A couple of starters: yummy artichoke, spinach and tomato pasta and a crab terrine

Yummy artichoke, spinach and tomato pasta

Mix cooked pasta with:

• chopped fresh spinach
• halved cherry tomatoes
• marinated artichokes, chopped

Add a little olive oil (or oil from the artichokes) to loosen the pasta. Stir the ingredients through the cooked pasta, keeping the heat on low to wilt the spinach and warm through the other ingredients.

Small portion for a starter, large portion for a main.

The colourful pasta with the tri-coloured ingredients made for a fun mix!

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Crab terrine

I can’t take the credit for the terrine - it from the Tesco Finest range! I served a slice of terrine with freshly toasted bread and a green salad with fresh, light dressing (lemon, Dijon mustard and white wine vinegar with a wee spot sugar).

 

A sort of Eton Mess, but with strawberries, and with added chocolate ganache (why not?!)

Another easy peasy dessert, serves about 8:

• 300ml cream, whipped
• 5 meringue nests, roughly crushed
• a punnet of strawberries, quartered
• chocolate ganache

Mix the cream, meringues nad strawberries. Spoon in to glasses or dessert dishes. Top with a good dollop of ganache and a piece of strawberry. Serve.

Some seriously good venison and Guinness stew

We use Seriously Good Venison in our house!

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• Take 2kg venison shin and cut in to chunks.
• Put 8 tbsp plain flour in to a Ziploc bag. Add a healthy dose of salt and pepper. Put the venison in the bag and move it around to coat the venison.
• Pour 1 tbsp of oil in to a large pan; heat the pan. Brown the venison in batches, and set aside.
• Put the venison in the slow cooker pot with 500ml of Guinness. Add a couple of bay leaves. Cook for a good 6 hours or so.
• Roughly chop three medium-sized onions. Fry in a little oil until soft and translucent. Add lots of sliced mushrooms – I used about 500g of three varieties of shroom: Forestiere, chesnut and button. Cook until the mushrooms are softened.
• Remove the stew from the slow cooker and place in a large pan. Add the onions/shrooms and another 750-1000ml of Guinness. Bring to the simmer and simmer until the stew has reduced and the sauce is thick. Keep the stew moving to stop it sticking to the bottom of the pan, but don’t stir too much or you will break up the meat.
• Serve with potatoes and green vege for colour.

Sausage in bacon baked with fennel and sweet potato

This recipe was quite a discovery, and one I’ll be making again, all thanks to our Delicious magazine subscription. I always try to cook at least one recipe out of each issue as my own way of justifying the subscription! And this Easter weekend, with a houseful due, I made up several recipes.

I used caramelised onion sausages, and smoked bacon – a heavenly combination in itself, and fab with the sweet nature of the other ingredients.

I didn’t have any celery seeds, so used caraway seeds as they were what I had lying around – but fennel seeds would’ve been an excellent substitute.

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Ingredients
15 sausages
15 rashers of smoked bacon
2 tsp celery seeds
2 tbsp olive oil
2/3 large fennel bulbs, sliced and broken up in to their natural crescents
400g sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced in to wedges about 1cm thick
1 tbsp flour
150ml balsamic vinegar
150ml white wine
300ml apple juice

Method
Place the sweet potato and fennel in a large oven dish (or two!). Add the seeds. Pour over the olive oil nad mix.

Wrap each sausage in a rasher of bacon. Nestle in to the vege in the dish. Cook at 200 degreesC for 30 minutes.

Remove the dish from the oven. Remove the sausages nad set aside. Sprinkle over the flour and mix. Replace the sausages. Mix the vinegar, wine and juice, and pour over the other ingredients.

Cook for another 30 minutes, until the liquid has thickened and the sausages are cooked through.

A layered compote and yoghurt dessert

This is such a simple dessert, and super tasty too! Layer compote with yoghurt and top with a little muesli.

I used:
- greek yoghurt – it’s thicker and tastier.
- shop bought compote - easy peasy!

The bigger the glass, the bigger the serving! Pour the two layers carefully to avoid too much mixing.

Wensleydale and broccoli quiche

So this recipe was inspired by something I saw in Delicious magazine last month, but then I used our regular family quiche recipe and added Wensleydale and sprouting broccoli.

Ingredients
1/2 a 500g pack of ready-to-roll shortcrust pastry
Flour for dusting
2 large eggs
1/2 a 400g can of evaporated milk
12 or so stems of sprouting broccoli, trimmed to the radius of the pan
100g Wensleydale cheese, crumbled

Method
Sprinkle the worktop with a little flour. Roll out the pastry into a large circle. Carefully place over a suitable quiche pan* – make sure not to rip the pastry as you press it in to the pan.

Beat the eggs and evaporated milk. Stir in the cheese.

Arrange the broccoli in the base of the lined pan – put the stems at the centre, with the flower head at the edge, which will make it easier to cut at the end. Pour over the egg/milk/cheese mixture.

Cook at 180 degrees C for 30 minutes. To check if the quiche is cooked, press the centre: it should be firm and bouncy.

Serve in slices with a little side salad as a starter, or in thicker slices with potato salad and sliced for a main meal.

* I use a 8″ diameter pan, about 1.5″ deep, with a removable base (very handy for getting the quiche out at the end of cooking).

TOP TIPS:
- make sure the pastry doesn’t have any holes in it, otherwise the mixture will leak out during cooking
- leave the excess pastry hanging over hte edge of hte pan, and trim later – it stops the pastry from shrinking below the level of the mixture while it cooks

Prawn chowder again

So I made the lovely prawn chowder again, but jazzed up the presentation a bit: a wide, low bowl to serve the soup with a dollop of mashed potato, topped with a crispy rasher of bacon (rather than chopped and through the chowder).

Slimming World Syns: don’t forget to cut all the fat off your bacon before cooking!