You might recall that a little while ago I started making a quilt cover to brighten up my bedroom. I finally finished! I’m thrilled with the result and it looks even better in real life.
Donna Hay: Sumac Chicken & Almond Quinoa
I am a meal planner. I sit down every weekend and plan out 5-6 dinner options for the next week and then go shopping. I find that it saves time both grocery shopping and when I come home from work, it saves money, it makes it easier to eat healthily and last but not least, it encourages me to make use of the awesome stash of recipe books I have and not get stuck in a dinner rut. That’s where this recipe comes in…
Last week, I decided to branch out from Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals and try something new from Donna Hay No Time To Cook. I made some additions along the way and the end product was so delicious that I have decided to share my version of her recipe.
Ingredients:
For 2 people
Sumac Chicken
- 1 Tbsp of oil
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 1 large chicken breast (or enough for 2 people)
- Sumac*
- Preserved lemons – 1 segment (ie a quarter of a whole lemon)**
Almond Quinoa
- 1 cup white quinoa (you can use couscous but you’ll need to adjust the liquid ratio)
- For quinoa in a rice cooker I use a 2:1 water/quinoa ratio. For couscous just follow the packet directions.
- 1 tsp vegetable stock
- pinch chilli flakes
- 25g butter
- 3 green onions/shallots, finely sliced
- 1/3 cup toasted, slivered almonds
To serve
- 100g natural yoghurt
- 1/8 bunch flat-leaf parsley (leaves only), finely chopped
- juice of half a lemon
- Baby spinach (a large handful for each person)
* It’s worth finding sumac, a substitute won’t really cut it here.
**Preserved lemons are my addition and I think they’re awesome but probably not essential. If you use preserved lemons go easy with the salt as vege stock and preserved lemons are both quite salty.
Method
- Mix 2 cups of water with the vegetable stock & chilli flakes. Put quinoa and water in a rice cooker to cook.
- Defrost the chicken if it’s frozen.
- Put a fry pan on to heat up and while it is heating up toast the slivered almonds.
- Dice green onions, dice the parsley and dice/mash the preserved lemons while the almonds are toasting.
- Crush garlic and place in a bowl with the oil and preserved lemons. Cut the chicken into large chunks or cut the breast in half lengthways like a schnitzel.
- Place chicken in bowl with garlic and sprinkle with copious amounts of sumac. Maybe try half a tablespoon at a time?
- Fry the chicken until it is cooked.
- While the chicken is cooking, mix the yoghurt, parsley and lemon juice in a small bowl.
- Once the quinoa is cooked stir through the butter, green onions and toasted almonds.
- Place the spinach in the middle of a plate. Top with the warm quinoa which will slightly cook the spinach. Put the chicken on top and add some of the yoghurt sauce to taste.
Meanwhile, I’m just under halfway through sewing my quilt cover together!
Bright & cheerful geometric quilt cover
Welcome to the beginning of my new project! Over the next few weeks I will be attempting to make a new quilt cover inspired by this one that I saw on Pinterest a while ago. I love that picture. It’s so bright and happy but the geometric print is still quite mature and grown-up. Our bedroom is currently very neutral – which I love – but a change would be nice.
The thought of cutting out and sewing together all those little tiny squares gives me a migraine so as I said, my version will be ‘inspired by‘ that one only.
Quilt covers for a queen size bed are apparently 210cm x 210cm. I have designed a triangle which is easily divisible into 210cm. Hence, my triangle template is 10cm wide at the base and 21cm high (not including a 0.5cm seam allowance).
I have chosen a variety of cotton twill/broadcloth fabrics. Choosing was pretty hard as I didn’t want it to be too feminine. I’m not 100% sure how much I’ll need but I have seven colours. I purchased 0.7m of the 112cm wide broadcloths and 0.5m of the 150cm wide twill. This calculation is based on dividing the square metres of the quilt cover by 7 (ie 2.1 x 2.1 = 4.41m2/7 = 0.63). All up, it’s about $38 worth of fabric.
