Dinner at home - Pumpkin & Parmesan Ravioli in homegrown tomato sauce

I adapted the recipe from the cooking class and made this Ravioli. Actually I didn't look at the recipe at all. Its easy enough to just make whatever sort of filling you want!!

For this one, I cooked some pumpkin in the microwave, added some sauted garlic and onion and some freshly grated parmesan cheese. I mixed and mashed this all together and placed half teaspoonful blobs into the centre of wonton wrappers which I had brushed with egg wash. I then folded the wrappers in half to make semi-circular ravioli.

For the sauce, I cooked an onion and some garlic in butter and olive oil. To this I added 1 peeled and chopped (homegrown) tomato. I simply cooked this together until the tomato had broken down, adding a little water along the way to loosen the sauce.

After cooking the ravioli in boiling water for probably a couple of minutes (until just done) I tossed it in the sauce and served with a sprinkle of parmesan on the top. DELICIOUS!!!!

Dinner at home - Pizza

Some more home made pizza!!!

This is the vegie one - with grape tomatoes, pumpkin, zuccinni and "not-bacon" (with tomato sauce)

and the meaty one - with left over bbq sausage, cheerio, bacon & pepperoni (with bbq sauce)

and the cooked vegie version

and the meaty one!

A delicious and easy dinner!!

Dinner with Friends - Make Your Own Pizza!!

Heres a good idea!! We went to our friends place for dinner and we had "make-your-own-pizza".  We used Pita bread as the base, and each made half a pizza each round (2 pizza trays and 4 people!!) There were so many different toppings to choose from - fresh tomato, mince, pineapple, onion, olives, corn, capsicum, pepperoni, other meat, squash, sundried tomato, cheese, and lots of sauces!

about to go in the oven

Just out of the oven

another round of pizza!

and then we played a bit of "Name that Tune 80's edition" in which Janet smashed us all.

Easy Vegie Lasagne

This is my easy, cheats way of making a vegie lasagne - and it tastes great!  Instead of cooking up anything and assembling the lasagne in the traditional way, I use a jar of bottled pasta sauce, grated raw vegies (usually zuccini, pumpkin & sweet potato), a couple of beaten eggs and a little cheese (all of these factors depend on what food happens to be in the house at the time)

You begin with a little of the bought sauce on the bottom of an oven proof dish, followed by dried, instant lasagne sheets. Next a layer of grated zuccini, over which I pour some of the beaten egg and sprinkle a little cheese (this can be cheddar, mozzarella, parmesan, fetta, or ricotta, whatever takes your fancy). Next, another layer of pasta, then a layer of grated pumpkin and some more pasta sauce. Continue like this until the dish is full.  I finish with a layer of pasta, covered with sauce and a spirinkle of mozzarella on the very top.  I then (depending on how "wet" the bottled sauce is) pur a bout 1/4 cup of water into the dish and bake the whole lot in a 180 oven for about 45 minutes, or until the pasta and vegies are nice and tender.

the pictures aren't exactly great, but you get the idea!!

Christmas Brownies

And before Christmas is too much of a distant memory..... some Brownies I baked to use up the leftover dried cranberries and white choc chips from the Nigella Cookies......

I simply used my usual stand-by brownie recipe can be found here, and stirred in the cranberries and choc chips.....YUM! (I always like it when I put white choc chips in these brownies, because they stand out and make the brownies look much prettier!! haha - even though I don't particularly love white chocolate!!)

Nigella's Cranberry & White Chocolate Cookies

I made these cookies as little Christmas gifts - nice easy cookies that reportedly tasted delicious. Obviously you could change the ingredients to make whatever sort of cookies you want - but cranberry & white chocolate sounded nice and christmassy to me! This is the first thing I have made from the "Nigella Christmas" book - I tend to just look through it and dream :-)

copy of recipe can be found here

to make gift tags, I cut out christmas tree shapes from corrugated cardboard (used a cookie cutter as a template) and glued on "merry christmas" thingies :-)

Unfortunately I didnt plan ahead very well, and only had freezer bags to wrap the cookies in - so not too elegant! Next time, Remember the Cellophane!!

dinner at home - times 2

for me - Quinoa with broadbeans, butter beans and assorted other vegies in a tomato sauce. This was my first try of Quinoa - I bought it on clearance at one of my Woolies stores :-). It was quite tasty!

for Janet - Sausages with potato cakes - I grated the potato, squeezed out the liquid, mixed in a little garlic and salt and then squished the mix into egg rings to fry.  They turned out nice and crispy on the outside, soft and tasty in the middle.

Dinner at home - Spagetti with Tofu or Chicken

Spagetti with sauce out of a jar - it was a Leggo's Pasta Bake sauce, but I didn't bake it - just stirred it through the spagetti, along with some baby spinach, Served with either Chicken or Tofu - both of which I marinated in garlic and fresh herbs and a littel olive oil before pan-frying until the Tofu was crispy, and the chicken was cooked through. Delicious!!

