Sponge Cake

Claire has been feeling poorly the last couple of days so I baked a cake to cheer her up! I used a basic sponge cake recipe for this so all you need is 175g of self raising flour, 175g of caster sugar, 175g of softened butter, 3 large eggs and a teaspoon of baking powder. Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl then add all the other ingredients and mix together. Pour mixture into cake tins and put into pre-heated oven of 170 degrees centigrade until golden brown and springy on top. Remove from oven and leave to cool. It's entirely up to you what filling you want, or whether you want to put icing on it. I chose to fill mine with jam and butter cream. I did the butter cream whilst it was cooling. Pretty simple to do this: 175g of icing sugar, 75g of butter and a couple of drops of milk. Mix all together and Bob's your mother's brother! The butter cream was spread on one half of the cake and the jam spread on the other side. It was then sandwiched together and dusted with icing sugar.

I was rocking out to Lamb Of God while making this... wooooooaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrhhhh indeed!

Pork N' Egg Fried Rice

This was a Chinese influenced dish I made yesterday coincidentally on Chinese new year! Pretty easy do do, toss some pork into the wok to seal. Whilst this is browning, in a bowl chuck in a few spring onions, a tablespoon of chili sauce, a tablespoon of minced garlic, 5 tablespoons of soy sauce and 3 tablespoons of hot water and mix this altogether. Chuck in in with the pork and turn the heat up. Whilst this is cooking, make some rice. Once the rice is cooked, chuck it on with the pork and sauce and mix together. You might want to add more soy sauce at this point. Finally add an egg and keep stirring until the egg is cooked. Serve with some prawn crackers as I have done! You can change the amount of ingredients in the sauce dependant on taste, Claire found it a bit spicy but it was OK for me. But It wasn't an over powering spicy taste that blows your head off!

Some Tips

Just some tips I would like to pass on. Buy fresh. I'm as guilty as most by buying ingredients from the supermarket as, yes, it is convenient. But I've found that buying fresh from farmer's markets or fruit and veg shops or butchers makes such a difference to your enjoyment of food.

I find that fruit and veg shops and butchers and the like are more sparsely spread around due to the fact that supermarkets are so dominant these days. But if you can buy fresh as the quality of ingredients is far superior to that of supermarkets.

Fruit and veg shops I find are much cheaper than supermarkets and you also get more for your money. Butchers tend to be slightly more expensive but the quality of meat is much better, although I find lamb to be much cheaper than supermarkets. Another source of quality ingredients is farmers markets. I go to one in Partick which is on every second Saturday and at these you can get all sorts of home grown produce, fresh meats and lovely big eggs. You can also get some of the more unusual foods as well. Such as ostrich meat!

As I said I'm as guilty as most for shopping at the supermarket, purely because it is convenient, but when I have time I go to proper butchers and fruit and veg shops. Try it and see :)

Breakfast Pockets

Inspired by a suggestion from Caire, this makes a nice breakfast of lunchtime snack. In one pan scramble some eggs, in another fry off some onions, pepper and chopped cherry tomatos. Season both and mix together. I had these pitta pockets in the bread bin, but you could use normal pittas or tortillas. Stick the pittas in the toaster then stuff with the scrambled egg mixture. Easy as that! 10 mins for an enjoyable snack. Again you can experiment with adding things like mushrooms or chopped bacon.

Wilst making this I was listening to Lamb Of God! Rock!

Chicken N' Chickpeas

This is something I rustled up for Claire the day before Valentines day because I couldn't cook on Valentines day because I was working. Inspired by both Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson it turned out to be a success! All I did was mix up a basil butter using chopped fresh basil and butter (obviously!) and spread it in the middle of the chicken breasts. I then wrapped the chicken in bacon and put it in the oven at 200 degrees for half an hour. Below the chicken is a chickpea mixture. I started off by frying off some crushed garlic, then added 1 finely chopped red chili, and a finely chopped onion. Next I added the chickpeas and some of the chickpea water from the tin. When this was almost cooked it was seasoned with some herby salt from Lakeland and some of the juices from the chicken and cooked for another 2 mins. I did a corn cob to go with it just as something extra. As you can see the chickpea mixture was dished up in the centre of the plate with the chicken on top.

You can try and vary this in other ways. Try experimenting with herbs, tarragon goes well with chicken and you could use this instead of basil. You could add peppers to the chickpeas as well, basically let your mind run wild and experiment!

Pork Korma

This is a pork curry I made from a recipe in the Ashoka Cookbook. You can get the book here and the recipe is on page 62. The recipe is for chicken curry but I fancied pork as a change, something that is not often used in Indian cooking.

Spiced Onions

Spiced onions, mmmmm... so simple to do too. Nice with poppadums (bought from the shop, I can't make them yet!) or with a barbecue as a side. All you need is onions, chilli powder, tomato ketchup and mint sauce. Basically just chop the onions then add the rest to taste. Nothing fancy, just as simple as that. You could also add mango chutney too.

Lamb Samosa

I've impressed many people with my lamb samosa's. This one has been made with puff pastry although I've done if with filo pastry too. You will need:

1 tbsp oil

1 garlic clove

175g minced lamb

4 spring onions

2 tsp curry paste

1 potato diced

2tsp apricot chutney

2tbsp frozen peas

lemon juice

chopped coriander

Straight forward to do this, heat the oil in a pan then add the garlic and mince. Cook for 5 mins then add the spring onions, curry paste and potato's and cook for 2 mins. Add the chutney, frozen peas and a couple of tablespoons of water then cover and simmer for 10 mins. Stir in a dash of lemon juice, coriander and season. remove from heat and leave to cool. Roll out the pastry and cut into squares. Place the cooked ingredients into the middle and fold over to make a triangle. Brush with beaten egg and if you want (as I have here) sprinkle with cumin seeds. Place on a baking sheet and cook in oven for 20 mins. Perhaps I should have said at the start, preheat oven to 220 degrees centigrade! Once done, sit back and sample your handy work. If it tastes good eat them all yourself, if not, give it to your neighbours as a present.

In The Beginning...

... there was little old me who very rarely cooked apart from a fry-up on Saturday evenings and some Asda noodles now and again. Then things started to change, I moved in with my then girlfriend (now she's my beautiful wife :)) and I started to get more adventurous... in the kitchen! So on a diet of cookery shows on TV and then some cookery books, cooking became very interesting.

This blog is aimed to show what can be done both quickly, and if you've got some time. Also I hope it shows what can be done without being any sort of expert.

Some of the dishes will have been taken from recipe books so recipes will not be listed in case of some sort of copyright infringement, but I will tell you which cookery books the recipes are taken from in case you want to get them. The other dishes will be of my own creation or been inspired by recipes and where I can I will list the ingredients etc.

My influences? Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith, Ainsley Harriot, Ina Garten (Barefoot Contessa), Antony Worrall Thompson, Two Fat Ladies, I could go on but that's the main ones I think. Links for their websites will appear for all the inspirational cooks.

And the title of this blog? I'm an engineer, the complete opposite of a cook! And I ROCK! I'll probably list the songs I listen to whilst cooking each dish :) As I write this I'm listening to Dire Straits Sultans of Swing! (Not quite as rock as I normally am!)

Look out for my first post shortly