All morning cooking

I spent all morning cooking.. all experimental and taken from other sites.. but anyhoo all delicious and all successes =)

In the order cooked.. I give you..

Coconut loaf cake from BBC Good Foods

Picture is my own, and added a splash more milk than the recipe said because the cake mix felt too dry.

Roasted spiralised sweet potato.

I went on the spiraliser band wagon more than a year back… went through a lot of courgettes… got thoroughly sick of courgetti and haven’t really done any since.  A colleague at work recently bought a spiralizer and has been bringing courgetti to work though… so that’s inspired me to try again… albeit with sweet potato instead of courgetti as I’m still sick of courgetti 😛 The full mixing bowl in the picture (which spread out into 1.5 oven trays) was from two medium sized sweet potatoes.  TWO!!  Costing £0.93!  So if you ever feel tempted to buy the measly tiny little 150g pre-spiralised vegetables from the supermarket… do the math and figure out how much less it’ll cost you to spiralise it yourself!  You don’t even need a £25 spiralizer.. I started off with a £5 julienne peeler.

I seasoned mine with olive oil, salt, and a last splash of balsamic vinegar (yay, i can finally throw the bottle away!).  And then, because I had split it into a large and a small oven tray, I sprinkle small one with some fajita spice mix I also really want to finish and bin.. and the other with garlic granules and black pepper.  After being roasted in the oven at about 200C for 12 minutes, they were cooked but still crunchy.  I didn’t cook them any longer as most of them were going into boxes for lunch and will cook a bit more when heated in the microwave.. but i’d have left it a few minutes more if entertaining and eating on the same day.

Duck Breast

Yesterday’s foraging trip to the supermarket got me some half price duck breasts… and as I’d never cook just duck breasts before… I looked to the internetz for some tips.  Taking instructions from here and here, I cooked them with the cold pan, sear, and oven for 10 minutes method.  The oven had already been on all morning for the cake and the sweet potato… and I seared the duck while the sweet potato was in.. so it wasn’t all that much extra electricity.

The duck cooked beautifully and tasted wonderful on it’s own or with a touch of hoisin sauce, buuuuuuuuuuut…. but my lunch boxes still weren’t full (yes I know there’s a cake in that picture.. but i can’t fill my lunch boxes with cake!!)… so I scratched my head and scratched my head and came up with…

 

Spinach & Kale thingy

Frozen spinach is one of my freezer staples… and I had bought kale yesterday.  I took some inspiration from the many times my indian colleague had described to me her favourite dish of saarson da saag, and with some help from the back of the fridge (a few last sprigs of wilting parsley.. and some lemon grass I never got round to using), I made a spinach and kale thingy.

I microwaved six ‘blocks’ of frozen spinach for 3 minutes.. and meanwhile I heated a saucepan, fried up some chopped garlic, followed by the lemongrass.  I then threw the kale and spinach in.  I wanted something more savoury because neither the sweet potato or duck had much salt on it.. something soft because the other two were both kinda dry.. and I wanted flavours which both added to and complimented what was already in the box.. so to the greens I added salt, some sabji masala powder, a spoon of hoisin sauce, and a spoon of wholegrain mustard (that’s another need-to-finish-this-jar-that’s-been-in-my-fridge-too-long ingredient).

And finally.. the boxes were full.. and I can rest.. I ate lunch from the bits of everything I put in bowl instead of in a box.. noted that I didn’t have anything left for dinner.. but eh.. who cares? I’ve got 3 boxes of yummy food.. and dinner tonight can be noodles and premade frozen wontons.