The disappearence of UVWXYZ

UVWXYZ!

Ok guys we are sad to inform you that we ended our journey from A-Z at the letter T. Time got the better of us and we found it really hard to keep up with it as well as do all of our other work. Also, recipes for these last few letters are really hard to find. We could only think of upside down cake for U and we didn’t have half the stuff we needed for it…

We did really well though to say we are useless cooks and as time went by we got more and more frustrated with the experiment. There were many opportunities to quit but we continued and did 20 letters solid. I think this has boosted our confidence in the kitchen and gave us more experience from when we first started. At least now I know I can cook various things I like that don’t include just putting chips into the oven.

Whether we will keep this up is unknown but we’ll have a good go at it…

Tina x

T is for Taco's

I absolutley love Mexican food so I was so excited about making taco’s. we’d made enchiladas and Quesadillas earlier on and spurred on by the success of these recipes, we settled on Taco’s...and I couldnt have been happier. I cant get enough of spicy food, with the exception of the disaster of the Pasta we made for A of course!

Anyway, Mum brought this amazing Vegetarian taco mince kit, it was quorn, rice, sweetcorn, flavouring and onions mixed in together. So all I had to do was mix in the salsa, grate some cheese, cut up some onion and add some chilli powder. Sorted! My flatmate had one of those amazing Taco Kits for El Del Paso (I have no idea if that's how you spelt it but I'm sure you know what I mean!)

So I don't really know what else to say here, we cheated again but it was sooooo worth it. Oh but thse are probably best saved for a specail ocassion because they aren't exactly the cheapest thing in the world!

No pics for this because there wasn't much to take pictures off to be honest! But here's a yummy Taco images I found online. Enjoy!

S is for Spaghetti

Just a quick not of apology about the massive amount of updates over today and yesterday...if you havent guessed already, this is because we've been really bad at updating this. However this was an experiment and I guess the question of whether its possible to fit fresh, home cooked meals into a student diet has been answered...it just isnt pratical!

Anyway, Spaghetti was definitely the easy option here but it also happens to be one of my favourite meals so I couldn’t resist making it. I was fairly confident that this would be a sucess!

The recipe was fairly standard. Chopped tomatoes, minced beef, mushroom, branston pickle…Branston Pickle?! Yup, three heaped teaspoons of the stuff! The recipe assured us that this would make the Spaghetti even nicer than usual. We weren’t so sure. I do like Branston Pickle but I can’t say Ive ever had the desire to throw it in my recipes!

Anyway, again this was easy and even for beginners like us, it was hardly challenging! For this reason Spaghetti’s definitely a good student food, it doesn’t cost too much and is easy to make and yummy!! I'd also say its fairly healthy too so thats a sucess on all levels there.

I cant say that the secret ingredient made it nicer than normal spaghetti's but I was relieved about that. Since I was dubious about putting the Pickle in, im glad it wasn’t really strong tasting when everything was mixed in all together.

You can find this Pickley recipe here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/7448/spaghetti-bolognaise

R is for...Rainbow Cookies

R is for…Rainbow cookies

Ok R was a really difficult letter to find something doable for. Most things wanted a lot of ingredients we couldn’t find and just as we were about to give up we came across rainbow cookies.

Ingredients:
Flour
Baking powder
Baking soda
Vanilla extract
Egg
Milk
Smarties

Cost: roughly £6-£8 – depending on required amounts

These started off well. I had fun mixing the dough as it gets your hands sticky and I like the feel of it between my fingers. We followed the recipe exactly so we had perfectly fine dough which we balled up and placed on the baking tray. We pushed in the Smarties as they wouldn’t be rainbow without them would they!?














Placing them in the oven we left them for the required time to bake but as we kept checking them, they had expanded more and more so it looked like one big rainbow cookie bake. We thought despite it’s appearance it would still taste nice so we let them cool down then went back and tasted them…

Verdict: FAIL

They did not taste anything like cookies…cookies are either soft or hard. They weren’t soft but they were definitely hard…too hard even to bite. We couldn’t work out where we went wrong with them. We just hope that we have more of a success with S.

