How to: homemade pesto (with wholewheat fusilli served with parma ham and sun dried tomato wrapped chicken breast)

So, another edition of my attempts of a 'how to' post , this isn't me trying to sound like an expert, just my tried and tested methods that I'd like to share. I've been wanting to make my own pesto for so long and it is a simple method and I'm sure people reading who have made it themselves would agree. Although saying that, for most people (myself include) grabbing a tin of pesto is much easier just making your own is more satisfying!

Ingredients

Makes enough for a pasta dish for 3 people.

100ml olive oil

1 packet pine nuts, roughly 50g

1 pack of fresh basil

80g Parmesan cheese, grated (basically a good handful)

Lemon juice, 1 tablespoon

1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed

The simplest way is to literally chuck everything into a food processor and whizz to desired consistency.

I did it in stages however, processing the drier ingredients first. So put the oil into the processor with the pine nuts and whizz.

Then add the basil leaves, parmesan, lemon juice and crushed garlic clove with a drizzle of olive oil over the top. Whizz up these ingredients and hey presto, you're done!






I served this with parma ham and sun dried tomato wrapped chicken breast. I'm slightly obsessed with sun dried tomatoes at the moment and how gorgeous they taste, all oily, bursting with flavour and it just reminds me of Italy!

If you want to try this as well, you will need the following ingredients:

Serves 3

A packet of mini chicken breast fillets
A jar of sun dried tomatoes (enough for the chicken and some to nibble on!)
A packet of parma ham

Olive oil

Lay a slice of parma ham on a chopping board. Place the mini chicken breast in the middle with one or two sun dried tomatoes on the top, then wrap up with the parma ham!



Arrange on a baking tray and pop in the oven at 200C for 35-40 minutes.

Nibbles for friends! Recipe: Lemon mint and paprika griddled chicken

The other night I had a few friends over, something I love doing and a reason I can't wait to get my own place, I just love cooking and entertaining. My lovely friend Christine also came over a few hours before and helped me with the cooking. We warmed up some very yummy mulled wine to drink whilst preparing the food and chatted a lot!

I thought I would just make a small ish spread but I was hoping that it was something that would appeal to most of my friends.

I served -

Halloumi pan fried with parsley, garlic oil and lime juice.

Oven cooked halloumi with tin roasted red peppers

Loaded potato skins - cheese and onion and cheese and bacon.

Breadsticks and a selection of dips and olives. (All shop bought, to save time!)

Garlic pittas with lemon mint and paprika griddled chicken.

Chocolate dense cake.

The recipes for these nibbles will be posted on here at a later date (and the majority are courtesy of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks!) but for the meantime I'm going to share the chicken recipe. This may seem like a slightly strange concoction of ingredients for a marinade and it was quite accidental (a case of me chucking way too much mint into the mix really!) but it actually turned out rather well! The paprika was another element added as I did want the chicken to have a kick to it, however I think the overall result was that the mint cooled the paprika down and the chicken came out quite mild!

Serves 4-6 (it really varies to how much people want to eat and if it doesn't all get eaten, it makes great leftovers!)

4 chicken breasts

3 tablespoons olive oil

Generous sprinkling of dried mint

1 tablespoon lemon juice

A light sprinkling of paprika

Chop up the chicken into bite-sized pieces and put into a large bowl.

Add all of the marinade ingredients and mix well.

Leave to marinade in the juices for as long as you're able to leave it!

Get a griddle pan on hot (it won't need any extra oil since the chicken is coated in quite a bit of oil already). Empty the bowl of chicken into the pan and pan fry until golden and brown.

Serve with pittas and dips for friends!

How to: herby parmesan breadcrumbed chicken

I attempted a breadcrumbed chicken meal the other day, which went surprisingly well! I thought it would be a cheaper and healthier alternative to shop or takeaway bought breadcrumbed chicken. It's not super crispy but I think this way makes the chicken taste very tender. You can also decide whatever ingredients you want in the breadcrumb mixture and make it more interesting and flavoursome. I wanted to go for a bit of an Italian theme with the meal, so I added basil and parmesan to the breadcrumb mixture and served with a creamy tomato tagliatelle and simple garlic infused roasted vegetables.

Serves 3

Ingredients (for the breadcrumbed mixture)

A packet of small chicken fillets (enough for 3-4)

2-3 slices of white/brown bread (minus the crusts)

1 tablespoon dried/fresh basil

50g parmesan (grated/shavings)

Olive oil

A few drops of lemon juice

Salt and Pepper

2 eggs

A good scattering of flour over a surface

Take the chicken fillets and lay on a chopping board and wrap in cling film, bash these out until they are nice and thin.

Prepare the breadcrumb mixture in a small food processor. Add the bread and the basil with a drizzle of olive oil and lemon juice and give it a whizz. Add the parmesan and give a final whizz. Empty into a bowl.

Arrange your eggs in a bowl, the flour over a chopping/bread board and the breadcrumb mixture in a bowl.

Take turns dipping the chicken in the flour first, then in the egg mixture followed by the breadcrumb mixture, making sure it is coated well.

Get some olive oil going in a frying pan/griddle pan (I used a griddle pan which I prefer as it actually seems less greasy and you get the nice lines from the pan on the chicken!) then add the breadcrumbed chicken. It will cook pretty damn quickly as the chicken has been bashed to within an inch of its life so it is a lot thinner! Turn them over when they look sizzling and toasty on one side. It should literally take around 5-6 minutes to cook on both sides.

Then make sure your accompaniments are ready, and serve up! Yummy breadcrumbed chicken which is actually way healthier than what you'd buy AND you can actually make the coating more interesting. Enjoy!

