Cooking and Recipes in English

Pumpkin and Feta Salad
Since it’s Halloween, I’ve been thinking about pumpkin. Pumpkin is very good for you so finding ways to feed pumpkin to your family is a good idea. Not just at Halloween but all year round.
Everyone in my house likes pumpkin, and this salad is a family favourite.
It’s very quick and easy if you have left over roast pumpkin. However, it tastes so good, that’s its worth cooking pumpkin just for this salad.

If you have to cook the pumpkin, cut it into wedges. Leave the skin on but take the seeds out. Rub the pumpkin with a little olive oil and sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Heat the oven to 180C and cook the pumpkin until the orange flesh is soft. You’ll find it’s easy to take the skin off after it’s cooked.

Salad recipe

• Two cups of cooked pumpkin cut into 1cm cubes.
• Half a cup of cubed feta cheese.
• Half a cup of nuts or seeds (almonds, pinenuts, toasted pumpkin seeds or sesame seeds).
• Toss the salad together gently with a dressing made from one tablespoon olive oil, salt and pepper to taste and a small amount of oregano.

Thoughts and notes
This salad is best with pine nuts but I often don’t have any. They are expensive and they are not available in all supermarkets. So I sometimes make it with almonds.
If your family doesn’t like feta cheese, try the salad with cubes of cheddar cheese or cream cheese.
Almonds go very well with cheddar cheese and sesame seeds are very successful with cream cheese.
If you buy your feta cheese marinated in olive oil, don’t worry about the salad dressing. Just take a spoonful of the oil out of the jar and use that!

Happy eating!

Cooking and recipes in English.

A friend bought me a packet of port wine jelly from Australia. In America, jelly is called jello.

I was wondering what to do with it. “It’s very popular in Australia,” my friend said. “People make trifle with it.”

“Ah,” I thought. “Trifle! I haven’t made trifle for years.”

This is what I did to make a trifle.

I made the jelly and put it in the refrigerator to set.

I made a pint (450ml) of custard. I was in a hurry so I used a packet of instant custard. Be careful though. You want the custard to be thick. So use only half the amount of milk that the instructions say.

I bought a sponge cake from the supermarket. I broke it up into pieces. I divided the pieces into three piles. I used one pile to make a layer of sponge cake in a glass bowl and poured some apple juice over it.

I chopped up the jelly and put half of it over the sponge cake.

I poured half the custard over that.

Then I repeated the layers; sponge cake with apple juice, jelly, custard.

I put the last pile of pieces of sponge cake on top. I put it in the refrigerator and forgot about until it was time for dessert. Then I decorated the top with cream and raspberries. Here is a picture. It’s not very pretty is it?

Trifle is a traditional English dessert. It usually has custard, sponge cake and fruit. Every family has their own recipe. Everyone has a strong opinion about the recipe and they are all different.

Some people soak the sponge cake in sherry. Other people use fruit juice. Many people use jelly in a trifle. My mother never did. She always spread the sponge cake with strawberry jam. The friend who gave me the jelly said, ”Where are the peaches? I always put canned peaches in trifle!”

So maybe a trifle is whatever you want it to be.

Have you ever made a trifle?

*Note: trifle is an interesting word. Look it up! It means something small and unimportant;  “a mere trifle”.

If you ever heard two cooks discussing dessert trifle, you might get another idea! Something large and rather important! This is because everyone has their own ideas about how to make a trifle. Modern trifles often have many ingredients so there are many things for cooks to disagree about.

The original trifles in the 17^th century were probably rather simple desserts. Just fruit and custard or fruit and cream. They were also sometimes called fools.

This simple version “a trifle” is still popular in modern English cooking and it is called a fool. But  the modern trifle always has cake in it.

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Cooking and recipes in English.

 

A friend gave me a bag of snow peas. He had just picked them from his garden. So I made stir fried beef with snow peas.

I had some beef in the freezer so I defrosted it. I try to catch it before it is completely defrosted. It is easier to cut thin slices if the meat is still half-frozen.

Most recipes don’t have cashew nuts. But I added some because my family likes them.