Recipce can be found here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5369/smarties-cookies

Q is for...Quesadillas

Q is for…Quesadillas

Ok so for Q we were originally going to do quiche but with the failure of the last pie base we tried to make and the fact we couldn’t buy them locally meant we had to change our idea. So instead we did quesadillas.

Ingredients:
Onions
Pepper
Cheese
Chicken
Salsa
Tortilla wraps

Cost:
Roughly £8 – quite a lot for a student budget but they taste nice.

Here was another success as they turned out right and were so tasty!! We were unsure as to whether we could pull it off as our attempt at enchiladas didn’t work out and it didn’t look like it should have but these looked sooo good only a fool could turn them down! I enjoyed putting the ingredients inside the wrap as you can put as much on as you want and basically what you want. They weren’t hard to do which was good for us as our attempt at anything too difficult resulted in a fail but we keep trying.

Let’s just hope that we have a few more successes as we are fastly approaching the end of the experiment…

Tina x

P is for Pizza

We used
Pepperoni
Pizza base (x2)
Tomatoe Puree
Mixed herbs
Olive Oil
Garlic Powder
Onion
Cheese
Jalapeno Peppers

It cost
Well its hard to say because we had alot of the ingredients in and we borrowed the ingredients off our flatmate...thanks Ceclia! At a guess your looking at about £5.

We had been really looking forward to this one! From the very beginning of the project we always knew P was gonna be for Pizza and today was the day, How exciting! For once we were looking forward to cooking and it didn't feel like a chore… the last time we made Pizza was in food tech back at secondary school. Our first attempt at making the Pizza had been so awful that our teacher had ordered us to remake it! It didn’t bode well for this attempt then...

We brought ready made pizza bases. Again, this was a cheat but we had no rolling pin to rolls out the dough to make a base. Rather than face a disaster by trying to use a glass to flatten it out, we felt the safest option was to just buy the base. However we did make our own tomato sauce base though. Basically it involved mixing water, tomatoe puree, olive oil, garlic and mixed herbs in a bowl, so not the most difficult recipe in the world! But it was nice to make our own because I felt like we were actually doing some cooking!

Adding the topping was easy and quite fun. I enjoyed spreading the tomato puree and decorating mine with onion, jalapeno peppers and spicy pepperoni and then they only needed 10 minutes in the oven so we didn’t have to wait long. It was so simple!

I don’t know if our attempts were any healthier than your shop brought or takeaway pizzas, I mean we did cover both of them with loads of cheese which isn’t exactly good for you. But they weren’t dripping with grease like the pizza’s we order from Dial A Pizza so that’s a good sign right?

They tasted great anyway so I’d definitely make them again!

O is for Oatcakes

Ok so I bet you’re thinking that the most obvious meal to have made for o would have been omlettes...But we made a chilli cheese omelette for C so didn’t particulary want to make the same thing again! that would be cheating wouldn’t it? So in desperation and with no other ideas,
we settled for something rather unusual, oatcakes.

Oatcakes are erm… cakes made of oats basically. They look like pancakes but are savoury and far less sweet. They are a Staffordshire delicacy and that’s why I had them ready to cook in my freezer. My mum is from Staffordshire so I was brought up on them have loved eating them since I was young. They are incredibly easy to make.

I had mine with cheese and sausage. Sounds weird I know but honestly, try it before you judge! It's amazing!!!

My sausages were microwavable sausages and so it was just a case of warming them up for half the recommended time. I took them out the microwave and they were soft enough to cut into small pieces. The small pieces of sausages were mixed in with grated cheese and placed on one side of the oatcake. The sides of the oatcake were then rolled to cover the middle, creating like a Fajita wrap type thingy. We used the same method for Tina except she had cheese and onion instead. Then you just place the oatcake in the microwave for about 1 and a half minutes until the cheese has melted. So simple but so nice! More people need to discovered the wonders of the oatcake and I hope they will after reading this!

