Tasty Dinners

On Saturday night I was craving something different. After watching endless cooking shows of late, I thought I would try and be a bit 'Jamie Oliver' and whip up one of his fab perfect roast chicken recipes.

It was so easy and so simple and tasted absolutely yummy. For an easy tasty dinner, give this one a go.




For dessert I was craving one of my sisters amazing pavs that she just seems to whip up on a whim. They too are so delish and the combination of pav, fresh berries and cream is to die for.

It was my first attempt at creating meringue and it wasn't too bad. My sister shared a pav secret afterwards and told me that once you have cooked the meringue you should leave it in the oven until stone cold or even better, over night. I pulled mine out too early, so the middle was a little soft and undercooked. But we managed to pick at the outside on Sunday morning until it was all but finished.

I again used the great book that my friend Katie gave me for the pav, Country Classics.

Here is the recipe.

4 egg whites

pinch of salt

1.5 cups castor sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

2 teaspoons cornflour

1 teaspoon vinegar

whipped cream and fruit or chocolate to decorate

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees. Cover the baking tray with baking paper or foil that has been slightly greased and dusted with cornflour. Beat egg whites and salt until very stiff. Slowly add sugar and keep beating for a minute or two. Fold vanilla essence, cornflour and vinegar. Heap mixture onto the baking tray in a circle about 5-cm high. Bake for 1.5 hours. Take out of the oven, remove paper and place cake on pavlova plate. Decorate with whipped cream and your choice of fruits or grated chocolate peppermint bar.

I had to jig some of the ingredients like vinegar, as there was no white vinegar here that I could fine, I opted for the üzüm sirkesi (grape) type that I had in the pantry. It did the job and didn't flavour the pav badly. I also had run out of vanilla essence so I bought vanilla sugar instead as there is no liquid essence type at the supermarket.

Cooking inspiration

After my last post, I began to consider all that was in my fridge, which was a lot of food. So today I decided to whip up a vegetable sauce, similar to a ratatouille. My mum used to make lots of yummy ones back in the day so I thought I could cook that in order to reduce what was in the fridge in order not to waste. I hate to waste.

I diced up some eggplant's, zucchini's, onion, garlic, mushrooms, green peppers-sweet and mild, and used fresh tomatoes as the base- peeled the skins off them and roughly cut them up. I then added some salça, tomato paste, salt and pepper, a dash of sugar and some dry mixed herbs and let it reduce for about 20 minutes.

But then, what to do once that cooked? A post from a blog I read a while ago reminded me of the open lasagna whereby you boil the pasta sheets separately and then on the plate build your own lasagna. I put one sheet on the base of the plate then added some cheese then sauce and repeated this with 3 lasagna sheets. On top, I added some more sauce, fresh chopped parsley and cheese and presto! You have an open lasagna. It was very tasty and easy and you can make loads of sauce and then freeze.