Coconut Butter Cookies

These delicious coconuty cookies are crisp at the edges, and perfectly chewy in the middle. Anyone who likes the aroma and taste of coconut is sure to love these buttery, and easy to make cookies.

• 150 g Butter, at room temperature
  


• 50 g Sugar


• 90 g Eggs


• 50 g All-purpose flour


• 30 g Potato starch


• 170 g Dried coconut shreds

1. Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Gradually add in eggs and continue beating until well-mixed.
   


2. Sift in the flour and potato starch and mix. Add in 160 grams of coconut shreds and mix until just combined. Wrap and chill the mixture for 1-2 hours.
   


3. Shape the mixture into 27-30 small balls and place on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Sprinkle the top with the rest of coconut shreds.
   


4. Bake in a preheated 180C/350F oven for about 22-25 minutes until lightly golden brown.

Jamie Oliver's Winter Coleslaw

I made this for a lunch party where Giles baked a ham (I've no idea how he did it, so can't explain it here), and it was totally brilliant.

This isn't the exact Jamie Oliver recipe, but it's close enough.

In the food processor, with the coarse shredding attachment, I shredded some

carrots
celeriac
fennel

and put it all in a massive bowl and squeezed lemon juice over it to stop it from going brown. Then we sliced up some

white cabbage and
red cabbage by hand, because putting it through the food processor kind of minces it up: no good.

I added the cabbages to the other veggies and tossed it around by hand. Then for a dressing I used

some large dollops of good quality plain yoghurt
some salt and pepper
one or two dollops of grainy mustard
a handful of fresh mint leaves, chopped up

And it was out of this world. Jamie: the master.

Cranberry Sour Cream Chiffon

This cake is inspired by Pei-Lin@Dodol Mochi. Thanks, Pei-Lin!

Yolk Batter	Meringue
90 ml Corn oil 30 g Sweetened condensed milk 150 g Sour cream 130 g German #405 flour 2 g Baking powder 6 Egg yolks, at room temperature 1/2 tsp Vanilla extract 70 g Dried cranberries 1/2 tbsp Cornstarch	6 Egg whites, at room temperature 100 g Caster sugar 1 g Salt 1/3 tsp Lemon juice

1. Preheat the oven to 165C/330F. Coat the dried cranberries with cornstarch in a small bowl. Set aside. Place the corn oil, sweetened condensed milk and sour cream in a mixing bowl. Whisk until the mixture fully blended and imulsified. Sift in the flour and baking powder, mixing roughly. Add in egg yolks and vanilla extract. Gently mix until combined.
   


2. Beat the egg whites with salt until fluffy, drizzling in the lemon juice, continue to beat until the soft peaks appear. Add in sugar in 3 additions, and beat until meringue gloosy and stiff. Gently fold 1/3 of the meringue into the yolk batter and then carefully fold in the remaining whites until well combined. Finally add in the dried cranberries.
   


3. Pour the cake batter into a 24 cm springform pan. Bake the cake in the lower rack of the hot oven for 65 minutes. Remove and invert it onto a wire rack. Allow it to cool to the room temperature.

Halloumi and quinoa salad

Oooh what a scrumptious thing this is. It's a Greek-inspired, fresh thing of lovliness, which can be tailored to suit your exact tastebuds. I had it for lunch just now and mine went something like this:

(For 2)

1 packet Halloumi cheese
80g dried quinoa
half a red chilli, deseeded and chopped very small
2 spring onions
1 stick celery, chopped
1 small bunch fresh mint, chopped
2 dollops natural yoghurt
pinch of salt

1 Cook the quinoa for about 16 mins and drain
2 while in the sieve, mix in all the ingredients except the halloumi
3 slice and fry as much of the packet of halloumi as you fancy - one packet is slightly too much for two people
4 pile up the quinoa mixture onto a plate, put a dollop of yoghurt on top, followed by the halloumi and sprinkle some more mint on top

Yummy

Brussels Sprout With Mustard And Honey

This is inspired by Tracie Moo on Bitter Sweet Flavours.

Brussels sprouts, or Brassica oleracea gemmifera, are related to other better-known vegetables in the Brassica genus like broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. They are part of the cruciferae or mustard family, so known because of a four-part flower in the shape of a cross.
Brussels sprouts are a very good source of many essential vitamins, fiber, and folate. They are especially high in Vitamin C. They, along with their other cruciferous cousins, have been shown to have some very beneficial effects against certain types of cancer, as they contain many different ingredients that are believed to help prevent the disease. Check Foodnetwork for more delicious Brussels sprout recipes.