So I guess this recipe was another cheat on our part to be honest. However this blog is about encouraging us to try more foods…and this was Tina’s first time tasting an oatcake, which she enjoyed. Therefore I’d have to class this one as a success and I'd reccomend it to anyone for a cheap, yummy meal!

M is for...Muffins, N is for...Nachos

I have written these together and the reason will shortly be discovered =]

M is for…Muffins

Ok so again we did a desert, which I guess isn’t helping us with all this healthy eating malarkey but as letters go one some recipes are really hard to find and we have a lot of work to do for other modules so we needed something easy and quick to do.

In these we had:
Cocoa powder
Egg
Flour
Baking powder
Smarties
Chocolate sprinkles
Caster sugar.

Overall cost was roughly £5-£6. It was hard to work out as we had basically all of the ingredients at the flat.


We did originally plan to do chocolate chip muffins but all the shops that were local to us did not sell them! Can you believe it? They had every other baking ingredient but chocolate chips!!

It was a messy job mixing them together and very tiring as it aches your arm so much when stirring the mixture!!
We spooned it into the pan and put it in the oven. They smelt sooo good while they were cooking and looked really nice. We took them out let them cool then came the important part. The taste test.

Verdict:FAIL!




They were no where near as sweet as they should have been, they just had a really horrible taste but we followed the recipe as instructed so we couldn’t work out where we went wrong. Well at least we know for next time that maybe we should double the amount of sugar to put in. lets just hope that N turns out better.

N is for…Nachos

Ok so there’s not a lot to write about for this one. We cheated slightly and went and brought a nachos kit from the shop. We were both tired and fed up by that point so we thought we would make life easier for ourselves…

They were nice though but the salsa could have been better. The nacho chips were nice warm and the melted cheese just added to the taste. It was a success but does it really count as we didn’t really make them ourselves..

Tina x

Want unsweetened muffins, with unclear recipe instructions and a bitter after taste? Well we've lost the recipe for this so I cant help your here. I suggest you search for a nicer muffin recipe anyway, this was a big disapointment!

L is for Lasagne

We used
Tinned tomatoes
Onion
Quorn mince
Parmesan cheese
Egg
Butter
Dolmio stir in vegetable sauce
Lasagne sheets
Garlic
Milk

It cost
About 8 quid so not the cheapest recipe in the world!

Hey guy, ok well I have a confession to make! We actually made lasagne ages ago now…but keeping this blog is such hard work along with the massive pile of assignments we have to do. It sounds stupid but eating healthily as a student is soooo not practical. If you have a massive essay to do, it seems impossible to find the time to search for a recipe, buy the ingredients and then actually cook the meal! So I totally get why students are known for their love of alcohol and Pot noodles, who can blame us?!

Anyway, sticking to the student theme, we got this recipe from a student cooking recipe in the hopes that a student recipe would be simple and easy and well idiot proof really!
Surprisingly this turned out to be one of our rare successes! It’s actually surprisingly simple to cook a lasagne. You cook the filling which is just as easy as making spaghetti and practically the same process and tastes the same too…and whilst you’re doing that you make the cheese sauce. It was so simple it made me feel slightly ashamed of my habit of buying ready meal lasagnes bit im a sucker for Chicago Town Pepperoni lasagne ready meals!
It was also quite fun layering the pasta sauce and filling at the end, like layering a cake and it was satisfying seeing one of our creations that looked like it does in the recipe photographs for once.
The finished product was nicer than any ready meal I’d ever eaten and I was really proud. It was also Tina’s first time eating a lasagne and she loved it so that was another success!

