sausage dogs

cooking Karen.

Eggplant parmigiana

This dish is basically sliced eggplant dipped in breadcrumbs and fried to make eggplant shnitzles, then layered with cheese, mascarpone, and passata, and baked in the oven. Oh yes. So of course it tastes great. One of those rare vegetarian meals that wouldn't benefit from the addition of bacon. 

Most of the cooking time is spent frying the breadcrumb-coated eggplant slices (and in this process I used an entire small bottle of oil, have I mentioned Karen is never shy with the oil?). 

 

Cooking time: about 75 minutes (mainly frying the eggplant)

Score:

 7/10

Would I cook it again?: 

Yes - though not too often due to the cooking time

Which book: Where the Heart Is

cooking Karen.

I'll put the past week's silence down to still pondering that weird election non-result. 

Anyway, this week I cooked:

Hard-boiled egg curry with spinach, tomato, ginger and yoghurt

This one I've actually done quite a few times now. It has a few things going for it - it's super quick, it's vegetarian, and the ingredients required are things that are always on hand (at our place anyway) so you don't need to buy anything. Karen is pretty keen on ginger and mustard seeds, and these feature in this curry, very yummo. 

Cooking time: about half an hour

Score:

 7.5/10

Would I cook it again?: yes, and I do quite often

cooking Karen.

Cannellini bean, calamari and chorizo salad

This was a quick and easy one, with the added bonus that it could be classified as surf 'n turf (which I love saying). The beans chorizo mixture is really hearty and filling, Tim was a big fan. I added less red and green chilli than specified, because combined with the spicy chorizo I think it would knock my socks off!

Karen really outdid me on the presentation.

Cooking time: about half an hour

Score:

 7/10

Would I cook it again?: yes

cooking Karen.

Choux puffs with ice-cream and hot honey-chocolate sauce

This is what I'm talking about. So good. Plus it looks impressive but wasn't very difficult. I've never cooked choux pastry before, and it was totally easy! My profiteroles were a wee bit sunken but I was still very proud ("your wife just cooked choux pastry" I announced to Tim). And the sauce is good because it contains not just melted chocolate, but honey, butter and cocoa too. Karen is not one to forego flavour for low calories, which is another reason I love her.

Cooking time: about 1 hour

Score:

 9/10

Would I cook it again?: definitely!

cooking Karen.

 
I love this book. Just about everything in it is a winner. Karen is a genius. My mum is obsessed with it. My colleagues are obsessed with it. The entire population of Clifton Hill is obsessed with the Syrian Chicken alone. (Syrian Chicken will get its own post).

i sometimes fantasize about cooking the whole thing front to back. I'm not going to right now, but I thought I'd try and cook something new out of it once a week or so. First up: 

Papardelle with duck and mandarin ragu

This one was not a good one to start with unfortunately, it wasn't so good. i did halve the recipe and my maths isn't amazing, but I'm pretty sure Karen wanted me to add a whole litre of stock to the ragu. Which I did, and it looked like a soup. There was no way it was going to reduce down so I took a few cupfuls out again.

But after that it all came together ok. The end result didn't look that appetising, but it tasted pretty good. You could definitely taste the mandarine. But for 2 hours of cooking and some pretty exotic ingredients (duck, verjuice) it wasn't amazing. So not a good one to start with, but all the others I've tried are BRILLIANT, I promise.

(I love how I felt it necessary to indicate which is mine!) 

Cooking time: 2 hours

Score:

 4/10

Would I cook it again?:

 no