• 350 g Brussels sprout
  


• 3 Shallot, finely sliced
  


• 2 tbsp Duck fat
  


• 1 Fresh chilli, sliced
  


• 2 tbsp Honey
  


• 3 tbsp Dijon mustard
  


• 4 tbsp Water
  


• Salt and black pepper

1. Wash the brussels sprouts well. Trim the stem ends and remove any yellowing leaves. Cut in half from stem to top. Finely sliced the shallot. Mix the honey, mustard and 3 tablespoons of water in a small bowl. Set aside.
   


2. Heat the duck fat in a large skillet over medium heat. Stir in sliced shallots until fragrant. Add in Brussels sprouts and sprinkle salt, pepper and a tablespoon of water over, stir, cover, and cook for roughly 5 minutes.
   


3. Pour in the prepared mustard sauce, stirring to combine. Cook until most of liquid evaporates and sprouts are tender but still bright green, 3-5 minutes. Add in sliced chillies and toss all together. Season with salt and pepper.

Chicken Flavoured With Fermented Tofu / 腐乳鸡块

Fermented tofu, called "doufu ru" (豆腐乳) in Chinese, is a type of soya products. This looks innocent enough, like cubes of tofu immersed in a broth, but it has a very pungent aroma and strong, cheesy flavor. It comes in two colors. The white version is often served with rice or used to flavor soups and vegetable dishes, while the red often accompanies meats. Look for it in jars or crocks in Asian markets. Store it in the refrigerator after you've opened it, keeping the cubes immersed in liquid or oil to prevent them from drying out and discoloring. foodsubs

	Marinade
250 g Chicken breast 15 g Cornstarch 45 g All-purpose flour Some frying oil	1 tbsp Egg, beaten 1 pc Fermented tofu (sesame oil flavoured) 1 tsp Light soya sauce 1/3 tsp Sugar 1/2 tbsp Jiafan rice wine 1/4 tsp White pepper powder

1. Blend starch and flour together in a bowl to yield a mixture for coating. Stir all the marinade ingredients in a bowl. Rinse and pat the chicken dry. Cut into inch-sized pieces and pour in prepared marinade. Stir and let marinate for 1 hour until chicken dices fully absorb the sauce.
   


2. Heat up a skillet with oil until hot. Coat the chicken with flour mixture and fry them until golden brown and crispy. Drain and serve with a dish of fermented tofu juice.

Curry-Fried Rice With Seafood

300 g Cooked rice 25 g Chopped onion 1 Egg, lightly beaten 50 g Shelled shrimps 50 g Conpoy (dried scallops)

15 g Peas 15 g Carrot dices 30 g Bell pepper dices 10 g Spring onion 1 tsp Curry powder 1/4 tsp Sugar Salt to taste

1. Bring a pot of water to a boil, poach shrimps, conpoy, peas, carrots and bell pepper. Set aside.


2. Heat up a skillet with some oil, add in onion and stir until fragrant. Stir in egg mixture until cooked.
   
   
3. Heat the skillet with some oil and, when it is very hot, add the cold cooked rice. Stir-fry until it is thoroughly heated through. Add in other ingredients and seasoning, stir-fry then toss in the spring onions. Stir and dish up.

Crunchy Marshmallow Brownies

A delicious chocolate marshmallow brownies with a kick! This recipe is inspired by Kristy@My Little Space. I must warn you, this is a 100% calorie bomb!

Batter	Topping
110 g German #405 flour 2/3 tsp Baking powder 1 g Salt 200 g 70% Bio dark chocolate 120 g Butter 3 Eggs 220 g Sugar 1 tsp Vanilla extract	25 g White chocolate courveture 125 g 60% Lindt dark chocolate 90 g Peanut butter 10 g Butter 1 cup Cornflakes with honey and nuts 42-48 Marshmallow

1. In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Grease a 20x30cm baking pan with some butter. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.
   


2. Melt butter and chocolate over a double boiler, stir until smooth and remove from heat. Blend in sugar, eggs and extract. Gradually sift in the flour mixture and combine until incorporated. Spread the batter into the prepared pan and bake in the middle rack of oven for about 25 minutes. Remove and cover the top with marshmallow squares. Return it to the oven and bake for another 3 minutes. Remove and cool completely on a wire rack.
   
   


3. Meanwhile prepare the topping. Over a double boiler melt white chocolate courveture, dark chocolate, peanut butter and butter. Mix in the cornflakes. Spread the chocolate mixture onto the baked marshmallow. Allow it to set and cut into 12 squares.

Carly's salad

I don't like salad. I don't even, really, like vegetables that much. I like hot, fried things, salty, fatty things. I like meat. And pies. And, most of all, meat in pies.

But I've got to eat salad. Got to. I am a grown-up and a sensible person and what separates me from animals is the ability to act now for my future self - thus I must eat vegetables to be healthy and not die from heart disease before then next series of X Factor starts.

