Tasty Tuesday a day late.

Because Tuesdays are pretty busy, it is hard to get a post up. Yesterday was unusually extra busy but because I took all the photos to do this post, I just have to do it a day late. So here is my Tasty Tuesday post on Wednesday.

Pizza Wheels. 

Ingredients:

1 zucchini

1 red capsicum

1 green capsicum

1 440 can crushed pineapple

1 box of scone mix

pizza sauce

shredded ham

grated cheese. 

Directions:

Get a big bowl and put a colander inside. Cut the capsicums into small dice and place in colander. 

Grate the zucchini and add to capsicum. 

Next add the tin of crushed pineapple Mix it all together and put in the fridge while you prepare the dough. 

I mix the dough in my Bosco mixer. 

Once it is mixed nicely together, tip it onto a floured bench and kneed lightly. 

I cut one box of scone mix into 4 parts. I roll them out into a rectangle and place on baking paper.

Before I make up the wheels, I turn the oven onto 210.  

Now for the fun.. First put pizza sauce on dough. 

 Next put the shredded ham in the centre. 

 Place mixed vegetables on top of shredded ham. 

 Next put lots of cheese. I love cheese so I add it more than I probably should. 

 Next roll the dough up in a Swiss roll. 

 Keep rolling till it is a long snake. (This is what Joseph calls it at this stage). 

Cut the pizza snake  wheels into 12-15 and place in muffin trays. 

Place in  preheated oven for 12 minutes. 

This is what they look like when they come out of the oven. On Friday, I made 60 of them and this is what we have left. They are pretty popular.

For those of you with diabetic children, these pizza wheels have a carb ratio of 0.25. 

Tasty Tuesday: Fruit buns.

This is a recipe I use often. The children and Steve love them and they are pretty easy to make. This recipe is a hot cross bun recipe I just don't put the crosses or glaze on and call them fruit buns.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups milk
7grms yeast
1 tspn caster sugar
1 egg
60grms butter melted
4 cups flour
1.5 cups mixed fruit.
1 tbspn all spice
1/2 tspn salt
2 tbspns caster sugar (extra)

Method:

Heat milk in microwave for about 50 seconds.
Add yeast and 1 tspn of caster sugar
put to the side until foaming.

Put flour, mixed fruit, spice, salt and extra sugar in bowl.

When milk has foamed, add melted butter and lightly beaten egg.

Mix dough together and turn out onto a lightly floured surface.

Knead dough for about 20 minutes. put into a greased bowl and leave in a drought free space for 1 hour or until doubled in size.

Put oven onto 200 Celsius when dough has doubled. Turned dough out onto a floured surface again and punch down then knead again. Break dough into 16 even pieces and put into square tin. Put aside for 20 minutes till they are 2 cm higher than before.

Place in oven for 10 minutes and then turn temperature back to 180 c. Cook for a further 20 minutes until buns sound hollow when tapped.

Serve hot or cold. These taste great with butter.

I have also made the dough in our bread maker but the dough comes out stickier and needs more flour added before you punch the dough down.
Therese.

Tasty Tuesday: Our favourite noodle recipe.

This is a dish we have started to have quite regularly here. It is really yummy.

I have adapted this recipe to make it a bit more to our families taste. 

Ingredients: (to serve 8).

350 pack fantastic egg noodles.

50 grams mushrooms. 

250 grams diced lamb or pork. 

4 tbspns soy sauce

4 tbspns rice wine vinegar

4 tbspns curry powder

2 tbspns brown sugar.

1 tin coconut milk

1.5 cups chicken stock

200 grams bacon. 

2 tbspns oil.

minced garlic to taste

2 tbspns minced ginger

chillies 

1 brown onion. 

350 grams mixed corn and peas

fresh coriander leaves. 

Method:

Boil water in kettle and pour over noodles till completely covered. Leave to soak while preparing the rest of the meal. Cut up mushrooms and cover with boiled water. Leave aside. 