I felt good after eating it...no IBS twinges and it was alot more satisfying then eating takeaway, which always makes me feel fat and greasy afterwards!




Find the recipe here: http://www.studentrecipes.com/recipes/pasta/kaits-easy-lasagne/

K i for Korma

Well this letter was a toughie!

For a start we couldnt think of a meal beginning with K and were getting desperate. So in our desperation, I posted on the digitalspy forums for help. Among the suggestions were keema, Kiev's and Korma. We decided to make either Korma or Kiev's. Now I love curry but Korma is probably my least favourite. It's far too bland and mild and I don't see the point in having a mild curry...the whole point is that it should be hot and spicy! So we went to the shop armed with ingredient lists for noth dishes...and couldnt find the ingredients for either. We needed parsley for the Kiev's which they didnt have and this yoghurt stuff for the curry which we couldnt find. You see thats the problem with shops on campus. They're hardly the most exotic places in the world. Students like alcohol and ready meals, which both shops sell in abdundance. Fresh ingredients are another story!



So we cheated and brought a jar of ready made Korma sauce. It's not the same as making the thing ourselves but we still had to fry the chicken and cook the sauce on the hob! I brought some strong curry powder to spice it up abit and it made the dish so much nicer, enjoyable even!

Not my favourite of dishes but it was cheap and eay and far more pratical for a student life style than things like "Bean Cheese Pie" or "Jame Doughnuts!"

I didnt feel great afterwards though, felt like a big cheat but oh well, we did try!

J is for…jam doughnuts

Ok so it’s not a main meal but J was a totally hard letter to try and find something for that we would both be able to do. So we had to do jam doughnuts!

In them we had:
Flour
Salt
Caster sugar
Yeast
Egg
Milk
Strawberry jam

The overall cost was roughly £5 so it was too bad really.

It was one of those recipes where you had to get your hands dirty, not to mention sticky. Very sticky indeed. Once we had the dough mixed we had to kneed it for about 5 minutes, the mixture was sticking to everything, my hands, my clothes, the table, the chopping board, you name it, it stuck. We used a lot of flour to try and resolve this but looking back I think it made things worse, when we balled them up, there we big cracks in them which we were certain shouldn’t be there….we never said we knew what we were doing…

Once we had cooked them and let them cool and stick the jam in and the sugar coating it was finally time for the taste test…

The verdict?
FAIL

They just tasted like jam cobs. There wasn’t that sweet doughnutty taste you generally get. Sweet cobs we should have called them as no way were they doughnuts. Oh well at least we tried our hands at something different! Not many students could say they are masters of the kitchen…and we’re not one of them lol.

With 10 recipes complete and only 16 to go can we have some more success before the time is up?

Tune in to find out =]…

And if you're crazy enough to want to recreate this one, find the recipe here: http://www.recipezaar.com/Baked-Jam-Doughnuts-181903

Tina

I is for…Italian chicken

For I as hinted by the name we did Italian chicken! And guess what guys!!?? It was a SUCCESS!!!! It tasted very nice and also looked very appealing!!

In it we had:
Potatoes
Chicken
Onion
Chives
Cherry tomatoes
Salt and pepper

The cost you may ask? About £6-£7 top end of the budget but well worth the dosh. Cheaper than a take away too which is a good thing I guess..

It was easy to cook as most of the things went in together. My only problem with chicken is the preparation, I so totally hate the feel of chicken breasts that aren’t already prepared and made into like chicken nuggets or something. It’s all squishy and wet in hands and very risky too. I can do it now I’m just not a huge fan at all!

Lyndsey peeled her first potato of her life so far!!! Big achievement for her eh? A very late one never mind but she’s learning how to prepare things as I am too!! We’re getting there!! We are getting better but it’s still hard not to just bang something in the oven. Cooking takes a lot of time and effort and we are two lazy students who have no energy what so ever, everything is too much of an effort…

So yeah! We had another success under our belts but we are yet to grab that master chef title. 3/9 aint too bad I guess, let’s just hope that J turns out as good =]…

Want to share our sucess, try it yourselves, recipe is here: http://www.cooksforcooks.com/sc/tx3/italian-chicken-and-chips.aspx

Tina

G is for Goujons, H is for Hotdogs

Ok so your probably wondering why I’m writing about G and H together right?
Well all will be revealed if you keep on reading!

