Tana Ramsay’s Bacon and Mushroom Pasta / Nigella’s Cheddar Cheese Risotto

Been a busy evening trying out new recipes wise. I cooked Tana Ramsay’s Bacon and Mushroom Pasta from her latest book, for the kid’s tea. I’m currently a big fan of giving the kids mushrooms at the moment, along as they’re chopped up small, as they mistake them for bacon. Anyway, I cooked the recipe and it looked, smelled and tasted delicious and was fairly easy to cook to. I can’t really eat mushrooms as they diagree with me but I would have so have eaten all of it if I could have. After all how can you go wrong with creamy, bacony pasta? I gave it to the kids and well, they weren’t as impressed, Boy Lacer showed his displeasure by repeatedly just picking up a strand of sphagetti and putting it down again. Girl Lacer wasn’t impressed as she’s a smart cookie, she recognised that I’d used cream and she also saw that Boy Lacer was eating it to, therefore it must have been goats cream (I wouldn’t have had a clue even goat cream existed prior to Boy Lacer’s cow dairy intolerance) and anyway Girl Lacer is not impressed currently by things ‘goat’ even though the small bit of pasta I tasted you wouldn’t have noticed any difference between normal cream and goat cream.

For ‘grown-up tea’ I cooked Cheddar Cheese Risotto from Nigella Express (has to be a record for me for cooking a recipe from time of receiving the cookbook, but luckily I had all the store cupboard / fridge items anyway) and it was absolutely lovely. It’s in the comfort food section of the book and boy is it comforting, I’ve never come across a recipe before where I’ve actively wished that I knew of the recipe before. I’m thinking particularly of when I was a student and I lived off the comfort food of ‘cheesy chips’ (chips with melted cheese on, bacon too if you were feeling like ‘splashing out’). Cheddar Cheese Risotto is the grown up equivalent of cheesy chips. Very fattening (probably, it uses a serious lot of cheese) but it’s like wallowing in a giant cheesy, oh I don’t know, something! One thing though, when cooking it I thought Nigella’s ingredients were a bit much, calling for 300g of risotto rice and something like 125g of cheese, for two people! I thought that was way too much and went through the recipe halving the ingredients (I was cooking for 2 as well) and the result was just pleasantly enough for  2 people for a main course, I was certainly feeling full up by the end and would have been defeated by twice as much. But still, lovely and I’ll be making this recipe again and again. As for the bacon and mushroom pasta, if the kids don’t like it I’m not going to try and encourage them to like creamy pasta sauces (I know it was the cream that put them off) so sadly I won’t be making it again at least for them, I might try it for me, been a long time since I’ve eaten mushroom, maybe my intolerance has worn off, because that dish looked well and truely delicious to.

Nigella and Jamie have arrived!

Yipee! Nigella Express and Jamie at Home have arrived! I knew they’d be waiting for me on my doorstep so it added an extra spring to my step on the way home from work this lunch time! First lets tackle Nigella -

Oh, just looking at the number of luscious chapters in this book, we’re in for a televisual treat. We’ve already had the ‘Everyday Easy’ chapter and I don’t know if she’s going to do every chapter but there are loads more chapters, such as breakfasts, eating on the run, Christmas food, mexican food, italian food, party food plus more. The food photography is mouthwatering and comprehensive and there’s only a few cheesy shots of Nigella. Plus as usual Nigella has written this book in her usual chatty style. Anyway obviously only just got the book but recipes I’m planning on cooking from it include:

• Blackberry crisp
• Pineapple Upside-Down Cake minus the glace cherries which I can’t stand.
• Home-made instant pancake mix (which looks a fantastic idea) with blueberry syrup on top.
• Pear and ginger muffins (never thought of that combination before but it sounds delicious)
• Chocolate croissants
• Frittata (with every single filling she’s suggested, not all at once though )
• Croque Monsieur Bake (oh my goodness it looks and sounds delicious)
• Sweet and sour cucumber salad
• Warm potato salad (with bacon and mustard, yum)
• Chicken Schnitzel with bacon and white wine
• Instant chocolate mousse (finally a chocolate mousse that doesn’t involve raw eggs! (I’m a bit phobic about cooking with raw eggs))
• Butternut and sweet potato soup
• Cheddar cheese risotto (this one is going to be made very soon, possibly tonight)
• Doughnut french toast
• Totally chocolate chocolate chip cookies
• Quesadillas (I’ve been making these for years but I like her suggestion for a filling)
• Sesame Peanut Noodles
• Banana Butterscotch Muffins (I’m intrigued about these, I’ve made her banana muffins in domestic goddess and they never work, so has this recipe improved things?)
• Hokey Pokey (a delicous looking honeycomb)
• Party popcorn (with cinnamon, cumen and paprika)
• Cocktail sausages (in a gorgeous coating)
• Marshmallow crispy squares (mmmmm)
• Wasabi lime dressing
• Golden Honey Mustard dressing
• Red pepper hummus
• Vanilla apples with sweetheart croutes

Mmmm, a lovely list, something which unfortunately is not going to be so long for Jamie’s new book.

