the instructions of the packaging, replacing water with the vegetable stock and adding the dried mint.

Once the couscous is cooked, fluff it up with a fork. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir it all up well.

Serve in individual bowls or on a large communal plate. If you want to, decorate with some rose bulbs.

Enjoy!

Funky Padron Peppers - Part 2

These little peppers really did taste nice, with the odd one out having a bit of a kick.

For once I didn't freestyle it, I actually followed the instructions on the packaging. Fry in olive oil for 3 minutes or so, until the skin on the peppers starts to blister. Hoik them into a bowl and sprinkle some salt over them. Job done.

Just peppers on their own would have been a bit too one-dimensional so I decided to add in some other small bits and pieces.

I ended up with a little platter consisting of the following: Padron peppers, chili stuffed olives, manchego cheese, Salchichon Ibérico, Chorizon Ibérico and Lomo Ibérico.

If you add some nice bread to that you'll find yourself with a nice (almost) non-cook dinner that you can enjoy in a nice and slow tempo.

I know for a fact that you can find these Padron Peppers in Waitrose but I'm sure there are some other shops around that stock them too.

Funky Padron Peppers

I found these funky looking Padron Peppers in my local supermarket. I've never seen or heard about them before, that's probably just me being ignorant as usual, so I had to grab a bag of them.

It says "1 in 30 has a kick!" on the packaging so I guess I'll have to verify that. I'll also verify if said kick is enough to warrant the image of a angry kicking bull on the front or if it should have been a slightly agitated wax worm instead.

The packaging says to fry them in olive oil for about 3 minutes or until the skin starts to blister, hopefully on the peppers. Once that's done, pop them into a bowl and sprinkle some salt over them.

I'll see if I can find any alternative ways of cooking them or if that is it. Once cooked and tried I'll post my findings up here.

In the meantime if anyone reading this knows anything about these little peppers, drop me a comment and let me know!

Recipe - Bourbon Glazed Pork Tenderloin

A very good friend of mine had some business down here in 'The Don' the other day so he checked if he could crash at mine. That was of course no problem.

After being told that Hotel Mikey operates strictly on a BYO basis he turned up with a mattress, duvet and a very nice bottle of wine. Good lad!

Since I knew that the risk of us going down the pub was off the scale I figured that we needed something to line our stomachs with. Bourbon glazed pork tenderloin sounded like a good idea in theory. Thankfully it turned out just that way in reality too.

I served it with some sweet potato mash and a mayo-free coleslaw, a combination that worked out really well.

Just a couple of pointers on this recipe. Using a silicone brush and lining the baking tray with tinfoil is a must. The glaze is stickier than Russel Brand's bedsheets.

After that nasty mental image, over to the recipe...

Ingredients (serves 2)
500g pork tenderloin (pork fillet), trimmed and cut in two
3 tbsp bourbon (JD preferably)
3 tbsp ketchup
3 tbsp soy sauce
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp smoked paprika

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 220c.

Combine everything besides the tenderloin in a pan. Bring this to a simmer and let it simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring, until nice and thick.

Put the tenderloin on tinfoil on a baking sheet. Brush liberally with the glaze and put it all into the oven.

Cook for 25 - 30 minutes or until done. About half way through the cooking, remove the baking sheet from the oven and brush the tenderloins with some more glaze before returning them to the oven.

Once done, remove from the oven and let the tenderloins rest for 5 - 10 minutes before slicing them.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Sausage Pasta Bake

Time for a recipe that uses some leftovers again...

I ended up having some nice pork sausages left in my fridge and needed to come up with some way of using them. I was in the mood for some pasta as well so that set the parameters.

I guess I could have just have fried them as they were and had them with some pasta and ketchup. That would have been a tad bit boring though, so this is what I did instead...

Ingredients (serves 2)
3 good quality pork sausages
2 portions cooked macaroni (or any other pasta you fancy)
1 onion, diced
1 tbsp butter
1.5 tbsp plain flour
250 ml milk
200 ml grated cheese
Baby plum tomatoes, halved lenghtways
Salt
Pepper

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 225c.

Pour the macaroni into the bottom of a oven safe dish and top with 1/3 of the cheese.

Open the sausage casings and squeeze out the contents into a hot non-stick frying pan. Add in the onion and fry until the sausage no longer is pink and starts to get browned. Make sure to stir well and get the sausage split up into small pieces. Pour this mixture on top of the macaroni and top with another 1/3 of the cheese.

