WeightWatchers Curried Fish Pie

Fish pie is a comforting family staple and is usually topped with mashed potato or puff pastry. The former is carb-heavy and the latter high in fat, so using filo pastry is a much lighter option.

I adapted a recipe in an old WeightWatchers magazine to make this, which tasted really good and made a nice change from the usual kind of fish pie. The WeightWatchers recipe had 6.5 syns per serving and I don't think my changes will have affected that.

To serve 2 you need:

175g white fish like cod or haddock, cut into cubes
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
75ml double cream (the WeightWatchers recipe calls for less than 55% fat double cream)
100g cooked and peeled prawns
1/2 tbsp. mild curry powder
zest of 1/2 a lime
4 x 15g sheets filo pastry
low fat cooking spray (I use Fry Light)

Preheat oven to 180C. Place the cubed fish and prawns in the bottom of an ovenproof dish and mix with the cream, curry powder and lime zest.

Cut each sheet of filo pastry in half to make 8 squares. Spray one side of the pastry with cooking spray and crumble up each piece of pastry and sit it on top of the pie dish until it is covered. Once you have used all the pastry, spray over them all with cooking spray.

Bake in the oven for 25 minutes until golden brown.

 

Spanish Roasted Fish with Patatas Bravas

I love fish, but usually find white fish - even cod - too plain and uninteresting. This recipe from Tesco, in one of their recent free magazines, is a great way to enjoy cod with some new flavours, and with the potatoes it makes a really substantial meal - and one that is really easy to cook.

You can find the recipe on the Tesco website. Don't be afraid of using fennel even if like me you don't really like it - it works really well in this dish and once it's roasted with the other ingredients the aniseed flavour is much less pronounced.

I didn't use the cherry tomatoes as I don't like them though I did use the tinned tomatoes in the patatas bravas sauce. I made this on a weekend as it does take quite a while to cook but is pretty easy - you just bung most things into a roasting tin - and it really was delicious.

 

Here's the fish (salmon, cod and prawns) plus potato, chorizo and onion in a foil-lined roasting tin.

It doesn't look much different after it's cooked, does it?!

Here's the patatas bravas - I cheated slightly and used Aunt Bessie's mini roast potatoes but then followed the recipe for the sauce, which worked really nicely.

The finished dish - really tasty!

MidWeek Coconut Fish Curry

I love prawns, and think they work really well with pasta or curry, so when I came across this recipe for a coconut fish curry on the BBC Good Food website, where the prawns took centre stage, I knew I had to make it. The flavours are inspired by both India and Thailand and doesn't take that long to cook -the part that took longest was probably finding all the ingredients in the cupboard! So it makes a great mid-week meal.

The shrimp paste in the recipe is not the kind that you may have had n your sandwiches as a child; it is an essential ingredient in Thai cooking. These days it is easy to find in supermarkets like Tesco though, in the speciality ingredients aisle.

To serve 4, you need:
1 tbsp. vegetable oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, finely grated
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp shrimp paste
1 small red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped
2 lemongrass stalks, split and bruised with a rolling pin
1 heaped tbsp. medium curry powder
1 heaped tbsp. light muscovado sugar
small bunch of coriander, stems finely chopped
400g can coconut milk
450g skinless hake or other white fish fillets, cut into large chunks
220g prawns
1 lime, halved
cooked rice to serve
I also served mine with some broccoli

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and cook the onion for 5 minutes until softened. Stir in the ginger, garlic, shrimp paste, chilli and lemongrass and cook for 2 minutes.

Add the curry powder and sugar and stir until the sugar starts to melt, then add the coriander stems, coconut milk and 2 tbsp. water. Bring to a simmer.

 

Add the fish and prawns and squeeze in half the lime. Simmer for 5 minutes until the fish is cooked, scatter over the coriander leaves and serve.

Carrot Rice 'Risotto' with Chorizo

Did you know that you can do more with your spiralizer than just make vegetable spaghetti? You can also make rice - or a vegetable rice anyway!

After spiralizing vegetables into spaghetti-like strands you can give it a quick whizz in the food processor and turn it into little grains like rice. I don't think you could put the raw veg straight into a blender - that is, you couldn't as easily turn a raw carrot into carrot rice without spiralizing it first, and a cooked carrot would just turn it to mush. You could of course grate it rather than spiralize like I did with this cauliflower rice.

