Tropical Turkey

I have been invited to take part in a recipe blogging competition being run by British Turkey. They asked me to spend up to £15 on turkey then share the recipe(s) I cooked with it. (Note - they are paying for the turkey)

For £11.22, I picked up this huge piece of boneless Turkey breast.

 

 

It is much too big for us to eat in one meal, so I cut off just under half of it and diced it for today's recipe, and will use the rest tomorrow.

 

 

Tropical Turkey – serves 4

 

400g diced turkey meat

1 large onion, chopped

1 banana (choose a fairly under-ripe one)

1 x 4 slice tin pineapple in juice

1 rounded tablespoon Caribbean style curry powder

4 tablespoons tomato ketchup

200 ml chicken stock

2 heaped teaspoons cornflour

1 tablespoon sunflower oil 

 

 

Pre heat the oven to 160 C (140 C for a fan oven, gas mark 3)

In a flameproof casserole, heat the oil and gently fry the onion until softened.  Add the turkey to the pan and cook until sealed all over, then stir in the curry powder and cook for two minutes. Blend in the stock and tomato ketchup and bring to the boil.  

Meanwhile put the cornflour into a small bowl or teacup,  blend in the juice from the tinned pineapple and cut the slices into large chunks. Stir the pineapple and blended cornflour into the casserole, cover and transfer to the oven.  

Cook for 1 hour, adding the sliced banana 15 minutes before the end of the cooking time.  

 

Check seasoning (with the spices, ketchup and stock you may not need to add any) and serve with rice and a green salad.  
 

 

Note: Caribbean curry powder is available in the ethnic foods section of many supermarkets. If you can’t find it, use any mild curry powder. It tends to be milder than the more familiar Indian ones, even the type labelled "hot" which I used, and the fragrant spices in it go well with fruit, but if you want a bit more heat to the dish, choose a tomato ketchup with added chilli.

The banana could be replaced with fresh mango – add it towards the end of the cooking time, as you would the banana.

 

Verdict:  We were delighted with this dish. The turkey didn't go at all  dry, because of the sauce, and the Caribbean spice went beautifully with the fruit as well as the turkey. It only took a few minutes to put together, which is a great bonus on a busy weekday.



Review: Old Amsterdam Cheese

Note: I was sent a sample of this cheese to try, but was under no obligation to review it or even to like it!

I seldom buy Dutch cheese. I put this down to overdosing on it in my student days. Edam was cheap and easily available, and both Edam and Gouda had a reputation for being very low in calories - the Slimming magazines we devoured were full of recipes and meal suggestions that used them.

But as my taste in cheese has, like a good cheese, matured, I've lost interest in the rather bland flavour and slightly rubbery texture of those old friends. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I cut a piece of Old Amsterdam and flexed it, to see if that rubberiness was there -and it SNAPPED! Not a hint of rubberiness, it is a proper mature cheese texture with that firmer texture that gives it a much more satisfying mouth feel.

The taste, too, was anything but bland. It has a lovely strong, nutty flavour that marks it out in my book as a Serious Cheese. Just one thing about it puzzles me. The blurb on the pack says "it has ripening crystals that guarantee its constant quality". What the heck is a ripening crystal?

Ripening crystals or not, I'll definitely be buying it again!

Feeling Funky

Lurking in my box of crafting CDs for several years now are three CDs of backing papers from Funky Hand - CDs I turn to time and time again for  their sets of striking, colour coordinated  paper in some wonderful and often very original colour schemes. They are probably the oldest CDs in my collection, bought in 2007 and 2008 and used many. many times since.

The CD I've been playing with today is called Now That's Funky and as well as papers, it has ribbons, circular toppers and slightly smaller circular greetings to co-ordinate with the papers. Apart from the card bases and the flower, everything I've used in these two cards came from the CD.

The first is a thank you card, so with it I am playing along with CD Sundays where the theme this week is Thank You

And the second concentrates on circles, so for the first time I'm joining in with CAS on Sunday where the theme is "Round and Round"

Less is More - Film titles

This week it's a one layer challenge at Less is More - and the theme is "A Film"  - not great news for me as I'm not a great film fan so I don't know the names of many films. And searching through my stash produced nothing that brought any films to mind.

Until I came to a portrait of Beethoven, and thought about the children's film "Beethoven" from the 1980s. The trouble was, the portrait was part of a large collage stamp which wasn't at all CAS. I tried just inking the portrait area with markers, but wasn't satisfied with the image, so I decided to use a mask. I inked a band, and  stamped the image near the bottom - but the masking didn't work too well and cut off most of Beethoven's hair, the inked band looked too dark and I touched the card with my inky fingers and made a huge smudge.

Never mind, it means I have a failure to share, I've not included one of those for a while.

