FROM THE VEG BOX - WORKING DINNER

So, Jaimie is now working. Working hard for the money. So dinners aren't as leisurely as they once were, and a lot more 'grabbed between the two screens'. If you're interested he's been working on this little wonder.

But I still want to make sure we're eating proper like, even if it's quick.

So this is a little root vegetable curry that I knocked up. Can also be enjoyed without 3 computer screens.

2 onions

ginger about a thumb sized piece

3 garlic cloves

750g root veg - I used what we had in the veg box, so parsnip, cauliflower, carrot and potato

6 cardamon pods

2 tsp cumin seeds

3 tsp coriander seeds

2 tsp ground turmeric

1/2 tsp chilli powder

500ml veg or chicken sock

single cream

Peel and chop the onions into hunks and blitz in a food processor until you get a rough mince. This is thoroughly satisfying. Peel and grate the ginger and peel and finely slice the garlic cloves. Also, peel and roughly chop the roots into chunks.

Now the spices, remove the black seed from inside the cardamon pods and grind them up along with the cumin and coriander seeds.

Heat the oil in a large pan and soften the onions, so they don't go brown. Add the ginger and garlic and after a few minutes add the ground spices along with the turmeric and chilli powder. It looks awesome:

Cook this through until you can smell the waft of the spices then add all the chopped veg. Add 500ml of chick or veg stock and partially cover with a lid and leave to simmer gentle for about half an hour. Carefully stir in the cream but don't let it boil or it'll curdle. Check if it needs a little more of anything. And serve with basmati rice, all fluffy like, and some nan bread.

Why have brownies, when you can have....

BLONDIES!

I've only recently discovered these truly amazing things. I had huge cravings for Brownies when I was pregnant with Laika, and I'm sure if I'd have known about them I'd have gone wild for them. I recently made them as an experiment for the Sisters Burn Christmas fair, Sister Sledge for the cake stall:

(you can see them in the front middle!)

So here is my recipe for creating these lovely things. And here's some I made earlier:

200g white chocolate

300g light muscavado sugar

250g unsatled butter

4 eggs, beaten

200g plain flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

85g peanut butter

100g unsalted peanuts (optional)

This recipe makes about 10 generous pieces.

So, preheat your oven to 180 degrees. When I made these for the fair I did them in a commercial oven. If you can get hold of one of them, so much the better! Grease and line a square tin. Over a low heat, melt together the chocolate, butter and sugar and stir until melted and combined. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Thoroughly mix in the eggs. Add the flour, baking powder, peanut butter and if using, the peanuts. Mix together until combined. Spread this mixture into the tin.

Right, the amount of time this takes TOTALLY depends on your oven. You want them to be squidy in the middle and crisp on the outside. Timing this is difficult without overdoing the outsides, so you may have to play around with it. I reckon on anything up to 45 minutes, but have a look after about 25 minutes.

Cool in the tin, and then portion by cutting into squares. Then eat. Alone.

FROM THE VEG BOX - CANDLE LIT CELERIAC

Who says celeriac can't be sexy. Well, no one actually. But I thought I'd made the effort this evening for dinner, seeing as we were using up the remnants of the veg box and dinner was going to be soup. Nothing wrong with soup for dinner, it's just sometimes it feels a little underwhelming.

So I lit a candle, in the hope that would make it feel a little more... sophisticated.

But it turned out that the soup was actually rather good. It was a suggestion from Jaimie, but I cobbled together some ingredients and pulled it together. The apple in the recipe isn't very pronounced but gives the soup a really fresh after taste. Which is nice. I suggest adding a little lemon juice in this recipe. This is because I added a rather posh ingredient, lemon and thyme infused salt to be precise. I imagine not many people have this to hand. So a squeeze of lemon should do the trick.

So, here is my Candle-lit celeriac and apple soup recipe (serves 2/3)

1 onion, chopped

1/2 head of celeriac, peeled and chopped

1 bramley apple, peeled, cored and chopped

600ml vegetable stock

200ml single cream or milk

salt and pepper

lemon juice (optional)

In a pan, sweat the onions in a little oil until soft. Add the celeriac and apple and heat through for about 10 mins to soften. Add the stock and reduce the heat to a simmer, and leave to simmer for 20-30 mins until everything is a little mushy. Remove from the heat, stir through the cream and add salt and pepper. Take a hand blender and blend until a smooth consistency is achieved. If the soup is a little thick, add a touch more milk or cream, or indeed more stock. If using, finish with a squeeze of lemon, perhaps some parsley, and serve with crusty rolls.

