More food!

Continuing my food theme, here are a few more "experiments" -

some of which were more successful than others!

The cheerfully coloured thing on the right wasn't an experiment, as I have made it several times before.  Sweet Potato Tagine, from a BBC Food website recipe.  I now leave out the green olives on the original recipe because, frankly, they don't add much.  I also omit the preserved lemons, because I don't like them.  And serving the tagine with the Lemon Couscous included in the recipe would be a complete no-no in a house where the couscous word is only ever pronounced with venom.  Instead we ate it with the yummy looking bread alongside, which was made with a Francine "Pain Maison" mix.  I have yet to find a French equivalent of "strong white bread flour".  All I can find in our neck of the woods is flour with all sorts of raising agents already in it, so that you just add dried yeast.  I've tried a few and this was my first real success.

Back to the sainted Nigella for a little treat for me.  Kevin isn't really a cake fan, so when I am occasionally overcome by the need for "CAKE!", the best thing to do is make something small.  (Only because if I make something big I end up eating it all anyway!).  These were Nigella's Christmas Morning Muffins, which, as you can see, I ate as suggested on the recipe, warm from the oven and spread with butter.  Like this they were gorgeous.  I must admit that I thought them less exciting once they had cooled, as I found them a bit chewy.

This is my "potato pastry thing".  The recipe was titled "Potato-pastry Leek and Mushroom Tart".  The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted a lack of mushrooms on the finished product.  I didn't have any mushrooms, so used some cherry tomatoes instead.  Prettier anyway!  Despite being re-named "Leek and Fart Pie" by my Chief Taster before he had even tasted it, the tart was delicious and we polished off the whole thing for lunch!  It's a great way of using up a bit of leftover boiled or mashed potato.  You add 100g of mashed spud to your pastry mixture and it comes out light as a feather and beautifully crispy.  I'll definitely be making this one again - although next time I think I'm going to try adding some finely chopped fresh rosemary (which we have growing in the garden) to the pastry mix to make it even yummier.

No experimental cooking session would be complete without something massively sweet.  This time it was a Good Housekeeping recipe for Dark Chocolate and Coconut Fudge.  I was interested by the recipe because it only required a bit of melting of ingredients and stirring, no actual cooking.  Quite nice as an easily-made massive sugar hit, all it really did was prove that "proper" fudge has to be cooked to the right temperature or the texture isn't right.  Given that Kevin is as particular about the texture of fudge as I am about the correct use of the apostrophe, I'll be sticking to more traditional methods of fudge cooking in future!