Category Archives: Food & Recipes

Weetabix cake

Its no secret that I enjoy baking cakes, in fact when I am feeling stressed I can often be found baking cake very late at night !!

A life time ago in another life I baked many cakes for many RAF coffee shops, including this one.

Luckily for me now,I know lots of people who like eating my cakes, else I might be a little larger than I am. I don’t like posh fancy cakes but good easy wholesome one’s and the occasional Guinness Cake that i still have to make for the girls at work ….

An old favourite recipe is A weetabix cake, many people have asked me for this recipe, including the Cambridge Rambling Club Ladies, after i took one for after our Saturday walk, so I thought the easiest way was to put the recipe here on my blog

2 weetabix

half a pint of skimmed milk

8oz soft brown sugar

8oz mixed dried fruit

1 egg beaten

8oz S/R flour

Place weet-a-bix. milk.sugar and fruit in a bowl and leave to soak over night.

add egg and flour then mix well.

bake in a lined 2lb loaf tin for aprox 1 hour, until skewer comes out clean at 180

Best left for 24 hours before eaten and keeps well for a week 

A feast fit for The Shelford’s

Yesterday my Mum and Dad came to visit us and a Tartiflette was needed for dinner 🙂

DSC_0004So while my Dad attempted to concrete my patio for the 3rd time I cooked dinner.

This time it was for 7 people so I had to make 2 large Tartiflette.

Which took 900 ml of cream, 750 grams of bacon, 2 camembert and 2kg of potatoes, plus 2 glasses of my wine!

Far too many calories to even try counting especially as I made a Rhubarb and Blackcurrant crumble for pudding.

Glad to say dinner was a huge success but the patio was a fail as once again the concrete refused to stick to my stones and just pulled out of the gaps 🙁

Labour of Love ..

February means marmalade making time and luckily for me Geoff loves marmalade 🙂

I struggled to get the Seville oranges this year,but eventually I found some at the Knights hill farm shop and bought the last 10lb they had in the shop.

While Geoff squeezed the 6lb of oranges and took the pips out I sliced the peel, which was then simmered for a couple of hours with the orange juice ,12 pints of water and the pips tied in a muslin bag.

The start

Once the peel was soft and the liquid reduced by about half, 12lb of preserving sugar was added then boiled for about half an hour, stirring all the time, till setting point was reached.

the middle

The whole process took 5 hours and we now have 26 jars of marmalade, the cost was approximately £17 so around 66p a jar, so well worth making…..

the end

If more Oranges can be found I hope to repeat the whole process again next weekend then Geoff will be set for the year 🙂

 

 

New year New recipe

I love cooking/baking and have wanted to make a Risotto for many months.

Its not something the boys wanted to try and with Geoff having been away, I had no one to make it for, BUT last weekend I finally had the opportunity to make one.

IMG_0563The Jamie Oliver basic Risotto recipe was the one that had been recommended to me, which is kind of funny as I dont really like his recipes, we have 2 of his books and they are the only ones that have never been used !

Anyway I liked this recipe, it had a few ingredients, was easy to make and just needed a little patience with all the stirring 🙂

 

I love that you can make this basic recipe then add anything of your choice, this time we had mushrooms, but I cannot wait to make it with the broad beans that I have growing in my garden.

Its tasted fantastic and will become a favourite recipe I am sure 🙂

 

Coconut Dhal

Thanks to a recipe recommendation on twitter, by Martin Black I decided to try out a new dish this week.

Coconut Dhal.… it was cheap,quick and easy to make, I had mine with some naan bread and it was very filling.

It will be a great to cook for Geoff too as its a vegetarian dish and it will give me the protein I need, which I feel I miss out on when I eat a lot of vegetarian food.

 

Its a great comfort food for cold winter nights and I will be certainly be trying out some more dhal recipes !

 

Pancake day 2012

We broke with tradition today and instead of the usual lemon and sugar pancakes, I made American style pancakes.

I made 2 different fillings, blueberry and peanut butter and banana.

They don’t look perfect but smell delicious ….

 

and now they sit on the kitchen table waiting for Matthew to  finish work 🙂

Fat free cake and calorie counting

Having cake without all the calories….is achievable if you know the right cakes to bake.

This week I have made a fat free, banana and sultana loaf, which contains 2,363 calories, so cut into 14 slices (66 grams) makes it 169 calories a slice.

Here is the recipe…

1lb of over ripe bananas (about 5)
2 beaten eggs
6oz brown sugar
4oz sultanas
8oz SR flour

mash bananas add eggs sugar and sultanas mix well then stir in flour . place in loaf tin and bake for 1 hour to 1hour 30 at gas mark 4 or 180

My food cupboards are also becoming a calorie counters dream, as I have been labelling all my containers with there calorie content.

All these small things make it quick and easy to see the calories in what I am eating 🙂

All this from someone who was so adamant that she would never count calories!

Mushroom and Potato Curry

I am loving the Good food web site at the moment, not only are there a huge range of recipes but they all come calorie counted too.

If you have read a previous post about my fitbit you will know why I am counting my calories, and having a huge success from doing it too 🙂

I always like to make an effort at the weekend to make at least one nice meal if not two, so last weekend I tried this one pot mushroom and potato curry.

After a days walking I need a recipe that is quick and easy to make, this certainly fitted the bill and yet again I was not disappointed.

Next time I might try making it with cauliflower instead of aubergine and maybe add some spinach too, just to give it some colour.

A great warming dinner after a days walking in the snow 🙂