Greek Summer Salad and a Photo Board backdrop for better blog photos

I want to tell you about a salad that I made and also a great product I found that will make taking photos for your blog or Instagram better straight away. But first the salad...

We went to a friend's barbecue yesterday which was lovely - my little girl enjoyed laying on a blanket in the shade and watching everything that was going on and meeting some of my friends for the first time. Here's a little photo of her for no reason other than she's cute!

My friend asked us to bring a salad and I decided to make a sort of Greek salad - it was very simple and doesn't really need a recipe! Simply half some cherry tomatoes, cut some feta cheese into cubes, slice some black olives and remove the stones (I actually used ready sliced ones from a jar) and tear some fresh basil leaves. Toss with a glug of olive oil and some salt and pepper for a simple but tasty salad.

I'm really pleased with this photo which I think is called a flat lay in style (i.e. a birds eye view). It was taken on my kitchen table which is made of glass - so it's a terrible surface for photograph and I usually put a mat or table cloth or something on it when I want to photograph food, but my table cloths always have creases and none of my mats are very big.

I came across a company called Photo Boards that makes backdrops for taking photos against. They use 'texture reproduction technology', whatever that is, so the boards look more three dimensional and not like a photo of a piece of wood - I think they actually look like you are using a piece of wood, rather than a large flat piece of PVC. They are lightweight and wipe clean which is great when you are photographing food, come in two sizes (I bought the 60x60cm one, the larger size) and a variety of designs and shades that look like you are photographing against wood, marble, linen etc. They are not cheap at £30 each so I only bought one, but I already want another!

Tuscan Chianti Chicken Cacciatora

My Tuscan Chianti Chicken Cacciatora

There's something about the idea of spending a week in a villa in Tuscany that really appeals to me. The landscape looks beautiful, from rolling Italian countryside to the sandy beaches, the small medieval towns to the cities of Pisa and Florence, where I'd love to go sightseeing some day.

Having a villa would mean getting away from it all - I imagine a rustic farmhouse overlooking vineyards, sitting at a big wooden table with my husband as we tear into fresh bread and let a bottle of Chianti breathe.

I love the flavours from this region, from zingy lemons (and limoncello) to the earthy taste of truffles when they are grated over dishes. The red wines from this region are smooth yet spicy and Italian olive oil is renowned world wide.

I also like the simplicity of food from Tuscany. Pasta might just be served with a little oil and butter - when freshly made pasta is that good, why disguise it with a sauce? The best Tuscan food is locally produced and enjoyed according to the season; chicken is free range (probably wandering around the rustic farmhouse of my imagination) and mushrooms are foraged for.

There re two other things that stand out to be about Tuscan cooking. Food is about family, and typical dishes are prepared in large quantities to serve a big family around the kitchen table. It is also traditionally peasant cooking - in other words, cheap and not wasteful. Some of the best known Italian dishes are things that use cheaper cuts of meat, are bulked out with cannellini beans, use up stale bread (panzanella), and using local herbs and vegetables to bring out the natural flavours of the dish. These days rather than being something that is done through necessity, due to lack of money, this is something that many cooks aspire to - natural flavours coming through, cooking more economically and feeding a whole family with a robust, filling meal.

I was genuinely thinking of looking into booking a Tuscan villa for our holiday next year when I was invited to enter a competition run by To Tuscany, a website that specialises in villa rentals in that very region. It must be fate!

They asked me to create my own Tuscan-inspired recipe using typical flavours and influences from Italy, so I started to brainstorm a list of ingredients. I also thought about all the things I described above - cheaper cuts of meat, bringing out natural flavours, and a meal that could be cooked in large quantities if needed, and came up with this recipe for chicken cacciatora.

Cacciatora means 'hunter' in Italian and this is a kind of hunter's stew - perhaps something that would be waiting when they returned home from a day's hunt. It traditionally uses chicken, game or rabbit, and is cooked in a tomato-based sauce, sometimes with wine added, featuring onion and garlic, sometimes carrot or red peppers - there are various versions.

I decided to make mine even more Tuscan, if such a thing is possible, by making Chianti wine an important feature of the dish (Chianti is in Tuscany, if you didn't know). Italian olives stood out to me as a good addition, both for the colour that they give the dish and the different flavour and texture. I love balsamic vinegar and how it can bring out the flavour in dishes so decided to add a splash; my sauce was going to based on tinned tomatoes and the wine, with bay leaves and rosemary for flavour (and again they look great in the dish, though remove the bay leaf before serving).

