Spaghetti Carbonara

This is the spaghetti carbonara I cooked for Claire the other night after she requested it 🙂

Very easy to make, all you need is:

• Handful of spaghetti
• Pack of bacon lardons (pancetta would be better if you can find it)
• Olive oil
• 5 egg yolks
• 100ml double cream
• 70g Parmesan cheese
• Salt and pepper

Cook the spaghetti in boiling salted water as per packet instructions. While this is cooking fry the bacon in  a little oil until crispy. For the sauce put the egg yolks, cream, and Parmesan in a bowl and mix together. Once the spaghetti is cooked, drain and immediately toss with the bacon and egg mixture. By doing this the residual heat in the spaghetti is enough to cook the egg mixture but not scramble the eggs so the sauce stays smooth. Season with salt and pepper and serve with more Parmesan on top if desired.

Here for a change is my windows media playlist while making this 🙂

Beef Empandas

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I was watching Saturday Kitchen on Saturday funnily enough, when I saw the Hairy Bikers come up with this recipe. Luckily I had all the ingredients in the kitchen to go ahead and do this.

For the pastry:

• 450g Plain flour
• 2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1 tsp Salt
• 60g Butter
• 60g Lard
• Ice cold water

Pastry is a lot simpler than I imagined so I will probably use this again and not including chilling time only takes about 10 minutes. All you need to do is combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl. Cut the lard and butter into small chunks and add to the bowl, then just rub the ingredients together until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the water a little at a time until it forms a soft dough. Rest in the fridge for an hour and you should get this:

While this is resting in the fridge you can get on with your filling:

• Olive oil
• 1/2 Beef stock cube
• 400g Beef mince
• 1 Onion
• 1 Green pepper
• 3 Garlic cloves
• 3 tbsp Red wine
• 1/2 tsp Cumin
• 1/2 tsp Paprika
• 1/2 tsp Chilli powder
• 12 Olives sliced
• Salt and Pepper for seasoning
• 1 Beaten egg for brushing pastry

Firstly add some oil to a frying pan and add the stock cube, stirring continuously for 30 seconds. Add the beef and fry until brown. In a separate frying pan add some more oil. Add the onion and green pepper and fry until soft. Add the garlic and cook for a further minute. Next add the wine, cumin, paprika, chilli powder, olives and seasoning and cook for a further minute. Finally add the meat and juices, stir well, and leave to go cold. You should end up with something like this:

Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C. Roll your pastry out to about 5mm thick and cut out circles. For this I used a saucer that was about 4″ diameter and with this amount of pastry I got 10 circles. Brush the beaten egg around the edge of the pastry and fill half of it with your filling. Fold over, crimp the edges and place on a  greased baking tray. As I said I ended up with 10 so there was plenty left over for lunch the following day! Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown. You should end up with what is in the picture at the top.

Claire did some rice with this adding some mushrooms, spring onions and kidney beans which made a nice accompaniment for these empandas.

Cottage Pie

 

Made this the other night with inspiration from Delia 🙂

The basic ingredients are:

• 800g mince beef (or lamb mince for shepherds pie)
• 2 onions
• 3 carrots
• 1/4 swede
• Fresh parsley
• Fresh Thyme
• Cinnamon Powder
• Beef stock (or lamb stock)
• Salt and Pepper
• 1.8kg Potatoes
• 3 leeks
• Good handful of cheese

According to some wise words (thanks Claire :)), it’s better to make sure your mashed potato is cold before spreading on top of your mince mixture. So first thing I did was peel the potatoes and boil for around 10 minutes. Once they were boiled they were drained off and mashed with some butter.

While the potatoes are boiling it is a good time to peel and chop your veg. Half the onions and slice about 1/2cm thick. The carrots and swede are just diced into small chunks.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan and add the onions. Once they start to brown, add the carrots and swede and fry for about 5 minutes. Put to one side to cool

Put the mince into another frying pan or sauce pan or whatever you have and brown off. Next add the onions , carrot and swede and mix together. Season this mixture with a good pinch of salt and pepper then add your herbs. If you want you can add some flour to soak up the fat that has come off the meat as it cooks or just pour it out. Gradually add the stock until it has all combined then cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

Pre-heat the oven to 190 degrees. I used a 6″x12″ baking dish for the pie. Once the mixture has cooked, pour into the baking dish. Next get your mashed potatoes and spoon over the top and make sure it covers the mince mixture. Wash and peel your leeks and cut into 1cm thick slices then scatter over the top. Scatter over the cheese then put in the oven and bake for 25 minutes or until the leeks are starting to brown.

Et voila! you should have what is in the picture

Thrashing to Send More Paramedics while making this!

 

Welcome Back!

Yes I’m back with my fancy new page!

It has been a while since I posted, a combination of moving house and lack of internet access has caused this, so now I will be posting again on a regular basis again.

Coming up soon, homemade soup, roast pork, Christmas dinner and cottage pie.

Just To Prove…

Lee Cooks
Originally uploaded by mooosh.

Just to prove it, here I am cooking and rocking! Me and my Anthrax apron rocking out making samosa’s!

Something To Try With Roasting Meat

Something I have tried a couple of times, but alas I don’t have pictures! I tried this with lamb first of all and something similar with beef the other day.

With the lamb, when I was preparing it, I sliced up some garlic, and had some fresh sprigs of rosemary. Using a sharp knife put random cuts into the skin. In these cuts put in your garlic slices and your rosemary sprigs, and that’s it simple as that. Put into a pre-heated oven and roast until cooked. The garlic and the rosemary flavour the meat so well, rosemary especially goes well with lamb.

I did a similar thing with beef the other day. I just used garlic this time and did the same as with the lamb. It was then drizzled in olive oil and put in the oven for an hour and a half before it was removed, covered and left to rest for 20 minutes. I find Beef a bit tough sometimes but the garlic flavoured it and helped it stay nice and juicy.

Give it a go, hopefully you’ll like it too

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!

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