Rosemary & Yoghurt Roast Chicken

2 Comments

Roast chicken

This heat is making me super lazy! So here’s another easy & super tasty recipe:

Rosemary & yoghurt roast chicken

a cup of plain yoghurt (you can use low-fat / Bulgarian or Greek)

sprig of fresh rosemary, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

pinch of salt

pinch of freshly ground black pepper

2 tbs lemon juice

half a cup of sauvignon blanc

3 tbs olive oil

Mix all ingredients and marinade one whole chicken (with skin is best!) for about an hour.

Roast in the oven or your grill for an hour and 45mins at a low heat of 150C. The low heat makes the chicken more succulent and if you’re using a grill (like a Big Green Egg or Weber), it imparts a delicious smokey flavour to the chicken. I used a small dutch oven to roast chicken in – for an hour and 20mins and the last half hour I placed chicken directly onto the grill to brown and get crispy.

Delicious – we just kept it simple and had a tomato, basil & feta cheese salad with the chicken.

Enjoy! X

Nicoise Salad

Leave a comment

Nicoise Salad

Does anyone else feel lazy on a Monday night..? Sort of still in weekend mode, and to top it all, the fridge is kinda empty too and we seem to have just skipped spring altogether and gone straight into summer – so salad it is!

(I cannot wait for our veggies to finally start growing and to be able to just pick whatever I want straight from the garden!  Hubby has made a fabulous vegetable garden and is still busy planting… (The chickens keep digging up and eating all the seeds!)  Anyways, that’s about 3-4 months away from reality and until then I’ll have to make do with shop-bought veggies.

So this is what I rustled up tonight – my take on a Niçoise salad, using sardines:

2 tins of Portugese sardines in vegetable oil (remove bones from middle)

3 hard boiled eggs, halved

lettuce

small plum tomatoes, quartered

olives

danish feta cheese

capers

olive oil

Red wine vinegar

Toss together, season with freshly ground salt & black pepper and enjoy! X

Chef´s kitchen

Leave a comment
Chef´s kitchen

Ferm LIVING kitchen linen
$15 – madeindesign.co.uk

VIPP bread box
$200 – madeindesign.co.uk

Linea kitchen gadgets tool
$13 – houseoffraser.co.uk

Kitchenaid
$125 – connox.com

Crate and barrel
crateandbarrel.com

Stelton jug
$33 – connox.com

Muuto kitchen gadgets tool
$39 – connox.com

Majamoo black trivet
$21 – finnishdesignshop.com

Metaphys kitchen gadgets tool
$32 – connox.com

Stelton sugar bowl
$33 – connox.com

Bodum kitchen gadgets tool
$13 – connox.com

Warthog Roast

Leave a comment

Big Green Egg

What a fab day – sunny Joburg with good friends, good wine & good food!

We tried out a new recipe today for warthog (I’ve never made or eaten warthog before…) from Shiny Happy People by Neil Roake (I love this cookbook!).

1 leg of venison (bush pig – I used warthog)

5 onions peeled & quartered

2 thumb-sized pieces of fresh ginger, peeled & crushed

freshly ground salt & black pepper

olive oil

200ml sherry

225g quince cheese (quince jelly)

Rub meat with olive oil, salt & pepper.  In a large casserole, brown meat on all sides & set aside.  Add onions & ginger to the same casserole used to brown the meat and sauté.  Add sherry to deglaze.  Return the meat to the casserole and add random dollops of the quince jelly.  Cover and slow-roast in a pre-heated oven of 160C For 3-4 hours.

Now, I adapted this recipe slightly by doubling all the quantities (except the onions) because of the huge piece of meat I used.  Also, we roasted it in our Green Egg.

The result – delicious and slightly sweet meat!  Next time I would just add more liquid halfway through the cooking process and have the temperature even lower – maybe at 120C for 4 hours.  The sauce was just a tad bit too reduced for me… But still delicious nonetheless!

Warthog roast

Sides:

Mielies (corn on the cob) with butter – always a braai favourite!