The other problem is that I'm not that great at making salad - especially not salad dressings. What will always prevent me, and anyone else, from being anything other than a perfectly competent home cook is a lack of clever taste buds. What makes, in my view, someone like Jamie Oliver, a genius, is his mastery of taste. He can create with taste in the way that a brilliant novelist can create with words. When it comes to taste, I'm barely past my ABCs.

Anyway, I put out a plea on Facebook for a great salad and my old friend Carly Chenowyth (try typing THAT when you're drunk) replied with a lovely asian fusion confection, that involved mung beans, which I've always dismissed as little more than tapwater in fancy dress.

But Carly is an Australian, you see, and does asian fusion off the top of her head, poof, just like that. So I went for it and it was magnificent (although I did add a lot of chopped, grilled chicken, just because I felt like it). Giles, who had initially made his just-seen-a-gross-mouldy-thing face, hoovered it up.

So here we go (this is not the exact recipe as Carly gave it to me, but this is my interpretation)

Carly's salad

Mung beans
carrots
alfafa
sesame oil
large clove of garlic
sherry vinegar
0.5 fresh red chilli
light soy sauce
salt
grated ginger
juice of half a lime
a small sprinkling of sugar

This is a very long list of ingredients, and you could skip out most of them except the beans, the sesame oil, the soy, chilli and garlic. Everything else is just vaguely asian salady-stuff I had hanging around.

Anyway, so start off with a base of about 3 parts sesame oil to 2 parts soy. Then add the garlic if you like garlic, or for just a hint (raw garlic at lunchtime doesn't work for me) chop up a really large clove into 3 chunks and let it sit in the dressing until you're ready to eat, at which point you can fish it out.

Add a sprinkling of salt and then the chopped chilli and you're done. If you want to add the other ingredients, add a little of each one and keep tasting as you go. The dressing tastes pretty overwhelming when it's neat, but over the mung beans and the carrots and alfafa, it's perfect.

I blanched the mung beans for one minute just to take the edge off and julienned the carrots rather than grated them as grated carrots always taste a bit weird to me. Throw the veggies in a bowl, pour over the dressing and that's that. If you want to add a bit of grilled chicken, brush it with the dressing before it goes under the grill and really grill it hard, to make it nice and crispy.

If anyone out there has a failsafe, tasty salad idea, send it my way.

A note about potato dauphinoise

Ok, I don't know a lot about a lot, but I do know about potato dauphinoise and enough people have expressed dismay at how their dauphs have turned out - 'practically raw' 'bland' and so on, for me to write about it.

The trick is to bung a LOT of salt and pepper and garlic inbetween your layers of potato. More than you think you need. A good sprinkle of salt, a good four twists of the pepper grinder and at least half a clove of garlic, chopped or microplaned.

Then you must, must, cook the sucker for ages. Like, two hours. You can just about get away with 1.5 hours if your oven is top-class. But nothing bad will happen if you blast it for 2 hours, so just throw it in there and forget about it.

A good dauph is the best thing ever, but it's not worth making an average one.

Braised Bean Curds / 红烧豆腐

Deep fried chunks of tofu braised with black mushrooms and vegetables in a light oyster sauce. It is perfect on a bed of steamed rice.

300 g Bean curds-tofu Some frying oil 20 g Dried black mushrooms 100 ml Water 1 tbsp Garlic, minced 150 g Bell peppers 1 stalk Scallion chunks 1 tsp Jiafan rice wine

1/2 tsp Chicken bouillon 1/2 tbsp Dark soya sauce 1 tbsp Oyster sauce 2/3 tsp Salt 1 tsp Cornstarch 1 tbsp Tap water A few drops of sesame oil

1. Cut the bean curd into rectangular pieces. Soak dried mushrooms in water until they soften. Squeeze off the excess water and shred. Save the soaking water. Shred the bell peppers. Heat up a skillet with oil until hot. Pan-fry the bean curd until golden brown.
   
2. Remain a bit of oil in the same skillet to stir fry the minced garlic and mushrooms until aromatic. Add in shredded bell peppers and stir-fry briefly, then drizzle in rice wine, chicken bouillon, dark soya and oyster sauces. Pour in soaking liquid and bean curd pieces. Cover and simmer for 3-5 minutes. Stir in cornstarch mixed with a tablespoon of cold water. Increase the heat and cook until sauce has thickened. Add in scallion and the sesame oil, toss through and serve at once with steamed rice.

O! For a Scotch Egg

God I love Scotch Eggs. I had forgotten how much until I rediscovered them at my amazingly food-fabulous local pub, The Bull and Last. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/giles_coren/article4935099.ece

Here they have them on the bar, as a snack, although they are big as your fist (if you're a girl with small-ish hands) and they have, somehow, contrived to make them so that the EGG IS RUNNY when you cut into it.

Anyway, it turns out that they are a sublime doddle to make in one's own kitchen. Have a go, it's very jolly. And you can make three, put them in the fridge, forget about them and then be thrilled the following lunchtime because you've got a Scotch Egg to eat.

