Writing and thoughts from NE Scotland
I had some olives and a pork chop leftover (from separate meals) and was looking for something to use them up. So I came up with this simple dish of mushrooms with garlic, tomatoes and olives and a pan fried pork chop. Great for a quick midweek meal as the whole thing just takes 15 minutes. Continue reading “Pork chop with garlic mushrooms and olives”
What am I going to have for tea tonight? That’s a question that takes up a lot of my time. For inspiration I’ll grab a few books and flick through them or trawl recipe websites hoping something jumps out of the screen. But often the best inspiration is my own memory of a dish I’ve eaten somewhere. This sea bass dish is my version of a restaurant dish I had at Sea Breezes on Skye. They used crushed tatties but I’ve done it with spaghetti for a slightly more mediterranean feel. Continue reading “Sea Bass with Tomato and Olive Spaghetti”
As you can see buying a new camera may make it possible for me to take better pictures but I’m still getting the hang of the technique required to get those pictures and I still have a long way to go on the presentation front. Well I’m always learning so one day perhaps I’ll get that happy moment when I can cook a presentable plate of food and take a good photo of it. Until that day comes you’ll just have to put up with what I can get in the meantime.
I’ve not done much cooking recently as the last few weeks have been pretty hectic in our house. It’s starting to calm down again now and I had time on Sunday to dig out the veal shins I bought at the farmer’s market last month and try a recipe for osso bucco I’d been eying up for a while.
I’ve blogged about Stephane Reynaud before and after expressing my love for Ripailles I was given his latest book – 365 Good Reasons To Sit Down And Eat for my birthday last year. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to try many of the dishes because almost all of them involve large amounts of butter, cream or some other fatty substance. However we are gradually becoming free of that limitation and so to celebrate I finally opened this weighty tome (he doesn’t seem to like writing small books) and selected his recipe for osso bucco. Continue reading “Osso Bucco”
This is another recipe adapted from the excellent Nick Nairn book, New Scottish Cookery. Not that it’s very new any more. It was one of the first cookbooks I bought. My graduation from the simplicity of my other book called something like “400 recipes with only 4 ingredients”.
One of the first recipes I tried from the book is also the one that I’ve made the most. Garlic stuffed mushrooms on toast. It’s pretty easy to see why this was the recipe I went for first. It’s simple but produces great results and is flexible enough to be a dinner party starter (it made an appearance at Christmas one year), a simple main course or a quick dinner for one. Continue reading “Garlic stuffed mushrooms”
Another pig recipe! We had some diced pork in the fridge which was going to be for kebabs, but I fancied trying this instead. It’s kind of based on a paprika pork recipe I got from a book when I started cooking but I never really liked it. The book’s recipe only called for half an hour or so of cooking which meant the pork was tough and the whole dish was really bland. This is a jazzier version with softer, more tender pork from the longer cooking and a massive flavour boost from the chorizo. Continue reading “Goulash”
Mince and Skirlie 