Herb crusted lamb. Vegetarians look away....

This photograph may look quite scary to some people but to me this is heaven on a plate. Ok maybe slightly underdone but it was delicious!. To make the herb crust you whizz up loads of herbs with some bread crumbs and once you've browned off the meat you smear it with english mustard and spread on the crust. I have never cooked lamb like this before and I will make it again. I didn't even bother offering this to the children for their dinner, why waste decent lamb. There is something really special about lamb. If you're going to be paying the extra cost of lamb then it's so much better from the butcher and in Wales why get lamb from the supermarket that's been sent half way round the world. This lamb was really good, so the sides were simple mash potato and peas, can't be beaten.

Spicy Satay Chicken with Vegetable Rosti

This is another one of those combinations where we have the stuff in the house lets make both. It also happened to be a sunday lunchtime despite the fact that we'd been shopping and spent loads of money on food there is never anything for lunch. So in a ridiculously short amount of time before we had to get the children out for their swimming lessons I had to make lunch and this is the result. I'll start with the rosti, quite easy really grate vegetables, in this case carrot and sweet potato, mix with spices and an egg, mould and fry and lastly bake in the oven. Tasty.

Now I'll move onto the good part, the satay chicken. My first experience of satay chicken was probably the same as most people. The funny nobbly looking bits of chicken on a small stick from the supermarket party food aisle. Now if that's all you've ever had you'd probably carry on uite happily eating it. But I'm sorry I'm now officially a satay chicken snob. Proper chicken that looks like chicken, fried and finished with a touch of honey. But the best bit is the satay, peanut butter (given), chilli, soy sauce, mirin and garlic all whizzed up together. Very addictive and we did wish we'd had more chicken to finish it off. But not to worry I had a very nice simple tea of chicken and carrot sticks a few night later. Well we can't let satay sauce go to waste!

Pan-fried balsamic pear salad with pancetta, Gorgonzola and a warm honey dressing.

Anyone who has read my previous posts will know that I don't do fruit in savoury. So this was quite a stretch for me. I have to be honest I saved it for a night when Mark was out, he would not have been impressed with a salad for dinner and I absolutely loved it. In fact I'm really looking forward to having it again. I think it was the cheese and pancetta that saved the pears. I couldn't have a mouthful of just pear but with a bit of cheese or pancetta it was delish, probably from all the salt! I've never had fried pancetta before and I made sure it was really crispy, my word if you could afford it you would never eat normal bacon again, especially if you get it nice and crispy. I'm quite new to blue cheeses too, before I went through the first book I don't think I'd ever tasty any despite my parents best efforts. So this dish will definitely be added to my single nights in, yum.

Spicy Tomato soup with Dinner Rolls

You say tomato soup and you think of Heinz. I wasn't sure if this would work out but it was really delicious with a hint of spice from the Worstershire sauce. Basically you boil tomatoes, add spice and whizz up. The bread rolls are a basic white bread recipe. Since watching Paul Hollywood on the Great British bake off I've discovered that I used to kill the yeast when I added everything to the bowl by putting salt on top of the yeast. Well I was really careful with this mixture and made sure I kneaded it a bit longer. I did however make the mistake of only making up half the recipe. Whenever I make rolls we always end up with a couple uneaten and they go to waste so I halved all the quantities. The problem is, these are quite small rolls so we had to ration them out to make sure we all had enough to eat. Plenty of snack were eaten that afternoon!

Lamb Tagine

I'm not very familiar with the food of northern Africa. When I went through the first book there was a filo pie with a savoury filling but used essence of sweet flavours such as cinnamon. I love cinnamon and this dish does use some. Now I have to admit now that I did miss out a major ingredient from this tagine. It is meant to have pear in it. I am still trying to train myself to put fruit into savoury dishes but I do find it really difficult, everything about fruit in savoury is wrong in my mind. So I wasn't too worried when I discovered that we had no pears in the house when I made this dish. But the missing pears didn't detract from the dish, it was really tasty with a hint of spice and the sweet flavours of cinnamon.

As usual I had some ingredients missing, apart from the pears. We used to eat a lot of cous cous and so assumed we had plenty, no we had a spoonful in the cupboard so I had to use bulgar wheat. It is still tasty but a bit rougher than cous cous. I liked the addition of pine nuts in the cous cous to add a bit of texture. So overall it was a really tasty dish, and maybe next time I'll be brave and add the pears!

Warm and cosy Coq au vin.

Well this is just the sort of dish you need on a day like this. Even writing this now my fingers are so cold I'm struggling to hit the right keys. I admit it isn't the prettiest or most appealing dishes to look at but it would definitely give you that nice warm cosy feeling. I have never cooked coq au vin before, I think growing up we had so many stews that I tend not to make or eat them as an adult. My Mum bless her would try and big them up by giving them a different name but would always be faced with the sulking teenager who would respond with, 'so it's beef stew then'. What an annoying brat I was! But maybe I could start to be drawn back to the nice big bowl of hot stew again. This was really tasty and because I didn't even bother offering it to our children we had massive portions. But I think the big rule to any stew is having the warm crusty bread to go with it. You need something crunchy just to give you a change of texture otherwise you might as well be eating  soup, which for dinner just isn't right.

Granola Bars

I am determined to catch up on my blogs, I am about ten dishes behind and beginning to forget how the cook went and tasted which is the whole point of this so there should be one every day for the next week. I think the problem is I prefer to write about the sweet things. So far I haven't made many of the puddings and sweets in the book so I've got to do something about that. Anyway, Granola bars.. to me these are flapjacks but with fruit and nuts in them, maybe that's the official line anyway, I'm not sure. Usually I avoid anything that contains currants, I'm sure I've told you before that they spoil decent food for me, why spoil a perfectly good flapjack by adding fruit. Well, maybe I'm beginning to be converted. I quite liked the little sweet pockets of the fruit and the odd bit of pecan added a little change of texture. The great thing about these is you can make them to your own preference, so add dried strawberries instead or pistachio nuts instead of pecans. This is a great base to make as you like. Both my children enjoyed these and I think Henry would have polished off the entire tin if he could have had the chance. A great little make without the huge feelings of sweet guilt that usually go along with a cake. Yum.