Lets start with chicken goujons.

We used

Small chicken breasts

About 6/7 slices of bread

Paprika

Chives

Tin of chopped tomatoes

Bag of couscous

Tomatoe Puree

Garlic Powder

Onion

Cayenne pepper spice

It cost

Loads! About 10 quid. Just not pratical on a student budget!

This was a Jamie Oliver recipe. Quite complex for us considering the previous disasters. The temptation when things go so wrong is to find the easiest recipe out there and just do that. However we decided against “dumbing down” the recipes so to speak. We chose the ones which we felt would be the nicest, regardless of how complicated they were. After all, theres only so many times a person can go wrong isn’t there? And chicken Goujons are nice so we thought lets just go for it.

The most boring part of this recipe is definitely the breadcrumb bit. It literally involves sitting there, breaking bread over a bowl. At least that’s how we assumed you make breadcrumbs anyway. So many minutes and many pieces of bread later, we finally had a bowl full of bread crumbs ready to coat the chicken. Adding some chives and spices to the breadcrumbs, they actually looked and smelt quite nice. To get the breadcrumbs to stick we had to coat the chicken in egg, then dip them in the breadcrumb bowl. Well this seemed fairly simple. Ok so the coated chicken looked a bit odd and nothing like and chicken Goujon id ever eaten but I was sure this would change when we cooked them.

We also attempted to make a spicy tomato couscous to accompany the Goujons and actually we realised that this recipe was a lot of bloody work! The couscous was almost as complicated to make as the chicken and its hard to get the timings right when your cooking and frying so many things at once. It took well over 2 hours. It was a very fiddly, fussy recipe. I reckon this taught us the lesson that we should actually read the recipes before we attempt them, rather than just getting caught up in what looks nice!

Anyway, by now were well on our way to yet another disaster. When cooking the chicken it occurred to us there was bare bits where the breadcrumbs just hadn’t stuck. God knows why, I mean we did submerge them in the breadcrumbs bowl. What more could we do? Then it appeared that the breadcrumbs were burning so we hastily served up, only to be told by our flatmates that the chicken wasn’t cooked. Keen to avoid salmonella poisoning, our efforts were binned leaving us with a plate of couscous each that neither of us liked the taste of anyway. Marvellous.

H is for Hot Dogs...

Well we did what I said we were so against doing. We dumbed down. Hot Dogs are idiot proof. As long as you can fry an onion and boil a Hot Dog then your sorted. These were lovely. Cheap and easy and tasty.

Were they healthy? No.

Did we care at this point? Not really. we were really disheartened! Anyway what else begins with H, except Hot Dogs and Haggis?!

If your made enought to want to attempt the Goujon recipe, you can find it here:

https://www.jamieoliver.com/bloggers/viewtopic.php?id=37600

F is for...Frittata

Hey Guys!

Tina again...

This again cost about £4 to make

In it we had:

new potatoes

egg

red pepper

ham

cheese

We thought masking a frittata would be easy in some way as it looked similar to an omelette. With the success of the omelette we felt positive that maybe something would go right for once. It seemed too however, when we put it all to cook in the pan it just did not seem to cook. We

tried putting it under the grill but when we took it out it didn’t seem cooked in the centre. Trying a little bit, I pushed the plate back as it was minging. I wasn’t going to attempt to eat egg that wasn’t cooked! I might have got egg poisoning as Lyndsey puts it =]...I think that night I just ate cheese and onion sandwiches instead...again the recipe looked simple but with us being amateurs i think even that was too hard for us.

