Party Food! Halloumi Cheese - 2 ways

I've been wanting to write about certain party food recipes for quite a while and I thought I would stick one in before New Year's Eve. Perhaps wanting to post about all of the party snacks I've made before NYE was a little ambitious, but I get so excited cooking for friends and I enjoy writing about it too. However, the other posts will have to wait for next week! For now, I want to share with you the following recipes which are two simple recipes to make the amazingly moreish Halloumi cheese even more moreish! They are both taken from Nigella Lawson's cookery book Nigella Express. Her books are becoming a permanent fixture in my cooking and blogging, I love her creativity in recipes and the exciting ingredients she uses. The following recipes really bring to life this salty delicious cheese. It is wonderful when you simply grill it, but these recipes give it another life, completely different tastes and flavours!

Halloumi Bites (yum, yum)

This recipes turns the Halloumi super juicy and flavoursome.

Ingredients

80ml garlic oil (or a crushed garlic clove works well)

1 x 15ml lime juice

3 x 15ml tablespoons chopped parsley

Generous sprinkle of black pepper

3 x 250g blocks halloumi cheese (You must buy the full fat version, the low fat one is just plain shoddy in comparison!) (You will have to drain the Halloumi and chopped into cubes, or whichever shapes you like but small cubes or thin long slices are best)

Combine the oil, lime juice, pepper and parsley into a small jug.

Heat a heavy based non-stick frying pan and quickly fry the Halloumi on its own, no oil or anything.

Once fried, browned and lovely looking, turn down to simmer and pour the mixture over the Halloumi (this is slightly different to Nigella's direction but it is what I prefer). Coat well. Then decant to a bowl.

Halloumi grilled with flame roasted peppers

Grilling the cheese makes it crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, the peppers give it a lovely vinegary taste as well. My favourite Halloumi recipe.

Ingredients

1 x 250g block Halloumi cheese. (Again, cut into small cubes or long slices)

1 x 220g jar flame roasted peppers (very easy to get hold of in supermarkets) (Sliced)

1 x 15ml tablespoon garlic oil

Preheat the oven to 220C.

Line a baking tin with baking parchment. Place the chopped Halloumi in the tin along with the sliced tinned peppers.

Drizzle the garlic oil over.

Cook for 15-20 minutes. The cheese should have browned by this point and will be ready to serve.

Enjoy the Halloumi and also enjoy people's reactions to how damn delicious this cheese is!

Easy peasy sweet chilli peanut noodles with sweetcorn and carrot fritters (Nigella Lawson/Rosie Lovell)

This recipe is a little different from what I usually cook, as I've probably said before, I tend to gravitate towards Italian dishes. However, this recipe is something with a more Asian inspired feel, with a kick of spices and it definitely wins for overall easiness. If I need something that's going to fill me up, be interesting and full of vegetables, then I always go back to this, it's taken from Nigella Lawson's Nigella Express, a cookbook full of quick and easy dishes. This recipe also allows you to really play around with what you put in it, you have the basis of noodles and dressing but the types of vegetables (and even choice of meat) you include are completely optional. So the vegetables I have included here aren't the ones that are on Nigella's recipe, but the link above will take you to her recipe if you want to see what ingredients she uses.

The sweetcorn and carrot fritters go beautifully with this dish, and they are great as meal accompaniments or just as snacks to have in the fridge, to warm up when you feel like one. This is taken from Rosie Lovell's, Spooning with Rosie, one of my all time favourite cookbooks. It was when I was just starting to get into cooking and my sister bought me this for Christmas. Her recipes are always so well thought out, featuring a huge range of different ingredients and she knows what foods go so perfectly with each other, I've made a few recipes from this book and there's definitely plenty more I want to try!

Ingredients - Sweet Chilli Peanut Noodles (serves 2)

Dressing:

1 x 15ml tablespoon (sesame) oil

1 x 15ml tablespoon garlic oil

1 x 15ml tablespoon soy sauce

2 x 15ml tablespoon sweet chilli sauce

100g crunchy/smooth peanut butter (Nigella recommends smooth, but I absolutely love crunchy and that's what we've always got in the house - I think it gives a better texture to the dressing)

2 x 15ml tablespoon lime juice

1 x 15ml tablespoon mirin wine (this is completely optional, but I had some in the cupboard and thought it added something extra!)