LEFT OVER CHRISTMAS CRANBERRIES...

For some reason I had a bag of cranberries left over after the Christmas period. I wasn't really sure what to do with them until I came across a recipe for cranberry and cream cheese muffins in January's Good Food magazine. I thought I'd make a little adjustment to the recipe so now they're:

Cranberry, clementine and cream cheese cakes

This recipe used up all the cranberries I had left over, about 300g which left me with a nice extra batch of cranberry sauce which went well with some pork pie for lunch.

100g full fat soft cheese

400g caster sugar

300g cranberries

200g plain flour

50ml clementine juice

2tsp baking powder

2 eggs

75ml sunflower or vegetable oil

1tsp vanilla extract

First off, you have to make your cranberry and clementine sauce. Heat the cranberries in a pan with 100g of the sugar and the clementine juice over a medium heat. It should take about 20 mins for you to achieve that sort of syrupy, jammy texture you're looking for. The skins of the cranberries should split, but mash any of the more stubborn ones with the back of a wooden spoon. Take off the heat and allow to cool completely. You'll need about 200g for the cakes and the rest, spoon into a sterilised jar.

Preheat the over to 180 degrees.

Beat together the cream cheese with 25g of the sugar and set to one side.

Sift the flour into a bowl and add the remaining sugar and baking powder. Add the eggs, oil vanilla and cranberry mixure and gently stir together. It doesn't matter if the mixture is lumpy. Divide it up between muffins cases, the mixture should do about 15-16 cakes. Make a small dip in the centre and pop in a tea spoon of the cream cheese mixture. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden.

GOT A NEW PINNY!

This pinny was from my Ma for Christmas. It's from the amazing Anthropologie, my new favourite shop. I like it so much I decided to overhaul the blog's design in its honour.

FROM THE VEG BOX

New Year, new you. So we decided that we'd be all ethical and good and eat more veg. So, on recommendation from James and Charlotte, we opted for the Able & Cole large veg box, twice monthly. Turns out its reasonably economical. And there's no packaging, they pick up the box and they're very nice on the phone to boot.

I've decided to regale you with recipes from my veg box, and this is the first this I made.

Laura's veg box curried parsnip soup.

1 large onion, roughly chopped

1kg parsnips, roughly chopped into small cubes

2tbsp olive oil

3 sprigs or so, of fresh thyme

3tbsp honey

4 tbsp mild curry powder

1.5 litres chicken stock

200ml double cream (naughty!)

bunch of fresh flat leaf parsley, or coriander to serve

So, preheat the oven to 200 degrees. In a roasting tin toss the onion and parsnips with the oil, thyme, honey and curry powder. I used mild curry powder as I'm a wimp, but feel free to spice things up with more potent blend. Pop into the oven for about 30mins until all the parsnip is cooked through and very soft.

When this is nearly done, get your stock into a large pan, along with the cream and bring to a simmer. Add the roasted parsnip and onion, being sure to pick out the thyme stalks. Simmer these in the stock and cream for about 10 mins. At this point, if you like, you can add a ladle full of the stock into the roasting tin, placed over the heat, to get all the lovely roasted flavour from the bottom of the pan, and add this to the soup. Remove the pan from the heat, and with a hand blender, blend the soup until smooth. If using a hand blender, be patient, it might take a wee while, but it's worth it for non-lumpy soup. If the soup is a little thick at this point, add some more stock to get a smoother finish. You don't want it to have the consistency of baby food, because that's gross.

Lovely, serve it with snipped flat leaf parsley or coriander and little toasted nan breads.

IT'S BEEN A WHILE...

So, it has been a while. I've been off cooking up a storm though. And here she is...

And from the off, she was influencing the culinary pursuits around her:

Her name is Laika Ida Barker. And she was 7lb 12oz. And she was born August 26th 2010. My best creation yet.