Turkey Mince and Potato Wedge Hash

I created this recipe to use up some leftover cooked potato wedges which I didn't want to throw away. I also had some turkey mince in the fridge which needed using up so I decided to make the mince into meatballs. At the last minute I wasn't sure if that would be enough so I cut up a few sausages and threw them into the frying pan as well, along with some onion.

I then added some passata from a carton as well as salt and pepper and a pinch of chilli flakes.

I then added the cooked potato wedges to heat through, and sprinkled some grated cheese on top.

Serve with some salad or green veg.

This was really tasty and a good way to use up leftovers. I think you could also use leftover turkey from your Christmas dinner!

2 course menu: cod en croute with crab and sticky toffee apple crumble

 

I love apple crumble and I love sticky toffee pudding, so I decided to combine the two and create my own pudding - which tastes amazing! I've never come across this before though perhaps someone has already invented it, but I am very pleased with my sticky toffee apple crumble.

I made this for the SACO Kitchen Challenge. SACO is a company that provides serviced apartments worldwide - as an alternative to staying in a hotel, where you might have more space but also the ability to cook your own meals, an option you don't have in a hotel.

The challenge is to come up with a two-course meal for two, that guests could cook in a SACO apartment kitchen with the standard equipment provided in the apartments. They sent over the inventory and I was impressed at the range of utensils, pots and pans and so on - there are too many things to list here but you get things like a mixing bowl, pie dishes, cheese grater, glass oven proof dishes, tea towels and so on.

This time of year is great to get friends and family together whether it's to go and see the fireworks on November 5, visit another country for a Halloween break or to check out the Christmas markets, or to do your own take on a Thanksgiving meal with family or friends - after all, not many people have enough room in their homes to put up that many people overnight, so you might be better off renting an apartment for a night or two!

With that in mind I wanted my two-course menu to be fairly autumnal - hearty food with warm flavours. I decided to make cod en croute stuffed with crab with potato wedges for the main course, and sticky toffee apple crumble for pudding.

Cod en Croute stuffed with  Crab - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

serves 2

2 cod fillets

170g tin of shredded crab meat

1 piece of day old bread, chopped into small cubes

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

2 tbsp mayonnaise

1 tsp capers, chopped plus two extra for decoration

dash of lemon juice

200g ready-made puff pastry

1 egg

For the potato wedges:
5-6 potatoes depending on size
olive oil
salt

Preheat the oven to 175C. First prepare the potato wedges. Wash and dry the potatoes with a clean tea towel. Slice with a sharp knife on a chopping board into wedges.

Line a large baking tray with foil or grease with a little oil. Toss the potatoes with the salt and a dash of oil and spread out across the tin. Bake in the oven for one hour, turning half way through.

For the fish:
Roll out the puff pastry on a lightly floured chopping board. Using a sharp knife, cut out a fish shape slightly bigger than your piece of fish; use that as a template to cut out another three.

Drain the tin of crab meat and mix in a small bowl with the bread, salt, cayenne pepper, mayonnaise, capers and lemon juice.

Place the cod pieces onto a piece of fish-shaped puff pastry and spoon half the crab mixture on top of each piece of fish, spreading out evenly.

Place the other piece of pastry on top. Place a caper where the fish's eye would be.

Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is golden brown. Serve with green veg and the potato wedges.

For the sticky toffee apple crumble
Serves 4 - ideal if there are two of you because you will want some more of this the next day!
75g unsalted butter
125g light brown sugar
2 eggs
200g self-raising flour
2 apples
50g light brown sugar
50g unsalted butter
75ml double cream

Preheat oven to 175C (or make this and the main course at the same time).

Grease a glass oven proof dish.

In a bowl cream 75g butter with 125g light brown sugar. Beat in two eggs and 200g self-raising flour.

Thinly slice two apples.

Spoon half the cake mixture into the base of the ovenproof dish and place the apple slices on top. Spoon the rest of the cake mixture on top of the apples.

