Weekend Carnivore

Do jaffa cakes qualify as a biscuit or a cake? This quandary has been pondered with such frequency in British society that it may just rival that of the chicken and the egg. I say, stop wondering and make this amazing jaffa drizzle cake!

I have had this Jaffa Drizzle Loaf recipe in my ‘to try’ folder since I first saw it in BBC Good Food Magazine in 2006. That is a long time to hold out on a recipe. For New Year’s Eve I decided to borrow the infamous misquote from Marie Antoinette and let myself eat (the) cake. A decision made much easier by the prospect of sharing the jaffa drizzle cake recipe with a house full of party guests.

Jaffa drizzle cake recipe

It turns out that this jaffa drizzle cake was truly worth the wait. Unlike actual jaffa cakes it is very much a cake but it really does taste near exactly like like a jaffa cake. The main difference being that the cake part is ultra moist and carries just the right level of orange flavour.

Happily, the jaffa drizzle cake recipe is also one of the more simple cake recipes I have followed in recent times. All the mixing of the cake batter is done by hand with a wooden spoon. Saving me from having to get my electric mixer out. One less thing cluttering up my worktop is never a bad thing.

The only place that I, ever so slightly, strayed from the written recipe was to not so much drizzle the dark chocolate as to lather it on the top of the springy spongy orange cake. Admittedly, I did at first attempt a drizzle but it wasn’t looking as neat as I would wish for a party presentation. In the end, I resorted to just spreading the melted dark chocolate all over the top of the cake, allowing it to drizzle down the sides. I have to say, I will do it exactly the same again because once the chocolate hardened, the layer of chocolate added a lovely slight crunch to each slice of the cake.

This is certainly a keeper of a cake and I shall not be leaving it another four years before I once again make this jaffa drizzle cake recipe.

Hurrah! I can make shortbread! If I managed to follow a shortbread recipe and make some tasty shortbread cookies without any bid disasters then so can you! I have had my eye on this Cranberry Shortbread on Recipezaar for the past couple years but I never had the confidence in my baking skills to try it out. This year though, I decided to give it a shot.

I am glad I did because it turns out that this cranberry shortbread recipe really wasn’t that difficult at all. I have made a good number of recipes posted by the king of Recipezaar, Sydney Mike, so I should have known better than to be a bit frightened by the recipe.

Cranberry shortbread recipe

The only part of the cranberry shortbread recipe that I needed to get my head around, was getting the dough the right texture to roll out without it sticking too much. To get to my comfort zone, I had to add a little bit more butter but the shortbread recipe still turned out really well. After all, is a slightly more buttery taste in a shortbread going to get all that many complaints? I think not!

What I really enjoyed about this shortbread recipe was the way the sharpness of the dried cranberries worked so well with the rich shortbread. I am sure this would be a good recipe for all times of the year. However, this play in seasonal flavours makes it a particularly good addition to your Christmas cookie tray.

As I have said, I am not all that much of a baker. So, when Christmas baking season comes around, I am not afraid to reach for recipes that others have perfected. In fact, I think that is part of the fun of holiday baking. It is great to try out the recipes that other people love to bake. For the next few Weekend Carnivore updates, I am going to share the love and show some great Christmas baking recipes that I have learned from other people that share their recipes online.

Kahlua chocolate chunk cookie recipe

Who doesn’t love a good Christmas cookie? They don’t have to be just for the kiddies either! This Christmas cookie recipe for Kahlua chocolate chunk cookies, is one which I have been making for the past few years. I got the recipe from the lovely Kittencal over at Recipezaar. Part of what I love about her The Big Kahlua Vanilla Cookies recipe is that it is so versatile.

In the original cookie recipe, she uses white chocolate. Through the years, both through necessity and through experimentation I have tried it with all sorts of different types of chocolate but keeping the base of the cookie the same. In the end, I have settled on using a combination of milk chocolate and white chocolate. Instead of chips, I get really good chocolate bars and use a knife to make chocolate chunks.

They are a luxurious tasting Christmas cookie that has just a hint of extra richness from the Kahlua. Which means you can take something comforting and familiar and jazz it up to be something extra special for the Christmas period. A real treat just at the time of the year you want it most!

