Attempting Chicken and Mushroom Parcels

I've been sitting here since the last post went up over an hour ago with no idea how to start this post. So I'm just going to give you the recipe and some pretty pictures and be done with it!

Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter

2 bacon strips, chopped

150g white button mushrooms, chopped

150g field mushrooms, chopped

6 green spring onions, chopped

1 tablespoon grain mustard

110g cream cheese

1/3 cup heavy whipping cream

450g cooked chicken, chopped

10 sheets pastry, filo or puff

To cook the chicken I decided to poach my chicken breasts. Poaching is basically a nicer way of saying boiling. So simple to do, just cover the chicken with water, bring to the boil, when the chicken rises to the surface weigh down with a small plate or something similar to keep the chicken under the water. Should take about 15-20 minutes for this amount of chicken. It makes it really succulent and if you season the water it should taste pretty good too!

Heat the butter in a frying pan, add the bacon and mushrooms and cook, stirring, until the liquid has evaporated. Add the green (spring) onions and cook, stirring, until soft. Stir in the mustard, cream cheese, cream and chicken and mix well.

God this mixture was SO yummy, I could have eaten it just like this (shhh don't tell anyone but.. I did!)

Cut sheets of pastry in to rectangles, you need two rectangles for every person eating, spoon a bit of the filling in to the middle of the pastry rectangles and squish the edges together, make sure you do this TIGHTLY or you'll get leakage!

Brush with a little melted butter and sprinkle poppy seeds on top (or in my case dried thyme). Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius and bake for approx 20 minutes or until golden.

 

Definitely something I'll be making again!

Attempting Banana Cake

I have this secret banana cake recipe that makes the most moist banana cake I've ever tasted and which puts all other banana cake to shame. Except, it's not so secret... It's from this website here, Exclusively Food...


Ingredients


125g butter, softened (if using unsalted butter, add 1/4 teaspoon salt with the flour)
330g (1 1/2 cups) sugar
280g (1 very slightly rounded cup) very ripe, mashed banana
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (1 teaspoon natural vanilla essence)
2 large eggs (we use eggs with a minimum weight of 59g)
100ml (1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon) buttermilk
225g (1 1/2 cups) self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius fan-forced. If you don't have a fan-forced oven, preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Grease the side and base of a 22cm diameter (inside top measurement) round cake pan. We use a springform pan for easy removal of the cake. Line base of the pan with non-stick baking paper.

Place butter, sugar, banana, vanilla and eggs in a food processor. (I use a blender cause I don't have a food processor. It doesn't work quite as well, but it gets there in the end.)

Process for about 2 minutes. Scrape down sides of processor. Add buttermilk and pulse to combine.

Sift flour, salt (if using) and bicarbonate of soda together into a large bowl. Add flour mixture to food processor and process until just combined.

Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake for about 50-60 minutes, or until a skewer or knife inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Remove from oven and leave to cool.


My cake was a bit sunken in the middle so I trimmed off the top to make it level.

And then iced it with a cream cheese icing, also from Exclusively Food.


Cream Cheese Icing
90g cream cheese, softened
45g butter, softened
210g (1 2/3 cups) icing sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice

Beat cream cheese and butter with an electric mixer until creamy. Add sifted icing sugar and beat until smooth. Add lemon juice and beat to combine. Spread icing over top and sides of cooled cake.

Yumbo!

I'm sorry poor blog!

I promise I have not forgotten about you, I've just been too busy to sit down and write! I'll have three, yes THREE, posts for you tomorrow! Coming up we've got Chicken and Mushroom Parcels (sooooooooo good!), The Best Banana Cake EVER and my first ever Roast Beef dinner! Exciting things!

Attempting Potato and Pea Curry (Aloo Mattar)

I've been wanting to try making this curry for months now, it's my absolute favourite curry and it's pretty simple to make! It's vegetarian and basically consists of potato and peas!
The ingredients are:

3 onions
3 cloves of garlic
1.5 inches of ginger
1/2 c butter
1.5kg potatoes diced
1 1/2 tablespoons curry powder
1 1/2 c chicken stock
350g frozen peas
1 bunch coriander
1 1/2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice

Finely dice the onion, mince the garlic and grate the ginger. Sauté onion, garlic and ginger in the butter in a large saucepan (trust me, the bigger the better, I ended up using our large catering pot to fit everything in.)

