Kitchen Experiments

I really enjoy cooking, and am keen to expand my repertoire. However, a search on the internet found no cookery schools closer to me than Yorkshire, and none of the local colleges offer basic courses, preferring catering and hospitality-led training instead. So I decided to trawl through some of my recipe books and learn how to make some traditional dishes and perfect them. I will sign up for courses where I can, but what with the wedding and only me working, I can’t really afford to go South at the moment. I have signed up for a tapas course, run by a woman in Durham but held in Newcastle. This is taking place in June and I’m really excited. I’ve also found a sushi course, which I assume is run by Yo! Sushi, as there’s an outlet in Fenwick and I think a restaurant somewhere in town. In the meantime, I have tried three new recipes, all with great success. The first came from a low-fat, low-calorie recipe website (I’ve already lost a stone, so I need to keep going with this!), but was amazingly simple and very tasty. Chicken, wild rice and shiitake mushroom soup is pretty much just that, although it also uses onion, carrot, garlic and chicken stock. And I added a pinch of chilli flakes, because I operate on the principle that no recipe can’t be improved by the addition of a little spice! My version was not identical to the recipe given, but it turned out well.

Next, I made frittata, as I’ve been reading a lot on how good eggs are for you and it’s a simple but enjoyable meal. Ours was chorizo, green pepper and spring onion (what there was in the kitchen!) and was really good. I was pleasantly surprised and quite relieved, as frittata is basically a fat omelette! I think some variations will be made soon.

Finally, and still on the egg theme, I made scotch eggs, as Mark has been quite keen to try these since a friend of mine made these for us. Again, they are fairly straightforward, although it was a bit of a faff to wrap the sausage-meat around the egg! I baked them rather than fried them, so they were fairly healthy. The sausage-meat of course is quite high in fat and calories, so I suppose to make them even healthier you could use the meat from low-fat sausages (a recent discovery and now obsession of mine – in a sarnie with tomato sauce they’re pretty good!) if you could be bothered to squeeze the meat out of the casings. I don’t think anyone sells low-fat sausage-meat!

HOW Long has it been?!

I can't believe that I've not blogged for an entire year! My feeble excuse is that the year really got away from me! So a quick recap of 2011 before focusing on the new year:

We are still in Gateshead, which is not great, as the house has been overcrowded and we don't have a living room - we watched DVDs on the laptop for about 10 months and I've seen very little TV! That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I do miss CSI - and Neighbours!

What else? Well, my friend's wedding came and went, and I worked really hard to look reasonable in my 'sausage' (red satin - eek!) dress. However, about three weeks afterwards I ended up in hospital for a week with what turned out to be ulcerative colitis, which was pretty tough and I'm still getting over it.

I'm still into the running, although I've cancelled my gym membership, as once I started working and then got sick I didn't manage to get there much. I've invested in some resistance bands and I'm looking forward to trying them out. I'm also trying to get a cheap exercise bike, but Tesco have sold out of their half-price-for-new-year ones!

For the rest, my 'resolutions' are much as they were last year - more reading, more cooking and more exercise. I'm also getting married in October, so I'll be planning for that! It was a total surprise (I actually thought it was a joke at first - oops!) but it'll be fun to plan and I'm hoping the weather won't be too bad.