I've got the Inspiralized recipe book by Ali Maffucci and also get a lot of recipes from her blog, www.inspiralized.com. I found a recipe for a spicy seafood and chorizo paella using carrot 'rice' and diced bacon (I used chorizo);  It tasted absolutely delicious - I was really impressed, and since it's now Sugar Free September (for some people at least) I thought I'd share my adaptation of this recipe if anyone is looking for meal ideas.

To serve two, you need:
1 tbsp. oil or a few sprays of Fry Light
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/4 tsp dried chilli flakes
half an onion, diced
1 chorizo sausage, sliced
200g tin chopped tomatoes
2 carrots, peeled and spiralized then processed in  blender to turn them into rice
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp. lemon juice
2 cod fillets, chopped into chunky pieces
12 large prawns
1 tbsp. chopped fresh parsley

Fry the chorizo, garlic and onion in the oil

Spiralizing the carrot, then pulse in a blender until it turns into 'rice'

Add to the pan with the tinned tomatoes, chilli, paprika, and turmeric, the cod and the prawns

Then add the lemon juice and sprinkle with the parsley. The finished dish:

Spiralized Butternut Squash with Prawns and Mascarpone

I realised I hadn’t used my spiralizer for a few weeks and was inspired to get it out again by this recipe from Ros at A Twirly Whirly Blog.

 

It was absolutely delicious and something that I would definitely make again. You do need to oven cook the spiralized veg for about ten minutes so it was good that I had the oven on anyway to make dinner for my fiancé (I’m never going to get him to eat spiralized veg!).

 

I altered the recipe a little as I don’t like mushrooms and didn’t have any spinach (as I don’t like it much either). I was going to add in some broccoli but realised I had run out, so there was nothing green in my dish in the end. It probably would have benefited from some extra green veg but it’s still a vegetable-based meal and was very filling.

 

I spiralized half a butternut squash – as it’s a chunky veg it is quite filling. I laid out the pieces on a roasting tin lined with foil and drizzled with a little oil, and baked it in the oven for ten minutes.

 

Meanwhile I fried half a chopped onion with some chopped bacon – I didn’t have any pancetta either but did have bacon and prawns in the freezer, so this was a good meal to make without having to buy any extra ingredients. I stirred in some mascarpone cheese so it would melt, added the prawns (already cooked) and the butternut squash and stirred it all through. You can sprinkle the dish with grated parmesan as Ros did, but I think it’s perfectly nice without – and if you are counting calories, a little bit of mascarpone in the sauce is probably enough.

I'm sharing this via my Spiralizer Saturday challenge - please link up any spiralizer recipes!

 

Spiralizer Saturday: Prawn Mooli Stir-Fry

This week my spiralized meal was based on a recipe from the Inspiralized cookery book by Ali Maffucci, which is a brilliant book (and website) if you are just getting started with a spiralizer. It was called Prawn Daikon Pho, a daikon being a type of radish, sometimes known as a winter radish or an Oriental radish. I'd never heard of it, let alone seen one in the supermarket, but I did remember seeing something called a mooli that was also from the radish family. From internet research I've decided that daikon and mooli are either the same thing or at least closely related!

If you have any spiralizer recipes you want to share, please add them to the linky at the bottom of this post!

I don't really like radishes as I find them too peppery so was a bit dubious about whether I would like mooli (and let's just say I'm not exactly known for liking new vegetables) - but I loved it! That may have had something to do with the sauce in this stir-fry but I am keen to try the mooli again (I used half of it in this recipe) in something else.

The Inspiralized recipe also includes jalapeno peppers but I don't like spicy food; I also left out the spring onions, onion, and whole coriander leaves - and instead added fresh dill which I had from another recipe. Ali's recipe is also a Pho which is more of a soup - I find eating those very messy so made it a much drier stir-fry. It tasted really good and was very healthy - I was having a bad day thinking about how much weight I need to lose so this made me feel a bit better!

 

Serves 2
300ml vegetable stock
2 tsp Thai fish sauce
3 tbsp. lime juice
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp chopped fresh ginger, or 1/2 tsp ginger puree from a tube
approx. 160g cooked and peeled large prawns
half a mooli or daikon radish, peeled and spiralized
1 large carrot, peeled and spiralized
handful of small broccoli florets
1 tbsp. chopped fresh dill

Heat the stock, fish sauce, lime juice, coriander and ginger in a large wok and add the spiralized mool, carrot and the broccoli. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables have softened, then add the prawns and heat through. To serve, sprinkle with the chopped dill and a dash of lime juice if desired.