Add in the diced potato and curry powder, mix all together. Stir in chicken stock and bring to the boil. Allow to simmer for 15-20 minutes or until potato is cooked through. Add peas and simmer for 5 minutes. Add finely chopped coriander, white wine vinegar and lemon juice. Season with salt.

I paired my Aloo Mattar with chapatis and rice. I bought pre-made chapatis from the Indian supermarket and heated them up in a HOT frying pan with a dash of oil, let them puff up then pat down with a tea-towel and flip over, best to use tongs to do this (I learnt the hard way, my poor fingertips!) These only take about 30 seconds each side to cook.

This was a HUGE hit with the family, the flavours go together soooo well. The lemon juice just really freshens up the whole dish and counteracts the heaviness of the carbs. Definitely something we will be eating again!

Attempting Devils Food Cake

(Ok, I'm just gonna say first off, I cheated with this one. I used a cake mix)

I didn't *plan* to bake a cake today, I was just wandering through the supermarket and this Devils Food Cake mix jumped out at me and I thought, why not!

Cake mix is easy peasy but I always feel like I'm being a cheat when I bake a cake from a mix. The bonus is though, it never fails!
So I totally forgot to take photos throughout the process but it's pretty darned simple, tip the cake mix in to a bowl, add three eggs, 1/4 cup oil, 3/4 cup water and mix with an electric beater for five minutes. Produces a deliciously rich looking batter. (The only problem I found was that my batter was a bit lumpy... This hasn't seemed to have translated in to a lumpy cake though, thank goodness.) Grease a baking lin, I used a loaf tin, pour in batter and bake in a preheated oven for 45-55 minutes. Halfway through I covered the top of the cake with tin foil so that the crust on top didn't burn, a pet hate of mine.
Frosted and covered with Skittles (my favourite lollies!) here's how it ended up.

P.S. I can't for the life of me figure out how to make that first photo *normal*...

Attempting Green Thumbery

Saturday, I decided this year, I was going to have a proper summer fruit/vegetable garden. Previous years I have also had this urge but this year is different, I swear!
This year, I pledge to water my baby plants every day, keep on top of pests and diseases, fertilize and feed my babies and most of all - eat what my garden produces!
With this in mind I popped over to my nearest garden center (across the road) and picked up a tomato plant (Roma), two basil plants (companion planting with the tomato... to increase the flavour of the tomatoes), a rockmelon plant, perpetual spinach, cucumber (long green), four Pajaro strawberries and a passion fruit plant. This along with two punnets of Marigolds (more companion planting).

Companion planting is this (not so) fancy schmancy idea of planting certain plants with other certain plants to increase flavour/as a pest repellent/increase allies such as bees! Check out this website for more information.

So here's my vege patch, all ready for the planting of my seedlings. To get to this stage, I've mixed in one and a half bags of compost to the soil with a spade and left it to settle for half a day or so.

The tomato, basil and marigolds going in. My tomato isn't staked, that's purely because I forgot to buy stakes. Staking tomatoes are a MUST otherwise you're just going to end up with mutilated tomato plants and this will hinder your plants fruit producing ability and also makes harvesting harder.

The strawberries are planted in mounds so that when they fruit, the fruit isn't sitting on the wet ground. These will be mulched as the plants mature. I tried to choose strawberries that were NOT in flower but the ones that had a couple of buds/flowers, I picked them off. This encourages the plant to work on becoming bigger and tougher which, in the long run, means more/better strawberries for you!

I got lucky with my Rock melon - two plants in one punnet. So I've planted them together and we'll see which one is the strongest one. I know this isn't the norm, you're supposed to separate them as to reduce competition which will encourage stronger growth in BOTH. But, poo to you, it's my garden. Rock melon need about a metre of space and I'm worried mine may not have enough room to grow but we'll deal with that as we come to it! Rock melon's are best grown on ground which is covered in black plastic to keep it warm as this makes the melon's sweeter and yummier. Once my plants are a bit more established a layer of plastic will be going down.

I chucked the spinach down the end of the garden and now that little patch is full. I've still got the cucumber and passion fruit left to plant but these are going to have to go in a different place in the garden.

So wish we luck in growing healthy, scrummy vegetables and fruit in my own garden! Let us pray that this year I turn over a new gardening leaf.

P.S. Don't forget to water you plants in once you've finished planting!! And don't forget to continue watering over summer!!