Cajun spiced chicken tonight. Vino and cards after with the girls.

Roasted salmon fillets over spaghetti Alfredo, romaine salad

I've discovered a new Ready Meal range and I'm having it far too often. It's called Super Naturals by Sainsbury's (one of The Big Four supermarkets here) and they're £2.99 each, with a Buy Three Get One Free discount.

Every meal supplies 1 or usually 2 of your 5 recommended portions of fruit/ vegetables a day and is nutritionally balanced in terms of the protein/ fat/ carb proportions. They are low in fat - although individual meals vary, I go for those with less than 10g of fat - and made from fresh products. The downside is you can't freeze them.

They are so damn tasty - you can taste every individual ingredient if you get what I mean. It's like having your own healthy eating chef in the kitchen - the only thing you miss is the smells when cooking and the sense of achievement.

So nowt is cooking right now, but next week I intend to start cooking pulses again. Honest. Unless I get sucked back into the Super Naturals part of the supermarket this weekend...

Sunday's Grill Menu
 

Shish kebab (with apricot) and grilled asparagus. Second pic is asparagus in their butter boats.

WOW! yum!

It's not been much noised about by either of us, but one area where V and I most agree is in matters of the belly.

I just lost a fight with temptation. I made up a birthday pie or three for our church potluck birthdays once-a-month fest. Two lemon meringue pies (see the Most Recent Recipe Thread in Food & Drink) for them and a third for us. I kept going back and cutting another slice. Finished the last of it this morning. While you can play with the sugar levels of this pie a lot, it'll never be sugar free until they come out with sugar free condensed milk.

I was in Philadelphia for training last week and on my last day I swung by Chinatown on the way home. I stopped in the fortune cookie factory at 9th and race and got strawberry and chocolate fortune cookies. I told my wife where I was going and she asked for 2 cans of lychee nuts (I got her 4) from the Chung May market.

Going through the supermarket, I noticed a jar of spare rib sauce. This is the sauce that I think has five spice seasoning in it that gives Chinese spare ribs their flavor. I don't eat pork ribs anymore, but I picked up some chicken breast, cut it into strips, marinated for a few hours in sauce, put it on skewers, and basted with more of the sauce. It tastes different on chicken but it still has that unique sweet flavor.

We love the Five Spice around here too, Rich. My spice bottle says it's anise, ginger, cinnamon, fennel, and black pepper (in that order; I'm assuming that's greatest-to-least proportions,) if you want to try your hand at mixing your own sometime.

Strawberries. I've been eating mounds of them.
Barbecued chicken wings with steamed potato and carrot.

This morning :coffee and store brand frosted flakes so they arn't so sweet. yum

The healthy naturals look real gourmet SG. The article has a list of fares which include the modern british. Which one is that?

Well recognised! They really are gourmet - only one step down from freshly prepared food.

I've been very good and not bought these for a while now. But I've been bad and succumbed to quick & easy cheaper but less healthy alternatives. Sigh. Went grocery shopping earlier - have a healthy, low cost, higher effort week ahead. Finally redeemed!

Checking the range available at present the two Modern British would be Beef in Red Wine and Smoked Salmon Salad. Because they're fresh ingredients the meals on offer tend to follow the seasons, so it's different every couple of months.

A tin of macaroni cheese......


I could really, really eat them thar shish kebabs and asparagus. mmmm. asparagus. My favourite green

Of course! To be truly gourmet they would have to follow the seasons. It is hard to find meals for one.

Speaking of meals for one. I love mac n cheese but the good stuff which is sold in huge boxes with that fake cheese on it is too much for one person. So I am curious when you say a 'tin' of mac and cheese you mean a single serving? If so we need tins here!

Tin = can. It's a 'can' of Heinz Macaroni Cheese.

... and it tastes grim.
Bleurgh - any tinned cheese is horrid.

I know it's bad. I know it has fewer nutrients than a pair of suede slippers.....but I like the taste.

As you can see, I made enough for everybody!

As a dinosaur-crazed kid, I thought asparagus looked like the vegetable most likely to be dinosaur food, so it was the most fun.

