Dinner with a G

Last night our culinary journey through the alphabet stopped at G and it was my turn to provide the food. Obviously I went with Greek.

What’s NOT to love about Greek food? Aside from the fact that I am still cleaning dishes because we didn’t break them!

dips blog

There were plenty of dips

pita

Pita to eat them with

olives

And olives, olives and more olives

dolmades

I served dolmades which I had bought

spanakopita

And spanakopita which I made

inside spanakopita

I like the look of it from the inside

haloumi

Of course I fried haloumi


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moussaka

And made an eggplant moussaka for the vegos

roast lamb

And roast lamb and potatoes for the carnivores

greek salad

With a Greek salad for everyone

My favourite part of the dinner was the Baklava ice cream loaf which was outstandingly delicious and actually looked like I wanted it to – ie it didn’t flop. I think I may just blog the recipe later this week

baklava ice cream

Baklava ice-cream

inside baklava

Check out the nutty goodness inside

greek biscuits

And Greek biscuits which I bought and nobody ate

Check out our French dinner here, our Ethiopian Feast here and all the delights from the Dominican Republic here

We were French (for a couple of hours)

My sister and I are taking turns to cook meals that are themed with a different country each Friday night from A to Z.  This week was my sister’s turn and we were up to F. Given that her daughter is a Francophile and everybody in the world loves crepes she chose France as her country.

Not making any excuses but my sister does have the added advantage of a son that not only loves to cook but is a little bit genius at it.  He even made butter! Yes, he made butter from scratch. Well from cream but still you get my drift…

butter

HOME MADE BUTTER!!!!

champagne

There was French Champagne of course

soup

French Onion Soup

french salad

French Salad (naturally)

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beef

Beef Bourguignon

salt

There was even French salt

citron

Citron Tart

The crepes were really hard to photograph because we switched the lights off to get the full effect of the flames once the alcohol was lit … also I forgot to photograph them when they were on my plate because I was too busy eating

crepes

Crepe Suzette with a tiny bit of flame

It was another awesome meal!

Looking forward to Friday at my house when we explore the letter G (for Greece of course)

Dinner brought to you by the letter E (for Ethiopian)

If you read about my Friday night alphabetical country tour you will know that this Friday we were up to E. If you haven’t read about it, you can catch up quickly here. (Basically my sister and I are taking turns to cook meals that are themed with a different country each Friday night – from A to Z.)

This week was my turn and I was very tempted to go for English and serve bangers and mash but I thought I better put in a little more effort. I waivered between Egypt and Ethiopia for a while but settled on Ethiopia when I saw that they served lots of curries and stews that could be made in advance.

An Ethiopian “feast platter” usually includes a couple of meat stews, a lentil dish (which I  opted not to cook because I know my family and the lentil dish would NOT have been a success), a cooked vegetable and a raw vegetable dish served on a large platter covered with Injera, which are Ethiopian sourdough pancakes type things and the biggest challenge of my meal. Some of the ingredients (tef flour) are very hard to source in Sydney and usually the injera are made days in advance to allow the culture to develop and the yeast to rise. I was never going to be that organised so I cheated with a quicker recipe you can find here.  Injera are also served as a side and are used instead of utensils to pick up the rest of the food.

Ethiopians don’t typically do starters but I had some roasted chickpeas to nibble on. You can find the recipe here.

chickpeas

Ethiopian spiced chickpeas

Main meal was the injera (recipe here) with a chicken stew known as Doro Wat (recipe here), an Ethiopian beef, spinach and peanut stew (recipe here), a vegetable stew known as Amhari-Atklit (recipe here) and an Ethiopian tomato and cucumber salad (recipe here).

injera

My injera which may have been too think but turned out better than I had imagined

eth chicken

Doro Wat (or chicken stew). Bad lighting  – in reality it was quite a reddish colour

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ethiopian meat

Ethiopian Beef, Spinach and Peanut stew (with a lot of capsicum)

veg stew

Amhari-Atklit (although we called it vegetable stew)

ethi salad

An Ethiopian salad which resembles a salad from most countries but with chilli

finished meal

And this is how the plated meal looked

Ethiopians are not big on dessert but I am so I made an icecream with honeyed almonds and a salted butterscotch sauce. Yum

ice cream

No one complained that it wasn’t on theme

Next week we are having a break because we are going to my mother-in-law for dinner. She has opted to do E again – she is doing E for easy.