E is for...Enchillada

Hey guys!!

Tina here! Ready to bring you news of yet another tasteful, but obvious fail.

For E, we made enchiladas. This cost roughly £4 to make. And in it we had:
red pepper
onion
chilli sauce
chicken
cheese

We did not know how we had to put it together because the instructions

were unclear and so it ended up looking like a tortilla wrap gone wrong. As weird as it looked it tasted great!! But I think we needed a better recipe. We tried to follow it and use our own heads to work around it but it still didn’t work so we ended up with this:

It went well preparation wise, the ingredients were sorted to the requirements but then how were we supposed to put it together if it didn’t tell us how exactly!!!Our friends thought it was a pizza at first but how can it be pizza when we was on the letter E?! Oh well, 2/6 successes isn’t bad for two people who are idiots when it comes to the kitchen. To say our cooking skills only stretched as far as putting chips in the oven or microwaving a curry etc, we have learnt new skills.
Eating different foods hasn’t changed me in anyway, except for getting bored with it. We still have 20 recipes to do and I know as we go into them I’m just going to get fed up even more. All this cooking is making me tired!

D is for...Deep Dish Chocolate Brownies

D is for….Deep Dish Chocolate Brownies

I know, I know, so much for healthy eating right? But the only success we’ve had so far with main courses was an “idiot proof” omelette, so feeling abit disheartened we decided an attempt at a desert was in order, chocolate is always a nice cure for a bad mood and main courses were defintley not our forte, maybe our calling was in deserts?

Deep Dish Chocolate Brownies seemed a fairly simple recipe and couldn’t go anymore wrong than A or B so we thought, screw the health kick. Our blog, our rules and we decided to break them. It seems we should have done so earlier coz this was recipe our greatest success so far.

The recipe was simple and fun!! It was so nice not be sat at a chopping board cutting up pepper and onions for once. Instead we got to mix sugar, butter chocolate flavouring, egg and cocoa powder in a bowl. It was like being a little kid again, baking cakes with mum and begging to lick the bowl afterwards. Somehow we resisted the temptation…perhaps it was the thought of raw egg and salmonella that did it!

The worst bit was the torturous 40 minutes wait for the brownies to bake. 40 long minutes, even though the mix itself only took only 10 to 15 minutes to prepare. The room smelt of chocolate and I couldn’t resist the urge to keep opening the oven for sneak peaks of our masterpiece. I was so proud to see that the mixture had risen and it looked yummy, like a massive chocolate cake.
We burnt two brownies out of 20 so I thought that was fairly good going to be honest with you and actually, the burnt brownies were rather nice and crunchy. The only problem appeared to be the fact that once you eat one, you just can’t stop eating them. 20 brownies between a flat of 6 girls are not going to stretch far. They actually lasted about one day which was surprising actually but this was only because I told my diet obsessed flatmates that they were eating a cup and a half’s worth of sugar. They weren’t impressed with this news!

Overall, I’d definitely recommend these. Simple to make and fun and most importantly cheap! There are loads of chocolate brownie websites out there but id find it hard to beat this one for chocolaty sweetness and overall yunmmyness. I plan to make these for my parents when I’m home from uni. Im sure i’ll impress them!

However I do regret the fact that we put no chocolate chips in the brownies, it needed that extra bit of crunchyness since the middle was so gooey.

Try these lovely chocolatey treats here: http://recipes.recipeland.com/recipes/recipe/show/Deep_Dish_Brownies_14719

C is for....Chilli Cheese Omlette

It cost
Just under 5 quid, not bad!

We used

4 Eggs
2 Spring Onion
2 Chilli's
Grated Cheese

So, since my experience of cooking egg involves…well actually Ive never cooked it coz I just buy ready made egg mayo, so I guess you could say I had zero experience, and what with Tina not liking egg anyway, this one seemed as though it was going to be quite a challenge! But I was assured by my mum that omlettes were "idiot proof", which is always reassuring right?