[But hold your nose when you pee afterwards.]

Tostinos pizza and a coke

Sunday brunch. Blueberry pancakes. First beans of season and new taters.
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In a literary/ culinary crossover, I'm reading a book set in Nigeria - Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Mentioned more than once is Pepper Soup. When I was in my local Afro-Caribbean shop today I noticed Lickie - meat pepper soup in the freezer.

So I asked the proprietor who confirmed it's a Nigerian dish. I'm about to try it. He warned my slyly that it's very spicy. I expect my bot will regret this tomorrow! But hey, how often do you get to taste the book you're reading :)

I will report back.

I made my first beer can chicken yesterday. A few months back, they were having a super clearance and I bought a whole bunch of foldable beer can chicken racks as stocking stuffers and in case I wanted to make more than one at a time. Yesterday I cooked a 6 pound bird and it came out great.

Well, Rich. The photo?

Oh an update for you on my Pepper Soup.
When it said Meat Pepper Soup I assumed it would have shreds of meat in it. Like oxtail or mulligatawny.

Nope. Great big bits of kidney, tripe and unidentified chewy meat (beef, just no idea what part). And when I say big, I mean BIG. Too big to comfortably eat in one go. It was frozen when I bought it, hence my surprise on thawing.

I'm not averse to offal, as I've said on this board before, but even I am daunted by chunks that ideally need to be cut into three or four appearing in my soup.

So after trying to pull the first piece of beef apart with my spoon I went to get a fork and a steak knife. With all three implements I got on very nicely. The tripe melted in my mouth and I'd forgotten how much I like kidney. The soup itself was thin but very flavoursome and acted as a good background taste to the meat. I left two pieces of beef in the end. A shame, but the cutting and chewing were onerous.

I felt doubly guilty because the book I am reading deals with the short lived Biafran nation and how they were starved into submission, and there I am scraping two big bits of meat away with barely a thought. The other guilt comes from throwing away any meat - doesn't fit with my ideals of respecting animals.

Interesting experiment. I would like to try stright pepper soup next time, with plenty of pitta bread or similar to soak it up and some yoghurt on the side to cool my mouth.

Father's day. Eggplant, chicken thighs, and a flat iron steak
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JUST saw this on Good Eats and want to try! A quick vegie curry using frozen vegetables. Reviews are great.

Alton Brown's quick vegie curry

Seared tuna with wassabi-hollandaise sauce, mango and purple onion, steamed white rice, and...asparagus. (we like asparagus)

Crap in a pan. Seriously.

We're taking off on vacation tomorrow morning, so tonight I cleared out every fresh veggie, all the unidentified leftovers in little tupperware containers, put it all in a pan on high heat, added some butter and ground beef, three scrambled eggs, and smothered it in cheeze.

We called it "hash", but my daughter wasn't buying it.

fish cakes.

I make them using bream, a little potato, coriander, onion, salt, pepper, egg, flour. Coat them in crumbs and shallow fry just till the crumbs go golden.

Yummy with sweet chilli sauce.

This might set a reasonable benchmark above which virtually any other dish would sit - anyone disagree?

I am Indian (at least as far as food goes) and I wouldn't ever consider Alton Brown's curry to be either good or authentic.

It looked pretty miserable to me.

I did this chicken curry a few times

http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2008...q=curry&st=cse

Protip: they are serious about getting the temperature down before adding the yogurt. Pie, can I just stick with sour cream? Or is that wrong?

Crikey me. I'm unhealthy. I hold my hands up. But even I balk at that. Doner in naan - yes please, nom, nom, nom. But the rest? Heart attack in a box. And for the record, when I was eating 'babs (joke there, as bab means poo) I always asked for just a little meat, and not even a full salad with it (real salad, not Scottish). I always offered to pay full price, which is why the local purveyors of spicy lamb were all very nice to me.
Being very English, I have to agree it doesn't look great. I've eaten enough real Indian curry to know what's what. And enough faux curry to know what works. And my Mum's vegetable curry, which an Indian lady she worked with taught her in the 70s... nothing like real curry, just something generic and safe for a British family. It involved a pressure cooker for a start... Still, it got vegetables down our throats.

