Cook, Bake and Eat do Ready Steady Cook #6

So we’ve been a bit rubbish haven’t we? It’s been almost four months and we haven’t shared any Ready Steady Cook shenanigans with you – oops! Please forgive us. We can’t really say anything other than things have been busy and we’ve just been rescheduling challenge #6 again and again. We promise to do better from now on though – and do yell at us if we fail in that respect. You have our permission! Anyway we are now back with a bang and a truly scrumptious recipe, enjoy!

The ingredients that Lau chose were: beef mince, parmesan, kidney beans in a chilli sauce (a mistake buy it has to be said), bread and sweet potatoes. Quite a good mix of ingredients if you ask me and I honestly couldn’t wait to get creating a delicious dish. After much deliberation I finally decided on a meatball bake which it turns out is delicious and easy to make. My two favourite things in a recipe!

So how do you make it I hear you ask, well here goes. First off you will need the following:

• 450g beef mince
• 2slices of bread
• 2eggs
• 1giant sweet potato
• 1tin of kidney beans in chilli
• half a jar of passatta (200g)
• 20g grated parmesan cheese

1. Pulverise two pieces of bread into breadcrumbs then combine them in a large bowl with 450g of mince and two eggs.
2. Leave them in the fridge overnight or for a couple of hours so the mixture is easy to work with, then form them into meatballs. In terms of size you should aim for about twenty small ones – think Ikea meatball sized!
3. Pop the meatballs in the bottom of your casserole dish and bake them in the oven for 15-20 minutes on 180 until they are almost cooked all the way through.
4. Meanwhile peel and slice your sweet potato into slices about 2cm thick.
5. Add them to a pan of boiling water and bring to the boil.
6. Once the water’s boiling cook them for another ten minutes or so until a fork goes in easily.
7. Drain the potatoes and slice each thick slice into two or three thinner slices.
8. Next mix your tin of kidney beans with 200g of pasatta.
9. Once your meatballs come out of the oven pour the tomato and bean mixture over the top of them so it’s spread evenly.
10. Layer the sweet potatoes on top and then sprinkle with 20g of grated parmesan cheese
11. Return the dish to the oven and cook for half an hour until the dish is piping hot.
12. Eat and enjoy!

I honestly was so pleased with how this turned out – it really was so scrumptious and it makes a change from using mince for spag bol, chilli or lasagna. Plus it’s perfect for rainy, dark and depressing days – so why not give it a try. We’d love to know how it goes down in your house!

– Fi xxx

Cook Bake and Eat do Ready Steady Cook #4

Greetings fellow foodies and how are you this merry Wednesday? Can you believe that there’s just over a month until Christmas, how exciting is that – I’m not sure I can bear it. I’m almost buzzing with excitement and I can’t wait until it’s okay to wear my Christmas jumper in public, it’s still too soon right? Today’s post is the fourth instalment of this here Ready Steady Cook business, I bet you’re excited to see what we’ve been nibbling on aren’t you?! Well read on…

So as Lau mentioned in her last post, we’ve sort of changed the rules of the challenge, so now it’s five ingredients and not £5. As let’s be honest sometimes you want to treat yourself which you can’t always do for just £5. The ingredients Lau picked for me were a pack of sausages, lots of raspberries, brownie mix, sweet potatoes and digestive biscuits. As you can see from the ingredients, someone fancied brownies! As for what I made, I went for a classic autumn recipe with the sausages and made a toad in the hole, which was out-of-this-world in its deliciousness. It was so good that I now want it every single week, there’s just something about the crunchy top of the Yorkshire pudding and the squishy doughy inside – scrumptious pairing if you ask me.

The toad in the hole was a breeze to make, simply

• cook the sausages for ten minutes in your dish (add some vegetable oil so they don’t stick)
• Combine two eggs and 140g plain flour to form a smooth paste. Then add in 175ml of milk a bit at a time, stirring continuously.
• Pour the batter mix over the sausages so that they are 2/3 covered
• Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes
• If you’re like me you’ll forget to take pictures of the finished article, whoops! It was just too good I couldn’t help it!