 I’ve said before, quite a few times, I love Jamie, he taught me how to cook 10+ years ago with his Naked Chef series and his earlier books are still well thumbed, well used additions to my cookbook library. But when it got to ‘Jamie’s Kitchen’ things started to get a bit ‘posh’ but then again it was more about the sort of food he cooks in his resturant kitchen. ‘Jamie’s Dinners’ and to some extent ‘Jamie’s Italy’ were more back on his old track but then ‘Cook with Jamie’ came out and yeugh could not really stand that one, I think if anyone wanted to learn to cook a copy of one of his Naked Chef books and perhap a DVD of one of his earlier series would be a lot better. Still, I suspect I’ll be buying Jamie Oliver books until he stops writing them, due to my fondness and greatfulness of the skills he’s taught me plus even if I don’t cook from them (with the exception of ‘Cook with Jamie’ which I thought was bordering on Delia levels of patronisation), Jamie’s books are usually fun to read and beautifully photographed. And oh the photographs in Jamie at Home, feel like I could open the book at certain pages and stick it on the wall and go ‘ahhhh’ (for some of the scenery shots) and ‘yum’ for some of the food shots. But, there is nothing like a Jamie Oliver book these days to make me feel just like my parents are at my shoulder again going “You are sooooooo fussy”, I have to admit there are still quite a few things I don’t like but there’s an awful lot of stuff I do like now but Jamie seems to cook these days with all the stuff I don’t like, loads of beans, tomatoes (can’t stand tomatoes unless they’ve been cooked and really whizzed/mashed up) and great big hunks of meat (I’m not a vegetarian but I don’t eat that much meat). Plus (at least in this household) the dishes in this book are hardly ‘standard’ family fare, a lot of them quite time consuming (although alot arn’t) and they’re more ‘dinner party’ than Thursday night tea, plus I have trouble enough getting my kids to eat the simpler dishes of Annabel Karmel and Tana Ramsay, a Jamie dish would be nigh on impossible, although to be fair on him he’s not billing this as a family cookbook (although I’m sure his kids eat this stuff). So the number of recipes I’m planning on trying from this book is considerably lower than some of the other new cookbooks out recently (Nigella, Tana Ramsay, Annabel Karmel, Rachel Allen). However I will be trying the:

• Rhubarb and sticky stem ginger crumble (Jamie’s crumbles are always nice, particularly when they’ve got oats in and I love anything with ginger in)
• Indian carrot salad (without the lamb)
• Courgette carbonara (didn’t it look divine when he cooked it on TV! The number of hits I’ve had on this blog looking for that recipe (which I ain’t going to reproduce it’ll contrivine copyright but I’d try the channel 4 site if I were you). I’m not going to to follow the recipe exactly though as I stated above with Nigella I’m nervous about cooking with raw egg, now if Jamie cooked this for me of course I’d eat it but me, cooking it, I’d be really nervous I’m about to give everyone food poisoning, so I’m probably going to combine this recipe with the carbonara from Cook Yourself Thin which I think doesn’t use egg (I’m sure Jamie would hate that!))
• Cheesy onion salad with creamy herb dressing but with a different cheese other than the roquefort which I don’t like.
• English Onion soup with sage and cheddar (I was squirming about in ectasy when I saw him cooking this on Tuesday, yum, yum)
• Balsamic Baked Onions and potatoes with roast pork (ditto as above, I’m even prepared to go against my hunk of meat loathing for this one as it just looked too delicious, wish I had a wood oven in the garden to cook this one in!)
• Pizza fritta but with different toppings, whole tomatoes, yuck, yuck, yuck!
• Pizza margherita
• Calzone (but without the mushrooms)
• Creamy rice pudding with the quickest strawberry jam
• Grilled peach salad with bresaola and a creamy dressing (now I don’t do starters except for Christmas and I could see this as a lovely starter but I know full well I’d be the only person eating it)
• Homemade ketchup
• Blackberry and apple pie
• Superb squash soup with the best parmesan croutons
• Butternut squash muffins with a frosty top (these just look fun!)

There’s also some great looking advice on how to grow your own veg, which I’d love to do but my time / space / gardening skills are pretty non-existant.

Flylady day 11 and general waffle

Yawn, oh my goodness I’m so tired, if I shut my eyes I could just fall asleep here and now. Boy Lacer is not sleeping well at the moment, plus I was up late anyway preparing for my book sale today and then I was up early when Boy Lacer woke me at 5.30am. So that along with the book sale itself, I am just too tired this afternoon. So haven’t done my hotspot, room rescue or 15 minutes yet, but I did sell a book, yipee! However I did amaze myself by loading the dishwasher and washing machine before we left. I do that anyway normally but more often or not if I’m extra tired and/or busy I won’t do it and leave it until I get back, when then ok I’m not busy anymore but I’m even more tired, so I guess there was a little Flylady on my shoulder telling me to do it. Unfortunately little Flyladies don’t come and tidy up your house when you’re out at work, just like the mythical house fairies as the rest of the flat, boy is it in need of those segmented 22 minutes!

Today, day 11, you’re meant to write inspirational phrases in your control journal (on the subject of which my ‘control journal’ a Sainsbury’s own brand post it note keeps falling off the fridge adding to the general mess on the kitchen floor, great). Sorry but I’m not an inspirational phrase type, although I have to say I do think two Flylady phrases are useful ones to remember (and I may be paraphrasing here); ‘all it takes is 15 minutes’ and ‘housework done incorrectly is better than no housework at all’, very true.