Mix soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, curry powder, brown sugar, coconut milk and stock. Leave aside.

cook diced lamb in oil till brown. Remove from pan and put in onion, ginger, garlic, chillies. 

Add bacon to onion mixture, once onions are soft and fragrant. Continue cooking till bacon is done. Drain noodles and mushrooms and add to onion/bacon mixture. Add meat, peas and corn and pour sauce over. Bring to the boil and simmer till the sauce has been absorbed.  Serve.

Tasty Tuesday: My new pie maker.

Today my pie maker arrived so we had cheese and Bacon pies for tea.
Ingredients:
Shortcrust pastry
Puff pastry.
1 extra large onion diced
1 kg beef mince
300 grams Bacon diced.
1 cup gravy
Cheese.
Fry onion, beef and Bacon till cooked. Add gravy and stir till gravy thickens.
Prepare pastry to go in pie maker. Put shortcrust pastry in bottom of pie maker. Put filling in pastry and top with cheese. Put puff pastry on top of pie. Bake in pie maker for 6 minutes. Take pies out and enjoy.

Tasty Tuesday: Menu planning.

Since I am going to Adelaide this weekend, I need to get a menu plan for the next 10 days. I already have up until Friday planned so just have to come up with 6 simple meals for next week.

Here is what we will do next week:

Minestrone. I cook this in our slow cooker. I just throw it all together and leave it for 4 hours on high.

Ratatouille. I have wanted to try this for a while. A friend reminded me when she said that she made it with her 9 year old daughter.

Chicken Fried Rice. All of us love fried rice. I thought the chicken would add a nice flavour for a change.

Spaghetti and meatballs. A meal everyone in our house loves.

Butter Chicken. Another favourite.

Pumpkin Soup. With bread rolls. I am going to take Deanne's suggestion and roast the pumpkin instead of boiling it.

Honey Soy chicken noodles. I love Hokkien noodles. I came across this recipe when looking for one to use with them. I am going to try putting them all together in the slow cooker for 5-6 hours on slow. Will let you know how it turns out.

Tasty Tuesday: Pumpkin soup.

Last Thursday, a few commenter's asked for my pumpkin soup recipe so I decided to post it.

My pumpkin soup is very similar to my broccoli soup recipe so you get a bonus recipe too. Two recipes, one post.

Pumpkin Soup:

Ingredients:

500 grms pumpkin diced.

500 grms potatoes diced.

1 litre vegetable stock.

300 mls sour cream.

chives.

salt and pepper to taste.

put pumpkin, potatoes and vegetable stock into a large saucepan.

Bring to the boil and simmer for 20-30 minutes.

When potato and pumpkin are soft, put in food processor with vegetable stock. Once soup is mixed, place back in saucepan and add sour cream, salt, pepper and chives. Heat through and serve.

I usually double this recipe for our family and it will have enough left over for me to have for lunch the next day.

Broccoli soup:

Ingredients.

500 grms broccoli.

125 grms spinach.

500 grms potato.

1 litre vegetable stock.

300 mls cream.

Place broccoli and potatoes into vegetable stock and bring to the boil. (I cut my potato up pretty small for this so that it cooks just as quickly as the broccoli does).

Simmer for 5-10 minutes so that the potatoes and broccoli are all cooked.

Add spinach and watch till it wilts.

place in food processor and mix. Put back in saucepan and add cream. Serve when heated through.

This recipe is usually doubled too.

I hope you all enjoy these wonderful winter soups.

Tasty Tuesday: Chicken Vegetable soup

Since it is the middle of winter here, we are enjoying lots of soups. I made up a chicken vegetable soup last Sunday that was delicious.

Here is the recipe I used but I changed a few things around with the vegetables we already had. I also used a whole chicken rather than chicken legs and made my own stock with the chicken.

Ingredients.

1 tbspn oil.

2 leeks.

1 medium onion.

1 garlic clove.

3 carrots.

3 zucchini.

3 celery sticks

8 cups chicken stock.

1 whole chicken.