 

Friday night dinner brought to us by the letter D

Every Friday night I have dinner with my close family – my mother, my sister and her family and a revolving parade of members of my husband’s family. It is a well polished routine one Friday at my house, the next at my sisters. And so on and so on for ever.

I adore having my family over and although the origins of the Friday night together are based in Jewish religion we use the time together to connect rather than for any religious significance. It “forces” us to get together and it is one of the traditions of Judaism that I love and hope that my son will carry with him way into his future because at the end of the day – and more specifically at the end of the week there is nothing like family.

The only real problem with making dinner every second Friday night (and it needs to be a proper dinner where we all sit at the table not grab pizza take away)  is thinking about what on earth to make. There are so many weeks that you can sit through soup and a roast dinner followed by a decadent dessert and then you start to tire of it.  And so it was that a couple of weeks ago we decided to theme our dinners. I so love a theme!

Starting at A we are going to cook the food of a country with every letter of the alphabet. I started 4 weeks ago with an Austrian dinner, my sister did Belgian the next week and I did Chinese the week after. On Friday night my sister (and her very helpful and uber capable son) made food from the Dominican Republic and Dominica (they may have blurred the lines between the two countries). While my husband was exclaiming that it was the best food that he had ever eaten and reminding me to take photos for my blog I realised I had never ever blogged about my alphabet dinners – and so that’s about to change.

This is what we ate on Friday night (although I didn’t because Michelle Bridges is not Dominican). We don’t usually eat all our food deep fried but then again we don’t always eat Dominican. Also bear in mind I am not a very good food photographer and I really don’t know a thing about retouching photos.

Chicharrones de Pollo –  My husband said that this was the best chicken he had ever eaten. Click here for the recipe (My nephew’s variation: equal parts flour, corn flour and panko crumbs, 2 tbs rosemary, 2 tbs dried chili, 2tsp cinnamon)

dominican chicken

Empanadas very impressively braided and everything by my nephew. Recipe here

empanadas1

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burger

Tostone which are plantains cut into 1 inch slices, deep fried, cooled slightly, smashed flat and deep fried again. Did I mention we don’t always eat so much fried food?

tostones

Caramel three ways. Inherited from the Spaniards, common across Latin America creme caramel is one of Dominican’s favorite desserts. Who knew?

caramel

 

As I said photography is not my forte so forgive me and trust that it looked a lot better in real life.

This Friday night is my turn and I have the letter E. I’m tossing up between Egyptian, Ethiopian or English (although I think English may be taking the easy way out).

Would love your ideas! And I’ll try to take better photos.

There is one healthy ingredient in these cupcakes (and lots of delicious ones)

carrot muffin insideThe other day an old acquaintance asked me what I blog about. “Nothing” was my immediate answer although I said it only in my head so that I sounded like I knew what I was doing.  “I know” old acquaintance said “you are a food blogger aren’t you because I remember that you love food?”.  Not sure how to take that but still, she’s right,  I do love food and I like to cook and it’s something that I do every. Single. Day.

So why not blog about it? Or at least share a recipe or two?

Here’s a little something I made yesterday at hubby’s request. The best ever carrot cupcakes. Seriously a friend came over last night and tasted one and said I should go into business making carrot cupcakes. Niche – but they are that good.

Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups flour
  • 1 1/4 cups oil
  • 1 1/4 cups sugar
  • 3 cups grated carrots
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon bicarb
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder

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Method

  1. Beat eggs and sugar very well.
  2. Add oil and beat again until just blended.
  3. Add sifted dry ingredients and then fold in sifted dry ingredients
  4. Pour into prepared cupcake tin
  5. Bake for 20-30 minutes in a 180′ oven (or till you touch them and they spring back)

Icing

Contents

  • 125 grams butter (softened)
  • 125 cream cheese (also softened)
  • 500 grams icing sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla

Method

  1. Cream the butter and icing sugar until it’s combined but still stiff.
  2. Then stir in the cream cheese and vanilla by hand.
  3. When the cupcakes are cool spread the icing on top of the cupcakes while trying not to eat all the icing with your fingers

May I just take a minute to thank the person who invented cream cheese icing?

carrot muffin

 

 

This recipe will change your life

I’ve shared a few er, not so healthy recipes on my blog in the past – there’s the rainbow cake that actually worked, mars bar slices which are heavenly and the cheesecake Easter eggs I boasted about. But I can also cook savoury! In fact let’s be honest I cook more than I bake because there’s that silly tradition they call dinner every night.

