Courgetti (Zucchini Noodles) with Tomato and Red Pepper Sauce

This year’s trendy kitchen gadget is the spiralizer, which turns vegetables (and fruit) into spaghetti-like strands. I’ve already used it to make these sweet potato waffles which were much tastier than I expected, and really healthy. I hadn’t successfully made ‘spaghetti’ out of it yet – I did spiralize a carrot, and bring the strands to the boil, at which point they turned to complete mush. Lesson learnt!

This time I had a courgette (zucchini) in the fridge left over from making vegetable kebabs for a barbecue and remembered that courgetti was one of the first recipes I came across for the spiralizer – courgette spaghetti. You can serve it with whatever you like; I also had some tomatoes and red pepper left in the fridge from the barbecue and found this recipe from Hemsley and Hemsley, two sisters who have a healthy eating website and recipe book.

They recommend eating the courgette raw but I didn’t really fancy that as I don’t even eat courgette at all normally, so I decided to fry it in a little butter. Be aware you don’t get a huge amount of ‘spaghetti’ from one courgette; it was enough for a small portion (it was pretty late when I got home from work that night and I didn’t want a big dinner at 9pm) but otherwise I would say this amount is more of a starter, side dish or small meal. For two people, I would do three courgettes.

I changed their recipe a bit:

To serve one, you need:

Spiralizer machine

1 large courgette, trimmed flat at each end

Half a red pepper

2 tomatoes

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp of oil for the pan plus 1 tbsp for the sauce

Clove of garlic

Handful of fresh basil

Handful of cashews or peanuts (I couldn’t find cashews in the cupboard and at 9pm wasn’t going to keep looking, so used unsalted peanuts!)

NB: Ideally you need to make the sauce, or at least the red pepper and tomato part, the day (or several hours) before.

Preheat oven to 165C.

Line a baking tray with foil and spread around 1 tbsp oil. Cut the tomatoes in half and the red pepper into chunks and place face down in the pan. Roast for about an hour; I had my oven at too high a temperature so the skins on the tomatoes burnt, but they were very easy to remove. After an hour, add the garlic to the tray and roast for another half an hour.

  

Remove the charred skins from the tomatoes and pepper and squeeze the garlic out of its skin, either into a small bowl or straight into a food processor. I did this part the night before so kept the ingredients in a bowl in the fridge.

In your food processor blend the tomato, pepper, garlic, vinegar and rest of the oil, plus the basil leaves, nuts and salt and pepper.

To make the courgetti, place the courgette in the spiralizer and turn the handle until you have what looks like spaghetti. You can eat this raw, according to the Hemsley and Hemsley recipe, but I preferred to warm it through in a frying pan in a little butter. Top with the tomato and red pepper sauce.

For someone who has honestly never willingly eaten courgette, I was very surprised at how nice this tasted! I think it will take a bit of getting used to- courgette that is, not spiralizing –but I would definitely class this recipe as a success.

Courgette is known in the US as zucchini but the name courgetti definitely sounds better for this dish! But since it does also begin with Z, and that is the letter I have chosen this month for Alphabakes (which I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker) I am sending it in.

I'm also sending this to Extra Veg, hosted by Jen's Food, on behalf of Helen at Fuss Free Flavours and Michelle at Utterly Scrummy.

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Sticky Orange Chicken Thighs

I made this for a barbecue and thought it was so good I wanted to share the recipe. I used boneless chicken thighs instead of wings and drumsticks, and cooked them in the oven then finished them off on the barbecue. It's a good idea to marinade the chicken overnight if you have time but it still tastes good even if you don't do that.

The original recipe is from the BBC Food website.

You need:
10 boneless chicken thighs
2 tbsp. clear honey
half a teaspoon of ground ginger
1 tsp Chinese five spice powder
2 tsp soy sauce
3 tbsp. orange marmalade
grated orange zest from 1 orange (optional - I actually left this out as I didn't remember to buy a fresh orange)
I tbsp. olive oil

Mix all the ingredients apart from the chicken, and toss the chicken in the marinade to coat. Leave overnight if time.

Line an oven tin with foil and cook at 180C for about 20 mins, depending on the size of your chicken pieces (mine were quite small).

Finish off on the barbecue.

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Keep Me Going: Cereal Review

I’m more of an occasional cereal eater and for breakfast usually have a yogurt or occasionally eggs, with cereal reserved for the times when I want something more substantial than a yogurt but don’t have time for a cooked breakfast. I have to admit a weakness for sugary cereals which probably stems back to my childhood when Frosties were the only ones I would eat! Now, I alternate between something healthy like Special K, a nutty muesli from Jordan’s or Dorset Cereals, and the occasional treat of something like Krave!

