My homemade hummus is the best ever. Why? Because I can adjust it to taste exactly how I like it. And so can you. Prefer a garlic hit? Add more garlic. Like the tang of lemon? Add some more. While cooking from scratch may not save you time, it does mean you can have perfect tasting food.

I’ve been making hummus as a protein / fibre snack lately to eat on whole wheat crackers or with vegetables. I’ve never been a huge fan, but lately I’ve fallen in love with it’s subtle flavour. The biggest challenge is to make the lot last more than one day. Makes just under 500g.

Method

1. Blend or process until smooth. If the mixture is too thick, add a little water to loosen it up or until you have your preferred consistency. Taste and season, adding more garlic, tahini or lemon juice as suits your tastes.

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This is a basic grilled or fried chicken breast with a little difference – topped with cheesy potato rather than having the spuds served on the side.

This dish is nice with a salad, but I have a pregnancy aversion to salad at the moment, so vegetables it was. The bonus of using vegetables is that you can add them to any leftover potato mixture for bubble and squeak the next day (just fry the mixture in a little butter like fritters).

That is exactly what we did for breakfast. The little fella insists on being involved in all cooking (who am I to argue with that! Hopefully the interest in cooking doesn’t wear off!). When I explained I was cooking bubble and squeak he noddled solemnly and said ‘noisy breakfast’. However there was total silence as it was eaten. Serves 4

Method

1. Boil whole potatoes until almost tender (a reader the other week suggested steaming spuds instead to ensure they don’t get overcooked. Great tip!) Cool and grate. I left the skin on when boiling and most of it stayed on the grater when I grated the spuds. If you over cook the potato (um, like I did) it’s more like mashed potato than grated, but that’s just as good!
2. Meanwhile, halve the chicken breasts horizontally so that you have two fillets or schnitzels. Lightly hammer or roll to flatten.
3. Combine potato, onion, cheese, egg and chives.
4. Fry chicken in a little oil until brown on both sides and cooked through or grill under the griller/broiler until cooked. Place on a tray and top with the potato mixture.
5. Grill under a medium hot grill until potato mixture is browned and cooked through (about 5 – 10 minutes).

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Our Christmas lunch with family was a bring-a-dish affair, the best way to enjoy Christmas day without having all stress and financial burden of catering for everyone. As well as potato salad, I took the raspberry swirl cheesecake above. You can find the recipe for this cheesecake here at Taste.com.au.

I baked this on Christmas eve. Being a cheesecake novice, I was nervous that I had taken on too much. The stakes were high. I had promised cheesecake and had no back up plan if this didn’t turn out.

Well, after a few choice swear words and two hours baking rather than one, the cheesecake didn’t look nearly as good as the one pictured on the recipe, but it sure tasted sensational! (Oh yeah, even if I do say so myself ).

This cheesecake recipe has a lot of ingredients, including a whole tub of mascarpone, meaning that it’s not the cheapest dessert to make. To bring the cost down, I made the mascarpone, which is relatively easy to make, much cheaper than the store bought stuff and tastes just as good, if not better.

To compare: a tub of supermarket mascarpone is $23 per kilo. Making your own with fresh cream comes in at around $7.90 a kilo, a big saving.

The recipe below yields about 400g of mascarpone cheese.

Method

1. Heat cream over medium heat in a saucepan until it reaches 85°C (a candy thermometer is useful here). Make sure you stir regularly to ensure the cream doesn’t scold on the bottom. Many recipes suggest heating the cream in a double boiler over boiling water, but I found the cream would not reach the desired temperature (even after constant heating for 20 minutes) so ended up transferring the cream to a saucepan over direct heat and this worked fine.
2. Once the cream reaches 85°C, add the vinegar and continue stirring until it is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon (a couple of minutes). Remove from heat and let sit to cool. The cream won’t visibly curdle like it would if you were making ricotta, for example, although you may see some whey. It looks more like custard.
3. Line a sieve with a double layer of cheesecloth or muslin or a new, clean chux and place over a bowl. Pour the cream into the sieve and sit in the fridge over night (I placed a saucer over the top to cover, but don’t squeeze or press down on the cream). What you will have in the morning is a thick, creamy mascarpone – thick like cream cheese, but with a creamy rather than tangy taste. Yum!

