So my wonderful husband (Grant) has helped with the web-site this week and set up ‘The Blog!’.  Here is where I think I’ll keep you all up to date with my adventures in the kitchen, what worked (and what failed).  Obviously, if a recipe was a success, it will go onto the main part of the website for all to enjoy …

I spent a reasonable amount of time in the kitchen last week and over the weekend, and here is the run-down:

White chocolate fudge – from a Facebook post from one of our friends.  Worked well enough, but probably not enough white chocolate taste in there for my liking.  Grant and the kids really enjoyed it, though!

 

Peanut butter fudge – this was a winner in my book – and will be added to the website shortly.  I found it here at Sally’s Baking Addiction and tweaked it a little.  I think this will become the middle bit of my ultimate chocolate peanut butter slice (which is hopefully soon in coming to a plate near you!).

 

I asked the kids what dessert they wanted me to make for the weekend – I try to make a really nice meal for Saturday lunch for the family to sit down and eat together – and they asked for a chocolate raspberry pavlova that we saw on one of Nigella Lawson’s shows.  It used 6 egg whites, and I didn’t want to throw away the yolks, so I looked up recipes with egg yolks. 

 

 

Grant has always had a soft spot for any pasta with alfredo or carbonara sauces, so when I found that most recipes for alfredo sauces used egg yolks, I found a recipe from an obscure website (so obscure I can’t find it again), but basically used the egg yolks, cream, butter and parmesan cheese.  Unfortunately, the parmesan cheese that we get here in Chile is not as flavourful as we’re used to, and we also didn’t have enough of it, so we added about 60g cream cheese.  It made the sauce pretty gluggy, but still relatively tasty.  I also fried up some bacon (which we amazingly found here – it’s not a staple supermarket ingredient), and added some broccoli, as a variation on my Creamy Bacon & Broccoli Fettucine recipe.

And with the other egg yolks (since the alfredo sauce only needed 2), I made some cookies.  I made half of this recipe from food.com, used my gluten-free conversion for the flour and added some lemon zest to it.  These cookies then became part of the base of a lemon coconut slice (recipe here) as we still had some lemons leftover from our backyard trees. 

So for our Friday night dinner, the bacon and broccoli alfredo, followed by the lemon coconut slice were a winner with one and all.

 

Saturday lunch was planned to be Honey & Tamari beef with rice noodles (vermicelli), followed by the chocolate raspberry pavlova.  I marinated the beef stirfry in the honey & tamari marinade, but, as opposed to when we did it with chicken, tipped the whole beef and marinade in the frying pan at once.  It kind of lost some of the flavours – I’ll learn from that!  The pavlova … well, let’s just say that my son, Henry, makes a better pavlova than what I ended up with.  Crunchy on the outside, yes, but not chewy on the inside.  It was more a big crunchy chocolate cookie, topped with cream and raspberries.  Still good to eat, but not exactly what I was after.

Sunday I tried to make a chicken masala using some of the seasoning we bought on our recent trip to Australia … the less said about this the better.  Way too spicy, not at all creamy, desperately need to try again and get it right this time!

So, it was a pretty busy time in the kitchen, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself this weekend.  I wonder what I’ll make next weekend … my brain is already ticking over!

Happy cooking!