1.5 cups split peas or soup mix.

1 turnip diced.

Start making chicken stock by putting the chicken in water. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 3-4 hours, skimming often.

heat oil in frying pan and add onion, leeks and garlic. Cook until leeks and onions are transparent.

When stock is cooked, remove chicken from stock and take meat off bones.

place chicken, vegetables, split peas and stock into saucepan together. Bring to the boil then reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with bread rolls.

Tasty Tuesday: Home made mayonnaise.

I think one of the delights of summer is having salad with mayonnaise. I love mayonnaise on salad rolls, chicken schnitzels and just to make some lettuce more appetizing.

I decided this weekend to try and make some myself. I looked for a recipe on the net and found this one.

I got all my ingredients out and realised we had no vegetable oil. I decided to use all olive oil. What a big mistake. The mayonnaise was awful. It had such a strong oil taste that I was gagging as I was eating it.

I then went surfing the net and found this little video:



I decided that I couldn't make myself or the children eat it so the chickens had a big feed of the olive oil mayonnaise.
I bought some vegetable oil last night. I haven't tried the recipe yet but I think I will try it tomorrow and see what it tastes like. Maybe Tom and Amelia will have a lesson on emulsifying.

Tasty Tuesday. Prawn Noodles.

Today I decided to give Tom and Amelia a cooking lesson and cook something for tea.

I wanted to try the prawn noodles that I had at cafe primo last Friday night.

Here is how I cooked them:

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil.
2 onions diced.
300 grams silver beet.
1 red capsicum.
500 grams green prawns.
1 family size pack of Hokkien Noodles.
1/2 cup chilli sauce.
1/2 cup of honey

Place the onion in olive oil and cook until transparent over a medium heat.

Put noodles into hot water and mix to separate.

increase heat of frying pan to high and add prawns.

When they are getting a pink colour, add the noodles, capsicum and silver beet.

Once everything is cooked through add the honey and chilli sauce.

Serve straight away.

I think next time I make this, I will mix the honey and chilli sauce with some water. The sauce was just a bit too think and too strong. It didn't really look like a glaze over the noodles.

We had this with a corn salad that I got from Abbey's blog

Here is a picture of the prawns cooking with the onions:



Here is a picture of everything all mixed together:



And here is a picture of the salad:

Tasty Tuesday.

This weekend I did my big cook. I still have a couple of dishes to do but we have enough meals for the next month in our freezer. I am hoping we will have the money for a new big freezer before Christmas so that I can start cooking muffins and biscuits ahead for snacks too.

In the freezer we have:

Spaghetti sauce.
Chicken Snitzel
meatloaf
pizza
chicken spaghetti
chicken and corn casserole.
carrot and zucchini slice
stew

Still to cook are

mac and cheese
potato pancakes.

Here is my recipe for chicken and corn casserole.

300 grams chicken fillets.
1 tin corn kernels
1 tin creamed corn
100 grams each red and green capsicum
100 grams carrots cut
1 whole onion
350 ml sour cream
1 cup chicken broth.
1 tbspn curry. (or less - we like it spicy here)

cook chicken on stove top and add to all other ingredients in casserole dish. bake at 180 Celsius for 45 minutes. Serve with rice.

Super busy.

It is only two days till Amelia's birthday and I am trying to make a pinafore for her so I don't have much time tonight to post.

It is tasty Tuesday and I could post a recipe but I wanted to link to Kalona again and tell you all go and make her King Ranch Chicken. We had it last night and it was a huge hit.

Tasty Tuesday. Potato Pancakes.

I haven't done a recipe for a while so I thought I would share this one.

This recipe comes from Exclusively Foods. They are one of my favourite recipe sites.

The recipe is for Potato Pancakes. They are really yummy and very filling.

Here is the link to the recipe with photos.

Ingredients:

1 small onion.
625 potatoes (about 4 small ones).
1 large egg.
2 tbspns self raising flour.
salt and pepper to taste.

peel onions and potatoes. Grate both and squeeze excess moisture out of potatoes. Mix onions, potatoes, egg, flour, salt and pepper.