To make the toffee sauce, place 50g light brown sugar, 50g unsalted butter and 75ml double cream into a small pan.

Bring to the boil and simmer for 1-2 minutes then pour over the top of the apple and cake mixture.

Place 200g plain flour, 120g butter and 120g caster sugar in a bowl and rub together with your finger tips to make a breadcrumb-like texture - this is your crumble topping. Spoon the crumble mixture over the top of the pudding.

Place the ovenproof dish on a baking tray in case of any leakage and bake in the oven for half an hour.

When you dig in you will see the base is like a sticky toffee pudding - the caramel sauce will have soaked in to the cake mixture as it cooks, giving a lovely sticky, moist base. Then you have the layer of apple in the middle and the crumble topping which will be a lovely golden brown. This is a very sweet pudding but absolutely delicious.

 This is my entry in the SACO Kitchen Challenge - thanks to SACO for providing £20 with which to purchase all the ingredients for these two courses.

I am also sending this to a blogging round-up called the Four Seasons Food challenge, hosted by Louisa at Eat Your Veg and Anneli at Delicieux. Their chosen ingredient this month is fruit.

Barbecue chicken with potato wedges

This is a really simple way of making your own barbecue sauce, and a recommended recipe for chicken and potato wedges to go with it. It's not that fast as the wedges take about an hour in the oven but it's easy and tasty so has become one of my go-to meals for a lazy Sunday evening.

You need:

3 tbsp tomato ketchup

3 tbsp brown sugar

1.5 tbsp soy sauce

1.5 tbsp worcestershire sauce

Simply mix all the ingredients in a small bowl

 Use to coat either chicken legs or chicken breasts (or thighs, for that matter). Make small slits in the meat with a knife to allow the sauce to get inside.

To make potato wedges, simply slice up some potatoes, toss in a little oil and seasoning such as paprika and lay out across a foil-lined baking tray. Bake in the oven for an hour, turning occasionally. Bake the chicken at the same time; how long it takes will depend on what cut of chicken you have chosen.

Serve with any leftover barbecue sauce and some green salad.

Peri Peri Chicken Burger with Spicy Potato Wedges - and the proper way to chop an onion

I made this for dinner with my boyfriend one evening based on a recipe from the Giraffe recipe book. I marinaded the chicken in a homemade peri peri sauce which I served in a bun with spicy potato wedges.

For the peri peri sauce you need:

1 onion, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, crushed

zest and juice of 1 lemon

1 tsp chilli flakes

1 fresh red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped

1 tsp dried oregano

1 tsp paprika

2 tbsp olive oil

But first things first - slice some potatoes into wedges and place on foil in a large roasting tin so they have enough room to sit side by side.

Sprinkle with paprika and cook in the oven at 180C for about an hour, turning once or twice.

Now make the peri peri sauce. I learnt the proper way - or at least, the fastest way - to chop an onion when I took a burger-making class at the Atelier des Chefs. Cut the onion in half then place it on your chopping board cut-side down. Using a small sharp paring knife, finely slice through the onion lengthways, stopping just before the top, so the slices are still attached and sort of fan out.

 Then slice through across the other direction and you will have a finely diced onion. Handy tip!

The easiest way to crush garlic is to use the flat of a large knife. Place the knife on top of the garlic clove and bash down on the knife a couple of times to flatten the garlic.

Then use the very tip of the knife in a scratching motion to finely shred the crushed garlic.

Place all the ingredients for the peri peri marinade in a bowl and mix.

Place the chicken in the marinade and coat.

Cook in the oven for 15-20 minutes with the marinade poured over the top.

The potato wedges should be done...

I decided to serve my spicy chicken in a bread roll with the potato wedges - it tasted really good. If you have time you can leave the chicken in the marinade overnight.

Burger Making Lesson at L'Atelier Des Chefs

For my boyfriend's birthday I booked us both into a burger-making lesson at the Atelier des Chefs near St Paul's in London. He loves burgers and I'd much rather he ate homemade ones than supermarket versions, and - I hope he won't mind me saying this - he doesn't know how to cook, so it would be helpful if there was something he could make if push came to shove! Also, I thought this would be a fun activity for us to do together.

