Food Minia

Stuffed mushrooms are one of those foods people think are difficult to make.  "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom" a phrase apparently coined by Shirley Conran.  Stuffing a mushroom does sound difficult, or fiddly but I promise it's not.   This super simple stuffing also makes it easy (and delicious).  I just had this as an adult meal for one but my son, a fan of both mushrooms and cheese would love these.  Do include the herbs, after all, without them they'd be a two ingredient recipe and that feels a little bit lame! Stuffed Mushrooms - Serves 1 Adult or 1-2 Children Ingredients 5 White Mushrooms (I didn't use large open capped ones, just ones around 2-4 cm across.  The bigger they are, the fewer you'll need.) A few sprigs of fresh herbs, I used parsley, thyme and chives 60g, 2oz Feta cheese, crumbled Method Preheat the oven to 200oC, 400F, gas mark 7. Take the stalks out of the mushrooms just leaving the caps.  If you like the stalks can be chop...

Cauliflower pakoras are something I'd never made before until recently, but as part of my 7 a day challenge I made some vegetable pakoras using peas and loved them.  When I moved house a few days back and restocked my cupboards (including buying some gram flour), the helpful assistant in the shop suggested cauliflower was pretty good and, in fact her favourite.  She also said that fresh spinach was, in her opinion much better in Indian food than frozen. I always like a bit of advice when it comes to cooking so I gave it a go.  The jury is out in the spinach.  In my opinion frozen is just as good but the great thing about baby spinach is you can use it as a salad vegetable or cook with it and it just so happened I had some in my fridge so I went with it. Traditionally I don't think the cauliflower is precooked but although I don't like soggy cauliflower, I'm not overly keen on cauliflower which bites back either so I partially precooked mine.   Caulflower p...

Cannelloni is a surprisingly easy dish to cook for one.  I had made some tomato and pesto soup the other day and the leftovers were in the fridge.  It occurred to me that it would also make a really good pasta sauce.  But I had no cream cheese, no goats cheese, no mince, nothing traditional for a cannelloni filling in the house.  So why not vegetables.  Why not?  You know what, it didn't just work , it was delicious! A great idea for fussy kids not keen on vegetables (or even adults!) Spinach and Carrot Cannelloni - Serves 1 adult or 2 children Ingredients 1/2 a carrot, peeled and grated 20g, 2/3oz Fresh spinach, finely shredded 2 tbsp Single cream (light cream) but any cream could be used 30g, 1oz Extra mature (extra sharp) cheddar 200-250g 7-9oz of homemade tomato and pesto soup 4 tubes cannelloni.  Mine were quite small, weighing 45g, 1.5oz.  Make sure you choose the dried kind which can be cooked without precooking Method Mix the grated carr...

Custard.  I never make it from scratch but I do make it from custard powder.  It occurred to me when making some custard from custard powder the other day that custard powder is simply cornflour (cornstarch) natural flavouring (vanilla) and colour (normally a natural colour like annatto).  I don't have much annatto floating around the house and there feels like something wrong about making white custard even though that's the colour it would be if not made with eggs, so my idea was to make chocolate custard. This would be great hot with chocolate cake, poured over banana (if you want to keep on my 7 a day routine), on it's own or allowed to cool in small pots and eaten cold like blancmange.  It's pretty low sugar too with only 1 tsp added sugar per portion.  There's more sugar in a fromage frais! Chocolate custard - Makes 2 small bowls Ingredients 280ml, Half Pint milk 1 rounded tbsp cornflour (cornstarch) 1 tsp Cocoa powder (unsweetened) 1/2 tsp Vanilla extrac...