Category Archives: Food

Food-related tips and advice

Make gratin with leftover tagliatelle

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Don’t throw out your leftover pasta//tagliatelle as they will make a lovely diner the next day.

Spread your leftover pasta (stored overnight in the fridge) over the bottom of an oven-proof dish. Here, I also used leftover fish (trout). Break a couple of eggs into a bowl, add milk (about 100-150ml), enough to cover about 3/4 of the pasta), an optional dollop of double/single cream, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour over the pasta and sprinkle grated cheese (about 50g). Cook in a preheated oven (180 degrees Celsius) until golden brown (about 25 min).

 Tip: add frozen peas for added colours.

Reuse the oil from preserved vegetables in a jar

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If you buy jars of vegetable in oil such as sun dried tomatoes or roasted peppers, make sure not to throw out the oil when your jar is empty. This oil, usually vegetable oil, can be used in your cooking. Handy for example when frying onions or in any recipe requiring vegetable oil. The advantage is that it already contains some flavour!

Cooking gone wrong – Meringues

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Don’t worry if things go wrong in your kitchen. It still happens to me even though I have been cooking for nearly thirty years.

I had a couple of egg whites left over from my delicious lime cheesecake. So, I decided to make meringues.

They looked lovely and delicious. But, believe me, they tasted horrible. I had a couple of mouthfulls just to make sure. They had definitely gone past the point of no return! Meringues are meant to look white. The temperature in the oven was just too high. Lesson learnt.

How to spread hard butter on bread

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To add to a previous post, I have another tip to share with you on how to spread hard/cold butter on bread. If your freezer is too small to hold all your loaves, only freeze half of them. Then, when making a sandwich, take one slice from a frozen loaf, on which to spread the cold butter, and one from the unfrozen loaf. Of course, you could always use the microwave to soften your butter but that would be cheating! ;-)

How to make healthy beef burgers

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Why is it that you cannot get men and children to eat vegetables with their burgers? I like to “hide” onions and sweet peppers in my home-made burgers so that the choice is not theirs.  ;-) It is also a healthy way to make more burgers with the same amount of meat without having to Continue reading →

How to make French flan / set custard

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Home made flan / set custard cooling on rackFollowing my post on how to use up milk, you will find below a picture-based recipe on how to make a flan, which is the French near equivalent to English set custard (only the French flan uses whole eggs not just yolk!). The following quantities will make about 12 ramekins. Continue reading →

Cool food down quickly with ice packs

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Ice pack under food for speedy coolingIn the winter, I often leave food outside to speed up the cooling process before placing it in the fridge or freezer, making sure that it is safe from any opportunistic thieves (whether my dog or the neighbour’s cat). In the warmer weather, this is not possible so you need to use another technique. Continue reading →