I've been to the Atelier des Chefs before (their Oxford Circus branch) a few years ago on a corporate cookery evening, which I really enjoyed - the idea is that you learn to cook a meal then sit down and eat it afterwards. They offer all sorts of lessons of different lengths and at different prices, ranging from a £15 "cook, eat and run" where you can make a burger and eat it on your lunch break, to a French cooking masterclass for £144.

We got really lucky, as I had booked the class for what was probably the first sunny Friday of the year, so the other people who had reserved a place (you don't pay in advance) didn't turn up - they were probably having a drink in the pub like the rest of the Square Mile seemed to be doing! So whereas the week before, we were told there had been 15 people in the class, on this occasion there was... just us! I've no idea how much we would have had to pay for a private cookery class but the £36 each for the burger making lesson (which also included making potato wedges and onion rings with a glass of wine thrown in) was definitely excellent value!

Some of our ingredients

After washing our hands we met our chef, who explained what we would be doing and that we would receive the recipes afterwards by email (which never happened but I found them on the website). Then we got right down to it, being shown the right way to chop an onion, then crushing garlic and herbs and cutting up the potatoes into wedges. We seasoned the potatoes with a cajun spice mix and salt, and drizzled them with oil, and they went straight in the oven.

To make the burger we had to remove the fat from a huge steak, which was very hard - when it came to trying to remove a very thin film of fat running along the side of the meat with a very sharp knife, I managed to cut myself, and had to leave the rest of the work to my boyfriend and the chef while I bled into the sink!

As well as the steak we cut up chunks of pork fat which was going to be minced together.

I was quite pleased to see the mincer we were using was a KitchenAid attachment; I want one for my KitchenAid now! I didn't really see it in use as I was busy turning over the potato wedges, which were looking very tasty at this stage, but I caught a glimpse of my boyfriend merrily mincing steak for our burgers and took a couple of quick snaps.

We also made a barbecue sauce, which was amazingly simple. Fry onion and garlic then add all the other ingredients to the pan and simmer: bay leaf, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, tomato sauce, cayenne pepper, cider vinegar, water, salt, dijon mustard and sunflower oil. You barely need to do anything and it tastes delicious.

The minced beef and pork fat was mixed in a bowl with herbs and large flakes of sea salt. We got our hands in and mixed it then shaped it into a giant ball.

Then we shaped it into five patties, to feed ourselves and the kitchen staff.

Next we moved onto the onion rings. We'd already sliced some onions into thick rings, then oil was heated in a deep fat fryer. We mixed a beer batter, dipped the onion rings, and carefully slid them into the fryer; they took less than a minute to cook then were lifted out and allowed to drain.

Here are the cooked onion rings

The burgers only took a few minutes to fry on each side. My mouth was really starting to water now!

Finally the potato wedges came out of the oven and we were ready to serve. The buns had been lightly toasted in the oven in the last few minutes while the potato wedges were cooking, which is something I haven't done at home before but it was really nice. We filled our buns with a burger, rocket, onion and tomato for those who wanted it.

And here it is, in all it's glory - a completely homemade burger, spicy potato wedges, beer-battered onion rings and barbecue sauce. I think my boyfriend, who has never even chopped an onion before, could barely believe he had made all this!

Here I am enjoying the fruits of my labours.... the food was delicious, probably one of the best burgers I've ever eaten, and I made it myself! The potato wedges were much better than the ones I make at home, so I will have to bookmark the recipe, and the barbecue sauce was tangy and worked perfectly with the rest of the meal. The onion rings were also probably the best I've ever had. The class was really good fun - the chef was highly skilled but also a good people-person and we had a great time learning from him and asking questions and chatting as we went. I highly recommend the Atelier des Chefs and I'd really like to try out some more of their classes!