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This recipe is an old classic that is always a winner! Be prepared for some serious ‘onion eyes’ during the prep as most recipes call for a large amount of sliced onions to form the main component of the dish!
Here is a classic recipe courtesy of Julia Child:
http://www.food.com/recipe/authentic-french-onion-soup-courtesy-of-julia-child-356428
And another from the Australian Women’s Weekly:
http://aww.bauer-media.net.au/food/recipes/2005/6/french-onion-soup/
One of our current favourites for dinner at the moment is pasta with an amazing goat’s cheese sauce. The flavours are unbelievable! We always make sure we use a quality cheese and you can’t go past the Meredith Diary Goat Cheese. You can eat it on its own with some crackers or add it to your cooking as it’s packaged with olive oil, peppercorns, garlic and herbs. Just amazing!
To make this dish, we firstly get the pasta out of the way and ready to cook. We like to make fettuccine-sized pasta for this recipe. Once that’s done, we brown some onion and start cooking the chicken. The sauce is made with the goat’s cheese and some cream, plus we add in some favourite herbs such as basil. Once that’s all going, we sometimes add some pitted olives and then right at the end, some halved cherry tomatoes. Cook the pasta for a few minutes until al dente and stir through the sauce!
Delicious!
This recipe is simply amazing!! It is by far one of the best mushroom risottos I have ever tasted – and I have eaten a lot of risottos when dining out. The flavours are delicious and if you can incorporate some different mushrooms (pending on seasonal availability etc), then you can enhance the dish further. In addition, the crispy mushrooms to place on top at the end really make the meal complete!
This is from the 30 minute meal book by Jamie Oliver, however I would recommend giving yourself at least an hour to make this dish, especially if you’re cooking it on your own and don’t have the assistance of your partner to help mix the risotto and prepare ingredients.
Definitely a favourite in our house though!
I’ve found a version of the recipe on the Jamie Oliver website – looks like there’s some slight differences in wording but otherwise it looks the same!
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/rice-recipes/grilled-mushroom-risotto
With the goal of continuing our healthy dinner meals for the week, I thought a simple steak would be perfect but just wanted to add a tasty sauce to brighten it up a bit.
Ingredients:
Method:
Add oil and leek to frying pan. Cook, stirring often, for 3 minutes or until soft. Add stock and cook for 2 minutes or until slightly reduced. Reduce heat to low. Add cream and sage. Season with salt and pepper. Stir to combine.
Serve steak with steamed vegetables – we used broccoli and baby carrots (seasoned with cumin and coriander mix – see below). Spoon sauce over steak and vegetables.
Enjoy!
Cumin and Coriander Baby Carrots – mix together the ingredients below and after steaming carrots, pour over and mix until covered.
It was my turn to cook dinner one night last week. I got home to an almost-empty fridge with the only main ingredients left being beef and potato. I thought this would be a good time to try one of the many recipes I’ve looked at online and went back to this one: http://bakingatmidnight.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/beef-potato-curry.html
I would usually have added capsicum, broccoli or some other type of colourful vegetable to add a bit of variety, but on this occasion, I had to work with what I had. It turned out pretty nice… A few extra vegetables would have made it perfect but my husband also enjoyed it and we both had it for lunch as leftovers the next day.
Thanks “Tramie’s Kitchen” for the recipe!
We have always wanted to try making cannelloni but weren’t sure exactly how to do it or what ingredients to use. While at the supermarket one day, we found pre-made cannelloni’s which just required to be filled with whatever filling you wanted! Since we love spinach and ricotta ravioli, we thought we would start with that. It was so easy to do and very delicious! We’re definitely going to try making our own pasta next time which would make it even better. We’ve poured a tomato pasta sauce over the top and added some extra grated cheese.
About four months ago, maybe more, we decided to buy our first pasta maker… but it’s taken this long until we’ve actually been motivated enough to use it. Not that we thought it would be terribly time-consuming and difficult, but I guess we haven’t thought of actually getting in and testing it out! After watching it done so many times on MasterChef, we really wanted to see how good fresh pasta was.
It turns out, it’s actually heaps of fun to use and quite easy once you get the hang of it. Plus, it’s true when people say that once you taste fresh pasta, you’ll never want to go back to the packaged variety!