Finally for a more modern, more indulgent twist, I sprinkled a little grated mozzarella on top of each chicken thigh just before serving, allowing it to melt - the cheese has a subtle taste but adds a little creaminess that is otherwise missing from the dish and to me just seemed to be the finishing touch. Serve the cacciatora with a hunk of fresh bread and a green salad - and the rest of the Chianti of course!

 

Tuscan Chianti Chicken Cacciatora - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

To serve four, you need:
4 large chicken thighs
pinch of salt salt
pinch of ground black pepper
1/2 bottle of Chianti
1 tbsp. olive oil
100g diced pancetta
2 bay leaves
sprig of rosemary
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
a large handful of green Italian olives
400g tinned tomatoes
generous dash of balsamic vinegar
pinch of smoked paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
50g grated mozzarella

Season the chicken and marinade in the wine for at least one hour or overnight if possible.

 

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and fry the chicken, in batches if necessary, until browned. Add the pancetta to the pan and fry until starting to brown.

Preheat oven to 180C. Transfer the chicken and pancetta to an ovenproof dish with the wine marinade. Mix in the tomatoes, garlic, olives, bay leaf and rosemary. Add a splash of balsamic vinegar, a pinch of smoked paprika and the oregano and cover the pot with a lid.

 

 

Bake in the oven for 1.5 hours; for the last 10 minutes of cooking time add the grated mozzarella on top of the chicken.

 

Serve with green salad, fresh crusty bread and the chianti and enjoy.

.
I want to win a week in one of your Tuscany villas!

Slow Cooker Butternut Squash and Goat's Cheese Enchiladas

I've been meaning to post this recipe for ages - it's not really a hot weather dish, but let's face it we haven't had a lot of hot weather recently! It's something you can do in the slow cooker on a weekend or when you are out at work (that being the beauty of slow cookers). I did it on a day when I was working from home so I could put everything in the slow cooker at lunchtime and forget about it until dinner time.

I really like goat's cheese (which is lucky as I once won a year's supply) and love enchiladas but had only made chicken ones before, so thought this recipe for butternut squash and goat's cheese enchiladas looked amazing - and it isn't something I'd have thought to do in the slow cooker but it works brilliantly.

The recipe is from a book called The Slow Cooker. To serve 4, you need:

1 large butternut squash, peeled and diced

4 tbsp. olive oil

1 tsp salt

3 tsp ground cumin

1 large onion, diced

1 tbsp. dried oregano

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tbsp. chilli powder

450g canned pureed tomatoes or passata

1 tbsp. clear honey

450ml vegetable stock

12 corn tortillas (I used flour tortillas)

225g goat's cheese

Preheat the oven to 200C. Toss the diced butternut squash with 2 tbsp. of the oil, half the salt and 1 tsp cumin. Roast in a baking dish for 30-40 minutes until softened. I sometimes do extra and add the rest to a salad.

Heat the rest of the oil in a frying pan and and the onion and garlic. Fry for a couple of minutes until soft, then add the rest of the cumin, the salt, chilli powder and oregano and cook for a minute. Stir in the tomatoes, honey and stock, bring to the boil and cook for 5 mins. Blend until smooth in a food processor or blender.

Spoon a little sauce into the base of your slow cooker so the tortillas don't stick. Cover the bottom of the slow cooker with a layer of tortillas (one might be enough depending on the size) and top with a layer of butternut squash, some sliced goat's cheese, a layer of sauce, and another tortilla.

Layer again with squash, cheese and sauce and finish with some sauce and some cheese. Cover and cook on the slow cooker's lowest setting for about 2 hours, and enjoy!



I'm sending this to Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes.

Leftover Sausage Ragu with Spiralized Butternut Squash Noodles

Welcome to my second Spiralizer Saturday! As part of my January health kick I’m going to use my spiralizer for dinner once a week as a way to get myself eating more vegetables, fewer carbs and generally have a healthier meal.

If you have a recipe that can be made using a spiralizer please add it to the linkup at the end of this post.