Melt the butter in a pot, stir in the flour and pour in the milk. Bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer. Let it simmer for about 5 minutes. Season to taste.

Pour the sauce on top of the macaroni and sausages, add in the tomatoes - cut side down. Finish off with the last 1/3 of cheese.

Put this in the oven for about 15 minutes or until golden brown and piping hot all the way through.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Hot Dogs with Red Hot Onion Sauce and Ovenbaked Potato Chips

These days hamburgers seems to get the luxury treatment everywhere. The poor old hot dog seems to have been forgotten amongst all the hubbub surrounding the hamburgers. Not so on this blog though.

The Red Hot Onion Sauce in this post is a real winner and it works with almost any grilled or barbecued meat. As always, freestyle it to suit you and your palate. With these quantities it will have a bit of a bite but it won't make your head explode. If you want that, add more chili sauce!

The potato chips are dead easy to make and can be freestyled to no end. Just add some different spices to give them some interesting flavours. Just to give you an indication of the quantities, using the 2mm slicer on my Magimix I got enough slices to cover about one and a half baking sheet from one decently sized potato.

Time for the recipe..

Ingredients
Potato Chips
1 potato, peeled
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

Red Hot Onion Sauce
2 yellow onions, diced
125 ml ketchup
125 ml water
3 tbsp soft brown sugar
1 tbsp Sriracha Chili Sauce (or any hot sauce really)
1 tsp Worchestershire sauce
1 tsp Oregano
Salt
Pepper

Hot Dogs
Hot Dogs
Hot Dog Buns

Method
Potato chips
Pre-heat the oven to 220c.

Slice the potato as thinly as you can, using a mandolin or a food processor. Put the potato slices on some parchment paper on a baking tray. Brush with olive oil and scatter some salt and pepper on top.

Pop the baking tray into the oven until the chips are nice and crisp, this normally takes about 10 minutes. Rotate the baking tray if needed during the cooking time.

Remove from the oven and allow the chips to cool on a cooling rack.

Red Hot Onion Sauce
Combine all the ingredients in a sauce pan. Bring it to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Let this simmer until it starts to thicken up quite a bit, normally around 20 - 25 minutes. Remove from the heat and allow it to cool down, bearing in mind that it will thicken some more during this process.

Re-heat when you are ready to serve. This sauce lasts for about a week in the fridge.

Hot Dogs
Fry, grill, oven bake or barbecue the hot dogs to your liking. Pop in a bun and spoon some sauce over.

Enjoy!

Recipe - Creamy Garlic Potato Gratins with a Rosemary twist

As side dishes go, this is one of my favourites. I think I can trace it back to something my parents use to cook now and then and it has evolved from there.

Depending on the mood I can add and subtract things to this recipe but what I'm listing here is the core recipe. Use this as a base and then freestyle it as you wish.

I think it's quite nice to cook and serve it in individual ramekins like this, but you can just as easily make one large dish if you want to. Just to give you an idea, the ramekins I used this time has a diameter of 10cm and holds about 350ml.

At first I thought that the only reason you should pour the milk and cream mixture over the potatoes even before putting them into the ramekins was to infuse flavour. It wasn't until quite late I realised that by doing that you stop the potatoes from discolouring.

When you cook this, if the gratins goes brown on top too early - just pop some tinfoil over them.

Let's head over to the recipe....

Ingredients (makes about 4 ramekins)
250 ml milk (go full-fat)
400 ml double cream
2 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed with the side of your knife
1 sprig of fresh rosemary
Salt
Pepper
4 large-ish potatoes (I used Desiree)

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 180c.

Pour the milk and cream into a pan and add in the garlic cloves and rosemary. Season well and bring the pan to a simmer. Once it's simmering, turn off the heat and allow the mixture to cool down.

Peel the potatoes and either use a mandolin or a food processor to slice them into 2 - 4 mm slices. If you don't have any of the previous, use your knife and try to be quite exact.

Put the potato slices in a bowl and pour over the milk and cream mixture. Fish out the rosemary and garlic cloves. Give the bowl a good shake or two to make sure to cover all the potato slices.

Now you can start lining the ramekins with layers of potatoes. Spoon over a teaspoon or two of the milk and cream mixture for every two or so layer that you make. Keep doing this until you've used up all the potatoes. If there's anything left of the milk and cream mixture - divide it up evenly and pour it on top of the ramekins.

Put the ramekins onto a baking sheet and pop them into the oven for about 45 minutes. You should be able to push a knife into the gratins with no real resistance once they're cooked properly.

Enjoy!