December has arrived and for most of us the calendar change signals that a month of hardcore cooking and baking is on the horizon.

I have a huge stack of cooking magazines and recipes I have printed out from the internet sitting on my desk as I try to widdle them down to decide what exactly I will be cooking and baking for the Christmas period. You would think after all that foodie focused research I would be settled on a menu by now. The problem is that the more I see the more I want to make but I want to be careful of not biting off more than I can (literally) chew.

One thing I do know is that Christmas cooking period is going to be one of those times where I won’t be sticking strictly to a vegetarian diet. However, I do really want to try as much as possible to be cooking and serving mostly vegetarian Christmas recipes.

The good thing though is that it really isn’t very hard to do that. When you think about it, most of the Christmas cookies and cakes we will munch over the holiday period are vegetarian by their very nature. Then, the normal Christmas dinner trimmings are also largely vegetarian. At least that is the case if you skip doing your roast potatoes in goose fat. Frankly, even when I wasn’t so focused on vegetarian cooking that never appealed to me anyway.

As I make my way through a largely vegetarian Christmas, I will check in and share my vegetarian cooking adventures. Hopefully, it will give some of you also trying to eat mostly vegetarian over the Christmas cooking period of bit of inspiration.

For now though, it is on to finally forming a solid Christmas cooking schedule. So, time to settle down with that stack of Christmas cooking magazines and make my mind up. At least until I change it again.

Of course, I can’t do that research without having a good hot beverage by my side. This month for the vegetarian swap I participate in over at Recipezaar, I picked out this Mayan Hot Chocolate recipe posted by Recipezaar member the80srule.

spiced hot chocolate recipe

It turns out this hot chocolate recipe is the perfect partner to planning my vegetarian Christmas cooking. Firstly, the big sell for me, is that it is actually made with soy chocolate milk. I am lactose intolerant so whenever I make a creamy drink like hot chocolate I have to weigh up the consequences. I could make a normal hot chocolate recipe with water, I suppose, but any lover of hot chocolate knows that is simply never the same. Amazingly though, I had never thought of using soy chocolate milk as the base of a hot chocolate recipe but it really did work.

What really makes this hot chocolate recipe special though are the spices that go into the mixture. First in the pot, is a bit of cinnamon which gives a real Christmas feel to the hot chocolate recipe. Then comes the real surprise, a pinch of cayenne pepper. You would think that would make it hot and spicy but really it just adds a back ground warmth to the hot chocolate.

So, make yourself your own mug of this spiced hot chocolate and pull up your own pile of Christmas recipes and join the foodie December ritual of planning your holiday baking and Christmas cooking. Let the games begin!

In the years since I moved to the UK, I couldn’t fail to notice some differences in the eating habits between the States and my new home. Largely, we aren’t all that different with what we eat but there are little variances that stand out over time. Often it is just differences in terms. For example, most people know that what Americans call chips are what the British call crisps and what the British call chips the Americans call fries. Other times though, it is more about our actual eating habits.

One of those that has been obvious to me as an American that has lived in the UK for so long is that the USA is much more of a a ‘chips and dip’ culture. By that, of course, I mean crisps type chips (confused yet?). In the States it just isn’t a party without a good selection of chips and dips. However, if I throw a party in the UK, the dips are often one of the last things selected by the guests. I can’t pretend to understand it because the love of dips is one of those American things I have just never been able to shake. If I am honest, I have no desire too either because what isn’t to love about a good dip? Perhaps it is that people think that dips are a bit down market but that doesn’t have to be the case at all. Really, hummus is just a dip by another name, isn’t it?

low fat carrot dip recipe

There is a problem with me having dips in my life these days though and it all comes down to fat and calories. If I am ever going to get my weight loss moving again and get to that magical 100 pounds lost (I am on an insanely frustrating and very long plateau) then I just can’t have anything high in fat. Even if it is as good as a dip!

Which means that I am always on the look out for low fat dip recipes that can help me satisfy my dip cravings whilst still tasting good. When I saw the carrot dip recipe over at the lovely Cupcakes and Cornwall blog I knew I had to give it a go. Pretty much the only ingredients in the healthy dip recipes are carrots, fat free Greek yoghurt and some spices. Who could argue with the healthy nature of that?