Pad Thai and Ozeri Wok Review

Often we go to my mother in law's on a Saturday night we have a takeaway from her favourite Thai place and we both always order the same thing - Pad Thai. I've never actually made one before but was given more confidence from doing a Thai cooking course recently, even though we made different dishes. And when I was sent a wok to review by Ozeri it seemed the perfect thing to cook.

I followed Felicity Cloake's recipe in the Guardian for the perfect Pad Thai though I wasn't as fussy about the type of noodles and used straight-to-wok ones. I found fish paste, tamarind paste and pam sugar in Sainsburys though I had to do without the dried shrimp; I didn't think it mattered as I was using prawns in the Pad Thai. I decided to leave out the Chinese chives as well as I had no idea what they were or where to get them (Chinatown, I imagine) but what was really annoying was that the shop I went to was all out of beansprouts.  I didn't want to put this meal off and make it another time as I had already done that twice so instead used some alfafa sprouts I had in the fridge and added some shredded carrot for a bit of crunch. I also left out the tofu as I don't like it. Other than all those things I followed the recipe!

 I was sure that the takeaway Pad Thai would taste a lot better due to some sort of MSG or highly calorific additive but was very pleasantly surprised to find that mine tasted just as good - even without the beansprouts!

The Ozeri Green Earth wok I used is one of my favourite pans now – it’s huge (12 inches) which means you can cook enough for the whole family – but it also works well for just one person as there is plenty of room to move the ingredients around, for instance when I added the egg and pushed the other things out of the way to let the egg scramble on the bottom of the pan for a few minutes.

 

But even though it’s big, it’s not as heavy as I was expecting, so is very easy to handle. The colour is great – the smooth ceramic coating coupled with the green base makes it look quite expensive somehow.

 

Ozeri pans use a ceramic coating that is PTFE- and PFOA-free, meaning that even at high temperatures it doesn’t release any harmful toxins, and is also scratch resistant and easy to clean. It’s non-stick and made cooking my Pad Thai a breeze.

 

Thanks to Ozeri for sending the wok to review. All opinions are my own.

Fried Coconut Prawns

 

These are so easy to make and really delicious. They remind me of a meal I had at Bubba Gump's in America, which involved prawns cooked four different ways. To make these, all you need is plain flour (which you can add some salt and pepper to), 1 egg, beaten, and bowl of dessicated coconut and breadcrumbs mixed together.

Take each prawn one at a time (you really want to use the large prawns for this) and dip in the flour then the beaten egg then the coconut and breadcrumb mixture.

Deep fry a few prawns at a time in a couple of inches of hot oil in a saucepan, for a few seconds only. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.

Delicious!

Serve with chips, of course - and a sweet chilli/mayonnaise dip wouldn't go amiss either.

Vietnamese Prawn Stir-Fry

I adapted this recipe from one in Slimming World magazine  but I did go a bit overboard on the spice! I've toned it down a little for this recipe but really it is a matter of personal taste.

To serve 2, you need:

300g straight to wok noodles

bag of mixed stir fry veg or a selection of veg such as beansprouts, red pepper, mange tout

Fry Light

1 lemongrass stalk, diced

1 clove garlic, crushed

1/4 tsp dried chilli flakes

1/4 tsp ginger puree or a 1/2 inch piece of root ginger, chopped

1/2 onion, chopped

100ml vegetable stock

2 tbsp soy sauce

200g large prawns, peeled

dash of lime juice

Spray Fry Light into a wok and fry the onion then add the lemongrass, garlic and ginger and the chilli flakes.

Add the vegetable stock and soy sauce then the vegetables. Cook until they are softened or wilted or cooked through - it will depend on what vegetables you use. If you use carrot or red pepper, slice it into matchsticks.

Add the noodles and prawns, stir through and cook for a few minutes.

Sprinkle a dash of lime juice over the top to serve. I think I used too much of the chilli flakes and next time I might leave it out entirely! I liked serving it in a triangular bowl; I think the shape works well with this kind of dish.

I'm sending this to the One Ingredient Challenge, hosted by Nazima at Franglais Kitchen, and Laura at How To Cook Good Food, as the theme for January is "healthy".

 

Similarly the theme for Four Seasons Food this month is "virtuous". The challenge is hosted by Louisa at Eat Your Veg and Anneli at Delicieux.

 
I'm sending this to Chris at Cooking Around the World for the challenge Bloggers Around the World, as the country this month is Vietnam.