Spicy lamb bake

Last week I won a baking dish from a competition promoting minced lamb, so although it has a multitude of uses, it would have been rude not to include minced lamb on its first outing, wouldn't it?

Minced lamb always makes me think of Bobotie, the spicy South African dish that looks like a moussaka, tastes like a curry and feels like a meatloaf, so I dug out a   recipe for it. But it used raisins and flaked almonds, and I happened to fancy apricots and pistachios, so I played around with the ingredients and ended up with something that definitely wasn't Bobotie - the taste was  much closer to a Northern African dish, but still with the Bobotie texture.

Here's the recipe:

500g minced lamb

1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic
25 g butter
1 tbs white wine vinegar
1 tbs mild curry powder
1 tsp dried oregano
75g ready-to-eat dried apricots, roughly chopped
50g shelled pistachios, roughly chopped
Juice of ½ lemon
seasoning
2 slices white bread
250 ml milk
2 eggs

Tear the bread into chunks  and soak in the milk for about half an hour.

 Preheat the oven to 160 C, gas mark 3.

 Chop the onion and fry gently in the butter until sort and golden, adding the garlic when it is almost cooked. Cool slightly.

Squeeze the milk out of the bread, reserving it for later.

Mix together the lamb, onion and garlic, vinegar, curry powder, oregano, apricots, pistachios, lemon juice, seasoning, one of the eggs, beaten, and the bread. Pat into a medium sized ovenproof dish, smoothing the top.

Beat together the milk left from soaking the bread and the remaining egg. Pour over the lamb, then bake for around 1 hour until the meat is cooked and the top is golden.

The leftovers were delicious  cold the next day, with salad and chutney

Random recipes #22 - Birthday number

This month at Random Recipes, Dom suggested we should pick a book to cook from by counting along our bookshelves until we reach the date of our birthday. Now this is all very well if you separate your books by subject, but I don't, so counting along 13 books on the first shelf (my birthday is August 13th) brought up this little gem, which I've had since school days.

Assuming you don't want to know the atomic weight of Molybdenum or the square root of 397, I moved on to the shelf blow and counted 13 books along. Now I have a huge collection of exotic, interesting and historic recipe books from all over the world, yet the magic birthday system came up with.........

DELIA!!!

Actually this isn't my first copy of this book. When it was re-issued, I bought it to replace my old copy, bought in 1981, which is just about worn out (although I've not been able to bring myself to part with it yet)

Well-used, as you can see, so I thought I must have cooked just about everything in the book. Yet the random page it fell open at was a recipe I had never tried - Delia's version of home made pork sausages.

The only change I made to the recipe was to cook them in sunflower oil rather than lard, as  I no longer keep lard in the house. The sausage mixture was very obedient and easy to shape

And after frying looked quite appetising although rather dry.

We served them with mash, Savoy cabbage and onion gravy, and our verdict was that they tasted good but were, as we'd anticipated, quite dry.

I suspect that for health reasons, supermarket minced pork is very much leaner than it was when  Delia first wrote the recipe, and with no skins to keep the juices in, the result is a healthier but less appetising sausage. The ones my husband made based on a recipe in "Sausages" by Paul Gayler were far superior.

I am joining in Random Recipes over at Belleau Kitchen



Candy from Polkadoodles

Fans of  Nikki Hall's lovely Polkadoodles range will love this! There is a £50 goody bag being given away on the Studio 12  blog.  Hop over there and enter before the end of November,

And if you are NOT familiar with Polkadoodles, here is a card I recenly made using stamps from the range.

Actually I was going to give you several photos of cards I have made from Polkadoodles CDs, but I have just opened my "Jane's Cards" folder on the computer...... and found it empty. So I've looked in my backup folder and found that empty too.

So excuse me while I go away and cry......

A plethora of pink

This week at Less is More, it's a colour challenge and the colour is PINK.  Now, as many of you will know, I am not a pink kind of person at all. In fact I'm so unfeminine that people are often surprised to know that I love cooking and crafting so much. My handbag tends to be used  as a convenient place to carry my screwdrivers and I feel more at home in P C World than Dorothy Perkins.

My older daughter, whose lovely family blog can be seen at Mellow Mummy,  is just the same and it is a constant surprise to both of us that her daughter Lara, who loves to craft with me, always chooses pink whenever she has the chance. So I really thought I wouldn't have anything pink left to play with, after her last crafting marathon a few days ago!

