My love for Collies, Cakes, Cooking, Eating Out & Days Out.
This recipe for Chicken and Egg Fried Rice is my go to recipe for authentic Fried Rice to cook at home. There are quite a few steps to follow but the results are excellent. Taken from Ken Hom’s Complete Chinese Cookbook and adapted to my personal tastes.
This Cookbook Challenge recipe for Pastiera di Maccheroni comes from 
Gino’s Pasta by Gino D’Acampo. I have cooked quite a few pasta recipes from this book and always had a great result. The methods of cooking are very traditional and relatively simple. The Pastiera di Maccheroni was a recipe I had just never got around to making. In simple terms it is a meaty macaroni bake. Continue reading “Pastiera di Maccheroni”
The weather here on Skye has taken a turn for the better so after weeks of rain it’s time to get outside. We decided Saturday would be some gardening
and Sunday a hike. These plans meant I needed to bake a robust cake that would survive a trip in a rucksack, wrapped in tinfoil. It calls for a Guinness Fruit Cake, any stout, or very dark ale will do but we always have Guinness in the fridge.
If like me you aren’t a beer drinker fear not you will still enjoy this Guinness Fruit Cake. You taste the richness of the stout rather than the hoppy beer flavour!
This week I dug out my 40th Edition Be-Ro book and did the Cookbook Challenge. It is a well thumbed recipe book so was hard to find something I
haven’t baked before but hiding away on page 53 is Chocolate Spice Cake.
This cake is suits Autumn perfectly, especially this week being Halloween and Bonfire Night. The Chocolate Spice Cake is lightly spiced with cloves, cinnamon and mixed spice so is a lovely alternative to parkin and gingerbread. Continue reading “Chocolate Spice Cake”
Chocolate and Orange are perfect flavours when baking cakes and never more so than in this recipe for Chocolate Chip Orange Cake. Chunks of good quality chocolate lace the moist orange sponge. This Chocolate Chip Orange Cake is reminiscent of when you bake with marmalade only this time you use a whole raw orange!
Read on for my recipe…
It has taken quite a while for me to get up the courage to make Cinnamon Buns. Don’t get me wrong I love eating Cinnamon Buns but dough is my
nemesis. Back in secondary school our bread lesson in Home Economics was interrupted by a fire alarm and all our hard work was ruined. I went home with wholemeal cannon balls rather than bread rolls. Continue reading “Cinnamon Buns”
When you get fed up of the same old spuds accompanying your meals give these Mini Jacket Potatoes with Sea Salt and Rosemary a try. They are quick and easy to prepare and very tasty.
Continue reading “Mini Jacket Potatoes with Sea Salt and Rosemary”
This weeks Cookbook Challenge comes courtesy of the Hairy Bikers. In 2009
the Hairy Bikers presented a cookery show where they toured Britain and cooked up dishes using local recipes and ingredients. I bought the accompanying book and have made a couple of the recipes religiously. However my cookbook challenge gives me the incentive to try something new so today it is Somerset Chicken. Continue reading “Hairy Bikers Somerset Chicken”
So I’ve set myself a little challenge and imaginatively called it Cookbook Challenge. Hopefully this will encourage me to try out new recipes. I’ll also learn to adapt recipes when I just can’t get hold of the necessary ingredients.
6 months ago my husband and I moved from East Yorkshire to the Isle of Skye off the North-west coast of Scotland. Thinking back to March 2018 and the “Beast from the East”, snow, winds, freezing temperatures, then that was the week we moved our world nearly 500 miles. Not without it’s challenges but we were living our dream.
So post-Christmas 2017 the packing started and wow did we own some stuff. We had an exact amount of space on the removals truck, any more and it wasn’t going to fit. We’d been in our house in Wetwang for 12 years, running two businesses and amassing a lot of clutter. It was very therapeutic sorting through things, throwing them away, recycling and donating, but the actual packing had to start at some point.
Decision made, I would sort through and pack books first. We had collected nearly two bookcases of cookbooks since we first set up house together 22 
years ago. We had cookbooks we never used, never were going to use and really didn’t need. Now I love books, I always had hundreds of reading books as a child, and I don’t exaggerate. When I moved out of my parents home after University I took half a dozen wooden tea chests out of their loft, full of all my books. But this time I couldn’t take everything, so I had to be cruel to be kind.
I managed to whittle the books down to ones I use all the time, ones I use from time to time, ones I love to look through for inspiration and ones I really want to start to use. The rest really had to go. Fortuitously our Village Hall had a weekly book swap and was also hosting a Jumble Sale so they did very well from my clear out. All the rest have made it to Skye and I have no regrets.
Last weekend I had to empty the bookcase in the kitchen where I keep all the 
cookbooks to do some DIY. As the books sat piled up on the kitchen table I kept looking at them and pondering. Maybe I should challenge myself to cook a few new things, maybe I should dare to try a few new recipes. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut. Whilst thumbing through a few pages with a cup of tea in hand I came up with Cookbook Challenge.
So I have challenged myself to pick up each and every book, choose a recipe and cook it. Sounds simple right? Maybe, maybe not! There are cookbooks old and new, traditional and modern, celebrity and very much not celebrity, books I’ve bought, books I’ve been given, books I’ve inherited, you get the idea. Some books are way out of my comfort zone and others are well thumbed.
It might be one recipe a week, some times more, other weeks may go by without a Cookbook Challenge happening. Either way I will give this a crack, learning new things along the way…
Each time I complete a Cookbook Challenge recipe I’ll write it up whether the 
result is good or bad. I’ll also be very honest about how accurately I managed to follow the recipe. One big challenge I have here on Skye is availability of ingredients. We only have 3 supermarkets on the island and they are all fairly small and all owned by the Co-op. Nothing wrong with the Co-op but if they don’t have what I need it can be a struggle. For time to time I use Amazon Pantry. On trips onto the mainland I dive in large supermarkets to stock up the pantry but groceries can be a challenge.
So here goes…my Cookbook Challenge!
There are an abundance of ready made meatballs available in the meat aisle of any supermarket but until you make your own you’ll never understand how good home made ones really are. They are relatively easy to make and Continue reading “Spaghetti Meatballs”