2 large tomatoes, chopped (the tomatoes make the dish juicy!)

100g mushrooms, roughly chopped

3 spring onions, finely chopped

1 red pepper, roughly chopped

100g spinach

Packet of dried noodles/ ready prepared egg noodles (use as many or as few noodles as you wish!)

20g sesame seeds/sunflower seeds - whatever seeds that are around and that go well, just to give the dish more of a crunch!

And now prepare for the simplest recipe method ever!

Chop up all of the vegetables.

Mix all of the dressing ingredients in a bowl together and then leave to one side.

Cook the noodles to the packet specification, then once cooked (it takes around 5 minutes!), drain and add back to the pan. Add the dressing, vegetables and mix well so everything is coated in the yummy sauce. Scatter the sesame seeds over and serve. Simple!

Ingredients - Sweetcorn and Carrot Fritters (serves 3-4/makes around 10 small fritters)

2 medium eggs

3 tablespoons cornflour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 spring onion, chopped

1 garlic cloves, peeled and finely sliced

A small handful of fresh coriander, chopped

1 x 285g tin of sweetcorn, drained

1 carrot, peeled and grated

3 tablespoons peanut (or vegetable) oil

Start by cracking the eggs into a bowl and whisk. Add the cornflour and baking powder, and mix so that the ingredients form a smooth paste.

Add the chopped ingredients; the spring onion, the garlic clove, and the fresh coriander, mix together well. Then add the drained sweetcorn and fold in with the other ingredients.

Heat the oil in a frying pan until hot, then add a tablespoon of the mixture so that it forms a medium sized pattie. Allow the mixture to spread, and bubble, when you see the patties crisping up at the sides, flip over quickly. Then when cooked, remove from the heat onto a kitchen towel so the oil is soaked up.

Nigella's Potato and Mushroom Gratin (with lemon chicken)

So as I mentioned before, a favourite cookbook in my house at home is "Nigella Express". My mum has made some of the soups from the book, all of which are lovely and very easy to make! Nigella may use fancy ingredients, and sometimes the recipes are not that healthy, but they are lovely warming recipes to make for friends or for a dinner party and they're usually something quick to rustle up.

I have never made a gratin so I wanted to give it a go and I'm very glad I used this recipe because it was quite quick! There was a lot of chopping but after that it was very easy. I wish that I had taken a photo of the gratin all nicely cooked out of the oven in the dish I made it in but I just was excited to eat it so had spooned it onto our plates before I realised! So it looks quite messy in the picture sitting next to the rocket and the chicken, but it was lovely and well worth making if you want to make a quick dish that will look quite impressive! Another great thing about the gratin, is that it uses just full fat milk and not cream, so it isn't as fatty as a gratin could be!

Again this is Nigella's recipe, so I am not claiming it is my own! :

Ingredients:

3 average-sized baking potatoes ( 750g) - thinly sliced

350ml full-fat milk

3 x 15ml tablespoons white wine

2 x 15ml tablespoons butter

2 teaspoons garlic oil (I didn't have any garlic oil, so crushed two cloves of garlic instead)

250g chestnut mushrooms - finely sliced

salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 220c and butter a shallow baking dish or gratin.

Put the sliced potatoes, milk and white wine in a saucepan and bring to the boil, season with salt and pepper to taste and stir occasionally. Then leave at a simmer while you get on with the mushrooms.

Warm the butter and oil (or crushed garlic cloves) in a frying pan over a medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened for about 3 minutes.

Pour the mushrooms and their garlicky, buttery juices into the pan of potatoes, stir to mix and pour straight into the gratin dish. Bake in the oven for around 45 minutes or until the potatoes and mushrooms are golden and crispy on top.

I also marinated a chicken breast in lemon and finely sliced garlic and cooked in the oven for around 30-40 minutes to go with the gratin and then arranged it on a plate with the gratin and a handful of rocket.

Enjoy!

Love FF x