 

I was recently sent some cereal called Keep Me Going. Richard Paterson from Freedom Cereals, the independent company behind the product, said it was developed "after noticing just how much sugar and salt were in the cereals my 3 children, in particular, were eating. The idea was to develop healthy nutritional products with functional benefits too (like low Gi) but which could be as competitively priced as the brands from Kelloggs and Nestle (Cereal Partners). This turned out to be quite challenging and it took over 2 years to get right!" 

 

So far they only have one product but are planning to expand the range soon.

 

The cereal consists of whole grain barley and oat pillows and I have to admit looks a bit like the kibbles I give my cat! It’s very healthy as it’s low in sugar, salt and fat and is high fibre and low GI. The GI testing was conducted by Hammersmith Hospital and involved around a dozen volunteers having their blood-sugar levels checked at regular intervals after eating the cereal over a two week period.
 

It took a little getting used to at first as I am used to much sweeter cereals, and I would prefer a little more flavour such as a sprinkling of cinnamon. But a healthy start is so important and it’s easy to find a way to tailor this cereal to suit you, whether that’s adding fruit or honey or a thicker soya milk – I really enjoyed it topped with low fat lemon yogurt.

 

The packaging of the cereal box tends to be quite important for children and the vibrant green colour, the image on the box and the red logo – in a writing that reminds me a little of Kellogg’s but clearly is different – would appeal. Most importantly you get a free pack of geographical trading cards in the box – so this isn’t some po-faced healthy brand that doesn’t want to have fun. You can print a world map from their website to go with the trading cards as well.

There's also a hidden code on the top flap which, if cracked, takes you to an off-menu page on their website with lots more information on codes and ciphers and another code to crack which leads to a further page; also, if you take the pack to pieces, you'll find a couple of words of 'Pig Latin' on one of the flaps. I completely missed all of that as my breakfast tends to be very much grab and go but I think it would be a lot of fun (and quite educational) for children!

I started off with the code thinking it was pretty easy but the last part is different and it took me a few minutes to figure out - but I got there in the end!

Keep Me Going is only available at Ocado at the moment; if you haven't shopped there before you can get a money off code here (or if this has expired, keep an eye out as they come up quite often). The company's second product, Keep Me Strong, which is high in protein and low in salt and sugar, will be on its way soon. It would be good to see more independent companies represented in the cereal aisle of the supermarket so I hope this brand does well.

Thanks to Freedom Foods for sending the cereal. All opinions are my own and I was not asked to write a positive review. Etc etc.                     

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Meat-Free Barbecue with Quorn

Did you know that only 25 percent of the people who buy Quorn are vegetarians? The rest, like me, buy it for health and diet-related reasons. Quorn is low in fat and calories and is a very healthy source of protein.

 

I often have Quorn sausages in a sausage sandwich while my boyfriend has the full-fat kind, but when it comes to barbecues, I never go meat free. Quorn just isn't a patch on a juicy burger - or so I thought until the brand invited me to an event at the London Barbecue School.

First a few words about the London Barbecue School. I was amazed I'd never heard of it before but then owner/head chef Alastair said it had only been going for a couple of months. They have an outdoor space in a courtyard just across the road from Peckham Rye train station (easily reachable from London Bridge in less than ten minutes), round the corner from the Rooftop Cinema I've heard so much about.

The London Barbecue School uses a ceramic barbecue called a Kamado Joe – I’d never heard of these before. They have interchangeable cooking surfaces which let you create different heat zones; you cook with the lid closed and control the oxygen going to the fire using a vent at the top and the bottom.

 

 

We divided ourselves into four small groups and each had a cooking station with the barbecue, a selection of ingredients and a recipe. My group used the Quorn breaded chicken burgers to make wraps – chop some courgette, peppers and red onion and grill it, then spread a tortilla wrap with Greek yogurt mixed with lemon zest. Add some rocket, slice up the chicken burger and add to the wrap, roll up and enjoy. You can find the recipe on the Quorn website here.

 

 

 

It was very easy to make and assemble. We mixed lemon zest into Greek yogurt and spread that on a tortilla, and added the barbecued vegetables, and the chicken burger which we sliced up. It was delicious and something a bit different!

 

 

 

Another group was cooking Quorn’s meat-free Swedish style meatballs, in a sauce made of red pesto, tomato puree and garlic. These were threaded onto a skewer along with some courgette, red onion and cherry tomatoes, and barbecued. The recipe is here.

