Dinner at home - Lasagne x 2

A couple of lasagne's that I made - one meaty, and one vegie (of course!).  I felt like making some fresh pasta, so I rolled it out and cut it into sheets to fit these tins. The result was quite delicious!

The vegie version had a pumpkin layer (I just microwaved and mashed it), a grated zucchinni and cottage cheese layer, and some tomato sauce layers (onion garlic and tinned tomatoes cooked down into a delicious sauce)

The meaty version contained a 3 - meat sauce - it had mince, chopped veal and bacon, cooked up with tomatoes onions and garlic. This one also had layers of a cheesy white sauce.

 

Happy Birthday Mum - Zebra Cake!

For my Mum's birthday (which was way back in May) , I decided to make a zebra cake - recipe from here. The only change I made was the addition of icing, because, well, it was for a birthday, and a birthday cake needs icing!! Despite appearances, this was a very easy cake to make, with the only fiddly part being the alternate spooning of mixture into the cake tin.  The resulting pattern inside the cake was certainly worth it. THe cake tasted good too!!

Out for Dinner - Focus by James, Springwood

For our fifth "not-wedding" anniversary, we went out for dinner to Focus by James at Springwood.  This restaurant is located upstairs in a centre on the Pacific Highway service road, so whilst we were sat by the window, the views were of the highway and car yards. It was a Saturday night and the restaurant was seemed to be nice and full.

For entree, Janet had the Sweet Pork Belly....this was a special, so not on the online menu, the specials were read to us by our waitress from a srumpled piece of paper, and I am not sure of what else was in this dish - we think it was served with sweet potato mash.  Whatever the ingredients etc, Janet loved this dish. It was tender and melt in the mouth.

I went for the Bruschetta Trio caprese, mushroom ragout, peperonata. The toppings were very flavoursome, but the bread was a little soggy for my liking.

We then had a rather long wait for our main course. We think something might have gone astray in the kitchen - as there was some concerned chatting amongst wait staff whilst looking in our direction.

For my main, I ordered a second entree - this dish jumped out at me  - Smoked Beetroot, Cashew & Goats Cheese Ravioli w/ red wine & tarragon butter The filling in the ravioli was absolutely delicious - smooth, sweet and smokey with a hint of crunch from the cashews.  I think that the actual "pasta" was wonton wrappers, rather than fresh pasta, as it was very shiny and a bit sticky. I did love the filling!!

Janet chose the Free Range Chicken Breast w/ prosciutto, provolone cheese & warm lemon potato salad. I tried a little of the potato and it was nice and creamy.  Janet thought the chicken was great - nice and tender.

Then it was onto dessert -

Janet had Frozen Profiteroles filled with peanut butter ice cream in a sugar cage . I of course tasted this one too. The profiteroles were the best I have ecver tasted - I don't know if this is because I always have had duds, or if these were extra good :-).  They were filled with peanut butter icecream, which was like eating extra creamy peanut butter - divine!

I chose the Sour Apple Creme Brulee with Green Apple Sorbet My favourite part of this was the fantastic green apple sorbet YUM!! THe creme brulee was good also - a hard shell of caramalised sugar covered a soft creamy custard, with just a hint of sourness. Quite a different taste!

So overall a great dinner - I'm sure we'll be back again!

Lunch at Home - Wholemeal Bread!!

Janet felt like some fresh bread for lunch, so I had a go of making some without the aid of Bread Mix this time.  It was just wholemeal flour, yeast, salt and water mixed into a dough and left to prove, before placing into a tin and letting it rise again, and then into the oven.  I was happy with the way it turned out, considering I didn't use a recipe and didn't measure anything.

I had my warm slices of bread spread with cottage cheese and topped with slices of tomato and pieces of gherkin! YUM!!

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!!

Picnic Lunch

This is our kind of picnc - the kind that involves stopping at the bakery on the way to the park!!

We called in at the Jason Lee BAkery at Westpoint shopping centre, Browns Plains and grabbed some lunch to eat at the Berrinba Wetlands

I got a Salad Sandwich.  They were extremely generous with the grated cheese. It fell everywhere. I love bakery sandwiches because they are made with deliciously fresh bread!

Janet had a sausage roll - she is a big fan of the sausage rolls from this bakery.