If you’re wondering how to use mascarpone, it is traditionally used in tiramisu, but is nice served with fruit (fresh, poached or char-grilled), tossed through pasta (instead of ricotta, say), spread on toasted fruit bread, or can be used in pretty much anything that asks for cream – mascarpone gives the dish a decadent touch.

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This potato salad is always a hit at BBQs and functions, is easy to make and can serve a lot of people on a very small budget. I’ve included prosciutto, four thin slices cost less than a dollar and add a gourmet touch, but for a vegetarian version, leave out the prosciutto altogether.

I took this salad to our Christmas celebrations and so used a kilo or so of potatoes, I usually allow for a potato or so per person (depending on the size of the spuds) and adjust the rest of the ingredients to suit.

Above I used garlic chives, which we have growing in our garden. I love being able to go out and snip a few chives for the salad – for free!

I’m surprised I haven’t shared this recipe before – it’s one that I learned from my mum and that I often take when I’m asked to ‘bring a salad’.

Method

1. Boil potatoes in salted water until tender and drain.
2. Place eggs in cold water and bring to the boil. Boil for 12 minutes then drain and rinse under cold water. When cool enough to handle, peel eggs and roughly chop.
3. Fry prosciutto over medium heat until browned, roughly chop and set aside.
4. Combine mayonnaise and sour cream. Taste and adjust ratio according to preference. In a large bowl, toss the potatoes, eggs, prosciutto and mayonnaise mixture until well combined. Add half of the mayo mixture and increase until you have the spud to sauce ratio you prefer.
5. Using a pair of kitchen scissors, snip the chives over the potato salad, lightly tossing to distribute. For presentation, sprinkle a little prosciutto and chives over the top.

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We got in some Christmas baking last week. Just before the tummy bug hit. While the weekend was not much fun, last week we had lots of fun making mess and eating biscuits.

I wanted to share this cheap and easy recipe from the Down to Earth website, which is what we used to bake the bikkies. The biscuit dough is just butter, flour, sugar, sweetened condensed milk. You can find the recipe here.

I actually halved the dough recipe because the original makes a huge batch. I froze the left over condensed milk; I’m not sure how it will go out of the freezer, but it will be used in baking also, so it probably doesn’t matter if it goes a bit grainy.

We rolled the dough and cut Christmas shapes from it. Just like playing with play dough but better tasting. They would be great to decorate, but they didn’t last that long in our house .

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Well two weeks stretched into four, a lot longer writing hiatus than I had intended, but it was a much needed break. I have a little confession to make: I haven’t been so much sick as morning all day and night sick . We have another member of the family on the way, due at the end of June.

As I’ve spent much of the last few weeks either in bed or indisposed, cooking has been well and truly off the agenda and there is a dearth of new recipes from our household at the moment and a very empty fridge and pantry from lack of shopping.

I fell back on this old staple to use up what we had on hand; this is a very flexible recipe that you can adjust with whatever ingredients you have in the fridge. Adding cooked chicken gives it a nice protein boost, but as our freezer was empty (for the first time in years), our pasta was vegetarian. The mustard and paprika along with the cheese make a tasty sauce.

Method

1. Melt the butter over medium heat and cook onion until soft and translucent without browning. Add the garlic and cook for a further minute or so.
2. Stir in the flour and cook for another minute. The mixture should look bubbly.
3. Add the milk a little at a time, stirring constantly to make a smooth sauce. Add enough milk to get the consistency you like. The sauce will thicken slightly as it cooks and it is always best to add less than you need and then add more later to thin the sauce out rather than adding too much.
4. Add the paprika, mustard and cheese and stir until the cheese has melted. Now the most important part: taste the sauce and adjust to your liking.
5. Stir in the cooked pasta and vegetables and heat through before serving.

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It’s Halloween today, so I thought I would share another pumpkin recipe: mini muffin- tin pumpkin quiches.

