Barbie, Paul's cooking, and Pasta (Cake too!)

This is going to be a fairly long post I believe, as I've gone quite a few days without posting anything and for that I am very sorry! I finally got my camera hooked up to the computer so I can share with you some lovely pictures!

The barbeque was fantastic. Great company of course, and lots and lots of food. And alcohol, I might add, haha! But yes, there were only 6 people and we ended up having 3 full platters of meat, which had chicken legs, sausage, and burgers on them! Needless to say, we couldn't finish it all, but it was fantastic! I ended up eating 2 burgers, 2 sausages and a chicken leg, and that's pretty good for me, as I am very tiny.
That was Sunday night, I believe, and then Paul cooked on Wednesday night because Monday night we went out for pizza at Pizza Express in Woking, which was amazing, and Tuesday night we had dinner with some of his work friends at a Indian buffet place, which was pretty tasty! I should really start taking pictures of my meals out as well. Silly me.

Monday night however, Paul made a pasta with minced meat and cheese, which was very tasty. I chopped some onion and garlic for him and we threw that in a pot with the minced meat with some red wine and chili flakes, boiled pasta in another pan and threw it all together before shredding parmesan and cheddar ontop, when it was then baked in the oven. I threw together a large salad with tomatoes, cucumber, carrots, onions, celery and rocket, and that was basically our meal. It turned out great!


Now tonight was by far the most exciting night for cooking. We had more chicken to use up, so we decided to go with a one-pot Italian chicken dish that was very easy to make! It only took about 25 minutes start to finish! Then, I decided I wanted to try my hand at baking a cake, so I decided I was going to make an almond torte with whipped mocha cream frosting. Doesn't that just SOUND orgasmic? Trust me, it tasted even better.

I decided to tackle the torte first, as we had a few hours to dinner, and the chicken pasta dish wouldn't take long to cook, and should be cooked right before serving, ideally. So, I took a blender and blended 4 eggs together with 175mL (3/4 cup) of regular sugar. Then, I added 250mL (1 cup) of whole almonds. Paul and I had accidentally bought salted ones, so we rinsed them thoroughly and it was better. I blended those in to the eggs and sugar until they were pulverised before adding only 30mL (2 tablespoons) of flour and 2 teaspoons of baking powder. We blended that together and poured them into 2 8"cake pans to cook. Oh, and the oven had been preheated to about 180*C and the cakes only took about 10-12 minutes to cook until they had risen nicely and were set on the counter until they were cut out and placed on a cooling rack.

While they were cooling, I emptied 375 mL (1.5 cups) of heavy whipping cream into a mixing bowl along with 125mL (1/2 cup) of sugar, 50mL (1/2 cup) of unsweetened cocoa powder, 2 tsp of vanilla and 1tbsp of instant coffee. Being the stubborn girl I am, I decided to hand whisk the mix. This seemed like a daunting task at first, because it took a bit longer to thicken, but the result was FAR more... personal, I should say, and I think it must've made it lighter as well. If you wanna recreate this recipe, you are allowed to use an electric beater, but I just preferred doing it by hand. Gotta give your food some TLC (tender loving care)! After the cakes cooled I frosted them and garnished the with some extra almonds.
We left it like that while we started on the main course. What had happened was I had chopped a large white onion and 8oz of button mushrooms, along with a clove of garlic before hand and after heating about 2tbsp of olive oil in a large pot, I dumped them all in, in the order they were listed before mixing them about. After that, I added 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts cut into bite size pieces into the mix along with a tbsp of Italian herb seasonings and some red chili flakes (which the recipe didn't call for, but I added them anyway). Then after that had been mixed together for about 3 minutes I added 1/2 a cup of chardonnay wine to the mix, stirred for about a minute before adding a can of Italian-style stewed tomatoes, 14oz of chicken broth, and a little bit of water to the pot before dumping 8oz of egg noodles into the pan. That was brought to a boil until the pasta was lovely and the chicken was cooked thoroughly, and then, it was served! :D

Everyone really liked this meal and it was super easy to make. Oh, did I mention we had a LOT of frosting left over even after I'd lathered on the frosting, so Paul and I were FORCED to get spoons and eat it up. This is not recommended as a two person job, maybe get some friends to help, cos my stomach HURTS. But it was an awesome meal, and there was absolutely NOTHING left of it. You could even hear people scraping the last bits of it from the pot, and their plates. No greater compliment to a cook than that!


Oh, by the way, I got the recipe for the torte from Evelyn Raab's Clueless in the Kitchen, and the recipe for the chicken/pasta dish from Cheap.Fast.Good! by Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross. All other meals were purely off the top of our heads.

Quick Lunch

Hello everyone! I hope you enjoyed my first massive post below! This one isn't going to be long, but I did decide to make lunch today for myself and my boyfriend's mother, so I thought I'd share, even if it's not very exciting.

So, today is ridiculously hot outside, and it's a bit overwhelming. However, when you're working outside and using lots of energy like Mother Turner has been doing today, you're going to want something filling, albeit a little light.