 

So what to do now? I was so short of ideas I seriously considered submitting this:

 

 

And calling it "Snow White". Do you think I'd have got away with it?

 

I was just about to give up when I remembered a box of "out of favour" unmounted stamps I have stored away. A quick rummage through it produced a couple of ideas. First of all this little chap basking by a giant cactus, which made me think of "The Mexican" (always nice to think about Brad Pitt!)

 

 

 

And this little robot, a perfect  character for "I, Robot". This is the card I am submitting to the challenge.

 

 

Sticky stuff!

Peel-offs, outline stickers - whatever you call them, I bet you have a pile of them that you never use, don't you? It seems that every new crafter sees them and thinks "Ooh, what a brilliant idea!" and stocks up on them. And then can't think what to do with them, apart from the occasional word and a few simple borders, yet can't quite bear to part with them. Having been lured by a few bulk buys on the shopping channels I've got dozens, stored in clear plastic wallets, most of which must be over 10 years old now.

So when I saw that the Use it Tuesday challenge is Sticky Situation! I just had to play along!

I started off by making a square frame from double sided peel offs and glitter. And immediately remembered why I have only ever used double sided peel offs once before..... I'm going to have to so some serious cleaning up after I've posted this!

The flower is made from a sheet of stacking peel offs, and finished off with the very last self adhesive gem from an ancient sheet!

Random recipes - Beancurd Satay

For this month's Random Recipe challenge, Dom has presented us with a nifty little widget to help us to choose a random book from our collection.

I won't tell you how many recipe books I have. I'll just say that the 181 I have listed on Eat Your Books don't tell the full story.... but the randomiser came up with a nice safe 29. Counting along my shelves, it took me to the Ken Hom classic, Travels With A Hot Wok.

I used the randomiser again to pick a page and it took me to page 176, Beancurd Satays. Great - we love beancurd, we love satay, we had all the ingredients in the house - what could possibly go wrong?

I must confess I was a bit anxious about the texture of the beancurd. I was using a firm one, and the recipe instructed me to drain it pressed between several sheets of kitchen paper,  which made it firm up a bit more - but even so, wasn't it going to break up the moment I started to skewer it?

Actually the breaking up started before then, when I was stirring it into the marinade. But I was extra-careful and didn't lose too much, and even managed to get it all on to the sticks without too much damage.

The next step was to make the sauce. I have a super-simple and very tasty recipe of my own, but for the sake of the challenge I followed the version in the book. It was also very easy but came out as a very thick, viscous mixture ..... I won't tell you what Mark said it resembled.....

 

Now the moment of truth.... cooking the satay. I used a table top grill, to give me plenty control as they cooked, but nevertheless as soon as they started to cook, the disintegration started.....

 

Eventually we gave up, removed the sticks and gently turned each cube individually

We ate it with fried rice (I'd anticipated disaster so chosen to make the meal-in-one dish of fried rice to make sure we at least had SOMETHING to eat!) and, as suggested in the book, a cucumber and onion salad

The verdict? The beancurd was far more trouble than it was worth. Cubes of fried beancurd with a satay sauce would have been much easier -and a better texture too. As for the sauce - well, if I hadn't been trying to follow the recipe exactly, I could have adjusted the texture, but it was also far too heavy on the raw garlic. I'm really not a fan of eating raw garlic in large quantities. And it simply didn't taste as good as my own version. 

So here is my own version of satay sauce. It's served me well for the last 35 years, and I think in future I'll stick with it!

2 heaped tablespoons smooth peanut butter
1 tablepsoon Ketjap Manis (thick, sweet soy sauce - if you can't find this, use Chinese soy sauce and add a teaspoon of black treacle)
½ teaspoon Sambal Oelek or dried crushed red chilli flakes
juice of 1 lime
200 ml water

heat all ingredients together, stirring constantly. As it comes close to boiling, it will appear to curdle, but just keep stirring and after a few seconds of boiling it will come together to form a smooth paste. Set aside to cool. You can make this hotter or milder, to taste, or add brown sugar or treacle to sweeten it, thin it down with more water or thicken it with more peanut butter,  or replace the water with coconut milk - it can be different every time you make it. Tamarind juice and - if you can face it- blachan are interesting additions.

I'm joining in with Random Recipes at Belleau Kitchen

 

 

Crunchy Pesto and Mozzarella Baked Mushrooms

The full recipe for this can be found on page 15 of the May issue of Good Food magazine. Large mushrooms are topped with a mixture of mozzarella, mascarpone, pesto and lemon rind, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and baked.

We ate these with home made rye bread and a green salad with tomatoes and avocado

A delicious and colourful meal - and absolutely crammed with vitamins too!