 

I actually made this recipe a couple of weeks ago to use up some leftover cooked sausages from a new year’s buffet at my fiance’s mum’s house. She is vegetarian so gave us all the leftover sausages to take home! I wanted to find a recipe I could use them in and had the idea of chopping them up and making into a sort of ragu (a meat-based sauce), to serve over spaghetti for my fiancé and with butternut squash noodles for me (he won’t eat butternut squash but I was dying to try it in my spiralizer!). So here’s my recipe:

 

Sausage Ragu with Butternut Squash Noodles – an original recipe from Caroline Makes

 

Serves 2

 

 

Sausages: if standard size, 2-3 per person. If chipolata, you will probably want more. The sausages can be raw or cooked – see instructions below.

Fry Light or 1 tbsp oil

Half an onion, chopped

400g tin chopped tomatoes

Pinch of salt

½ tsp oregano

1 whole butternut squash

 

If you are using raw sausages, chop with scissors and fry them with the onion in a little oil until cooked. If using leftover cooked sausages, fry the onion as above then when the onion is translucent, add the chopped cooked sausage.

 

Put the tomatoes, salt, oregano and 100ml water in the pan and simmer until the sauce has reduced.

 

 

 

Meanwhile peel the butternut squash and cut the ends off so each end is flat. Place in the spiralizer and choose whether you want thin spaghetti style noodles or thicker, fettucine style – I went for the thicker ones for a change as I hadn’t done that before.

 

There are various ways you can cook spiralized veg - boil, or rather blanch, as they only take a couple of minutes; fry in Fry Light or similar, or oven bake. I already had the oven on as I was serving my fiancé's ragu with spaghetti and doing him garlic bread as well so laid out the butternut squash noodles on a baking tray, sprayed them with Fry Light and roasted them in the oven for about 15 minutes. They turned out really well.

Serve the ragu over the top and enjoy.
 

 

If you have a recipe that can be made using a spiralizer please add it to the linkup below.

 

 

Courgetti (Zucchini Noodles) with Tomato and Red Pepper Sauce

This year’s trendy kitchen gadget is the spiralizer, which turns vegetables (and fruit) into spaghetti-like strands. I’ve already used it to make these sweet potato waffles which were much tastier than I expected, and really healthy. I hadn’t successfully made ‘spaghetti’ out of it yet – I did spiralize a carrot, and bring the strands to the boil, at which point they turned to complete mush. Lesson learnt!

This time I had a courgette (zucchini) in the fridge left over from making vegetable kebabs for a barbecue and remembered that courgetti was one of the first recipes I came across for the spiralizer – courgette spaghetti. You can serve it with whatever you like; I also had some tomatoes and red pepper left in the fridge from the barbecue and found this recipe from Hemsley and Hemsley, two sisters who have a healthy eating website and recipe book.

They recommend eating the courgette raw but I didn’t really fancy that as I don’t even eat courgette at all normally, so I decided to fry it in a little butter. Be aware you don’t get a huge amount of ‘spaghetti’ from one courgette; it was enough for a small portion (it was pretty late when I got home from work that night and I didn’t want a big dinner at 9pm) but otherwise I would say this amount is more of a starter, side dish or small meal. For two people, I would do three courgettes.

I changed their recipe a bit:

To serve one, you need:

Spiralizer machine

1 large courgette, trimmed flat at each end

Half a red pepper

2 tomatoes

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp of oil for the pan plus 1 tbsp for the sauce

Clove of garlic

Handful of fresh basil

Handful of cashews or peanuts (I couldn’t find cashews in the cupboard and at 9pm wasn’t going to keep looking, so used unsalted peanuts!)

NB: Ideally you need to make the sauce, or at least the red pepper and tomato part, the day (or several hours) before.

Preheat oven to 165C.

Line a baking tray with foil and spread around 1 tbsp oil. Cut the tomatoes in half and the red pepper into chunks and place face down in the pan. Roast for about an hour; I had my oven at too high a temperature so the skins on the tomatoes burnt, but they were very easy to remove. After an hour, add the garlic to the tray and roast for another half an hour.

  

Remove the charred skins from the tomatoes and pepper and squeeze the garlic out of its skin, either into a small bowl or straight into a food processor. I did this part the night before so kept the ingredients in a bowl in the fridge.

In your food processor blend the tomato, pepper, garlic, vinegar and rest of the oil, plus the basil leaves, nuts and salt and pepper.