So anyway, turns out mum was right and we had our first success! Two eggs in a bowl, whisk then fried, with cheese, spring onion and chillis chucked in the frying pan and that’s all it took to make! No fiddling around making another disastrous pie pastry! Oh no, cheap, simple and easy. 3 of my favourite words in the English language! Ok so we burnt my omelette a little bit but for a beginner, it was a dam good attempt I'd say. I proudly served up my omelette with “salad” or at least my version of sald. You see I don’t like lettuce or any other leafy type things! I don’t eat carrots or tomatoes. So my salad consisted off cucumber, coleslaw and onion. I may the mistake of chopping my cucumber on the same chopping board as I chopped my chilli, therefore ending up with some weird chilli tasting cucumber (dam those things are strong!) but apart from that, we had a definite success for once.

Tina tried egg, which she normally hates, and she like it! We both learnt how to prepare a new meal and it was cheap and easy to make. I mean bean cheese pie? Were students! What were we thinking? As if we could afford to make that on a regular basis! Oh and the biggest success of all? Our flatmates brought takeaway that night, Chinese. I was so proud that we resisted the lure of the takeaway. I wasn’t even jealous either!! Normally if someone eats takeaway infront of me im pratically salivating at the mere smell of it, especially pizza. The fact that I resisted and wasn’t jealous is a definite breakthrough! Maybe im already on the way to kicking my takeaway addiction!

So overall, Id definitley recmomend this, especaily to fellow students. I felt really healthy eating it too, its basically just egg and salad and didn’t give me that horrible greasy fatty feeling that takeaway gives me. Ok so egg isn’t exactly the strongest tasting food in the world, even when its covered in cheese! But it tasted a dam lot nicer then that kebab and far less calories too!

My favourite so far and I will make it again sometime!

Heres the link to the recipe, if anyone wants to try it themselves:

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2973/chilli-cheese-omelette

Guilty secret...

Hi, Lyndsey here,

I know, I know, its late and I should be in bed! But Ive just came in from a night out and for some reason, I have loads of energy!
So I have two guilty confessions for you!


Confession number one...Ive just eaten Kebab meat chips and chilli sauce from the chippy. 4 quid it cost me! And it was vile! The meat tasted like microwave kebab meat from a pack. The chips were thin. And was I hungry when I ate it? No! Its just that weird thing isnt, alcohol makes you want to reach for the nearest greasy takeaway. Sooo to cut a long story short, ive just wasted 4 quid on a meal I didnt want, didnt enjoy and is bad for my health! The result of my binge? Chest pain and not being able to go the loo, it seems my IBS doesnt like Kebab meat, suprise suprise!


I mean what is the point in getting dressed up like this, ya know, nice dress nice makeup etc:

And stuffing my face with possibly the most unattractive and unladylike food ever, this:

I mean why???

Worst thing is is do it all again next time I go out!!!

Confession number two...We decided to have a break from our experiment today. How bad is that?? We've only got to the letter C! But to be fair...it is abit of a bloody effort, getting in from uni and cooking, when Im used to bunging some oven chips in for 20 minutes! But what with the pie disaster and chilli overdosed pasta, we deserve a break right? Right......???? (she tries desperatley to justify her actions!!!) So my dinner today was Pizza, chips and cheesy garlic bread. Not a vegetable in sight, You know what? It tasted AMAZING!!! I'd love have told you that I missed the abscence of vegetables...I did not. Still, no one said this was gonna be easy and Im game for a challenge! Bring it on!!!

B is for...Bean and cheese Pie

Hey Guys!
Tina here again!