By my calculation I will need 43 triangles per row. While I haven’t completely committed to cutting out hundreds and hundreds of triangles finalized my design, there would theoretically be 10 rows and 430 triangles. Thus, the arduous process of tracing and cutting begins…
So far I have cut out enough triangles for one complete row. It should look something like this once I sew it together…
Yes…once I sew it together……………
Review: The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
I have finally caved in and purchased a copy of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. This is a compilation of recipes from the kitchen of blogger Deb Perelman.
First Impressions…
There is a good variety of recipes for each meal of the day, there are pretty pictures and a lot of words.
Each recipe begins with an anecdote to personalise each dish. The book is somewhat similar to the Smitten Kitchen blog in this respect. While these anecdotes give the book a warm and inviting it makes the book seem quite wordy in comparison to other cookbooks. This style shouldn’t come as a surprise to her regular readers.
The book contains reasonably simple, home-style food and steers clear of pretentious, hard-to-locate ingredients most of the time. It is no 15 Minute Meals – some recipes look particularly time consuming. The Sweet Thing section contains some particularly interesting recipes that are sure to impress, for example, the Chocolate Hazlenut Crepe Cake, or the Red Wine Velvet Cake with whipped mascarpone. However, the next on my list is the Deepest Dish Apple Pie which looks so, so delicious!
Downsides…
Layout. The composition of the book means that the list of ingredients is frequently on the reverse side of the page with the instructions. This means that you are constantly turning the page (with dirty hands) to double check ingredients and quantities. In so many cases it seems that this problem could have been cured simply by reordering pages so that story/ingredients & the instructions were always on a double spread. The fact that it hasn’t been considered is a little annoying.
Another (minor) gripe is that each section begins with an introductory page setting out the recipes in that section. However, this contents page of recipes does not contain page numbers. It would have been a small effort to include the page number and would have made locating recipes much simpler.
Test run…
Last weekend I decided to give the book a whirl and made Fig, Olive Oil & Sea Salt Challah Bread.
This recipe involved making the fig filling (which I did the night before) and making the bread dough. The recipe was quite accurate however I found I needed to a touch more water to my dough. (Tip: just wet your hands while you’re kneading the dough to get the perfect texture and to avoid adding too much water)
I had some difficulty with the technique to create 2 rolls/logs of dough, each 90cm long. Mine were nowhere near long enough and started breaking at about the 50cm mark. I think this probably just means I need more practice.
The end result doesn’t look as good as the recipe book however, I was happy with the outcome. I served it for breakfast with butter, slices of smoky ham and fresh apple. Yum!
Overall…
This is a good book and one that fans of the blog will love. If you want a cookbook with a sense of warmth, with impressive home-style cooking, give this one strong consideration. It is one that I am happy to have on my shelf and I have enjoyed reading the stories from cover to cover. I’m looking forward to making that deep dish apple pie…
Where have I been???
It’s been a while since my last post and that is because I have been enjoying a fantastic, 2 week holiday in Japan. We flew to Osaka and then on to Sapporo the next day.
We were lucky that our day in Sapporo coincided with the Sapporo Snow Festival. As part of the Festival, there were tonnes of ice sculptures throughout the town. Some were quite small and sponsored by local businesses but the main area had massive sculptures – truly impressive. I imagine that the sculptures have historic/cultural significance but unfortunately that is not my area of expertise.
The following day we caught a bus to Hirafu village where I spent a week learning to snowboard. I can already ski but I figured that if there was ever a time to learn to snowboard it was in Niseko. There was so much snow and it was incredibly beautiful!
We stayed in a townhouse called ‘Hurry Slowly’ in Hirafu lower village and when we weren’t snowboarding we were either eating at the local restaurants, watching episodes of Homeland or playing bananagrams. As for the restaurants, I’d highly recommend The Niseko Supply Company for breakfast and their delicious crepes (and free wifi!), The Green Farm cafe (for breakfast or lunch) and The Fridge Door Bar for their amazing mulled wine and other delicious hot drinks. All the food was great but in my opinion those places rate a special mention for their awesomeness.