To make the courgetti, place the courgette in the spiralizer and turn the handle until you have what looks like spaghetti. You can eat this raw, according to the Hemsley and Hemsley recipe, but I preferred to warm it through in a frying pan in a little butter. Top with the tomato and red pepper sauce.

For someone who has honestly never willingly eaten courgette, I was very surprised at how nice this tasted! I think it will take a bit of getting used to- courgette that is, not spiralizing –but I would definitely class this recipe as a success.

Courgette is known in the US as zucchini but the name courgetti definitely sounds better for this dish! But since it does also begin with Z, and that is the letter I have chosen this month for Alphabakes (which I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker) I am sending it in.

I'm also sending this to Extra Veg, hosted by Jen's Food, on behalf of Helen at Fuss Free Flavours and Michelle at Utterly Scrummy.

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

Bridget Jones' Blue Soup Dinner Party

I love Bridget Jones. When she first exploded onto the scene – by which I mean the novel by Helen Fielding, as I’d never read the forerunner Independent column – she was a breath of fresh air. The diary style of the novel was unusual for its time (though the epistolary novel has been around since at least 1748 with Samuel Richardson’s famous ‘Clarissa’, fact-fans and literature geeks like me) and not the cliché it is now, but it was Bridget herself who was ground-breaking. Here was a heroine who was flawed, funny and fond of giant pants. She made singledom both depressing and hilarious, and made ‘smug marrieds’ into a catchphrase that I still hear today. I was in a relationship when the film came out, so while I wasn’t quite a smug married, I could read Bridget’s adventures without worrying that I too would die alone and be eaten by cats (one of Bridget’s fears). But when I suddenly became single at 30, Bridget was more of a role model – if this ‘overweight’ (though actually a perfectly standard size), chain-smoking, career in a mess woman could find true love with Mr Darcy, who likes her just as she is, then so could I.

 

Evelyne at Cheap Ethnic Eatz has chosen Bridget Jones’ Diary for Food ‘n’ Flix this month which did bring a smile to my face. I’m not going to describe the plot of the film any more than I have above, because you have almost certainly already seen it, and if you haven’t, you must DO SO NOW.

 

The idea of Food ‘n’ Flix is to cook a dish inspired by the film; it can either be a meal featured in the film or something inspired by the characters, setting etc. But as soon as I saw the movie choice this month there was really only one thing I could possibly make: blue soup. I’m sure you all remember that scene, where Bridget is trying hard to throw herself a birthday dinner party and cook an elaborate menu, which goes horribly wrong. But can you actually remember what she was trying to make?

 

Her planned menu is:

Veloute of Celery

Char-grilled Tuna on Veloute of Cherry Tomatoes Coulis with Confit of Garlic and Fondant Potatoes.

Confit of Oranges. Grand Marnier Creme Anglaise.

 

And as she says in the book, “Will be marvellous. Will become known as brilliant but apparently effortless cook.

People will flock to my dinner parties, enthusing "Oh it's marvellous to be going to Bridget's for dinner, one gets Michelin star-style food in a bohemian setting."”

What Bridget actually ends up serving is blue soup, omelette, and marmalade.

As it’s harder to quote the film here is the relevant passage from the book.

                   *****************************************************

7pm Hurrah! Just got home. Right. Soup will be absolutely fine. Will simply cook and puree vegetables as instructed and then - to give concentration of flavour - rinse blue jelly off chicken carcasses and boil them up with cream in the soup.

8.30pm Aargh aargh, just took lid off casserole to remove carcasses. Soup is bright blue. And have not even started veloute of cherry tomatoes. And fondant potatoes should have been ready 10 minutes ago and are rock hard.

9pm Love the lovely friends. Were more than sporting about the blue soup, Jude and Tom even making lengthy argument for less colour prejudice in the world of food. Why after all - just because one cannot readily think of a blue vegetable - should one object to blue soup?

Aargh aargh. Just looked in fridge and tuna is not there. What has become of tuna? What? what?

9.30pm Thank God. Magda come in kitchen and helped me make big omelette and mashed up half-done fondant potatoes and fried them in the frying pan in manner of hash browns. Tom put the recipe book on the table so we can all look at the pictures of what char-grilled tuna would have been like. At least confit will be good. Looks fantastic. Magda said not to bother with Grand Marnier creme anglaise but merely drink Grand Marnier.

10pm V sad. Looked expectantly round table as everyone took first mouthful of confit. There was an embarrassed silence.