Recipe (for 4)

400g thinly sliced beef

2 tablespoons (30ml) soy sauce

1 tablespoon (15ml) sherry or mirrin

1 tablespoon (15ml) sugar

2 tablespoons (30ml) of grated ginger

2 cloves of garlic chopped

1 teaspoon (5ml) of cornflour)

2 cups snow peas

½ cup cashew nuts (if you like them)

2 tablespoons of cooking oil (I used peanut oil)

chopped red and green peppers

 

This was very quick – I put the soy sauce, sherry, sugar and cornflour in a bowl and mixed them together well.

Then I added the garlic, ginger and beef, and stirred until the meat was mixed with the seasonings.

Then, I left it all for a few minutes.

I washed the snow peas  and took the leaves off the top. The ones in shops usually have these removed already.

I heated the oil and threw the contents of the bowl into the wok. When the beef looked almost done I added the snow peas and stirred.

I sprinkled the chopped red and green peppers on top, and the meal was ready.

 

Thought: My peas were very young. If you buy them in the supermarket, they might be older. So you might have to drop them into boiling water for a minute. Drain the peas and run cold water over them. Then shake them dry before you add them.

My friend also gave me a box of freshly picked strawberries so we had them for dessert. You have to love this time of year!

Stir fries are great when the weather gets hotter. They need almost no cooking so there is not too much heat in the kitchen.

 

Do you have a favourite stir fry combination?

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Cooking and Recipes in English

The Best  Part of Broccoli

We know that broccoli is good for us.  I also read that raw (uncooked) broccoli is better for health than cooked broccoli.

That’s good news for me. I don’t like cooked broccoli heads. If I eat the green heads of broccoli, I like them to be uncooked. In a salad maybe. Or with a nice dipping sauce.

I don’t like cooked broccoli heads but I love to cook broccoli stalks.

Do you cut the stalks off broccoli before you cook the heads? You are missing an amazing taste sensation.

Broccoli stalks are amazing!

You cut off the heads and use them however you like. (If you are me, you eat them raw). Then you peel the stalks and cook them.

Broccoli stalks are great in stir fries or steamed vegetables. Cut them sideways so you have round shapes. Or cut them into sticks. It doesn’t matter.

They are tasty and crispy. They taste better than asparagus. Why not try and add them to your favourite vegetable recipe?

Or, save the stalks and look at your recipes for asparagus. You could use the stalks  instead of asparagus. They are cheaper, crunchier, (and I think), nicer.

Or you could try them raw with a dip. I ate them with an avocado and onion dip. Very tasty!

Do you use broccoli stalks? How do you use them?

Try it and tell us what you think!

 

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Cooking and Recipes in English

This was a new experience for my family. I have cooked it a few times and it has always been a success.

I found the recipe in Marcella Hazan’s Italian Cooking, but I changed it a little.

How did I make it tonight?

●　I cooked 250g of spaghetti. I drained it, put it in a bowl and added 25g of butter. (I think a tablespoon of olive oil would be OK too.)

●　Then I stirred it up and waited for it to cool a little.

●　I cooked two slices of bacon and chopped the bacon into small pieces.

●　 I mixed three eggs in a bowl with salt, pepper and half a cup of grated parmesan cheese.

●　I added the bacon and the egg mixture to the spaghetti and mixed it all together. (You could add red pepper, green peppers, parsley, basil.)

Now, it’s time to cook!

●　Choose your fry pan. You need a plate the same size, or bigger, than the fry pan.

●　Melt 25g of butter or 15ml of olive oil in the fry pan.

●　Pour in the omelette mixture.

●　Cook over medium heat. Lift the edge of the omelet to check how it s cooking.

●　When the bottom is golden brown and looks crispy, put your plate over the fry pan.  Turn everything upside down.

●　Put the fry pan back on the gas burner. Add 25g of butter or 15 mls of olive oil. When the pan is hot, slide the omelet off the plate back into the pan.

●　Cook the bottom of the omelet.

●　When it is brown and looks a little dry, slide it out of the fry pan onto a plate.

●　Enjoy! (We usually eat this with salad.)

Do you have a spaghetti omelette recipe? Please tell us about it!

Did you try this recipe? What did you think?

 

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