We caught the long and tedious bus back to the Sapporo airport and flew to Tokyo. In Tokyo we used AirBnb to rent an apartment in Shibuya – it was great to have a little extra space! On our first night we had dinner at this cute little Teppanyaki bar in Roppongi – Panic Restaurant (KY Building, B1F 3-16-14 Roppongi, Minato-ku Tokyo. It was fantastic! Hands down the best dinner I had in Japan! Although food was cooked in a traditional Teppanyaki bar, the food was somewhat westernised (think bruschetta, potato & spicy sausage, spinach & bacon & beef noodles). They also had leafy green salads which I was absolutely craving after days of ramen and deep fried dinners. As a side note, the chef is hilarious and makes quite a production of preparing food!
We looked at museums, went shopping, walked through parks, observed from observatories and ate a lot of food! I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.
Shinjuku, buildings near the Tokyo Government observatory, Takeshita St in Harajuku
Cherry blossoms in Hama-rikyu Gardens
Shibuya Crossing & a traditional wedding at the Meiji Shrine in Yoyogi Park
Me trying to look my classy best on the Omotesando & an exhibit at the Edo-Tokyo Museum
PS. If you go to Japan, try the donuts from Mr Donut. You won’t regret it!
PPS. Apologies if you’ve already seen this post, WordPress swallowed the formatting and half the pictures and I had to repost it.
DIY Hipster Vases
You’ve probably seen those vases in fancy homewares shops that are jars wrapped with twine into bundles. Here’s an example. I’ll admit that these can look pretty funky and I’ve always wanted a set BUT at the end of the day, they are offcast jars wrapped with twine…I cannot bring myself to pay money (in some cases A LOT of money) for jars and string.
So, I was making Spaghetti Bolognese the other day and realised that I had two, perfect-sized, identical jars just begging to be wrapped with twine and hipsterized.
For my version of hipster vases you’ll need:
- Empty jars, cleaned and labels removed (I think that you could even use mismatched jars and it would look cool!)
- Twine – I used good old gardening twine available from Bunnings for about $2 for 100m or something ridiculous but you might want a thicker string for a better look.
- Scissors
- Non-slippery surface
Instructions:
- Make a slip knot in one end of the string. Make sure you have a 20cm tail on the string.
- Slip the open portion of the slip know over one jar and pull tight.
- Wrap the string around the other jar so that the knot is between the two jars. Tie the string to the tail of the knot so that this new knot is also between the two jars (or as close to between them as you can manage).
- Using a figure eight pattern, go round the jars checking the string alignment until you have the look you’re after.
- Leaving approx. 30cm of string free, cut the string.
- Using this leftover string wrap it several times around the string in the gap between the jars and secure with half-hitch (I think that’s what they’re called) knots. Any old knot will do as the string is pretty rough and shouldn’t slip.
- If you’re a true hipster I guess you’ll fill it with a rusty old pair of scissors or something else ironic. All I had to hand was some fake flowers and assorted stationery…seriously though, these would make really cute bud vases for a party or wedding. Enjoy!
What’s on my shelf
Every time I go into a book shop I’m astounded by the number of cook books on the shelves. On Book Depository there are nearly 60,000 cook books in the ‘general cookery’ category alone. There are so many to choose from. One of my resolutions for 2013 is to make more effort to cook a greater variety of food and actually cook from all the wonderful books that I own. I’d love to hear the recipe books you have on your shelf and what you love/hate about them. With this in mind, I thought I’d get the ball rolling and share which ones I have on my shelf & why. In no particular order…
Marie Claire real + simple by Michele Cranston
This book is hard to describe. The recipes are split up seasonally and range from salads & grills to roasts, desserts and drinks. Most recipes are fairly straightforward and use fairly mainstream ingredients with the odd exception. It has very pretty photography.
Why is it on my shelf? It was a gift & I like the way the recipes are categorised.
No time to cook by Donna Hay
This book is fantastic. The recipes are fast & simple, as the title suggests, but they usually pack a giant punch of flavour. There a recipes for everything: breakfasts, dinners (one pan wonders!), desserts & everything in between. My favourite part of this book is the ‘Cheats’ section which includes fast, easy ways to whip up sauces, marinades, rubs, dressings & sides etc.
Favourite recipes? Mini bacon & egg rolls, Apple slaw and Cucumber salsa
Madison Entertains by Briget Palmer
A cook book from one of my favourite magazines. This book was published in 2007 and I got a free copy with a subscription to Madison Magazine. It is a compilation of recipes that previously featured in the magazine. Recipes are clearly categorised into Summer, Autumn, Winter & Spring. The photography is gorgeous & it is great inspiration for food presentation. The only downside is that this book is no longer widely available. If you ever see it you should grab it!