Roast beets with balsamic vinegar, olive oil & feta cheese

Scrumptious salad with roasted tomato & Danish feta with avocado – made by my friend Karin

Dessert:

Summer Berry Pavlova

This might just be my all-time favourite dessert – and healthy too! (Just egg whites & fruit… Oh yes, and a bit of cream and sugar too… Just a bit ;))

Summer Berry Pavlova

6 egg whites

pinch of cream of tartar

1.5 cups of castor sugar

1.5 tsp corn starch

pinch of salt

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp red wine vinegar

Whisk egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks form.  Add sugar slowly, along with the corn starch & salt until glossy and stiff peaks form.  Fold in vanilla & vinegar.  Place on baking paper, in a round or oval shape.  Bake at 120C for 1.5 hours and let it cool in the oven.

Top with sweetened whipped cream (I use regular cream, whipped with castor sugar), fresh strawberries (cut and sprinkled with castor sugar), blueberries, gooseberries & pomegranate seeds.  Dust with icing sugar, serve & enjoy!

x

Friday – Green Egg Roast Chicken

2 Comments

Roast chicken & caprese salad image

Can you say yum?!

The Big Green Egg – one of my favourite cooking tools! Yes, it’s a ‘braai’ of sorts, but you can do anything in it, I’ve even baked a cake! There is just no comparison to the taste it gives to your braai goodies, so yum.

Anyways, so enough punting of the Egg – here’s tonight’s recipe:

1 whole free range chicken

spicy Cajun rub

Robertsons portugese chicken spice

1 lemon

Olive oil

Rub chicken with olive oil, Cajun rub and Portuguese chicken spice.  Slice lemon in half and place both halves inside the chicken.  In a roasting dish, roast chicken in your Green Egg / Weber / braai for 40 minutes. After 40 minutes, place chicken directly onto the grill and grill for another 40 minutes until done. (You want it to be just juicy and cooked – not overcooked! I think we had the temperature at about 180C)

While the chicken was roasting, I also added a few slices of aubergine onto the grill, along with the chicken (aubergine was dipped into the olive oil and spice mixture in the roasting dish that the chicken was in).

My take on a caprese salad:

aubergine slices (grilled as explained above for about 20 minutes)

mozerella cheese

sweet basil

tomato slices

toasted pine nuts

olive oil

salt

Assemble by layering slices of aubergine, cheese, tomato and basil. Drizzle olive oil and add a sprinkle of sea salt. Sprinkle with toasted nuts.

We enjoyed this scrummy meal with a glass of Van Loveren Pinot Grigio.

Enjoy! X

Kids bunkbed – DIY

3 Comments

Finished bunkbedStaining & varnishing of bed

I decided on a bunkbed for the boys – Seb is ready to sleep in a ‘big boy bed’, and by the time Francois is ready for a bed, Seb can move to the top bed, or the beds can be taken down and just be 2 single beds. Either way, I still love the bunkbed look, plus it’s a great space-saver! (Something we don’t have a lot of in our little country cottage!)

After shopping around a bit, I found a great Small Business that could make it just the way I want… But, and it’s a BIG but, it would’ve taken 3 months minimum to supply!

Eek – I don’t have the time or patience for that, so, I decided to Do It Myself… (Well, sort of – we bought a ready-made natural pine bed, which I then stained and varnished myself.)

It was really easy to do and didn’t take that long (ok, it took 3 weeks, as I could only really do it during the boys’ nap times, and I didn’t work on it every day…).

And here it is – thanks hubby for assembling! 😉

(Bunkbed & mattrasses from Lotter’s Pine, wood stain is a Woodoc gel stain {dawn red} and the varnish is a matt sealer, also from Woodoc.)

x

Thursday – Asian-style venison with butternut squash

Leave a comment

Image

I don’t know how much venison they eat in Asia, but nevertheless, this is my Asian-inspired venison with butternut squash:

500g stewing meat (I used venison)

2 tbs soy sauce

1 tsp fish sauce

2 cloves of garlic

1 thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, roughly chopped

2 red chillies, sliced open length-wise

peppadew spice (one my faves!)

1 cup of chicken stock

1 tbs honey

Place all these ingredients in your slow-cooker (so easy!) and cook on high for 3 hours. After 3 hours, remove meat from cooker and chop into pieces and remove bones. Return to cooker and add another splash of soy sauce, a dash more water and 3 tbs of sweet chili sauce. (Venison loves something sweet!)

