dinner at home - wholemeal vegie flan

I borrowed the book "Frugal Food" by Delia Smith from the library and made this flan from it - I did change the vegies that went into it.  I have however returned the book to the library without taking note of the recipe. oops! It had a very easy pastry base - I think it was 40g butter rubbed into 40g plain flour and 40 g wholemeal flour, with cold water to bind it together. probably a pinch of salt also. The vegetables (I used onion, pumpkin, sweet potato and zucchini) were cooked in a pan before layering them into the blind-baked pastry shell, and pouring over an egg mixture (sorry, can't for the life of me remember what went into the egg part!).  then it was baked in the oven until done!

 

it really was very delicious and easy to make with ingredients I had in the fridge/cupboard. 

Dinner at Home - roast chicken for one!

note the lack of greenery on the plate? Must be dinner for Janet :-)

I bought some chicken marylands so I could make a roast chicken dinner for Janet, without having to cook an entire chicken,  I marinaded the chicken "Nigella-style" in a plastic bag with lemon, soy and garlic for a few hours before roasting in a ht oven with some potato, pumpkin and carrots.  I could have cooked some peas to go with, but I was being lazy and dint want to dirty anything else :-)

Hell Pizza - at last!

There was much excitement when we saw that a Hell Pizza was going to open at Village Square Browns Plains.  This meant we didn't have to go to Darra for our Hell Pizza fix.  SO for months we droveand walked by without seeing a loto fprogress in the empty shop with the Hell Pizza sign on the window.  Eventually it opened, and well, we just didn't get around to going straight away. So when we finally got there it was a quite joyous occasion :-)

THis shop is bigger than the one at Darra, and has some booths inside, and quite a lot of seating outside on the footpath. We decided to eat our pizza there and then instead of driving home with it, so we sat at one of the booths.  We both ordered a "snack-size" pizza, which is the perfect size for one person.

Janet chose "Lust" ($9.50) - Bacon, cabbanossi, cheese, ham, pepperoni, salami.With the optional bbq sauce

I tried the "Sinister" ($11) which is a vegan pizza -Avocado, refried beans, black pepper, capsicum, jalepeno, onions, salsa, you can choose cheese as an optional extra if you don't want to stick with the vegan-ness of the pizza.  I skipped the cheese.

This was delicious -I loved the beans and the salsa on the pizza.  The jalepenos made it a little too spicy for my liking, but I could easily remove a few to lessen the heat factor a tad!  I love the crispy edge of the pizza bases at Hell - yum, yum, yum!!  

Dinner at Home - Spring Rolls & Sweet Corn Soup

So I was feeling brave and actually tried deep frying something.  I was planning on making rice paper rolls, but on reading the packet, saw that it had instructions for deep frying them, so I decided to have a go!  The filling was a basic stir fry of vegies, tofu and rice noodles tossed in some soy & sweet chilli sauce.  The deep frying was a little scary, and I probably won't be rushing in to do it again, but the result was some quite tasty spring rolls!

to go with the rolls, I made sweet corn soup - this was fresh corn cooked up in some vegie stock with some garlic and ginger, then whizzed with a stick blender.  I then drizzled in whisps of beaten egg. Delicious!!!

friday night dinner - satay box, Browns Plains

We had dinner at Satay Box, Browns Plains before doing our grocery shopping.  This is really a takeaway shop, with a few tables and chairs if you want to dine in, the cooking is done just behind the counter, so you can see your food getting tossed around in the hot woks.

We had to try the vegie spring rolls, because we hadn't tried them before! They were quite good, but the close proximity to the kitchen meant they were very very very hot when they arrived at our table!

I had the satay vegetarian noodles. Which came with a nice mix of vegies, and even a few pieces of tofu, and a fairly standard satay sauce. Again, very hot! The steam just kept on pouring out of the noodles!

Janet had the crispy chicken in sweet chilli sauce - this was a whole little chicken, deep fried until crispy and covered in a delicious sweet chilli sauce.

when we finished, they brought us a plate of orange wedges, which was an unexpected, but pleasant surprise!

Dinner at home - Sausages with French Toast

hmmm, I seem to have cooked lots of sausages lately. I think it must be because they jump out of the freezer at me when I am staring into it before work. Something like that!!

On this occasion, I sliced up some left over bread into thick fingers, dipped it in beaten egg and made some french toast to go with Janet's sausages. The lack of vegetables on the plate was only an issue for me. And I didn't have to eat it, so no problem at all really!

Out for Lunch - Grill'd (Garden City)

We had a buy one get one free voucher for Grill'd so off we went for lunch!!!!

I ordered the "Garden Goodness" with no bread roll (because I wanted to be able to eat my lunch with out feeling like I was going to explode at the end :-) ).  This was a great way to have this burger - they put the avocado in a little container on the side. mmmmm this was a fantastically delicious lunch! (unfortuately it seems I wobbled when I took the photo)

Janet had the crispy bacon burger, in the traditional fashion, and somehow managed to eat the whole gigantic thing!

 

and we shared these absolutely deliciously crunchy chips! (with some sweet chilli mayo to dip them in!!) Best. Chips. Ever.

Dinner at Home - Sausages x 2

for me - a couple of vegie delight Rosemary sausages, served with onion and tomato "gravy" (just onions and tomatoes cooked down into a chunky sauce), with mashed potatoes and green peas!

for Janet - sausage "balls" in gravy with mashed potato and peas. TO make the sausage balls I just took the skins off the sausages, broke them into pieces and rolled them into balls.  I fried them in the pan, before removing them and making the gravy (it was just a bit of gravy powder, water and some bbq sauce).  I popped the sausage balls back into the gravy pan to simmer for a little while.

The mashed potato was made with a dollop of the new Philadelphia Cream. Made them deliciously creamy!!