Something that I find surprisingly light despite the fact that it has meat and mayo in it is a BLT sandwich. These are stupidly easy to make, and very self explanatory. Just fry up some bacon in a pan, toast some bread, spread it with mayo and add a layer of sliced tomatoes and some lettuce, slap the bacon on it and you're done!

You don't have to be a brilliant chef to do that, for sure. It was very satisfying, and very yummy. Not too heavy either! I was glad. My mother will be proud of me. Hehe!

Tonight I'm heading over to a barbie (barbeque) at a friend's house, so I shall give you all the delicious details of that tomorrow! I'm sure there will be plenty of meat and drink to go around!

Stay hungry!

Hello there!

Hello everyone, and welcome to my new blog!

I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Elizabeth and I am most definitely a foodie. I am 20 years old and attend Michigan State University, despite the fact that I'm spending nearly all my time here in sunny old England, UK. I'm a psychology major and have no idea what I'll be doing with my life after I graduate, but I'm proud to say that I am in a band called the Narcotics, and I'm also a budding cook! Well, we'll see about that, but I'm certainly working on it!
I always grew up with amazing food. My mother is a fantastic cook and is always making wonderful things to eat. It's quite intimidating trying to cook with someone so talented over your shoulder, but she has taught me some wonderful techniques for which I am very grateful.

Anyway, since I'm over in England with time to spare, I've decided to do some cooking--instead of just eating! So far I've been very pleased with the results.
My mother, being her generous self, had given me some of her own self-canned jars of items like jam and salsa for my boyfriend's family. One of the items was actually a bruschetta mix which was made with tomato, garlic, basil, olive oil, and a few other herbs. I shall ask her sometime for the actual list of ingredients if you'd like, but that's what I noticed off the bat. Anyway, my boyfriend's mum had gone to get some bruschetta bread, which is basically just flat, long sliced Italian bread so that I could use it to make dinner that night.
Given that we were already going to have an Italian starter, and happened to have four boneless chicken breasts in the fridge to work with, I decided to go for something vaguely Italian for the main course as well and decided to make Chicken Parmigiana. That is basically chicken breasts topped with tomato sauce and melted parmesan cheese over that. To start, we put the chicken breasts in the oven which I'm not sure of the preheated time, I'm sorry, but I think it was something like 250*C. Please don't quote me on that, I'll ask my boyfriend for sure, because it was his oven and he had done the preheating. We lay them in a row and put them in to bake a bit.
While we did that we took out a sauce pan and minced some garlic (2 small cloves) and red onion and scraped them into the pan which had been prepped with a sprinkle of olive oil. We added a can of tomato sauce to that when the lot had cooked a bit (careful cos garlic tends to burn quickly) and mixed that together for a while before adding sprinklings of oregano, basil, salt, pepper, crushed and dried chili peppers (which added a FANTASTIC spicy kick to it) and a few capers. We didn't bother to measure any of it, just chucked them in the pan and stirred.

After the chicken was cooked most of the way through, we took it out and poured the hot tomato sauce over top of them. We went to find some parmesan cheese, but to our shock there was none! There was, however, a block of hard white cheddar in the fridge so we grabbed that and grated it over top until there was a nice layer over each breast and popped it back in the oven to melt and finish cooking.
While they were doing that, we began to grill the buschetta bread to make them toasty and pour the canned sauce into a bowl. It was a tiny bit tomatoey to the taste, so we decided to kick it up a notch by mincing another clove of garlic and tossing it in, along with a very VERY small dash of balsamic vinegar (hardly any as its a very overpowering taste). We brought that to the table and while Paul was setting up the table for dinner (after he had chopped up some greens and veggies for a small salad) I pulled the delicious smelling chicken out of the oven. What was awesome about the tomato sauce was that any juices from it had gathered in the bottom of the pan (which was lined, by the way, with a plastic reusable sheet) and had sort of marinated the chicken and left it beautifully moist.

Everyone loved it, and I must say, I was SO proud of the meal.

So proud that I was inspired to get up at silly o'clock the next morning to make myself an omelette! It was stupidly simple to make. I cut up a strip of bacon into small little pieces and tossed them in a pan that had been prepped with a bit of butter. I waited for the grease to come out a bit before throwing in half of a diced white onion. While those were cooking a bit I whisked 2 eggs into a measuring bowl and poured it over the ingredients into a pan. Looking back I should have probably used 3 eggs, but never mind. I then got strips of camembert cheese (a delicious, creamy French cheese) and folded the egg in half so that it was almost like quesadilla. Oh, and I had sprinkled a TINY bit of crushed red/chili pepper into it too. It was deliscious. Creamy, with a tiny bite of the sour-ish cheese and savoury bacon and yummy browned onions. Best start of the morning ever.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed my ramblings and that they were not a jumble of text on a page. I'll try to post a picture of the meal for you if you'd like! Give me feedback and let me know what you like or would like to see in posts and I will love you forever. Haha! Thanks for reading!

Stay hungry.