Sunday 18th August – Croque Monsieur Bake

Nigella Lawson – Nigella Express

I’ve had my eye on this one for absolutely ages. Last year we were in Paris for a few days and had Croque Monsieur or Madam pretty much every day and completely fell in love. I used to think it was just cheese on toast with bacon on top but the ham and Gruyére cheese make a real difference, and this one is a kind of cross between a Croque and French toast.

I’m not sure if making it the night before really made much of a difference but I did as I was told and came home from the BBQ having had a fair few wines and spread Dijon mustard on the bread and made the cheese and ham sandwiches. We had some really nice roast ham from a joint that my Mum had cooked and given us so I sliced that up rather than using packet stuff. Then I poured over the beaten eggs, salt and milk, covered it with cling film and left it in the fridge until the morning. Then it was just a case of sprinkling grated cheddar and Worcestershire sauce over the top and then baking it for 25 minutes when we wanted to eat. It was nice but not quite as amazing as it was thinking it would be, I’ll probably do it again at some point but you definitely need to get your five a day after such a calorific breakfast. I might head back to Paris next time I want a proper one ;o)

Wednesday 24th July – Tapas Feast

This week has been one of my better foodie weeks, I’ve been flying through the recipes with Greek chicken last Thursday, I made soda bread on Sunday (which isn’t in here because it wasn’t a new recipe), last night I made Cajun chicken and tonight my good friend and tapas lover Nicky was coming round so I took the opportunity to create a tapas feast. All the recipes are pretty easy but I’d never done a tapas meal before and the challenge was really getting it all ready at the same time and finding enough bowls etc to put it in, as you can see in the picture I didn’t quite manage to get it on the garden table before dark!

BBC Good Food – Patatas Bravas

I was impressed with how much this tasted like the patatas bravas you get in a restaurant and it’s so easy. I roasted the potatoes as normal and then just fried onion and garlic with a jar of passata, tomato purée, smoked Spanish paprika, chilli powder, sugar and salt and let it simmer for about 15 minutes.

Nigella Lawson – Express – Spanish Omelette

I’ve made this recipe loads of times now and it’s brilliant. It’s impossible to muck this up and everyone loves it. I’ve tried it with a few different ingredients and it always tastes fabulous, the most important ingredient to keep for the Spanish flavour is the jar of flame roasted peppers, but pretty much any other combination of onions, potatoes, bacon/chorizo, whatever, works really well. Nigella makes this by boiling new potatoes until cooked and while that’s happening you whisk 4 eggs by hand and add the chopped red peppers, spring onions, grated cheese and salt and pepper. When you pour it all into the frying pan it’s lumpy and doesn’t seem like it’s going to turn into much, but I always stir the ingredients round a bit so they are evenly distributed and then the egg puffs up around them. Nigella’s instruction to put the pan under the grill to cook the top of the omelette is inspired as well, I will never attempt to flip an omelette ever again!

Garlic mushrooms

I just fried chopped mushrooms up with some garlic and white wine which was easy and tasted lovely.

Chilli and garlic prawns

Pretty much the same as the mushrooms, I’m not a prawn lover myself and I never cook them so I just kept things simple and fried these up with white wine, garlic, chilli flakes and paprika.

Chorizo

Again, keeping things simple I just oven baked the chorizo with red wine.

Once everything was cooked and my kitchen work top was covered in bowls and chopping boards and Nicky had to hold things just so I didn’t lose them, I was ready to go. I served all of the above with fresh bread and butter and Serrano ham. We sat outside and had a good natter while we ate and drank wine, it was a wonderful way to spend a Wednesday night.

Sunday 26th May – Green Eggs & Ham

Nigella Lawson – Nigella Express

Despite the non-edible-sounding name this was actually really lovely and a lightening fast brunch. The recipe says this makes 5 pancakes but I wasn’t sure if that meant it served 5 so I decided to make 4 pancakes out of the mixture and Jay and I ate the lot, which turned out to be pretty filling.

In Nigella’s photo it looks like an omelette but it actually only uses 1 egg so they are more like greenish pancakes, and the thing that makes them green is pesto, yum! Basic recipe: mix all ingredients in a bowl, make 4 thin pancakes and then lay your pancake on a plate, put a slice of ham on top and fold it artfully. Lovely.

Wednesday 15th May – Vietnamese Pork Noodle Soup

Nigella Lawson – Kitchen

We’ve had a busy week on and work has been incredibly stressful so I’ve actually let my one recipe a week goal slip by three days, very naughty. However, I maintain that I have not failed in my quest as I have so far made 27 recipes in just 20 weeks woohoo!

Still, this is no time to get cocky so it was high time I got my arse in gear and made something. I had a flick through my books for something quick that I could whip up after an hour spent dragging a trolley and a reluctant husband around Sainsburys.