  

 

There were other kebabs on offer: when I’ve cooked Quorn sausages before it hasn’t occurred to me to do anything to them, but I will from now on! Another group was slicing the sausages into chunks, coating them in a mixture of mango chutney and mustard, and threading these onto skewers – they were delicious!

 

 

 

Finally you can’t have a barbecue without a burger; the last group was grilling Quorn’s meat free burgers and serving them in ciabattas, which they also lightly grilled, with sliced red chilli and pea shoots.

 

 

 

It was a very enjoyable evening and great to meet a few other bloggers who I follow like Becca from Amuse Your Bouche and Becky Thorn, author of one of the books I have at home, the No Waste Meal Planner. It was interesting hearing some things I didn’t know about Quorn, such as that they are launching a vegan range earlier this year, and that the brands is celebrating its 30^th anniversary, and is present in so many countries around the world. It was great fun learning some new ideas for things I can do with Quorn so I will be trying some of these out at home!

 

Thanks to Quorn for inviting me to the event.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 34

Monday: fish and veg for me, gammon and mashed potato for him

Tuesday

Dinner- was supposed to be out but it just got cancelled; now working from home so I will get creative with whatever is in the freezer

Wednesday

Lunch – team lunch at Wahaca

Dinner – sausage and tomato casserole

Thursday: curry - had on the meal plan last week but didn't make it

Friday - chicken pie and mashed potato

Saturday

Lunch – at a car show where my boyfriend is taking part in the Sportingbears “Dream Rides” team, offering rides in supercars to paying customers for charity. He did this at Leeds Castle last year and it was brilliant – though it means I will have to occupy myself all day!

Dinner – something quick as I don’t know what time we will get back

Sunday

Lunch- Waterzooi chicken soup/tomato soup for him

Dinner- Slimming World nachos/potato wedges

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Embellished Photo Greetings Cards

You may have seen the family photo letter collage I already completed using my voucher from Snapfish, the photo printing people.
 

There was another idea I wanted to try, that uses a printed personalised photo from Snapfish but also allows for some homemade embellishment. I didn’t know until I started looking around the Snapfish site that they do personalised cards – you simply upload a photo and choose the card design. There are birthday cards, with the design already provided (eg an age, some animals and so on) or more blank, colourful backgrounds where your photo takes centre stage (you can also choose cards where you can add multiple photos). As well as personalised birthday cards they have a huge range for other occasions, some of which are folded cards you can write inside, and others are flat cards – like postcards, but used for save the date reminders for weddings and birth announcements and so on.

 

I chose a couple so I could experiment and see what they had, with the intention of using my craft supplies to add some finishing touches at home.

 

It’s my Dad’s 60^th birthday next month so I made him a personalised card with some family photos. There was a layout where all I had to do was drop in the photos:

 I wanted to add some extra embellishments so used a cardboard label mounted onto blue card saying 'for the world's greatest dad' at the bottom, and a silver outline sticker saying 'dad' in the top right corner. As the title of the card was 'birthday star' I put some silver star stickers in the top left corner as well.
 

 

My sister is in the process of buying a new house; I couldn’t find a layout suitable for ‘congratulations on your new house’ so instead chose a card saying ‘we’ve moved’. This is designed to tell people of a change of address but you can change the wording, so I changed it to congratulate my sister and her boyfriend on the new house. The space in the middle was to add a picture; if you were using this card to tell people you had changed address then a picture of the new house would be perfect! But as I didn't have that - my sister hasn't moved yet - and I wasn't sure what else to use, I decided she would like a picture of my cat! To me it looks a bit like the cat is peering through the letterbox :-)

 

Most of the 'new home' embellishments I had were too large to fit on this card but I did have a pack of stickers with clear backgrounds that I thought would work. It had a flower on it so I added some extra flower stickers around the card.

Personalised Christmas cards are a lovely idea, especially if you are sending them to family or friends you haven’t seen in a while. I didn’t really have any suitable photos from previous festivities (we don’t really do posed family photos) but I did have some nice ones of the holiday I took with my boyfriend to Lapland a couple of years ago. It wasn’t Christmas but there was still plenty of snow!

This card had a lovely background with snowflakes around the edge so I decided to embellish it with some extra snowflake stickers. You can't see them all too well in this photo but they are there!

Finally I used a collage layout for a birthday card and used pictures of different cakes I've made.

I embellished this using some little cupcake stickers on each point where the lines crossed:

 

All of these cards would be nice without the extra embellishments but I do think it's nice to add a little extra!