I served out toad in the hole with ketchup and sweet potato fries, see here for the recipe we used. An interesting combination I agree, but delicious nonetheless!

For pudding I created a new form of brownie: The raspberry, chocolate and biscuit brownie AKA brownie heaven! To make these wonderful creations you do the following:

• Line your brownie pan and then spread the bottom with broken up digestive biscuits
• Make up the brownie mix as per the instructions on the pack before adding in half of your raspberries – slowly stir to combine
• Pour the mix over the biscuit base
• Sprinkle the rest of the raspberries on top
• Bake as per the brownie mix instructions

So there you have it, an amazingly delicious ready steady cook meal, what do you think, did I do good?

Now over to Lau for the scores, argh the pressure! Fi x

Hello, here are the scores on the doors –

Use of Ingredients – 10/10

Ingenuity – 10/10

Taste – 10/10

So full marks all round from me. Both of the dishes that Fi cooked were completely delicious, used all the ingredients well and had clever thinking so I couldn’t mark any other way!

Lau xx

 

Ready Steady Cook #2

Massive apologies one and all as it’s taken me FOREVER to actually write up this post about part two of our Ready Steady Cook challenge. I’m not sure what’s taken me so long apart from life generally getting in the way, so sorry about that and let’s get back to the business of a cooking challenge! As you might remember it was Lau’s turn to choose the mystery ingredients for me to cook with, and she presented me with the following: Scottish mackerel fillet (£2.00), milk chocolate (30p), a potato (98p), basic digestives (31p), Spinach (50p) and a pot of double cream (85p). In total my six ingredients came to £5.04, so only marginally over budget and actually if you remove the cost of the squares of chocolate and numerous digestives that I ate during the cooking process then we’re probably under budget! 

I was ever so slightly concerned when presented with my ingredients, not the sweet ones as I knew straight off what I’d make with those, but with the mackerel. Confession time: I’ve never cooked with mackerel before and I’ve only ever eaten it in pate form so I wasn’t sure where to start! I automatically thought pie but I didn’t know what kind really, but thankfully my good friend, the Good Food website, came to my rescue as I found this recipe for a mackerel pie which contained all of my ingredients. Perfect you say? I followed the recipe almost exactly:

• Boil the potatoes until they are almost ready to eat
• Cut them into chunks and lay half of them on the bottom of the two dishes
• Remove the bones and skin from the fish and throw the flesh on top of the potato layer
• Add the remainig potatoes to the top
• Pour over the cream
• Cover the dishes with foil and bake on 190°C for half an hour
• Remove the foil and bake for another 25 minutes until brown (or you’ve lost all patience!)
• EAT with a side salad of spinach leaves

This mackerel pie was absolutely scrumptious and I can highly recommend it for the upcoming cooler evenings. As for the pudding side of things, I went for a simple rocky road recipe as with biscuits and chocolate it was begging to be done! Thankfully we have a massive collection of nuts and dried fruit in the cupboard so I had lots of options to add to the ingredients Lau gave me. For the Rocky Road I simply:

• Melted the chocolate in the microwave
• Mixed together the broken up digestives, raisins, sultanas, flaked almonds, hazelnuts and cashews in a separate bowl
• Combined the two
• Pressed the mixture into a lined tray
• Cooled it all in the fridge for two hours before cutting them into large squares

This is possibly my favourite pudding idea, as it’s just so so simple and tastes divine. Also you don’t really need a lot to make it scrumptious! So there we have it my two yummy dishes: Mackerel and potato creamy pie and rocky road – yummy! Now we just need to know what Lau thought of my endeavors. So Lau, over to you…

Use of ingredients: 10/10 – I felt a bit mean with these ingredients, but Fi used them so well that she really does deserve top marks. 

Ingenuity: 7/10 – the fact that Fi picked something completely new deserves high marks, but the rocky road appears quite a lot in the flat so I think a seven is fair here. 

Taste: 10/10 – Totally delicious and the fish dish is one of my new favourites.

– Fi and Lau xx