Chettinad Chicken

New favourite chicken curry alert! Well it was at the time of cooking and eating it anyway, but honestly that was so long ago now it may well have changed a few times.I’d not used Olive magazine as a source for recipes for some time, although I’m not sure why. There were a few in the most reason issue (at time of cooking - I’ve now actually cancelled my subscription as nothing seemed to be particularly...

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Monkfish Cheek Coconut Curry Stew with Carrot and Fennel

To be honest the name Padma Lakshmi to me was just someone who had been married to Salman Rushdie and who had had a modeling career but in fact it seems she’s published a couple of food related books as well as presenting some cookery shows. I stumbled across a recipe of hers for mahi mahi which was the inspiration for this monkfish curry as that was what I fancied cooking for some reason. I...

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Slow Cooker Picadillo

Picadillo, a traditional dish in Spain (the name comes from the Spanish word "picar," which means "to mince" or "to chop") and many Latin American countries as well as the Philippines is something that I’d been wanting to cook for ages and when I saw this recipe on Skinny Taste I thought “yay! 2 birds, 1 stone!”Picadillo is made with minced beef, tomatoes and other ingredients that vary by region...

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Smoky Chicken Pasta

This is a something I had pinned to my pasta board and had wanted to cook for absolute ages as it just looked so damn good (sadly this is not the case with my photos). I wasn’t able to get the marinade specified though (and I now presume that this is probably available only in the US anyway) so kept putting it off. In the end I decided to try it anyway using any smoky BBQ marinade that I could...

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Prawn Gumbo

Another Cajun / Creole inspired meal in a week (by accident rather than design) after the dirty risotto. I think I saw a version of this on Pinterest originally which spurred me to do a little research and then some more when that in turn spurred me on to find out the difference between an etouffee & a gumbo. For those that are interested, a gumbo is made with a traditional roux, that is...

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'Dirty' Risotto

Dirty rice is a traditional Cajun dish where the white rice gets a "dirty" colour from being cooked with small pieces of chicken liver or giblets, (bell) pepper, celery, onion (the so-called Cajun Holy Trinity of ingredients and spices. Most common in the Cajun regions of southern Louisiana and Mississippi it can apparently also be found in other areas of the American South. I’ve never had Dirty...

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Slow Cooker Chicken & Black Bean Soup

Back when we got the slow cooker we’d decided to have a slow cooker meal at least once a week if we could and so I had been pinning quite a few slow cooker (or crockpot) recipes onto my Pinterest boards. This is adapted from one of those, originally seen on skinnytaste.com - I hadn’t used the slow cooker enough myself yet to have the confidence to devise recipes myself. I needed to get used...

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