Cook for another hour and serve with roasted butternut squash.

Enjoy! X

Wednesday – summery angelfish salad

2 Comments

I saw a snippet of a master class from Masterchef last week, where they made some sardine salad and it really looked delish, but then of course I couldn’t find the recipe.

So, inspired by that, I created this fresh and flavoursome angelfish salad:

For the greens, I used a butter lettuce torn into pieces (enough for 2 people), topped with grilled carrot ribbons and green beans, cucumber ribbons, diced papaya and thinly sliced fresh pears.

I grilled the carrots and beans for 8minutes.

Dressing for the carrots & beans:

Half a tsp sesame oil

1 tsp lemon juice

2 tbs soy sauce

2 tbs honey (I grilled the carrots & beans in this dressing – keep leftover dressing)

Dressing for the salad:

2 tbs olive oil

Juice of half an orange

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp honey

Pan fry fish in butter & olive oil for about 2-3mins on each side until just cooked and golden on the outside.  Place cooked fish in the leftover dressing from the carrots.  Cut into strips and place on top of salad.

This was a seriously delicious salad – perfect for summer!

For dessert, I made a vanilla pannacotta. For some reason I just cannot get this right! It’s either been too soft, or the gelatine hasn’t dissolved properly and I was left with a funny layer at the bottom of the dessert, or like tonight, I used too much gelatine and the pannacotta was too firm… Next time will be a winner! Nevertheless, it tasted great and now I know exactly how much gelatine to use next time.

For 2 pannacottas:

500ml cream

a quarter cup of sugar

the seeds from half a vanilla pod

1 sachet (10g) gelatine powder from Woolworths

Heat the cream slowly over a low heat, add sugar and dissolve.  Add vanilla and gelatine.  Stir over low heat until gelatine is dissolved completely, taking care not to let it boil. The gelatate does take a while to dissolve, so be patient!

Serve with fresh strawberries – enjoy! XImage

Image

Birthday cupcake – Red Velvet meringue

Leave a comment

Image

Today is hubby’s birthday and as you do on a birthday, you you have cake for breakfast!

Our favourite red velvet – from a cake recipe of a fellow baker friend, Rozanne Pieters, and my own twist: a light and fluffy meringue topping.

250g butter (I used salted)

125ml sunflower oil

2.25 cups of sugar

2 free range eggs

1 bottle of red food colour (40ml)

1 cup of buttermilk

10ml baking powder

2ml salt

2.5 cups of flour (all purpose)

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

Cream butter, oil & sugar together.  Add buttermilk, red food colour & eggs.  Add all dry ingredients and fold into the wet mixture. Place dollops of the mixture into cupcake casings in a muffin pan. Bake in a pre-heated oven of 180C for 20mins.  A toothpick should come out dry when you test it.

For the meringue topping, whisk 1 egg white while slowly adding about half a cup of castor sugar.  Add shelf a teaspoon of vanilla essence and a pinch of cream of tartar. Whisk until glossy and soft peaks form.  Pipe onto cooled cupcakes.

Enjoy! X

Tuesday dinner

2 Comments

Mince pockets filled with raisin relish and wrapped in bacon

I do love bacon! Who can live without it?! Like I’ve mentioned previously, most of the meat I use is venison (blouwildebeest to be exact), but all these recipes can be made with beef too.

I usually make this with stewed prunes and cling peaches, but tonight I used the leftover raisin relish from yesterday’s dinner.

500g venison mince

1 tablespoon peppadew spice

half a teaspoon salt

half a teaspoon paprika

half a teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

2 tablespoons raisin relish juice

1 egg

1 tablespoon tomato paste

Mix all ingredients together. Now, take your bacon rashers and place them in a muffin pan in a cross-shape with the ends draping over the side of the pan (to fold over the filling later.). Add a spoonful of mince mixture, press down and create a hollow for the relish. Add spoonful of relish and cover with more mince.  Wrap the ends of the bacon over the parcel and secure with a toothpick. Bake at 180C for 30 minutes until cooked.

Serve with a salad (I made a simple salad of lettuce, roast pine nuts, carrot ribbons, fresh basil and tomatoes)

Image