Thanks to Snapfish for the voucher code for their site

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Scrapbooking: a great way to preserve memories

I think it’s a shame these days that people don’t get their photos printed out. But it’s so easy to take photos these days with mobile phones and digital cameras that I would spend a fortune printing out all the photos that I take. I used to do that, until a few years ago, and have dozens of photo albums containing hundreds if not thousands of photos. But I find it hard to narrow down holiday snaps to just 24 or 36 – like when you used to only have that many exposures on a roll of film – and it gets expensive if you print out 100 photos at a time. Having said that, I have done that, using Snapfish – a photo printing website where you can upload your photos and print them out from as little as 7p each.

 

Not long after I met my boyfriend I started scrapbooking, as a fun way of crafting and preserving memories. I made one for him with a few pages, including our first Christmas and first holiday together, and planned to add some pages every year. The last couple of years I don’t seem to have been able to find the time so I was long overdue – since I last added to our scrapbook we’ve moved in together, bought a house, and gone on several holidays to Lapland, America, Vienna and Mexico.

 

Snapfish gave me a voucher code to spend on their site and do some crafting with whatever I bought. The main project I tackled was covering some cardboard letters spelling the word ‘love’ with a collage of mini photos.

 

I also decided to get some more photos printed out to use in our scrapbook. I got some standard-sized 6x4 photos (from 7p each) and some 10x8 collage photos (£1.09), which allow you to take up to 20 images and shuffle them around in different combinations, so some print out different sizes than others. These are then great to cut up allowing you to arrange them wherever you want in the scrapbook.

 

I keep various little souvenirs – ticket stubs, paper napkins from restaurants and so on – and I have a huge stash of crafting supplies as I make a lot of cards. I often look online for specific embellishments I want for a particular project.

 

So how do you get started with scrapbooking? First get a scrapbook – it can be any size but for this project I prefer to use 12x12 inches. I have made much smaller scrapbooks before for friends where I only had room for one 6x4 photo and some embellishments on each page. I’ve also seen some nice 8x8 scrapbooks with thick black cardboard pages. My 12x12 scrapbook actually has clear plastic pockets rather than pages, which gives you even more freedom.

 

You can buy loose pages from craft shops (eg online or my local high street has a card making supplies shop), Hobbycraft, Ebay and so on. Sometimes they come in packs, which is usually cheaper, but you can also buy individual sheets of card or thick paper which means you can choose exactly the colour and pattern you want for your project.

 

Decide on the theme or subject of your page. What story are you telling? This will also help you decide your layout – for instance if there is going to be one main image or several. It could be celebrating the birth of a new baby; a child’s birthday; a holiday; or a season, like a selection of autumnal pictures (children playing in the leaves and so on).

 

Once you’ve chosen your photo(s), the next step is the embellishment. You can add what is known as journaling – i.e. words – either by using some letter stickers to spell out a word or name, or writing some lines on a piece of card or paper and adding this to the page. Or how about using your computer to print out captions to go under the photos?

 

Photos look nice when matted onto a piece of card and then mounted on the page; you can also give your page a title, a border – anything you like. Think about layouts – do you want pictures in a particular order to tell a story? A main image with smaller ones underneath, or overlapping the corners, or create a pocket out of card that you can tuck ticket stubs and mementos into? Have a look at Pinterest for some inspiration.

For this page I decided to record some memories of a recent holiday to Mexico. I bought a packet of stickers in a gift shop at Uxmal, one of the archaeological sites we visited, that had a lot of the different places we've been to.

First to choose the cardboard for the page itself; I wanted something with a bit of  a Mexican feel but that didn't have too dominant a pattern. I decided to go for a plain red page, but mount a square of card on top that had red flowers on it.

I used Snapfish's collage printing service and cut up a photo collage I'd had made of some of our holiday photos from snapfish and decided to mount them on card. I arranged some down the side of the page, and some on the patterned piece of card, at slight angles.

 

I decided the stickers looked best across the bottom of the page; I only used three but they were some of the most impressive places we visited and the three stickers I chose were roughly the same size and shape as well - I liked the uniformity.

I had a packet of Jolee's Mexico stickers I'd bought from Ebay a while ago in anticipation of this project which contained the word Mexico in big letters, which I stuck across the top of the page. It had some other stickers which I had fun with  - when my boyfriend saw the page he commented "You've got me in a silly hat and a lizard playing maracas!". Sadly only one of those things actually happened on holiday.

There were some red chilli pepper stickers I put along the bottom and also a margarita cocktail sticker I added to a little photo of our amazing hotel balcony where I enjoyed a few drinks in the sunshine. Finally a tall thin cactus sticker filled a space I had been wondering what to do with and added the final touch!

Thanks to Snapfish for the voucher for their website

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