We grew up with quite a varied menu because Mum was a hospital cleaner until my brother started school (the shifts fit in with Dad's). She worked with mostly Italian, Polish and (one) Indian women. They were all feeding families on a budget and all (except again, the Indian - sorry) Catholic. So they swapped recipes and tips. Mum taught the mysteries of Yorkshire Puddings to any number of colleages. Even at the time I wondered how - when hers were so flabby!

Then again, I taught my Mum how to cook Mexican food. And you'd fall about laughing if you saw what we called Mexican.

UT - not to speak for Pie, but sour cream will serve equally well in this recipe. It's a flavour of India rather than an authentic curry (lile my mexican) so use whatever works. I don't know about India, but sour cream is still an unusual item in this country, so yoghurt is the default. I can't see that there's an awful lot of difference here.

Sour cream will be fine, and lend a lot more richness to the dish.
As a south Indian, I get worried anytime someone mentions the dreaded "curry powder". I have never seen such a substance used in situ. Every grandmother grinds her own many mixes, depending on the exact application.

And my grandmom's is better'n yours. :p

Your heritage is from the hotter lands where the spices grow. Mine is from where they had nothing but wild pigs and grassy grains, so they made sausage and beer. They moved to middle Pennsylvania and did weird things like fermenting their meats. It's disgusting, but we don't even want to mention limey's heritage, where if they had a beast to eat they ate all of it, boiling it in the intestines and making sausage out of the blood. Of course we could be from Japan, an island nation and have at our disposal nothing but fish, rice, and little energy to cook it with... thus sushi. Or Danac's northern England where they had plentiful cheap fish from the North Sea, and root vegetables, and thus created the fish n chips industry.

But see, I like sausage and beer! :yum:
I don't cook Indian food much, mostly because it's a sh*tload of work to do it right. I have enough of a background to know when it's not right, and that bugs me. So I rather make... I dunno, polish food? mexican? italian? chinese? That way, the little voice in my head doesn't criticize.

I will be making stuffed shells on Saturday for the first time. Plus waffles with homemade blueberry syrup. Little nervous

I dunno yet, but I could use a bit glass of Shiraz right now.

Just a warning...Don't put everything on the same plate or the Brits will lose their shit.

and the australians

pork simmered in the crockpot in enchilada suace and chilies, served on tortillas with fresh cilantro tonight.

EW! No, one is for breakfast and one is for dinner. Also, some almond cookies. MMmmm

Though you might look for the zingiest yoghurt you can lay hold of. Or try a German delicatessen for the sour cream, as the Germans favor the stuff. A Middle Eastern market might be a source for Lebni, which tastes like yoghurt crossed with sour cream and finishes with a hint of butteriness.

If your Mum likes chicken soup, introduce her to Mexico's Caldo Tlalpeño. There are links in The Latest Recipe Thread, or you can google 'em up for yourself -- there are ten thousand little variations. A peppery, clear broth chicken soup, it's Mexican Grandmama's Jewish Penicillin, and will surely cure what ails. If you can't get chickpeas, lima beans will do. Sliced fresh avocado and fresh jalapeño peppers give it added depth. Slice in a couple of serranos or similarly hot peppers for that high-explosive effect if you want not merely a cure for what ails, but to fuel what made the preacher dance.

Other things that will ramp up the authenticity of your Mexican-iana would be the chili powder in the Recipe Thread again -- and you can play with the proportions to control its heat. Main thing for sabor auténtico is not to skimp on the cumin. Not enough cumin is where chili may often go wrong -- just toss in some more.

For stew/soups like menudo, whose active principles are peppers and tripe and beef with broth, sprinkle on the Mexican oregano with a fairly liberal hand. Mexican oregano differs somewhat from the Mediterranean variety. The usual condiments for this ethnically formidable dish are nigh-equal sprinklings of red pepper, Mexican oregano, and minced onion. It's a popular weekend dish around here, apparently esteemed for its restorative properties after a hangover. Or so they say.