Dinner at Home - deconstructed shepherds pie

I made this for Janet's dinner. I came up with this while driving home from work.  I wanted to make a shepherds pie, but we don't have any oven proof dishes of the appropriate size to make just one serve.  Plus, as a week night dinner, I wanted to get it cooked fairly quickly, cos I don't like to muck about - things to do, tv shows to watch and all that :-)

So I microwaved some potato & sweet potato, which I then mashed with a little parmesan cheese.  I then put this onto some baking paper in a somewhat circular shape, and scratched up the top a bit with a fork. THis I baked in a hot oven whilst I created the meaty mixture, or pie filling.For this, I basically browned a small amount of onion, added some mince and sizzled it until it changed colour.  To this I added a squeeze of bbq sauce, a little gravy powder and some water, along with some chopped carrot.  I let this mixture simmer away until the mince was cooked, and the sauce thickened.  Then in with some corn and some frozen peas. By the time this was cooked, the potato topping had become brown and crisp on top!

I simply served the meaty mixture onto a plate, and topped it with the potato "disk".  If it was my dinner, I would have prefered to serve it in a bowl, but Janet likes to eat her dinner on a plate with a knife and fork, so no bowls for her (unless I make soup :-) )

Chocolate Coca Cola Cake

I saw this recipe in a book I borrowed from the Library - "Sue Lawrence's Book of Baking", and just had to try it.....it turned out well - a deliciously moist chocolate cake.... (co-incidentally, we got home today after buying a new dvd player, and I popped in the "Nigella" dvd, which wouldn't play on our other dvd player, and Nigella made a version of this same cake....)

Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake from "Sue Lawrences Book of Baking"

250g Self Raising Flour

3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder

1/4 teaspoon bicarb soda

280g caster sugar (recipe actually calls for golden caster sugar, but I haven't seen that anywhere)

250g Butter
250ml Coca-Cola

100ml milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

for the icing
150g butter
50ml Coca-Cola
3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder
400g icing sugar (again recipe calls for golden icing sugar)

Preheat oven to 180 c, and prepare a 24cm springform cake tin (I lined it with baking paper)

Sift flour, cocoa and bicarb into a large bowl.

Slowly melt butter and cola in a saucepan, then slowly add this to the dry ingredients along with the milk, eggs and vanilla, stirring all the time.

Once thoroughly but gently combined, pour mixture into the prepared tin and bake for about 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean (it took a little longer than 40 minutes in my oven).  Leave in tin on a wirewrack for about 10 minutes, then remove from tin.  Allow to cool completely.

To make the icing : melt butter along with cola and cocoa in a saucepan.  Pour this mixture into the icing sugar and beat until smooth.  Ice the cooled cake.  I decorated the cake with coke bottle lollies.

Wedding Card

I made this card for John & Kara - I first tried to draw some penguins. I really suck at drawing, so I googled how to daw a pengiuin (taking a leaf from my Mum's book who previously googles how to draw a teapot!) I then traced the penguin drawing from the screen.  And it still looked crap. So I turned on my brain and did something I am good at - cutting up cardboard! Some black, white & orange cardboard and a few googlie eyes later and we had penguins!

dinner at home - chips

Home made, Oven baked chips - I chopped the potato, tossed in some rice-bran oil, with some fresh chopped rosemary and sea salt and then baked in a hot oven until deliciously golden.

To go with my dinner, I made an avocado & fresh tomato salsa - avocado & tomato, chopped and stirred together with a little olive oil, lemn juice and basil.

My plate - chippies, salsa & Fry's Vegetarian Nuggets

Janet's Plate - Fish Fingers and chips (this is before she covered everything in bbq sauce!)

dinner at home, or what to do with broken crackers...

We had a packet of "Country Cheese" biscuits. When we opened them, we discovered that quite a lot of them were broken. Which is no big drama, they still taste the same.... however, I decided to do something different with them. I put all the broken bits into a plastic bag and bashed them with a rolling pin. Fun!

I then mixed the cracker crumbs with about the same amount of dried breadcrumbs and some fresh herbs from the garden and made Janet a piece of crumbed chicken.  Now my crumbing technique involves lightly flouring the piece of meat, dipping this into egg, and then into crumbs, back into the egg and back into the crumbs.  This makes for a nice crunchy crumbed coating once panfried (or oven baked)

On this occasion, I made some vegie mash to go with - it was cauliflower, potato, sweet potato and pumpkin which I boiled and then mashed with a little parmesan cheese mixed in.

and for me? a vegie burger stack - tomato, beetroot, avocado, a Sanitarium not-burger and onion with some mash.

New Baby Card

I made this card for my friend Kellie who just had a baby girl.

Interesting time was had shopping for the baby - I refuse to buy something pink for a baby girl, so we found a nice green item of clothing for her. Since when is green for boys? The tag said it was for a boy! So I cut that part off the tag. Problem solved!!

Homemade Pizza

Yes, we love pizza. Recently I have been using Greek Yiros bread from Woolies as the base. (Instead of making it from scratch) It works out great, and makes for very speedy Pizza. Takes about 10 minutes in a hot oven.

Pepperoni Pizza for Janet

Vegie Pizza for me (with zuccinni, onion, tomato, avocado & not-bacon)

YUM!!!!!!

Garlic Parmesan Bread

I made up this bread to go with some home made soup. I mixed some garlic into the bread dough, as well as rubbing some garlic and olive oil onto the top before baking. (I also sprinkled on some parmesan cheese). It didnt turn out exactly as I wanted, but we nearly ate it all, so there wasn't much wrong with it!