However  rummage through my drawers (ooh! Mrs!) yielded a surprising amount of pink, but very few stamps that would work with a pink colour scheme. At least, I thought that at the  time - having looked at some of the wonderful work form other bloggers for this challenge, perhaps I should think again.

I stamped a simple floral motif in Brilliance ink and added a background of pink pearlescent card embossed with the 'Bug for my first attempt. I used a square backing card but it looked all wrong so I trimmed it down and I'm afraid I still hated the result. it's too........ PINK. But here it is:

Really not me at all, so I thought I'd try for something bolder.  I dropped the idea of stamping and used die cutting to produce this card. Well, I did add a stamped sentiment, but the texture of the card is all wrong for stamping on so I had to cover it up with a die cut one.

I can't say I'm really thrilled with how this one looks in the photos, but actually it looks a lot better in real life. The photos don't  really show the amount of dimension that it has. So this is the one I am submitting to Less is More this week.

And now I have a pile of pink odds and ends on my craft table - what a pity my granddaughter is away on holiday and I can't invite her over to play!

Too Much Stuff- Autumn catch-up

Earlier this year I set myself a personal challenge - not to buy any more craft goodies, apart from restocking basics, until I have created some space in my cluttered mountains of stash.

It's been about 7 months now since I bought anything new, apart from restocking on adhesives, and despite having made dozens of cards and sent four large bundles of them to charity, I don't seem to have cleared any space yet...... everything just seems to spread out a little bit more instead.

So my next step is to tackle all the part-used kits I have amassed. I keep telling myself to stop buying kits. They look so good demonstrated on the TV, yet when you get them home they are uninspiring and lack challenge. I find myself just slavishly copying the things that were demoed on TV - if I can remember them.  About a third of the kit gets used and the rest sits in boxes getting gradually more and more dog eared, or I decide to break down the kits and use them with the rest of my stash, only to decide that none of it really works with anything else I own. In fact I find myself completely incapable of "thinking outside the box".

Some of my part used kits must be 15 years old or more, so it really is "use it or lose it" time, and I've had  a bit of a blitz on a few of the oldest ones, the result of which you can see here. Now I have four fewer boxes cluttering the place up, I'd better get back to the Christmas cards or I'll still be making this year's next year!

Less is More week 91

Week 91's challenge at Less is More is a sketch. This is the sketch

I've not had much experience with sketches, but I was sorting out some old part-used kits as part of my self-imposed "Too Much Stuff" challenge(there will be an update later this week) and came across some Oriental bits and bobs which looked as if they would lend themselves to the sketch. I used an embossing board to make parallel lines each side of the band, to make it stand out a bit more, but as I had my usual "photographing metallics" issue they have been a bit overshadowed by the glare from the flash. Pity the weather is so gloomy there's nowhere bright enough for me to switch the flash off!

The Chinese characters say "Peace", "Love" and  "Happiness"

The World's Easiet Tomato Tart

If you read my husband's blog, Marks Veg Plot, you will know that we've had a fine crop of tomatoes this year, and we ALWAYS have a fine crop of basil. We make batches of pesto with the basil, freezing it in ice cube trays, so we can defrost one or two cubes as needed. This tart needs two or three of those cubes from the freezer, but pesto from a jar would work if you have no home made, a sheet of ready-rolled bought puff pastry (also from the freezer, in my case), a little Parmesan or any other hard cheese and as many tomatoes as you happen to have lying around.

Heat the oven to about 200 degrees Celsius (or  whatever it recommends on your pack of pastry). Line  a baking tray with non-stick paper, then unroll  the defrosted pastry directly onto it. Cut into it to a depth of about halfway down all around, about 3cm from the edge, to form an inner rectangle. Prick the inner area all over with a fork and then spread with the pesto, making sure none goes onto the border.

Slice your tomatoes, guesstimating how thick they need to be in order to cover the inner area with them - the more you have, the thicker you can afford to have them, and arrange them on top of the pesto, again not going over the border. Then grate a little cheese over the whole thing.

At this point you can get all fancy with the border, scoring fancy patterns into it, egg washing it, whatever floats your boat, only then it isn't the World's easiest any more, is it? And even the keenest cooks have lazy days.

Finally stick it in the oven until the border is puffed up and golden, by which time the tomatoes will be cooked.

And there you are - minimum effort,  maximum taste. This really ought to serve 4, but there are only two of us and there has never yet been anything left for next day's lunch, although I would imagine it is perfectly delicious  cold if it is ever given the chance.

I'm linking this to Food on Friday where this week's challenge is tomatoes