Favourite recipes? Pear, witlof & blue cheese salad, duck & green mango salad, banana & pecan loaf & choc malt cookies
Family Circle Best of Kids Cooking
This was the first cook book I ever owned and I loved it so much as a child. It has snacks, main meals, microwave recipes and desserts. My childhood specialty was the chocolate Fudge Cake.
Why is it still on my shelf? Mostly nostalgia but the dessert recipes are actually pretty awesome & easy.
I ♥ Macarons by Hisako Ogita
The ultimate guide if you want to learn how to make Macarons. This book explains how to make the batter and the filling with step by step instructions and pictures. It also has flavouring and gift wrapping ideas and easy desserts to make with the left over egg yolks.
Why is it on my shelf? It makes macarons simple. The best parts are the accompanying picture with every step of the instructions and the troubleshooting guide for when things don’t work out.
Food, Fashion, Friends by Fleur Wood
This is my absolute favourite cook book. That’s a big call I know. It contains nine menus and each menu has all the recipes you need for a party including styling tips and music suggestions etc. The attention to detail is exquisite with each menu having a unique photoshoot and distinctive paper and font. The recipes range from very easy (the majority) to slightly tricky.
Favourite menu? Brunch in the city
Delicious. Quick Smart Cook by Valli Little
This book is simply a kitchen work horse. The recipes are reliable and there is a very large variety of recipes categorised by ingredient or dish mostly.
Why is it on my shelf? It was a very thoughtful gift. The variety of recipes makes this an excellent source of inspiration to use up ingredients and if you’re stumped for ideas.
4 Ingredients by Kim McCosker & Rachael Birmingham
For clarity, I have the green book. Can’t say that I love this one. The recipes are pretty uninspiring. So much so that I haven’t really used it very much. I think that it is extremely over-hyped and I wouldn’t bother personally.
Why is it on my shelf? It’s small and I often forget about it. I can see that at a pinch this one might be good for those “I haven’t shopped in 3 weeks and I need to cook dinner for 10 uninvited guests” moments.
What Katie Ate by Katie Quinn Davies
This book is only a recent acquisition so I can’t really comment on the recipes. They look delicious! They also seem to err on the side of hearty/wintery fare (that’s just a first impression though). Beautiful doesn’t do this book justice. This book contains the most amazing photography and I love the styling.
Why is it on my shelf? Because I love beautiful things and couldn’t resist. Also the recipes look delicious.
Mrs Beeton’s Everyday Cookery
I have my mum’s copy from when she was in High School. It’s a guide to making almost anything in the kitchen but I use it mainly for making jams and preserves. The copy I have linked is the 2011 updated version of the book which I am sure is much more readable than my 40 year old copy.
Why is it on my shelf? Because everyone benefits from a bit of old-fashioned wisdom and tips every now and then.
Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery by Martha Swift & Lisa Thomas
I picked this up from the Book Depository for about $7 in one of their 24hr sales. The cupcakes look adorable but I have to confess that I’ve never actually cooked any of them. I had great intentions…
Why is it on my shelf? Because I aspire to be a great cupcake maker one day.
Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals by Jamie Oliver
For a man that cooks beautiful food, this is one of the ugliest covers ever. The book looks much better without the paper sleeve. This is another recent purchase that I’m yet to cook from (bought it today!). Since drafting this post I’ve actually cooked two meals both of which were fab. You really do need a good food processor to do these recipes easily and in 15 minutes. I’ve also ordered the Philips Jamie Oliver food processor since acquiring this cook book. I like that some effort has been made to consider the nutrition factor in many recipes (although this is not strictly a healthy food cook book).
Why did I buy this one? Because I am time poor and would like to cook a bigger variety of food each week.
Smitten Kitchen by Deb Perelman
I don’t actually own this one but it is right at the top of my wishlist. I love the Smitten Kitchen blog- Deb Perelman’s writing style is hilarious. Thanks to Smitten Kitchen I can now poach an egg 