Well god knows what happened to this one lol…

We decided to do a bean and cheese pie. In this one it had:

Flour
Cheese
Baking powder
Salt
Milk
Egg
Kidney beans
Baked beans
Peppers
Onion
Chilli powder

Garlic
Taco seasoning mix

As soon as we did the base we knew it was going to go wrong. The instructions were not clear enough at all so we ended up with something that looked like a deflated cake mix

After much discussion we put in the mixture of the other ingredients and ended up with something that looked like what a pig would eat. We ended up with Bean Chilli...

We popped it in the oven with a few chips each as it would be a waste of ingredients and it actually tasted quite nice…not something I’d go mad on though…

When preparing it, it looked horrible and smelt horrible but it tasted quite nice, guess you can’t judge a book by its cover can you?

Want to make this messy disaster yourself? Find it here: http://recipes.recipeland.com/recipes/recipe/show/Bean_Cheese_Pie_20725

A is for...Amatriciana Pasta

Hi Guys Tina here!

Well the big cook has started and as planned we started with “A”. For this we made Amitriciana Pasta.

The ingredient included in this were:

Ham
Onion
Chillies
Chopped tinned tomatoes
Chilli flakes
Garlic
Spaghetti

The overall cost of the ingredient came to roughly £5, cheaper than a takeaway but is it better you ask?

It was a nice dish but we are new to this cooking thing so we ended up having chilli overload in it. Just one little taste and it felt like my mouth was on fire. We tried to cool it off using more tomatoes but even that didn’t work…

The final product was nice but just too hot, maybe we should cut back on chilli in future. It resulted in me leaving half of it as it was too hot and I had nearly finished a litre bottle of water!
It was fun to cook and as you can probably tell from the pictures it was a messy job but we had a laugh =]…

If you wish to try this recipe yourself (With a reduced number of chilli's of course!), you can find it here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5211/amatriciana-pasta

F is for...first post!

Hi everyone!

Ok, well this a new experience me, the first post in my (or should I say our) shiny new blog. I’ve never written a blog before so im finding this kind of odd but I do have a diary and I imagine that’s kind of the same thing? Not that Id let anyone read my diary of course!
Anyway my name is Lyndsey and I’m creating this blog as part of a project with my flatmate and friend, Tina. Were in our second year of a media production course at De Montfort University in Leicester. This blog is part of a web 2.0 project were creating but I hope it evolves to be something much more than that because there are many interesting elements to this project!

The basic idea is that over the course of 26 days, Tina and I create a meal, each one beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, from A all the way down to Z. These meals must be prepared by ourselves, not the local pizza hut or a ready meal from Iceland! Having recipes ranging from A to Z is an added stipulation to encourage us to try things we’d never normally eat (Z’s certainly gonna be a tricky one!) and since I’m scared of any vegetables except a cucumber and a onion, this should be beneficial to my health and my diet!

Now for someone whos idea of gourmet dining is a Pot Noodle and a recently diagnosed sufferer of IBS, the hope is that this change in diet will see an improvement in my condition as I will be consuming nutrients not provided by the endless amounts of fast food and takeaway I usually consume. Also, IBS sufferers are told to keep a food diary to see which foods effect them the most. Ive never actually done this so the results of this experiment will be very interesting I think!

The project is far more complex than that though. Understanding blogs and online communication is the key aspect of this project. How can we keep this blog interesting for our readers? What other forms of Web 2.0 can we branch out in to encourage reader participation? Well I can tell you we’ve just created a new Facebook group. Avid Facebook user though I may be, creating a group is another new experience for me! Basic though this group undoubtedly is, hopefully it will provide a lot of interesting feedback; feel free to leave us comments and interesting recipe suggestions!

Were also going to be looking at just how easy it is for a student to eat healthily these days, how much do fresh meals cost in comparison to the delights of the ready meal? Is there enough variety of food shops around the DMU campus to allow us to buy some of the more exotic ingredients needed for certain recipes? How useful are the food recipe websites compared with the more traditional student cookbooks and will the health benefits this of this experiment be worth the extra effort? Well I guess we’ll soon find out over the course of this blog!