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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!
On Australia Day this year, as we were both not drinking alcohol, we decided we would try making some fresh juices as a fun and healthy alternative!
This recipe has become one of our favourites. As we don’t have a juicer, we just use our blender and add some soda water and ice to increase the liquid content (as there’s still so much fibre left with blending, it’s a good idea to add either some extra juice, ice or soda water).
For this one, we added fresh apples, pears, lemon juice, lime juice, ginger, soda water and ice. Easy and very refreshing!
If you’re looking for a dessert to impress, then this delectable number should be definitely added to your list! It’s most probably not one for slimming the waistline… however it’s perfect for if you’re cooking for a special occasion or just feel like an extra treat!
You can find the recipe in the Women’s Weekly “Show-Stopper Desserts” which also contains a number of other amazing recipes!
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
Recipe from “The 20/20 Diet Cookbook” – made from all natural and gluten-free ingredients! Delicious breakfast (and also to snack on!)
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.
This recipe was absolutely amazing! I felt like fresh fish for dinner and thought that a dill and caper sauce would be perfect. I quick look through the Taste.com website and I found this one. I used Nile Perch which didn’t have an overpowering flavour and was complimented well by the sauce.
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/8251/whiting+with+lemon+dill+sauce
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!
Puppet had his night of creative cooking last week and decided, after watching Masterchef, that he would attempt the Beef Stronganoff. I had the job of getting the beef stock, brandy and sauce mixture ready. When we first added it to the meat, it was tasted so strong of alcohol that we thought we’d wasted the crazy amount of money we had spent on buying 1.5 kg of beef eye fillet. Thankfully, after a few minutes of simmering away, the strong alcohol flavour disappeared and once the cream and some more tomato paste had been added, it was just delicious!
Of course, as we had 1.5kg, we had to triple the recipe from Masterchef as they has only used 500g. We also served with rice instead of pasta.
We had my family over for dinner and I have to say that there wasn’t much conversation happening while eating – except the constant praise for how wonderful it tasted! I’ll definitely be trying more of these types of recipes throughout winter!
For the Masterchef recipe: http://www.masterchef.com.au/beef-stroganoff-with-parsley-and-black-pepper-fettuccine.htm
Cooking with a Puppet 