It turns out that the low fat dip recipe is also rather forgiving. For some reason, I forgot to cook the carrots in water for a few minutes before sticking them into roast. I remembered this about ten minutes into the cooking and decided to let them roast for another ten minutes to get them more tender. That worked just fine and when they came out they looked lovely and roasted with just a little bit of the tell tale black spots that come with a good roasting. By using cooking spray instead of the suggested olive oil, I managed to cut the already very low fat dip recipe down even more and they roasted just fine.

Once the carrots were roasted, the healthy dip recipe just couldn’t be easier to put together. I tossed the carrots into my mini chopper, threw in the spices and blitzed it for about 20 seconds. At that stage, I tasted it and it was really nice but I decided to add a little bit of garlic powder simply because I am a sucker for garlic in just about any dip. It would have been just fine without it too. I put the fat free Greek yoghurt into the mini chopper and blitzed it again for maybe 30 seconds and then the dip was done!

I cut up some lovely crisp celery and tore up some toasted pitas and had the low fat carrot dip for my lunch. With a healthy dip that tasty and easy around there is no reason for this chips and dips gal to shun them any longer.

Ah, the humble spud. As much as we love the potato, it can get a bit samey if you have them often. Luckily, one of the best thing about potatoes is that they are so adaptable and you aren’t likely to run out of new potato recipes any time soon if you allow yourself to get a bit creative. There is always a potato recipe that is something totally new to try and that is exactly what I thought when I saw Anjum Anand’s recipe for Baked ricotta-stuffed tandoori potatoes in a recent copy of Good Food Magazine.

baked ricotta-stuffed tandoori potato recipe

I won’t lie, the recipe is a bit fiddly because you have to hollow out the potatoes just enough to stuff them with the ricotta mixture. However, I found that once I figured out that an apple corer was the right tool for the job it went much more smoothly. Once you are past that bit it is just a matter of making up the ricotta mixture and the tandoori yoghurt glaze for the outside of the potatoes. Both are pretty darn simple. After that it is just letting them cook in the oven.

Since I am a bit of a spice wimp, I used less chilli in the ricotta mixture. I also left out the cashews to save calories and because my husband isn’t a lover of nuts. I don’t think the dish really missed the nuts, if I am honest. I suppose they add texture but I didn’t eat the potatoes and think ‘hmm, this needs nutty crunch’.

Sliced thickly, these look pretty impressive on the plate and served along with some steamed veg made a great light meal. I think the tandoori glaze would be excellent on chicken or fish too for the meat eaters in the family. As it uses Greek yoghurt as the base, it isn’t even really too calorie loaded either.

Beans, beans, the more you eat the more you….erm, feel full? When I decided to start eating less meat, I knew that I still had to get my protein from somewhere if I was going to be eating a healthy diet. This is where my love affair with beans and other legumes began.

I quickly discovered that if I made beans and pulses the main feature of my evening meals that I would feel satisfied and full all the way through the evening and feel no need at all to snack or nibble for the rest of the evening. The reason for this is because they are slow burning and low gi which means that it takes your body longer to break them down for digestion. All of this regulates insulin levels and helps you to feel fuller and sustain energy for longer. All of which is fantastic for me since I am insulin resistant.

Bean and veggie baked patties

Something else I discovered was that beans and other legumes are very flexible and you can get really creative with them in your cooking. Everything from a bean casserole to a bean burger can be whipped up and be both tasty and healthy. What’s more, is you don’t have to be an actual vegetarian to enjoy these dishes, either.

When I saw the My Legume Love Affair food blog event, it sounded like a perfect event for me and the Weekend Carnivore blog. The event is run by The Well Seasoned Cook and is this month hosted by Monsoon Spice.

I thumbed through my cooking magazines looking for a legume based recipe to make and the veggie bean bakes found in a recent copy of BBC Good Food Magazine caught my eye. In the past, my husband has been really receptive to bean burgers and so I was fairly sure he would eat these without much complaint.