Chicken, Chorizo and Potato Tray bake (Nigella Lawson) with lemony salt and pepper green beans

Tray bakes are one my favourite dinner ideas, it is just so easy to chuck everything into an oven tray, season and pop in the oven! Not to mention tasty too! This is another recipe taken from Nigella Lawson's Kitchen, a cookery book I've been loving lately! This recipe involves one of my favourite ingredients, chorizo. I just love how amazingly juicy, salty and crispy it is when you cook it, of course it is not healthy at all but sometimes you have to accept these small details and just enjoy it! I don't eat it that often but it is one of my favourite things to cook with (a chorizo tomato salad is also gorgeous!)

This is more than enough for 4 people, I also served it with green beans to get some more colour and a least a little bit of healthiness onto the plate!

Ingredients

2 large oven trays

2 x 15ml tablespoons olive oil

12 chicken thighs (I used 6)

750g chorizo sausage (whole if baby ones or cut into chunks if a regular-sized ring)

1 kg new potatoes

2 red onions, peeled and roughly chopped

2 teaspoons dried oregano

Grated one zest orange (I used lemon instead)

Good handful of green beans

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Sea salt and cracked black pepper

Preheat the oven to 220 C. Rub the olive oil over the chicken thighs in the oven tray, reserve 6 pieces for each tray.

Divide the chorizo sausage, new potatoes and chopped up red onion between the 2 trays. Sprinkle the dried oregano and lemon zest over the trays. Drizzle oil over the contents and make sure all is coated.

Cook for 1 hour. Nigella recommends that after 30 minutes the trays are swapped round in the oven and the ingredients are basted with the orange zesty juices (or lemon juices!)

Lemony salt and pepper green beans

Around 10 minutes before the tray bakes are ready, get the green beans boiling.

Once ready, drain and pop back into the saucepan. Coat in the zest and juice of 1 lemon, a sprinkle of crunchy sea salt and cracked black pepper.

Serve both up straight away!

My Food Diary - part 1 - Cornish Times!

Normally when the words "food diary" are uttered it conjures up images of girls dieting and scribbling down everything they've eaten, to in turn just feel bad about themselves! This is not that kind of food diary! These are photos of food I've eaten on my travels to both Cornwall and Valencia, however there are a LOT of photos so I am splitting it into two posts, this one being the food from Cornwall. It might be completely obvious from either this post or from knowing me, but when I'm travelling, food is one of the highlights for me. I'm so excited to try new, different foods and just generally open up my food horizon!

Lemon and Thyme flavoured chicken from this wonderful little restaurant called Rhubarb in St.Ives.

The accompanying sides to the meal, plain and sweet potato wedges, green beans and mangetout with a lemon and sesame seed dressing. I had fried butter beans and chorizo as my side, but unfortunately did not take a picture of it!

Well, you can't go to Cornwall and not have fudge! This is rocky road fudge and black forest fudge. The black forest was miles tastier than the rocky road!

Delicious chimichangas from a teeny tiny Mexican restaurant in St. Ives.

Similarly to the fudge, you definitely can't go to Cornwall without having a Cornish cream tea. Above is the cream tea that me and my sister shared in this little tea shop called Madeline's (I think!)

A very gluttonous but moreish dinner of a giant lamb and mint pasty with roasted vegetables (cooked at home as we were staying self catering)

Double scooped ice cream in a huge chocolatey cone! YUM!

I heart chickpeas

So along with all the ingredients mentioned with that pasta (chorizo, tomatoes, crème fraîche), chickpeas are another ingredient that I really love and that goes so well in so many recipes. I found this recipe in Jamie's America cookbook (a recipe book that does come across as having pretty tricky recipes, but there are some that on a closer look are actually not that hard) One of my favourites is Jamie's chicken chickpea stew. A recipe where the chicken drumsticks and thighs are marinated in a light lemony, garlic marinade and the stew is full of tomatoes, chickpeas and tinned peppers which makes a rich, oily stew. It's so summery and lovely to enjoy with a glass of cold white wine.

a day of nice food

Seeing as I'm in the midst of French oral examinations, I figured I need a day of good food to get me through. Today's plan is to be learning my oral presentation, in between that will be nice and quite healthy food to get me through and get my brain ticking! 

Breakfast - porridge oats with a handful of blueberries and strawberries and a drizzle of golden syrup. 

(Porridge oats release energy slowly, so will keep you fuller for longer meaning you can study longer! - add some fruit to the mix for a good vitamin and natural sugar hit)

Lunch - omelette with cherry tomatoes marinated in garlic, apple, goats cheese, spinach and crispy bacon. 

(Slightly on the not so healthy side however eggs are a good source of choline which is an important nutrient in regulating the brain. Plus apples, cherry tomatoes and spinach are all nutritious foods. Garlic of course is considered as having medicinal properties (for curing the common cold etc), goats cheese and bacon are not so healthy but grilling the bacon lowers the fat amount and both can be the little treats of the meal, just grill 1 bacon rasher and cut into small pieces and drop about 4 blobs of goats cheese over the cooking omelette - use about a quarter of the goats cheese roll, I'm talking about a small one!) Finish with a sprinkling of basil. 

Dinner will be moroccan vegetable cous cous with skinless chicken and halloumi cheese. Photo will be posted later.

Love FF x 

Potato & Mushroom Gratin (Nigella Lawson) and Muesli Bars (The Hummingbird Bakery)

Two upcoming recipes that I will be posting are a potato and mushroom gratin that I made from Nigella Lawson's "Nigella Express", a great cookery book and a staple in my house at home - my mum is always using it when she has friends over to cook for and I think it's great for a quick meal. I cooked that with some garlicky lemon chicken and some rocket. 

Next are (as I've mentioned before) muesli bars which my housemate made from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.

Love FF x