The ingredients:
Shelled prawns
Baby Spinach
Garlic
Diced tomatoes
Japanese chilli seasoning
salt
black pepper
a knob of butter or margarine
Stir-fry prawns with baby spinach
Spaghetti with Fresh Chorizo Sausages and Olives
It’s pretty self-explanatory. Except that the chorizo sausages are of the halal kind – so it’s chicken. And the tomato sauce for the spaghetti is from my favourite bottled pasta sauce – Leggo’s.
Roasted Rosemary Quail
I like quail. They’re so small and adorable. And yummy. Luckily, I have a great colleague who shares with me a passion for cooking. She got a packet of halal quails for me and I got to cooking it that very weekend. I marinated the quails in olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, garlic. Pop it in the oven till done and voila! Fragrant, juicy roasted quails!
Quick quick Cod curry
This has got to be one of those lazy cook’s recipes. And I made them. In my defence, I really didn’t have much time to cook but we had to have dinner. So, the cod fillets that I got semi-defrosted earlier had a nice rub of curry powder, paprika, cumin, salt and black pepper. I placed the spiced cod fillets on a baking tray, poured ready-made tomato soup from Marks & Spencers (it’s ready made runny soup) and threw in some okra. I placed the dish in the oven till the fish are done. What do you know? I made a meal in 20 minutes! I served this with ready made naan and my bell-pepper and garlic olive oil relish. It wasn’t fantastic, but it wasn’t horrendous either and everybody finished the dish. Even The Little Girl. The things one can do when pressed for time.
Brainy Brownies
I miss you dear food blog. Sigh. As you may have noticed, I have been extremely busy. It’s the exam season and I don’t even have enough time to rest what more cook. The first weekend of school, however, I managed to whip up these healthy brownies that I actually made before at school during one of those Staff bonding sessions. I actually bought the book – The Sneaky Chef-in order to,well, sneak veggies into my picky son’s meals. It worked! He ate those brownies without realising that there were broccoli and blueberries in them. HA to you my boy! (Wait till he’s old enough to read this blog… 😦 )
Anyway, I also learnt a super healthy way to incorporate healthy ingredient even when baking. Mix equal portions of white flour, wholemeal flour and wheatgerm. The Sneaky Chef calls this “Flour Blend”. You can use this to bake cookies, cakes etc… I’m even going to use wheatgerm in place of breadcrumbs when coating meat etc. Anyway, for these brainy brownies, the dry ingredients are the flour blend, cocoa powder …erm, I can’t exactly remember the recipe. Ooooo…maybe I’ll put a link: Click here. For the purple puree: mine was blueberries + broccoli. I didn’t use spinach because we can’t really get spinach here, you know. The bayam which we are used to is not really spinach but amaranth.
They turned out great! Except for my in-laws who have a very discerning palette, the rest of us won’t even know there are veggies in them. Try it! For Home Ec kids (I know some of you still read 🙂 ) you can try this for a healthy dessert (in case your teacher calls for one!)
The Occasional Cook 