While salad is technically not cooking, my salad dressing is my “most asked for recipe”.  I make it often (actually always) and every single time someone new tastes it they ask for the recipe.  Every time.

And I always share it – I think somebody asking me for a recipe is the highest compliment I could get.

So try it…

Lana’s Salad DressingImage

2/3 cup oil

1/3 cup brown vinegar

1/3 cup soft brown sugar
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5 tbs whole egg mayonnaise (please use a brand that uses free range eggs)

3 tsps crushed garlic

3 tsps mild English mustard

Shake t up with some salt and pepper.

Enjoy

And yes, you can win friends with salad

What is your most asked for recipe?

Is this an Easter Egg or is it a cheesecake? Or is it just bloody delicious?

It didn’t take me more than 5 seconds to decide to make these No Bake Cheesecake Easter Eggs when I saw them on Paula Joye’s website, Lifestyled here. 5 seconds and I was already thinking who I could serve them too, what I would serve them on etc. I spent far too much time worrying that they wouldn’t look like they did in Paula’s pics because my food seldom looks like the recipe book image.

But in the end I decided I’d go ahead – what was the worst that could happen? If they looked bad I just wouldn’t mention them to you 😉

But imagine my surprise when they were as easy as she promised and they looked great (other than the fact that I made the yolk too runny).  I only made one change to the recipe on Lifestyled which I will outline as we go. (For ease of shopping I have bolded the ingredients you need.)

First: Get your husband to chop the tops off some hollow chocolate Easter Eggs. This was actually the hardest part which is why I outsourced it. Mr Pencil promised that if the chocolate is cold and you use a serrated knife it’s really easy.

cutting the chocolate

After you’ve prepped the eggs stick them in the fridge to cool.

chocolate cases

Then mix the following ingredients together (I doubled these quantities as I was making eggs for 18 people)

150g cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp lemon juice
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Beat  1/2 cup thickened cream till it stands and then whisk it together with the cream cheese mixture

cheesecake mixture

Pop the combined mixture into a piping bag and simply squeeze it into the cold chocolate cases then chill for 30 minutes and allow it to set.

cheesecake in case

Easy as.

The original recipe suggested you make the yolk out of some combination of passionfruit pulp, apricot jam and butter. I  decided to just go for icing. So I mixed about a cup and a half of icing sugar with 1tbs of butter and an egg white (best icing recipe ever) with a few tiny drops of red and quite a few drops of yellow food colouring to resemble yolk colour and then I piped it onto the egg whites. My icing was a bit runny but it was okay

eggs

Done. And Proud

easter egg

Mars Bar slice (that doubles as a birthday cake)

Today is Nat’s birthday. Nat is the amazing Editorial Coordinator at Mamamia and she is simply the kindest, most gentle, beautiful and helpful person you are ever likely to meet. She also loves my Mars Bars Slice so they are part of her birthday present today. Actually I made them last week because I thought her birthday was last week – ooops. She got them a week early but I kept the post for today! Sneaky.

Anyway look how easy they are

Melt about 200grams worth of Mars Bars

Image

Add in 100grams of butter while the Mars Bars are melting and mush it all up together over a low heat

Image

When it’s all smooth(ish) add 1 and 1/2 cups rice krispies and mix it all up. Then pour it into a baking tray lined with baking paper. Pop it in the fridge for about 20 minutes.
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Image

Then melt two packets of Cadbury’s melts in the microwave and pour the liquid chocolate over the rice krispies

Image

Pop it back in the fridge for about 30 minutes. Then remove and slice. Like this

Image

Enjoy and wish Nat happy birthday here