Cobbled Together

Many people have tried to tackle quick meals in the past, and a fair number are professional chefs who have professional training. I doubt the majority of people can chop up onions in the blink of an eye. So I’m setting a bit more of a realistic tone. Try it in 30 minutes. I cobbled…

Chicken & Mushroom Risotto

This is a Hairy Bikers dieting dish, and it fricking rocks. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been an enormous risotto fan, but this is pretty darn awesome. Perhaps the best thing about this recipe is nothing to do with the rice at all, but with the chicken. The chicken is poached in stock, which adds…

Sticky Beef Ribs

I’ve been wanting to try this ever since I found this recipe of James Martin’s. It really is lazy day food, monstrously unhealthy, and deliciously sticky. I served this with some smooth garlic mash with wilted leeks. Beef ribs are ginormous, you really only need one per person. They’re also not terribly cheap, so they are a…

Experiments With XO

Lots of Chinese cuisine uses sauces that go back centuries, but this XO is relatively new. It gained popularity in the 80s, and has translated into Western-Chinese food more recently. It’s an amazing sauce, you can get it in a thick paste, and it’s now one of my go-to sauces for mid-week cooking when I’m…

Chorizo Bean Burgers

I always feel that we don’t make enough of the bean, they come in so many varieties and textures, they are immensely versatile. I think there’s also a sense that the bean has been the domain of the vegetarian, but it need not be. You can make a veggie version of this dish, just replace…

Chicken Fricassee

I’d normally cook this in the winter, it suits a beautifully rainy, cold winter day. However it is August Bank Holiday, so rubbish weather guaranteed! Lo and behold, as we tucked into this for lunch, the heavens opened outside. A fricassee sounds like a really poncey term, but what it means is to cook meat…

Liver & Bacon With Glazed Chantenay Carrots

There are few things you can say that sound more middle class or poncey than ‘Chantenay carrots’, but I really don’t care. They’re a beautifully sweet, and also they’re cute and look good on a plate, but most importantly you don’t need to chop them up. Glazing the carrots is really easy, but has a…

Koftas with Hummus

I did Kofta kebabs recently with some turkey mince, and I passed these flatbreads while doing food shopping on Saturday and thought, ‘yeah, they’d go well with koftas and some home made hummus’. So that’s what I did, and while this is not a low calorie dish, I used some sneaky tips to slim it…

Coffee Caramel Cake

I’m not a big baker, and I don’t make beautiful tidy cakes. I make cakes which are ‘rustic’, which is a nice way of saying it’s a little imperfectly presented, but tastes bloody awesome. This uses dulce de leche, a caramel sauce made by heating sweetened, usually condensed milk. I got mine from a tin, as it…

Peanut & Sesame Turkey Kofta Kebabs

I adore kebabs, they are massively diverse, and cooked in so many ways across the world. Don’t be a kebab snob, you’re not too good for them. Humans have been cooking this way for thousands of years. Kofta is something you’ll find quite commonly in supermarkets when you buy pre-made kebabs, it comes from the classical…

Boeuf Au Bleu With Chimichurri

Steak is smashing isn’t it, and so many ways to cook it!  If you order steak in France, and ask for ‘au bleu’, it’ll be cooked, at most, a minute on each side, it won’t be warm in the middle. I know, it sounds disgusting, and in the middle of winter when you want something…

Balsamic Egg Salad

Egg salads appear to have been forgotten over the years, and they can prove unpopular with colleagues in the office, but there’s nothing better for filling you up on a weekend lunchtime. Eggs are relatively dieter friendly, fill you up, and contain very little fat. Serve with a slice or two of sourdough or rye…