Fennel, chicken, pomegranate and mint salad

This a gorgeous salad that I had for dinner one hot sunny evening; the recipe came from a free newspaper I picked up from Waitrose and it is also available at Waitrose online.

The ingredients are not particularly cheap but I already had half a bulb of fennel left in the fridge from another recipe, and half a pack of pomegranate seeds from something else. I often buy cooked chicken to make easy lunches for work and I'm growing mint on my windowsill.

The recipe instructs you to marinade and then cook the chicken but as I used the pre-cooked slices I just had to throw the other ingredients together, which was great as it was too hot to cook. Slice the fennel thinly and layer on a plate with a bed of watercress on the bottom, then the fennel, chicken, pomegranate and mint. To make the sauce mix crème fraiche, oil, garlic, lemon juice and zest, and a little water so it is thin enough to pour over the salad.

I'm really not a salad person but I thoroughly enjoyed this - it tasted as good as it looks!

Deliciously Ella: Fennel, quinoa and broad bean summer salad

It's been a lovely bank holiday weekend and we've been to a barbecue today for my boyfriend's mum's 60th. It was hosted by her other son so I wasn't needed to provide the food (and didn't get to make the cake unfortunately!) but I did want to help out if I could. I was asked to make some sort of cous cous salad - since the other bases were already covered - and immediately thought of Deliciously Ella.

Have you come across Ella Woodward yet? Her cookbook was the fastest selling debut ever - though Ella had already become something of a celebrity through her blog, Deliciously Ella. The recipes are all extremely healthy, as Ella changed her way of eating after being diagnosed with a rare illness. I'd seen some of her recipes online and they appealed to me, so for my birthday I asked for - and got - a spiralizer and a copy of her recipe book.

The recipe I chose for my salad dish is available online here. It actually uses quinoa, though I found that the quantity wasn't really enough so added couscous as well (after all I was asked to make a cous cous dish!). It involves a whole host of other vegetables, including avocado which I have never cooked with before, and I thought that since my boyfriend's mum is a vegetarian she might enjoy it. It's certainly a very colourful, summery salad, and far more substantial and interesting than a bowl full of lettuce, tomato and cucumber!

Preparing the fennel mixing with the marinade

Cooking the quinoa

Red pepper and avocado

Adding the sweetcorn and broad beans

With the cous cous and quinoa, the fennel and the marinade some extra lemon juice and seasoning

I'm sharing this with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is Q.

I'm also sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by My Recipe Book, as it's National Vegetarian Week and also this is perfect for BBQ season.

 This recipe is ideal for No Croutons Required, the salads and soups blog challenge run by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes and Lisa at Lisa's Kitchen.

Butternut Squash, Fennel and Goat's Cheese Quiche

I made this quiche for our new year's day buffet party and it uses winter vegetables, but they are ones you can also find at this time of year - at least, I certainly did the other day. As a quiche is a light dish that can be eaten cold, while it is great for buffets that you need to prepare ahead, it is also really good for picnics and al fresco lunches.

 

I based my quiche this Linda Barker recipe on Good to Know; I used my giant pink pie dish which I love but don't have reason to use very often. You can make your own pastry but I used ready-made as the recipe suggested, as I had a lot of food to prepare for the buffet!

 

Roll it out and line the pie dish and then fill with baking beans - this weighs the pastry down while you bake it blind.

  

I had a lovely selection of vegetables to use for this including some fennel, butternut squash (one of my favourite vegetables), red onion and spring onion.

You do have to pre-cook the vegetables so chop them up, lay out in a roasting tray and drizzle with a little bit of oil. Bake at 180C for about 20 minutes and allow to cool a little, then sprinkle over the baked pastry crust. I then sliced up some goat's cheese and laid it on the top.

Beat 3 eggs with 300ml milk and season and carefully pour into the quiche making sure it doesn't spill over the edges. Bake in the oven at 180C for 25-30 minutes.

The top is a lovely golden brown when cooked; I don't have a picture of the whole quiche but you can see a lot of the ingredients inside in this slice. I thought the quiche was lovely - the butternut squash and fennel went really well together and the goat's cheese gave a really nice depth of flavour.

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is Q.

 

 

The theme for this month's Pastry Challenge, hosted by Jen's Food, is picnics, and this quiche is perfect for a picnic.

 

Butternut squash is one of my favourite vegetables - it's so versatile, as it can be roasted, mashed, used in soups, and goes well with salads as well as hot meals. I also like the fact that it's a really robust vegetable and quite difficult to overcook, and the colour always adds something nice to a plate. So I am sharing this with Vegetable Palette, hosted by Shaheen at Allotment 2 Kitchen, as her theme this month is 'your favourite vegetable'.

 

 

 

 

This also fits in with the Simply Eggcellent challenge hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen, where eggs take centre stage, as his theme this month is savoury dishes.

 

 

 

In Praise of Canned Food: Pork & Fennel with Red Wine & Borlotti Beans Casserole

Last week we bought some pull-out shelves for the kitchen cupboards which makes everything much easier to get to. When I restocked the cupboard I organised everything by shelf - and for the first time I can find what I want within a couple of seconds. I realised how much I rely on canned foods when I had to devote two entire shelves to cans - one savoury, like tinned tomatoes, tuna, baked beans etc - and one sweet, with tinned fruit, Carnation caramel, and golden syrup.

