Memories of Sienna

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to win a recipe competition run by Merchant Gourmet foods. The recipe I submitted was Spiced Lamb with Pastawheat, and the final was a cook-off at the Good Housekeeping Institute.

The prize was a cookery holiday to Tuscany - for one. I was a little nervous about holidaying alone, but we were a small group of people who shared a love of cooking and I had a wonderful time.  Each day was divided into a cookery session and an outing, and one day we went to the historic town of Sienna. I set off to explore by myself,  but it soon started to pour with rain and I dashed into a tiny restaurant where I had a wonderfully reviving lunch of a simple tuna and bean salad with some crusty bread.  Now I think of that holiday every time I make the salad.

It is  wonderfully easy to make. For one main course serving or 2-3 starters, or as part of a selection of antipasti for more, you need

1 small tin tuna, approx 80g (I like Tuna in brine, but tuna in oil would be more  authentic)
1 small tin canellini beans, approx 150g
1 small shallot or  a piece of red onion, very thinly sliced
juice of half a lemon
1 tbs olive oil
seasoning

Simply mix all the ingredients together and serve with crusty bread.

A quick card from a prize kit

A little while ago, I was lucky enough to win a goody bag from a  craft magazine. Some of the elements in it were great for making a quick but striking card - ideal for when I'm pushed for time yet feel the need to do some "therapeutic crafting". I'd never used die cut decoupage before. It feels a bit like cheating, but I was pleasantly surprised by the result. The co-ordinating papers were included in the kit, so all I needed to do was score and fold my card, add some red matting to pick out the colours in the design, and higlight it with a little red Candi.

Better a dinner of herbs.....

If you read my husband's blog, Marksvegplot you will know that we have a lot of herbs in the garden, and while the recent weather might have made most of us feel miserable, the herbs are loving it! Most of them  are luxuriant and fragrant at the moment, and when we have plenty herbs, I'm inspired to make a dish loosely inspired by one from the book Spices,  Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen by the late Elizabeth David.

I pick a selection of herbs - this time they are parsley, thyme, oregano, rosemary, sage, chives and bayleaves. The other ingredients are

2 pork steaks or chops

2 cloves of garlic

½ a lemon, sliced

a drizzle of olive oil

seasoning

Score the surface of the meat in criss-cross lines then rub all over with the cut face of a halved garlic clove. Rub with a drizzle of olive oil and seasoning.

Put a layer of herbs in the bottom of an ovenproof, non-metallic dish and top with the meat. Cover with the lemon slices and cut garlic then top with more herbs.

Cover with cling film or a plastic lid and refrigerate for several hours. Then replace the cling film or lid with foil  and bake for about an hour in a moderate oven. If you like your meat to look brown, you can remove it from the herbs at the end of cooking and quickly brown it under the grill, but I think that can make it rather dry.

Just scrape off the herbs and eat! This time, I served it with a gratin of potatoes, kohlrabi and butternut squash

And some braised Florence Fennel with white wine, shallots and raisins

The finished meal - I'm afraid I forgot to keep back any uncooked herbs to garnish it with and I didn't want to go out in the rain for some fresh ones! It really could do with a fresh green touch on the plate.

I am submitting this for the Herbs on Saturday challenge

A dragonfly card

Many of my crafty friends will know that dragonflies are my favourite theme. I must have about 20 different dragonfly stamps, in various styles and sizes, so when I saw a card using one of my favourites in Making Cards magazine a few months ago, I kept the article in my "must try" foder and eventually got around to making it a few weeks ago.

The card was designed by the very talented Dee Paramour and while I used her measurements for the "engineering" side of things, I created my own background paper from a free download I picked up about 10 years ago and used my own stamps for the rest of the card. So it's a "based on an idea by..." card, and now I've made the mechanism once, I'll feel confident to choose designs and colours of my own next time.

The dragonfly is stamped and embossed directly on to the background card then coloured in, and the flowers are stamped on to a scrap of gingham patterned card then mounted with foam pads to give some depth.  The card is a standard easel card.

But this is where Dee's clever engineering comes into play - pull the ribbon at the top and look what happens!



A very easy pizza

Since following a Jamie Oliver recipe several years ago, I no longer make a tomato sauce pizza topping. I simply finely chop a few tomatoes - skin, seeds and all - mix them with salt, pepper and a drizzle each of olive oil and balsamic vinegar and leave them for a couple of hours. The  result - more of a salsa than a sauce - makes a lovely vibrant, fresh topping for a pizza and is incredibly simple.

The other day, I made pizza and it was almost less trouble than picking up the phone to order a takeaway. First I made a basic pizza dough in my bread machine, using the instructions in the manual. While it was mixing, I made the above tomato topping and sliced and fried a few mushrooms that were hanging around in the fridge.

I divided the  dough into two rounds. One I cooked naked (the dough, not me) to freeze as a ready made base for a future pizza. I topped the other with the mushrooms and tomatoes, then scattered on some dried oregano and a few crushed chilli flakes. I roughly tore a ball of mozzarella over it and drizzled the edges with chilli oil, then rested it for 20 minutes or so and baked it.  Here is the uncooked pizza.

As soon as it came out of the oven, I scattered over some home grown baby rocket leaves and flakes of Parmesan, and it was ready to serve.

Accompanied, of course, by some lovely home grown green salad, grown, like the rocket,  by my husband Mark who blogs about gardening and food over at Marksvegplot

A card to welcome baby Holly

On Tuesdsay night, May 1st, my new granddaughter Holly was born. If you are a follower of Mellow Mummy  you may have already read about her arrival and seen photos of her, but I had to share a photo of my own

The proud grandparents!

Naturally I had to make a card to welcome her. We hadn't known whether she was going to be a boy or a girl, but as she turned out to be a lovely little girl it was easy to choose which card and paper to use. last year I was lucky enough to win a HUGE bundle of assorted 12 x 12 papers and cards, which included several baby designs in pink (but none in blue, so it's lucky she wasn't a boy!)


Since getting my Hougie Board, I've been very keen on making shutter cards, and I decided one of these would be a good way to make the most of the lovely embossed washing line design on the background card. The paper used on the top and bottom panels also came from my prize bundle, and I stamped the images and coloured them in with Promarkers, then mounted them on frames cut with Nestabilities. A little Candi from Craftwork Cards to highlight the design and this quick-to-make card was ready.

Baking without sugar

This time last year I was diagnosed as diabetic. For the first few weeks I was deluged with information about diet and lifestyle, and found out that it was still OK to eat some  products containing sugar as long as I took into account the overall balance, what I ate when, the GI value of the meal...... it just sounded so complicated that I decided it was simpler just to give up refined sugar and products contaning it completely!  I don't have a very sweet tooth, and I needed to lose some weight, so it wasn't too difficult.

Although I love baking, I didn't really want to bake things that I couldn't eat, so I gave up baking too. However that changed a week or two back when I won six bottles of a product called Sweet Freedom, a plant-based syrup with a low GI value and 25% fewer calories than sugar. It came with a recipe booklet so I immediately set to to bake some flapjack and some nut cookies. Here are the results:

And the taste verdict? I found them rather too sweet! I seem to have completely lost my sweet tooth. But my husband and mother, both confirmed biscuit-lovers, both loved them. I will definitely be using it again whenever a situation calls for cake!