"What's this, hon?" said Tom eventually. "Is it marmalade?" Horror-struck, took mouthful myself. It was, as he said, marmalade. Realise after all effort and expense have served my guests:

Blue soup.

Omelette.

Marmalade.

Am disastrous failure. As Tom remarked, "Michelin-style cookery? Kwik- Fit, more like."

                   ***************************************************

 So my intention was to make Bridget's planned dinner party menu for me and my boyfriend on new year's eve, but to do it properly. Unfortunately, it went wrong - though in different ways to Bridget's - so it was a complete disaster! It would have been funny but my boyfriend's family pet rabbit was unexpectedly put to sleep by the vet that day so we were all miserable and it was the icing on the cake of a terrible day!

Some of the food turned out OK and since this is my entry for this month's Food 'n' Flix I thought I'd still share with you what I did and what went wrong.

First up: Veloute of Celery aka Blue Soup.

I'm not really sure what the difference is between a veloute and a smooth soup so I made a simple celery soup recipe. I sweated some onion and celery in butter, and brought it to a simmer in a pan of vegetable stock.

Season, puree in a blender... and if desired, add blue food colouring so it looks something like this!

For the main course: Char-grilled Tuna on Veloute of Cherry Tomatoes Coulis with Confit of Garlic and Fondant Potatoes

I'd been thinking about doing steak for new year's eve before I decided to cook Bridget's menu and my boyfriend doesn't eat tuna so I was going to do that for me and steak for him, then somehow forgot that she did tuna and cooked steak for both of us!

I found a Martha Stewart recipe for roasted cherry tomato sauce which was easy to make. I had a packet of cherry tomatoes which I put into a roasting tin and drizzled over some oil, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, thyme and salt and roasted in the oven for about an hour.

Martha Stewart serves them as they come and they do look very attractive - I forgot of course that for Bridget Jones the menu is a coulis, so I should have put it in the blender. This is the sauce after being blended, which I did with the rest to put in the freezer:

 Confit of Garlic

I found this recipe on FoodandStyle.com. All you really do is heat some cloves of garlic in a saucepan, covering them with oil, over a low temperature for about an hour. After that you will have cloves of garlic that are slightly crispy or browned on the outside but beautifully soft on the inside - if you press one, the garlic inside squeezes out - and also some garlic-infused oil which you can use for another recipe.

 Fondant Potatoes

This is where things really started to go wrong. In the book, Bridget complains hers are still rock solid; mine turned to mush. Unfortunately I was so disappointed I forgot to take a photo. The recipe I used was from BBC Food.

I peeled and fried the potatoes then poured in the stock and garlic. I tried to cook them until tender but they went very quickly from being not quite cooked to being far too soft and falling apart. Also, I used a whole stock cube with the 75ml water which I think was too much for this amount of liquid as the potatoes had a strongly overpowering taste of stock which wasn't very nice. I've had fondant potatoes in restaurants so knew what they were supposed to be like, and mine were nothing like that. I decided the stock flavour was so overpowering that I threw the potatoes away and put some chips in the oven!

So instead of tuna steak, veloute of cherry tomatoes coulis, confit of garlic and fondant potatoes, we had beef steak, roasted cherry tomatoes, confit of garlic and chips. And very nice it was too!

Confit of Oranges. Grand Marnier Creme Anglaise.

Bridget's confit of oranges turns out to be marmalade, and I don't think she attempts to make the crème anglaise in the end. I'm pretty sure crème anglaise is just custard and I had an open carton of custard in the fridge so thought I would allow myself one cheat and use that instead.

For the confit of oranges the recipe I used was from Snapguide. It was easy to follow though I reduced the quantities; I didn't think it was setting enough though so I turned the heat up and boiled it for longer. I then left it to cool and when it returned to the pan, it was solid - I couldn't even get a spoon into it! The only thing for it was to reheat it a little so it would soften, and then put it into serving dishes, which I did but the consistency had changed - it was a little like sugar that has dissolved then set into crystals again. And when I did get it into serving dishes, it was rock solid again within minutes - I wouldn't recommend over-boiling it! So whereas Bridget had marmalade, I had solid orange-flavoured sugar... we gave up and had a bar of chocolate for dessert instead.

So like I said it would have been funny if it hadn't been for the rabbit being put down that day - but I can still sort of see the funny side that Bridget had a total disaster with this dinner and so did I!