Did you know that this week is actually Canned Food Week? It is promoted by Canned Food UK, a not-for-profit organisation made up of leading can and product manufacturers, which promotes the benefits of cooking with canned food.

Canned food is:
- affordable - often cheaper than buying fresh
- lasts longer
- is a useful standby to have in the cupboard in case you don't have time to shop for fresh
- can help reduce waste as you can buy a small tin of something that would only come in much larger quantities fresh
- have great nutritional content- canned foods are sealed and preserved by pressure cooking the food in the can, to lock the nutrition in

Canned Food UK has created seven new recipes to showcase some of the tinned foods you can add to meals to eat healthily at home without spending a fortune. They have also come up with seven healthy eating plans designed for people and families at the different stages of their life, whether that's growing teens, students, more mature or cooking for one or for a small army.

They sent me the ingredients to make one of these seven new dishes and I chose the pork and fennel casserole with red wine and borlotti beans. I chose this for several reasons: I know fennel has quite a strong taste and isn't to everyone's liking so I wanted to try a recipe where it is an integral part. I'd also never tried borlotti beans before, which are a good source of fibre, help to lower cholesterol and can help lower blood pressure as well due to the potassium they contain - all good things in my book!
I also liked the fact that this was very easy to prepare - about ten minutes to chop and fry off the ingredients then in the oven for just under an hour and a half. Perfect for a Sunday when you're at home but want to be getting on with other things!

You can find the full recipe here

To serve 4, you need:
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
400g very lean pork leg, diced
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 fennel bulb, roughly chopped
1Tbsp plain flour
150ml red wine
150ml vegetable stock
1 x 400g can unpeeled cherry tomatoes
Seasoning
Few sprigs thyme, plus garnish
1 x 400g can borlotti beans, rinsed and drained

Preheat oven to fan 160°C, conventional 180°C, gas 4.

·         Heat 1Tbsp oil in a large flameproof casserole dish.  Fry the pork in batches, browning well and set aside. 

·         Add remaining oil and fry the onions, when just beginning to brown add the garlic and fennel.

·         Add the meat and any juices back into the dish, sprinkle over the flour and stir well.

·         Gradually add the wine, stock and tomatoes, season well and add the thyme sprigs.

·         Cover, cook in the oven for one hour add the borlotti beans and return to the oven for a further 15-20 minutes or until the meat is tender.  Remove the thyme sprigs and replace with fresh to garnish.

 It's so easy to make, it doesn't really matter how fine you chop the vegetables, and if you buy a pack of diced pork the hard work with the meat is already done for you. You do need either a casserole dish or just any oven-proof dish which you can cover with foil if it doesn't have a lid.

Frying off the meat

Into the casserole dish with the onion, fennel, garlic and flour

 

With the tomatoes, stock and red wine

Baked in the oven for an hour

 

The borlotti beans - star of the show! These only cost 60p for a 400g tin, which is loads

Adding the beans to the casserole, then it goes back in the oven

A delicious, warming, easy, healthy and relatively cheap dish for all the family!

Thanks to Canned Food UK, who sent me the ingredients for this recipe

Orange and Fennel Tuiles

As many of you know, I co-host a monthly blogging challenge called Alphabakes, where Ros and I take it in turns to choose a letter of the alphabet at random, and ask other bloggers to submit bakes beginning with that letter, or using a main ingredient that begins with that letter. We've been doing it for nearly a year and a half now and we're having a great time! The letter that came up this month was F, and a few things sprang to mind, like flapjacks and fudge, but I wanted to see what my collection of around 100 recipe books would offer up. And so I came across this recipe in Marian Keyes' Saved by Cake for orange and fennel tuiles.

You need:

50g butter

1/2 tsp fennel seeds

2 egg whites

110g icing sugar

50g plain flour

zest of 1 orange

I had a small pot of fennel seeds in the back of the cupboard that I'd never found a use for, so they were perfect for this recipe! You need to grind the fennel seeds in a pestle and mortar first, and also melt the butter and put to one side to cool. Preheat the oven to 180C.

In a clean bowl, whip the egg whites until they form soft peaks.

Gently fold in the icing sugar and flour

 Finely grate the zest of one orange, and add to the mixture along with the fennel and the melted butter.

Mix in until you have a thick batter.

Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper and spoon the batter onto the sheet, leaving a good space in between. The mixture will spread; mine turned out quite large so 1 tbsp of mixture is probably enough.

These only take about ten minutes to bake. The idea is that when they come out of the oven - literally the moment you take them out - they are pliable enough to be shaped into a curve, a little like a Pringle. You can apparently do this by curving them around a rolling pin, and the recipe recommends taking them out of the oven just a couple at a time. Even though I did that, they cooled too fast and I was unable to curve them. Still, they tasted good! In fact, I was very pleasantly surprised by these cookies. They are thin and a little brittle, but really chewy (in a good way) with a hint of orange and fennel. We ate them after dinner as that's when I made them, but I think they would be great with a cup of coffee in the afternoon.

I'm sending these to Alphabakes, which I am hosting this month; come back to my site for the roundup of everyone's recipes at the end of the month!

I'm also sending this to Cooking With Herbs, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage.

 

I'm updating this to add it to the Classic French blogging challenge, as their theme this month is tuiles - and I'm about to go on holiday so won't have time to bake these again! The challenge is hosted by Jen at Blue Kitchen Bakes.