Mothers Day

I went home to surprise my Mum last weekend for Mothers Day! 

I planned a lovely 4 course meal with Indian flavours throughout and I'm very happy to report that it all went extremely well! I was very proud as I feel it was a mark of how far my cookery skill has come! 

The menu was as follows:

Spicy Potato with a coriander raitha, red chilli chutney and a lemon and rocket salad

Tandoori Prawn skewers with a butter sauce (which I got from James Martin, but cooked under a grill rather than a barbecue!)

Slow cooked lamb with pilau rice and greens 

Red velvet cake - this recipe has a lovely texture but unfortunately for whatever reason never turns out red, just a reddish brown but I'll post the link anyway - (Velvet Cake)

Everything came out extremely well and I hope to post recipes for all of the individual courses soon! 

Oaty Cookies

The term is drawing to a close, and as I am going home I wanted to use up all my perishables before the Easter Holidays, so I got baking and treated all my flatmates to an Easter treat! I had loads of oats left so I made some oaty cookies. They were yummy and chewy, but mind, this recipe makes over 40 cookies, so if you only have one tray like me, you're gonna have to do several rounds!

This is the recipe that I used Easiest Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, but I used 200g of oats and 150g of flour because I wanted to use up my oats! I also used about 100g of caster sugar instead of the granulated as it provides a smoother mixture and I don't like too use a lot of sugar. 

Also, if they seem really soft and are almost falling apart when you try to pick them up when you take them out of the oven, that means they are perfect! Don't leave them in the oven too long, because as soon as they cool they harden quite considerably, and some of my batch ended up quite crispy because of this! (unless of course you like a crispy cookie!) I also whipped up a batch of brownies with some chocolate I had - my flatmates were quite pleased!

I had some leftover food that needed using up from past cooking, some carrots, mangetout, a lemon, a potato, about half a tin of lentils and an onion, and I needed something for lunches for the week. In my cupboard I had some spices and some couscous so I decided to make myself a couscous salad.

I chopped the carrot and the potato into cubes, cut the mangetout in halves, sliced the onion and fried gently in a little oil with a some garlic powder, curry powder, chilli and cumin powder. After about 5 minutes I put the lentils into the pan, to give them a chance to soak up the curry flavours.  Meanwhile, I put some couscous in a bowl with a lid, and squeezed in the juice of the lemon, salt, some ground coriander and some chopped fresh coriander, poured over the boiling water and left for five minutes to cook. When the veg were cooked through, I simply mixed them into the cous cous and left in the fridge until I was ready to take it out.

I ate this both hot and cold, simply reheating a serving in the microwave or taking it into uni as a packed lunch, I also ate some of the veg/lentil mix on its own which was really nice and very filling too!

Carrot Cake

My first time making a carrot cake, I was a bit nervous about how it would turn out but I needn't have worried! This cake was so wonderfully moist, I was really pleased with the turn out. I used Rachel Allen's recipe and it was pretty easy. The only thing was that I bought whole walnuts and it took quite a while to do all of the chopping but the result was more than worth it. I also used lemon zest rather than orange zest because I prefer the lemony flavour, which worked really well. I really recommend this recipe, with or without the icing, to have with a nice cup of tea!