This week's Wednesday with Donna Hay recipe is Chicken Spaghetti Salad, chosen by Kayte from p57 of Modern Classics Book I.
This salad is so simple but so good - shredded chicken breast, cherry tomatoes, baby spinach, spaghetti, egg, mustard, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
It is absolutely delicious - I could have this again.
To see what Kayte, Margaret and Chaya thought of this dish, visit their websites.
I have previously mentioned Share: The Cookbook That Celebrates Our Common Humanity, sales of which support Women for Women International. If you are looking for a cookbook that is both beautiful and has something for everyone, this is it, and by buying it, you are supporting a very worthy cause.
I have been enjoying cooking various recipes out of this book, and recently, I made Rwandan chicken casserole from p133 of the book. This is a wonderful spicy casserole with a thick, rich sauce - just the kind of meal I love in the winter. There are various very similar recipes on the Web, but to make this casserole, the recipe is as follows:
3 tbspns vegetable oil
1.5kg chicken pieces
1 thinly sliced onion
3 chopped tomatoes
2 sliced sticks celery
1 minced chilli
250-300ml chicken stock
salt and pepper
Brown the chicken in the hot oil in a large, deep fry pan. Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside. Add the onion to the pan and cook until soft and browned. Return the chicken to the pan with the tomatoes, celery, chilli and salt and pepper to taste. Add the stock, bring the liquid to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, covering the pan, for 30-40 minutes until the chicken is cooked through. Serve the casserole over rice (or in my case, cous cous).
Life is full of surprises, and this week's French Fridays with Dorie recipe is no exception. We had to make Goat Cheese and Strawberry Tartine, which I imagined to be a tart, but is in fact, bread topped with goats cheese, strawberries and balsamic vinegar.
Instead of baguette, I used apricot delight fruit loaf. I tried it with the bread both fresh and toasted, and loved it both ways. This truly was superb - it is so good that when I ran out of strawberries, I kept going with tinned peach slices instead, which is an equally delicious combination.
Who knew that goat cheese and strawberries on bread tasted fabulous? Dorie obviously, but I don't recall of anyone else ever suggesting such a thing. All I can say is try it- I loved it.
To see what the other Dorie participants thought, visit the LYL section of the website.
Do you like trying recipes where there is no photo and you have no idea how the dish will turn out? With the Internet, you can always browse for a photo of what you are about to make, but it doesn't always yield results.
Baseema is a South Sudanese dessert that I had never heard of before, but I was curious about it after reading the recipe on p41 of Share: The Cookbook That Celebrates Our Common Humanity. According to the recipe, "baseema" means "delicious" - how could I resist? I did browse for a photo of Baseema so that I had some idea of what I was making, and the golden, fluffy looking cake that I found encouraged me.
I was very pleased with the Baseema. There is no photo of it in Share, but with ingredients like yoghurt and coconut, I couldn't go wrong. The end result was as light and fluffy as these photos suggest, and Baseema tastes wonderful and moist without any frosting or other additions.
To make Baseema, you will need:
5 eggs
140g icing sugar
200ml vegetable oil
500g plain yoghurt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
300g plain flour
2 tspns baking powder
110g dessicated coconut
350g sugar
1 tbspn lemon juice
225ml cold water
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease and line a 23cm x 33cm cake tin.
Beat together the eggs and icing sugar until light and frothy, then stir in the oil, yoghurt and vanilla.
In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and coconut. Fold these dry ingredients into the egg mixture, and pour the resulting batter into the prepared cake tin.
Bake the baseema for 30-35 minutes or until cooked through.
While the baseema is baking, put the sugar, lemon juice and water into a small saucepan, bring the mixture to the boil, then simmer for 5 minutes to thicken up the syrup.
Pour the syrup over the baseema while it is still warm from the oven, and leave the syrup to soak in for a while before cutting the baseema into squares to serve.
This week's Wednesday with Donna Hay is my pick. I went for quick and simple, and chose Bacon and Egg Pies from p158 of Off the Shelf.
These little pies are so easy - just line a mini pie pan with puff pastry, brown some bacon in the oven, put a cheese and mustard mixture in the puff pastry base, put the browned bacon on top, and crack an egg over all of it, and bake for around 20 minutes in the oven. (Donna uses two eggs and two pieces of bacon per pie, but I wanted something a little less hefty.)
These pies taste delicious, and are achieved with minimal effort.
To see what Kayte, Margaret and Chaya thought of these pies, visit their blogs tomorrow when it will be Wednesday their time.
Two months ago, I had no idea what a Savarin was. Fast forward to now, and I have made two of them. My first effort was for Daring Bakers in April. Now I have made a Savarin again, this time for Baking with Julia.
The Baking with Julia version of Savarin was much less of a production than the Daring Bakers version. Instead of six hours of rising time, there was just under an hour of rising time all up. The finished product was smaller, but was therefore easier to work with. Instead of soaking the cake in cooled syrup while the Savarin was hot, in this recipe, the hot syrup is spooned onto the cold cake until it can't hold any more fluid. I found that the Savarin was moister and spongier than the Daring Bakers version because it was smaller and therefore it took less syrup to saturate it. For the syrup, I added a tablespoon of Chambord to give it a slight raspberry flavour.
Although the recipe called for whipped cream to fill the middle, I used the same crème patisserie as we used for the Daring Bakers version. This time, I used blueberries and cherries to top the Savarin.
Here is the end result:
While this Savarin is not on such a grand scale as the Daring Bakers version, I liked it better because it was much easier to make, and the Savarin itself was softer and moister because of its smaller volume versus the amount of syrup. I had dreaded making another Savarin so soon because I knew the amount of effort that went into the last one, but I needn't have feared it this time - I could have easily made the entire cake, filling and all, in an afternoon.
To see what the other BWJ bakers thought, visit the LYL section of the website.
I adore raspberries - any recipe that pops up in a magazine that contains raspberries has my attention. Accordingly, when I spied Donna Hay's recipe for raspberry yoghurt loaf, it was love at first sight.
I found the recipe in Sunday Style (12 May 2013), but you can find it online here in blueberry form.
What is not to love about this cake - it contains tangy yoghurt and gorgeous raspberries (the frozen variety so that you don't have to remortgage your house to make it). I think this would work well with cherries as well as other berries.
The cake itself is soft, moist and tangy - it is really easy to eat.
If you love raspberries, do try this cake - it is a treat.