We just used a basic recipe for this first time which we found at: http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/12460/basic+fresh+pasta
There’s also suggestions for other things you can add to it to make different variations – beetroot pasta, fresh pesto pasta, spinach pasta, saffron pasta… I’m sure you could basically try anything!
Once we had made the pasta sheets, we cut out circles using a cutter as we were making half ravioli, half fettuccine.
For the ravioli, we mixed in a bowl some chopped spinach leaves and ricotta. Once the circles were cut in the pasta, we put a dollop of the spinach mixture into the middle, put a light layer of whisked egg around the outside of the pasta circle and then put a second piece of pasta on top, closing it up properly by using a fork around the outside.
The fettuccine was easy as there’s an attachment with our pasta maker. Once we’d made a pasta sheet, we just put it through the attachment and we had fettuccine!
For cooking it, we had a boiling pot of water with some salt added and it probably took about 8 mins for the ravioli and a bit less for the fettuccine. It was all trial and error though – we kept testing it until we were happy with it!
We served it with a semi-dried tomato sauce and some of the spinach and ricotta mixture on top. Delish!!
Please see the photo gallery for the whole process!
This is an easy meal to prepare and cook, plus very delicious!!
We made bruschetta for a small entrée using a bread stick, cherry tomatoes, little onions and mushrooms. The lamb cutlets were seasoned with Moroccan spices and served with a sweet potato mash, asparagus and the bruschetta topping. So easy but so tasty!
I was feeling really uninspired at work today while thinking of what to cook for dinner… In between my hectic periods of actually working of course! 😉
A very handy site that I love looking through is taste.com.au. It seriously has thousands of recipes of every type of meal. There’s even handy recipe collections which allow you to select a type of meal, for example, curries or stir-fries, and then it brings up all the different types of meals in that category.
I was feeling like a healthy stir-fry as we had a massive eating weekend celebrating our anniversary. Lots of delicious, very special food… and we definitely ate alot!
This is the stir-fry I made tonight and it was so good! My lovely husband was very impressed and kept on saying how much he loved the flavour. We both agreed that this would be added to our favourite meals as it was also very cheap to buy all the ingredients! Highly recommended! The photos just don’t do it justice as it looks bland and colourless here… it looked very bright in real life with the vegetables and noodles providing lots of colour!
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/5688/beef+stir+fry+with+rice+noodles
Also, make sure you check all the ingredients properly if you’re celiac, but I’m pretty sure this is also gluten free! Instead of soy sauce they used Tamari sauce. Otherwise, soy sauce works perfectly.
(Please excuse the photos – the quality is pretty shocking as my good camera had run out of battery!)
Poppit – Last night, we had my family over for dinner and for something special, we thought we’d make the ultimate favourite family meal, a roast. We chose to make roast lamb and spent the afternoon preparing the vegetables and seasoning the lamb before putting everything into the Weber and BBQ to cook. Now, you’d think that something involving just roasting meat and veg would be a simple task… it probably should be! But as mentioned in our very first post, https://cookingwithapuppet.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/cooking-with-a-puppet-an-introduction/, we only have a Sunbeam Pizza “Oven” which doesn’t even fit a whole pizza let alone a roast and full trays of veggies!
We didn’t let this stop our feast preparations and we set up the BBQ with a boosted-up tray so that the veggies wouldn’t be touching the plate where they would risk being burnt. The two roast lambs went into the Weber and everything seemed to be going smoothly for the first hour after which time, the gas bottle for the BBQ ran out. We frantically decided that the lamb would probably keep cooking as the weber was still hot and changed the bottles over… but it seemed that the BBQ had just decided to stop working all together and would only produce a tiny flame (definitely not worthy of heating up an entire BBQ).
I quickly ran inside, switched on the pizza oven and as the lamb was already on its way to being done and had shrunk in size, we squeezed them into the little oven and switched the veggies over to the Weber. Once again, everything seemed to be going well until a burning smell wafted in from outside where the veggies had begun to burn as they were now sitting directly over the flame.
Although there was quite a bit of drama involved in the cooking, everything turned out pretty well (minus a few burnt pieces of sweet potato). The meat was very tender and the rosemary, garlic and sea salt seasoning really gave it a nice flavour. The family all agreed that it was delicious – but don’t families always say that?
The veggies prepared and waiting to be cooked
Almost forgot to take a photo of the meal! Excuse the poor presentation and nibble from the side – by this stage, we just wanted to eat!
Cooking with a Puppet 