Being an Asian dish it does have a lot of ingredients but we always have this stuff in the house; limes, soy sauce, paprika, fish sauce, garlic, fresh ginger, chillies (I keep them in the freezer). All I needed to buy was some pork medallions and a cabbage. Nigella uses pak choi and beansprouts but I’m not over keen on either so I used savoy cabbage and just cooked it a bit longer.

I like all the ingredients but I wasn’t expecting anything other than an easy week day meal, but I absolutely loved this – it actually transported me straight back to Vietnam! It reminded me very much of Pho and Cau Lau which I ate a lot of while in Vietnam, so I’ll definitely be making this one a lot.

Sunday 5th May – Lazy Loaf

Nigella Lawson – Nigella Express

We had AJ and Amy round for dinner this evening so it gave me a chance to try a couple of new recipes which both went down very well. For the main course I decided to do a recipe that I’m really familiar with, a Nigella Kitchen one called Spring Chicken which I absolutely love. I sometimes serve this with bread and sometimes with risotto rice, so this time I decided it would be nice to make my own bread to go with it. I didn’t think I’d be any good at kneading and proving so this loaf was perfect.

I put museli, wholemeal bread flour (are wholemeal and wholewheat flour the same thing? I never know…) yeast, salt, water and milk into a large bowl and stirred it around until it looked thoroughly unappealing and gruel-like. Then I slopped it into a loaf tin and put it in the oven.

It becomes a dense, crusty and filling little loaf, not unlike soda bread. I really like it, but it’s definitely one to be eaten hours from the oven, the following day it’s even more dense if possible and not as nice. I have found that cutting it into slices and then freezing them works pretty well though.

Two things tripped me up in this recipe; the first was that I couldn’t for the life of me find museli without raisins and other fruit in it, which meant that the longest part of the prep for this involved me sifting through the museli by hand and picking all the raisins and horrible dry banana pieces out zzzz.

The other trip up was that I never ever read a recipe properly before I start, so I had read “put into a cold oven and turn it to gas mark 1/4 for 45 minutes”… sadly I hadn’t read “when these 45 minutes are up turn the oven to gas mark 4 and leave for one hour” oooops. Luckily I made the loaf early enough that adding another hour to the cooking time took us to pretty much the exact time I needed to serve it. I’ve made this loaf again since, and I made exactly the same mistake again and delayed dinner by an hour when Jay and I were starving – what a donut. Maybe by the end of the year and 52+ recipes I will have learnt better!

Monday 22nd April – Linguine with Lemon, Garlic and Thyme Mushrooms

Nigella Lawson – Nigella Express

I picked this one out in advance for a Monday night as I get home after 9pm and this looked like the perfect quick meal, and a good store cupboard, I’ve-got-nothing-in-the-house-but-mushrooms kind of a meal. It was nice enough, but nothing to write home about. Even though I do appear to be writing about it right now.

Nigella doesn’t cook her mushrooms but I’m not a great fan of them raw so I fried them off with the thyme, oil, garlic, salt and lemon juice, and then just threw in the linguine with some parmesan and pepper and stirred it all around. I tasted it and wasn’t wowed so I squeezed in some more lemon and put another spoon of parmesan in. It was pleasant but quite boring by the time I was half way through eating the dish, I think I’d do the lemon, thyme and parmesan dressing again for pasta but I would add some more veg, or some chicken to give it a bit of oomph.

Friday 5th April – Poached Chicken with Lardons and Cous Cous

Nigella Lawson – Kitchen

With a rare Friday night in and nothing in mind I grabbed a variety of pieces of meat on the way home from work and then set about finding a recipe that we fancied. Poaching appealed because I’ve only ever roasted chicken legs before, Nigella was using chicken breasts with the wing bone attached, so I just increased the cooking time slightly by browning off the legs and then followed the recipe and added 5 minutes at the end for good luck.

Jay doesn’t eat lentils so we substituted them for cous cous but otherwise we were pretty faithful to the recipe. After browning the chicken we chopped onions and carrots and threw them in the pan with oil, bacon lardons and garlic. Then after a few minutes you just add water and leave to simmer for 45-50 minutes and go off and, in my case, have a nice lazy bath and come back to a lovely home cooked meal. This is classic Nigella, a really nice meal with not very much effort, perfect for a Friday night in front of the telly.

Sunday 17th February – Roast Duck Legs

Nigella Lawson – Kitchen

This was a perfect Sunday evening dish, simple, easy to prepare and really really yummy. We’ve only cooked duck a couple of times in the past and usually we’ve cooked breasts, but I was surprised at how cheap these were when I saw them in Waitrose and I’d definitely do this again for Sunday roast.

As well as being incredibly easy to prepare, this recipe made me happy as it gave me a chance to use my favourite piece of kitchen equipment – my lovely Le Creuset casserole, which I have named Nigella, after the great woman herself.

All the recipe actually entailed was browning the duck in Nigella (the casserole, not the foody flirt) and then chopping up some spuds, and some thyme, throwing them all in and putting the whole lot in the oven for two hours. I served this with some green veg and the duck fat made the spuds crispy and delicious. Yum.