These mini quiches are similar to this recipe, previously shared, except that they are baked in a muffin tin, and therefore take much less time to cook. Of course, you can make any quiche recipe ‘mini’ by following the directions below.

These make great finger food, picnic lunches, school or work lunches or an out-and- about lunch. Makes approx. 8.

Method

• Preheat oven to 180°C. Lightly grease a muffin tin.
• Over a low heat, sauté onion and garlic until softened, without browning. Add the dried herbs and sauté for a further minute, then set aside to cool.
• Beat the eggs and cream, then beat in the mashed pumpkin and cheese. Finally, stir in the onion mixture.
• Cut rounds from the pastry using a pastry cutter or glass, and line each muffin tin hole with pastry. Spoon or pour quiche mixture into each hole.
• Bake for 10 – 20 minutes or until quiche is set. I find that in my oven, things cook more evenly if I turn them half way through.

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We stopped eating beef about five months ago. The reason is that beef doesn’t agree with me. My digestive system has been much happier since. While I think this decision is not only good for me, but for the environment as well, beef mince is a frugal staple and finding replacements can be expensive.

Lamb mince is both difficult to find and expensive (although a first: Woolies is cheaper in this case. Our local Woolies sells lamb mince for $10 a kilo, while the wholesaler charges $27 a kilo and you have to order it in advance). Pork mince is another alternative and reasonably priced. Both can be substituted successfully for beef mince.

Method

1. Prepare noodles according to directions on packet.
2. Brown the mince, breaking lumps up with a spoon. Drain.
3. Heat a little oil and add the cabbage, capsicum, mushrooms and garlic. Sauté until vegetables are just tender.
4. Return mince to pan and stir through peanut butter and soy sauce (taste and add more if preferred).
5. Toss the noodles through the mince mixture, heat and serve.

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This dish was adapted from two recipes: I used this recipe for the satay sauce, halving the quantities and leaving some of the ingredients out and adding a little lime juice; and this recipe for the meatballs. Then I tossed the both with some noddles and cooked vegetables. It was quite a hit, even the little fella telling me it was ‘ummy’ as he slurped peanut buttery noodles.

I didn’t use all of the sauce, just add enough to coat rather than drown out the noodles – the rest was frozen; I found the sauce to be a bit claggy and added water to loosen it up a bit once I mixed in the noodles.

One packet of noodles was sufficient for the two of us and the little fella; if you’re feeding more, use two packets of noodles and maybe a bit of extra veg and enough sauce to coat.

The ginger in the meatballs works really well to cut through the nuttiness of the sauce. Ginger in a jar is one of the few cheats that I use in the kitchen.

As usual, use whatever vegetables you have in the crisper. Serves 2 – 4

Method

1. To make the meatballs: combine all ingredients, squooshing well with your hands. Roll teaspoon-full amounts into small balls and set aside in the fridge.
2. To make the sauce: sauté the garlic in a little oil over low heat until soft. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir for a few minutes over low heat until combined and thickened slightly. Set aside.
3. Prepare noodles as per packet directions (usually soak in boiling water for a few minutes).
4. Fry meatballs in a little oil over medium heat until browned and cooked through. Remove from pan.
5. Sauté the vegetables in the same pan until softened slightly. Return the chicken to the pan and toss in the noodles. Stir in enough sauce to coat and make the dish saucy. Add a little water if needed to loosen the sauce. Serve.

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I know. I should be banned from doing any sort of food photography. This dish does taste much better than it looks in the photo. The pork is marinated in herbs and garlic and the vegetables, honey roasted. What’s more, it’s cheap and easy to throw in the oven and forget about. Serve with your favourite greens for a complete meal. Serves 4.

Method

1. Combine the oil, lemon juice, rosemary and garlic and pour over pork chops. Marinate for one hour or over night.
2. Preheat oven to 220°C. Place vegetable in a baking dish, drizzle over honey and olive oil and toss to coat.
3. Bake vegetables for 40 minutes, turning once.
4. Place chops on top of vegetables, drizzle with marinade. Roast for for 15 – 30 minutes until pork is just cooked through (cooking time will depend on the thickness of the pork chop). Serve with greens.

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