I love popcorn. While it seems a bit more popular in the States than in the UK, I love it more than most people (although maybe not as much as Orville Redenbacher). Just as a quickie, here are some easy popcorn balls, whether they’re for brightening up a rainy Saturday afternoon, for a movie/tv viewing party, or just because you’re a big pig like me, these take about 10 minutes and are totally worth it. Continue Reading
Category : Nibbles
Recipes are great. I love them to pieces. I love choosing my recipes, writing down the ingredients, checking what I have and then writing a new list of what I need to buy. I’m convinced more people enjoy lists than they let on. However there’s also something fun about using up what you have in front of you or picking an ingredient and basing a meal around it. Which is what I did the other day when Doug wasn’t feeling too well. This won’t be written with precise amounts of anything because I wasn’t stopping to measure, I was just chucking in what I had or felt was right! Continue Reading
Category : Desserts
I may not be big on Valentine’s Day, but if it’s nothing else, it’s an excuse to make these lovelies: Dark Chocolate/Red Wine Truffles. Sweets for your sweetie! Or sweets to bemoan your lack of a sweetie, or sweets because you’re totally awesome and confident whether or not you have a sweetie, or whatever other excuse you want to use! And besides, they’re very easy.
Ingredients
- 16 oz dark chocolate, chopped (chocolate chips work too, semi- or bitter-sweet, I prefer 60-70% cocoa)
- 1/2 c heavy/whipping/double cream
- 1/2 c red wine
- 2tbsp butter, cut into small chunks
- Optional: Cocoa powder, chocolate for tempering, whatever other things you want to use to make it pretty!
Put the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl. Boil the cream in a small saucepan, when it hits a boil, pour it over the chocolate and let it sit. Heat up the wine (microwave’s fine), not to a boil, just too hot to drink, and pour that in the bowl as well. Then get to stirring! It will look a little chunky at first, don’t worry about it. Add the butter, and keep stirring until it’s smooth and glossy. Make sure there’s no unmelted chocolate chunks, you want smooth truffles, not chunky one. At this point it’s ganache, if you want to use it as frosting or some such, go for it!
Category : Main Course
Pizza is generally seen as a default when you’re feeling lazy, not something to make from scratch. It never really occurred to me as something even remotely worth the time/effort to do myself: it’s in the category of foods that may as well be made of magic, I was just as likely to summon a unicorn as successfully make any version of it that would take as little effort and taste as good or better as the stuff that can be delivered to my door.
Monday 25th January was Burns Night in Scotland, the annual evening of drinking whisky, eating haggis and toasts to everyone under the sun by the time we’re finished. We celebrated with Doug’s Mum this year and as well as the traditional haggis, neeps and tatties – those last two are turnip or swede, depending on your part of the world, and potatoes, we also had my favourite traditional desert in the world – Cranachan.
This is a desert that even when I was a useless cook I could still make. It’s easy to make, tastes delicious and contains so many calories that it’s not even worth counting them.