Shadow had some leaves and sticks. And some lettuce that fell from my sandwich.  She had a lovely time watching small children ride by on bikes

she also rather liked playing with this empty Coke bottle.

dinner at home - noodles

Noodles and vegies with some sort of meat from the freezer :-)  (possibly veal!)

Noodles and vegies with Tofu!!

I marinated both the meat and tofu in soy, brown sugar and lemon juice before pan frying.  The noodles and vegies were simply stir fried with some of the marinade from the tofu. Easy and delicious dinner!!

dinner at home - pasta 2 ways

I'm on 2 weeks holiday at the moment, so not really spending a great deal of time on the computer. But heres something I prepared earlier :-)

For Janet - because she loves bbq meat lovers pizza, I made bbq meat lovers pasta! This was mince, pepperoni and bacon, cooked up with some bbq sauce and tossed through wholemeal pasta, with grated mozzarella on the top. Big thumbs up from Janet for this one!

for me - I cooked up red capsicum, onion, grape tomatoes, baby spinach and fresh basil which I tossed through the wholemeal pasta with some parmesan cheese on the top. Yum - I could just about eat tomatoes for every meal and be very happy :-)

Friday Night Dinner - Souvlaki Hut

A trip to Souvlaki Hut has become a bit of a regular occurance for us on a Friday night.

 

Janet always gets the Fish & Chips. (And I always steal a few of the deliciously crunchy chips)

I always get a vegetarian Souvlaki, minus the cucumber and olives, with some hommus. Sometimes I get regular, sometimes I get small, depending on how hungry I am! But it is always absolutely delicious! I love the squeaky haloumi cheese, and the stripy bread, mmmmmmmm!!!!

We always eat in, beacaue the one time we took away, by the time we got home (only about 5 minutes drive) the souvlaki was soggy :-(

Easter Baking disasters!

We invited Pam & Sid over for morning tea on Easter Sunday. Janet asked if I could make a chocolate cake and some cookies. As is usual, I started looking through my cookbooks and magazine clippings for some inspiration. I found a recipe for a chocolate sponge roll that I had kept from a baking tin I bought, so decided to give it a go. This was my first disaster. I think I cooked it wrongly, because it was a little crunchy on top, an when I tried to roll it, it just folded and broke into pieces. I tasted a bit of the broken cake, and it didnt even taste any good.  So the cake AND the recipe went in the bin.

So I moved onto the cookies while I waited for some more butter to soften for Cake take 2.  I chose some choc chip cookies from a generic tyoe of cookie and slice book that I have. Never cooked from the book before, may not do so again :-).  The cookies looked ok when they went into the oven, they puffed up and looked fine when they were nearly baked, but when the timer went off and I looked in the oven, they had flattened like pancakes! Oh dear. These ones didn't go in the bin.  We tasted them and decided they were still edlible - we renamed them "pancake cookies"

Onto cake number 2 - I made Nigella's Sponge cake recipe from "Domestic Goddess", substituting some cocoa powder for some of the flour. I like this recipe because everything gets thrown into the food processor!

My 2 sponge cakes came out of the oven looking nice and even! YAY another disaster avoided.

I decied to fill the cake with mock cream & grated chocolate, since I didnt want to go to a shop.  Heres a tip - don't make mock cream in advance because (d'uh) when you put it in the fridge it goes hard.  To fix this small problem, I just beat it up again, and added a couple of tablespoons of "Philadelphia Cream" yes, cream, not cream cheese! They have a new "cooking cream" product - its not for whipping though, so by mixing it with my mock cream, I softened the mock cream, and thickened the Philladelphia cream! Brilliant!!

the cake was goooooood!!

Out for Lunch - Melange, Roma St Parklands

I met up with a lovely bunch of ladies from "Calorie King" for lunch at Melange, Roma St Parklands

Nadine had spoken to the chef, who had agreed to create some "lighter" options for the purposes of this lunch.  He came over to our table and talked us through a few items that weren't on the menu

I chose to have the "chefs special" vegie salad.  This had delicious morsels of roast vegies tossed through the salad leaves.  Suprisingly, my favourite part of this whole dish was the mushrooms! They were amazing!!

Other peoples choices included:

Salt & pepper calamari, fresh lemon aioli

Smoked salmon, hash cake, avocado salsa  sour cream

oven baked salmon with salad (chefs special)

fruit salad with yoghurt