Scotch egg

1 egg

another egg, beaten

2 sausages' worth of sausagemeat (as good quality as you can get your hands on, I used Cumberland)

some bread - a bit stale if possible, whizzed up in the food processor to make breadcrumbs - about one, 1.5 slices

flour

groundnut oil for frying

Preheat your oven to 180

1 Boil one egg for 9 minutes. Or for less, maybe 7 mins, if you are feeling brave and want to have a go at keeping the egg runny. Cool the egg in cold water and peel

2 Dry the egg off and roll it in seasoned flour

3 extract the top-end, high quality sausagemeat from your two sausages by scoring the sausage skin from top to bottom with a knife and peeling it away. mash it all together with your hand and then pat out in a circle about 1cm thick on a floured surface

4 place the egg in the middle of the sausage circle and then bring the sides up around and over it, bbeing extra careful if you've got a 7 minute egg not to squish it. smooth the sausagemeat around the egg until there are no gaps. This is very easy.

5 roll your ball of sausage and egg into the beaten egg and then roll it through the breadcrumbs, gently pressing as many crumbs into the surface of the egg as you can.

6 get your groundnut oil really smoking hot and then shallow fry the egg for about five or six minutes, until the breadcrumbs are a nice golden brown all over

7 transfer to a baking tray or sheet and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Easy tomato and courgette gratin

What with all my pork pie and turkish delight making, I'm getting a bit fat. And it's not even, really, Christmas yet. I haven't even had the first mince pie of the year (more of which later).

So I'm going on a post-Christmas run-up, pre-Christmas diet, in anticipation of all the chocolate and potato and salmon-on-bread I'm going to be eating, starting in about a week's time.

Staring at the larder at about lunchtime yesterday, all I could think about was have a very large egg sandwich (or maybe 2) with a lot of butter and homemade celery salt:

(Celery salt:

The leaves from a head of celery
salt

Cut from a head of celery all the leaves and arrange them on a baking tray. Put in the oven at 180 for five minutes until they are dry and crispy. Remove to a pestle and mortar and bash up, then add rock or sea salt.)


But I couldn't have that, all that bread. But what I did have was a quantity of tomatoes and some courgettes and remembered a Delia recipe for a tomato and courgette gratin. The secret with a gratin, I find, is to use about four times as much cheese as you think is reasonable and scatter, over the top a small quantity of breadcrumbs, which give a smidge of crunch and a tiny thrill of carbohydrate to the stodge-dodger.

Tomato and courgette gratin:

I used six large-ish tomatoes and two courgettes for this. It fed two hungry people, with a salad, with leftovers.
A large block of parmesan
a handfull of breadcrumbs
salt
pepper
sage or other herbs

1 Slice up the courgettes thinly and sautee them for about ten minutes with sage and garlic (or thyme, or whatever herbs you have) and salt.
2 Slice up the tomatoes and the parmesan, leaving about a third of the parmesan to grate over the dish
3 arrange the tomatoes, courgettes and parmesan slices in layers. Delia recommends overlapping them, like tiles on a roof, but I simply don't have that kind of dexterity, so it all went in sort of higgledy piggledy.
4 grate over the remaining parmesan and scatter over the breadcrumbs and season generously with salt and pepper
5 stick in the oven at 190 for 30 mins

Spekulatius Spiced German Christmas Cookies

It simply isn't Christmas in Germany without flat,crunchy and richly spiced Spekulatius. Traditionally Spekulatius are moulded into shapes with a small Christmas design on the surface. Well, those wooden Spekulatius forms are not cheap at all, so I have decided to use X'mas-themed cookie cutters to make these cookies. You can garnish the cookies with colourful sugar icings, or with confectionery coatings made with couverture chocolate, to decorate your X'mas tree, or table center.

500 g All-purpose flour, sifted 4 g Baking powder 2 g Baking ammonia angiesrecipes 200g Sugar 1 pack Vanilla sugar 2 Eggs

1/2 tsp Almond extract 100 g Almond, ground angiesrecipes 1/3 tsp Cardamom, ground 1/3 tsp Cloves, ground 1 tsp Cinnamon, ground angiesrecipes 200 g Butter, chilled

1. In a large bowl, mix flour, baking powder and ammonia. Make an indent in the middle and add eggs, sugar, spices and extract, and combine all into a thick dough. Cut in the cold butter and together with the ground almonds and knead it well to form a smooth dough. If the dough is still sticky, then wrap and rest it in the refrigerator for 1 hour.
   
2. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F. Roll out the dough into 3mm thick circle and cut out the cookies with favourite Christmas cookie cutters. Place them onto greased baking sheet and bake until starting to brown, about 10 minutes. When cool, store cookies in an air-tight container. Decorate the cookies with sugar icings as desired.