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
Monday, 23 February 2009
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!
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
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
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.
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
Sunday, 22 February 2009
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!
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!!!
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!
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!
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