I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter apart from using panko breadcrumbs instead of fresh ones. That did indeed work well but I think next time I would try the fresh breadcrumbs to see if it makes any difference. I also chopped up some fresh parsley and added it to the mix. For the mixed beans, I used a can of mixed beans that included adzuki beans,cannellini beans and a few other types.

Once the potatoes are boiled, the rest of the bean and veggie patties recipe comes together very quickly. At the stage in which I was forming the patty, I thought that this would actually make a really tasty mashed potato. In the patty form, it wasn’t dissimilar to a bubble and squeak cake. Nothing that I am going to complain about!

The original recipe, calls for them to be served with salsa. We didn’t have any in the house, so I simply served them with a green salad and they went down hubby’s hatch without complaint. Next time, I will try putting some spices into the bean and potato mixture to try to pep them up even more.

One of the things I love the most about cooking vegetarian food is that there is always some new ingredients to explore. Until I started to follow a largely vegetarian diet, I had never had or cooked with polenta. I am not even really sure that I knew that it was actually cornmeal. Yet, now I love the stuff. I dig how you can have it all mushy like porridge or if you let it sit for a bit it gets nice and solid but tastes just as yummy.

When I saw this recipe over at Recipezaar, I knew I had to give it a try because I had never had polenta combined with parmesan cheese. For some reason, I have mostly kept it sweet. The recipe was posted by Sharon123,  a Recipezaar regular who has tons and tons of very good vegetarian recipes amongst her collection. Really, she is the one that should be doing a vegetarian cooking blog!

Creamy Parmesan polenta with garlic kale

I wasn’t sure about some aspects of the recipe when I first read it. In particular, I wasn’t sure how the raisins would play with the other savoury ingredients. They really did work though to balance out all the rich tasting ingredients that went into the dish. A bit like how it is always nice to add a little something sweet to a curry to balance the spice.

The original recipe – Polenta With Garlicky Greens – called for Swiss chard. I have never been able to find chard in any of the British supermarkets I visit unless it is as part of a pre-packaged salad bag and then only in very small amounts. I did, however, have some curly kale and so I used that instead and I have to say it was a good choice because the dark leafy green really carried the garlic very well.

Truly, this is a great vegetarian comfort food dish and isn’t too dissimilar to eating a big batch of cheesey mashed potatoes topped with rich garlic greens. Mmm!

Every month, I take part on a vegetarian recipe swap over at Recipezaar. The basic idea is that everybody interested in the vegetarian recipe swap puts their name in and at the start of the month you adopt one of those chefs and somebody in turn adopts you. Over the following month you agree to make two vegetarian recipes from that person’s Recipezaar recipe collection. I love this because it is a great way to discover new vegetarian food and you don’t at all have to be a vegetarian to take part. In fact, I think that most people that are involved aren’t actually vegetarians but are just enjoying learning how to cook vegetarian dishes. That can never be a bad thing.

This month, I adopted January Bride. I must have been in a lemon mood because the two recipes I decided to make both had some lemon element to them. The first was the lemon garlic green beans that I blogged about earlier in the month. The second were these amazing Lemon Pepper Nuts .

lemon pepper nuts recipe

If I am honest, when I selected this recipe I wasn’t sure if it would work. I love candied nuts and have had salt and pepper cashews before which I enjoyed. However, lemon pepper on nuts was something totally new.

I am so glad that I tried them though because they were super easy to make – simply put the nuts, sugar and lemon pepper into a pan and heat and then cool down. On top of that, they were just incredibly tasty! There was a background of sweet heat that was perfectly balanced. I am glad I only made the one batch or I would have for sure eaten the whole nut recipe! It is even a vegan recipe so it doesn’t get much better when it comes to snack food recipes.

There isn’t a modern day British celebrity tv chef that doesn’t owe something to Keith Floyd. Most of them, may not share a cooking style with Keith Floyd but if it wasn’t for Floyd and his tv cookery adventures none of them would have the sort of cooking shows they now front. Keith Floyd took the British tv cookery show out from the stuffy studio and onto location.

