Sunday Roast with a Tweak or Two

Perfect autumn day + Sunday + spare time = Roast dinner. Obviously.

Yes, Sunday is an ideal time for a roast so I purchased a massive chicken at the supermarket and returned home. When I came to actually cooking it I fancied something a bit different and came across this recipe:

http://www.waitrose.com/content/waitrose/en/home/recipes/recipe_directory/l/lemon_and_oregano_roast_chicken_with_spinach.html

Lemon and Oregano Roast Chicken with Spinach

I have the Waitrose app on my iphone and have already tried a couple of recipes from it. Its a free app and has a really handy shopping list thingy that lets you cross things off your list as you shop - just like having a shopping list and a pen in real life - but without having to root around in your handbag for a pen that then doesn't work! Anyway this recipe has magically appeared on it with the most recent update so I thought I'd give it a go.

The recipe calls for chicken thighs but I thought it would work just as well with a whole chicken. I covered the chicken in a bit of olive oil, lemon and oregano and popped it upside-down in the oven. After 45 mins I turned it over, basted it and popped some spuds into the oven for a bit more of a Sunday roast feel. So far so easy.

The other part of the recipe is the spinach bit. Here I encountered a slight problem. The ingredients list on the app doesn't list caraway seeds and the spinach does actually require it. As I didn't have caraway seeds I used cumin seeds instead. You add olive oil, crushed garlic and the seeds and then add the spinach to wilt in with them. Finally you add feta and lemon juice.

All in all the recipe was easy and amounted to a lemony fresh chicken with some really nice spinach. I really liked this way of doing spinach and will use it again (will try with caraway seeds next time). The meal, minus gravy was a bit dry but that may be because I roasted a whole chicken rather than cooking thighs as suggested in the recipe.

Summary: nice way of roasting chicken, nice spinach, all easy. Not sure it made a cohesive meal. looked yummy though.

Tarka Dal

Want a healthy, easy, cheap and restaurant quality meal? I've got just the thing for you.

I love ordering dal when out for an Indian meal and when I decided that I'd try this dal recipe I was expecting it to be a bit bland and worthy, as other dals I have made before have been. Madhur Jaffrey's Tarka Dal from My Kitchen Table's 100 Weeknight Curries was by no means worthy tasting. It tasted just like the dal from one of my favourite indian restaurants, Hot Stuff in south London. It was warm tasting with a hearty kick.

It is also ridiculously easy. It takes about an hour to cook but most of that is cooking the lentils down so you can easily get on with something important like watching Eastenders whilst that is happening. Its also a brilliant store cupboard staple as you make the base with it red lentils, yellow split peas, tumeric and water and then add olive oil, dried chillis, cumin seeds and garlic at the end to flavour it. All cheap and readily available ingredients that most people have at home.

The only thing I would say is that by the time I get home after a long commute and sometimes the gym, one hour's cooking time is a bit too much for a weeknight but in this case I just doubled up the quantities making enough for 2-3 meals for two and I think that negates the original cooking time. It would be perfect for cooking at the weekend and freezing for the week. That way you just need to cook rice or naan to accompany it on the night you want to eat it.

Summary - Brilliant. Cheap, healthy, easy, easy to source ingredients, long on the cook though.

Sticky Maple-Apple Traybake

I am loving the Great British Bake off. I have to admit that until now though there was one particular reason that I was loving the show… I’ll spare my blushes and his and leave it at this – he left this week and the shock and upset of it all drove me straight to the book that accompanies the series in a pathetic attempt to be closer to him.

The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake offers both tantalising glimpses of the object of my affection and over 120 scrummy looking recipes. This week’s pork pies are included and I really want to try them and soon, but after ten minutes of flicking through the recipes I had resolved to bake and rushing out to Waitrose at 9.30pm I decided a cake was more going to be more doable than the trickier pies. So off I raced to procure goods for my post bake off bake of mourning.

Returning from Waitrose, via a dodgy corner shop to pick up eggs as Waitrose was in fact closed at 9.30 on a Tuesday night (not the late night pick up joint I had been led to believe it was…) I set to. Given the limited ingredients in my house, teamed with a less than fruitful trip to the shop I plumped for the Sticky Maple-Apple Traybake.

Firstly I raided the fruit bowl for apples and doused them in cinnamon and maple syrup.

Luckily I have one of those magical Kenwood machines and with its help I whizzed up the sugar and oil until mousse like consistency and then added in the apple, nuts (pecan as I didn’t have walnuts) and flour. I then used the whizzer again to whisk egg whites into stiff peaks and then mixed them into the cake mixture. Done! Well apart from the cooking bit and that’s the easy bit – well it can be.

As Mary Berry herself says ‘Baking is a fickle mistress’ even the doyenne of cakes admits to having baking mishaps now and then. Luckily, despite having the wrong sort of nuts, too dark a sugar and eating rather than cooking apples it all worked.

It was late by the time I eased the cake out of its tin so I decided not to ice it and as its a lovely moist and flavoursome cake anyway but by the end of the evening I had a lovely cake and had partly eased the pain of my earlier loss. All in all not a bad hour and a half’s work! A great recipe for a yummy cake that is forgiving enough to let you substitute ingredients here and there.