Evidence of the influence of Keith Floyd’s cookery shows can been seen even in the current tv schedule with Jamie Oliver’s American Roadtrip cooking series. The whole idea of going to another country, meeting the locals and then cooking their own dishes for them is taken directly from the Keith Floyd school of tv cookery.

So, when it hit the news earlier this week that Keith Floyd died of a heart attack, the British foodie community certainly took notice. Normally, you would say that when somebody such as Keith Floyd died at such a fairly young age that it was a shock. However, nobody that ever saw the way that Keith Floyd drank or saw the fat levels in his recipes could be all that shocked that he would have a heart attack. None of which, makes it any less sad.

When two members of the UK Food Blogger’s Association – Back To The Chopping Board and A Slice Of Cherry Pie – started the Farewell Floyd blogging event I knew that I wanted to take part and make a recipe.

The quest  to find a vegetarian Keith Floyd recipe began. If there was one thing that Keith Floyd was not then it was vegetarian. He used bacon drippings in recipes the way that some chefs use salt and pepper. For a moment, I thought I struck gold when I found a Keith Floyd recipe for braised celery. That was until I actually read the recipe and discovered that he cooked the celery in veal stock. I mean – *veal stock*. As if chicken stock wouldn’t have been good enough to take it out of the realm of vegetarian possibilities. He has to go use stock from a meat that most meat eaters in the Western world won’t even eat!

Finally, I settled on having a go at making Keith Floyd’s Welsh Rarebit recipe. Just by reading the recipe over at BBC Food, I felt my arteries harden. Still, I had already mentally committed to it and since my husband is visiting his folks this weekend, I can cook ‘weird’ meals without anybody but me pulling a face.

The recipe called for brown ale, butter, cheese, whole milk and egg yolk. I decided to do my best to make it just a tiny bit more healthy. For the bread, I used Burgen’s soya and linseed bread and since all I ever have in the house is reduced fat cheese I used that in place of the full fat cheddar. I mean, if I was going to use real butter than there was no way I was using full fat cheese too. I also went for skim milk instead of the whole full fat milk.

I don’t drink beer either. Which meant that I had to go across to the shops to pick up a bottle of beer. Me shopping for beer is about as clueless as it gets. I stood there just looking at the beer for ages. The only brown ale I know the name of is Newcastle but they didn’t have any of that. So, I decided just to grab a bottle of Guinness.

The only other real change I made was that instead of normal English mustard, I used some of some beer mustard I bought from Emily’s Jams and Preserves when I was in Wales earlier in the year. It felt apt to use the boozy mustard for a Keith Floyd tribute. Of course, this being a vegetarian recipe blog, I used vegetarian Worcestershire sauce too.

As far as Keith Floyd recipes go, this wasn’t a complicated or overly involved recipe but it still had a lot of fiddly bits. Certainly more than I would normally take to do what really boils down to cheese on toast. Still, it was pretty darn tasty even if there were so many calories in it that I had to make two slices be my entire evening meal.

Here is my somewhat healthier (but not all that much) version of Keith Floyd’s Welsh rarebit recipe.  I think I will use this Keith Floyd inspired cheese fest as my jumping off point to get seriously back on track with my calorie counting and make up for the ton of cheese I just ate!

Keith Floyd’s Welsh rarebit makeover

Keith Floyd Welsh Rarebit Recipe

Ingredients:

1 ounce butter
1oz flour
5 fluid ounces skimmed milk
6 ounces reduced fat cheddar cheese, grated
5 fluid ounces Guinness
1 tsp English mustard or beer mustard
2 tsp vegetarian Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper
2 egg yolks
4 slices of granary toast

Directions:

1. Make a roux with the butter and flour, and leave to cool.
2. Bring the milk to the boil, then whisk it into the roux. Bring to the boil once again, whisking to ensure that it does not burn and also that the sauce is free of lumps.
3. Add the cheese, beat in and remove from the heat.
4. Reduce the ale, English mustard and Worcestershire sauce. When thick, add this mixture to the cheese sauce. Season well with salt and pepper and beat in the egg yolks.
5. Spoon on to the slices of toast and grill until bubbling. Serve with extra Worcestershire sauce handed separately.

Serves: 4

Glasses up to Keith, whereever he may be!