Heat oil in heavy based frying pan over medium to medium high heat. Drop scant 1/4 cup mixture into pan and flatten.

Cook potatoes for 4-5 minutes each side or until golden and cooked through. If they are cooking too fast, adjust heat.

This mixture makes about 9 pancakes. We triple the recipe for our family.

I wouldn't mind trying this one day with zucchini either. I am sure they would be pretty yummy too.

Tasty Tuesday Tuna Mornay.

Tonight I cooked Tuna mornay for tea so thought I would post the recipe I used and the carb factors.

Now that Tom is on a pump we need to count every bit of carb going into his body. The way this is done is by working out the total carbs in the recipe and then weighing the food. If the food weighs 2kg and has a total of 300 carbs then we divide 300 into 2000 and get a carb factor of 0.15.

If Tom eats 200 grams then he has a total of 30 gram's of carbs.

Simple maths (when you have a calculator). I am working out the carb factor for all my recipe's and writing it down in a little book that I am keeping in the kitchen by the scales. It is a lot of work now but once I have most of our recipe's I will only have to weigh Tom's food.

Tonights recipe:

1 can of Tuna in Springwater.
2 medium onions
1 can of creamed corn.
1 can of corn kernels.
500 grams of mixed frozen vegetables.
2 cups of milk.
50 grams plain wholemeal flour.
2 tablespoons of oil.
1 packet of Dried French Onion soup.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and cook the onions. When the onions are turning clear add the flour. Mix to make a think paste. Add a little bit of milk at a time and mix until it disappears into the paste. Keep adding milk until all is added. Add the tuna, mixed vegetables, corn, cream corn and french onion soup. Bring all to the boil and simmer for 15 min.

Serve with rice or pasta.

Carb factor is 0.18 per gram.

Tasty Tuesday.

Today I cooked Chicken Enchiladas for tea.

I have been looking at the once a month cooking site for a while now and decided to try a few recipes and see what they are like. This was delicious.

I gave Tom a cooking lesson and he helped me cook the sauce this afternoon. We made up the Enchiladas this evening and put them in the oven for all to eat.

This is the recipe:

Ingredients for Cooking Day:
1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
2 Tbsp. butter
1 boiled chicken, deboned, skinned and chopped
1 - 4 oz. can mild green chili peppers chopped
1/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp. of salt
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup sour cream
3 Tbsp. butter
3 oz. Monterey Jack cheese shredded
3 oz. Cheddar Cheese shredded
12 6-inch tortillas
Cooking Day Instructions:
Saute onions and green peppers in butter. Add cooked chicken and green chili peppers.
In separate pan heat chicken broth and and cream of chicken soup. Remove from heat and mix in sour cream and 1/2 cup of the cheese. Stir 1/2 cup of the sauce into the chicken mixture.
Dip each tortilla into remaining sauce to soften; fill each with the chicken mixture. Roll up and arrange seam side down in a baking dish prepared for freezing. Pour remaining sauce over enchiladas and sprinkle with remaing cheese. To freeze use the foil and plastic wrap method. For instructions of this method click here.

Tasty Tuesday: Butterscotch Icecream

This is one of my favourite recipes. It is a recipe that we only do for special occasions because it is an expensive icecream and also a bit too fatty for Tom to eat regularly.

250g block PHILADELPHIA* Cream Cheese, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 cup cream
100g chocolate coated honeycomb bars, chopped

MIX Philly* for four minutes or until soft. Add brown sugar and vanilla essence and mix until well combined.
BEAT cream until thickened. Fold cream and chopped honeycomb bars through Philadelphia mixture.
POUR into a lined or lightly greased loaf tin, ring tin or pudding basin. Freeze overnight.
Variation:
* Peppermint: To make a delicious Peppermint Ice cream, simply substitute the chocolate coated honeycomb bars for 100g Peppermint Crisp chocolate bars (chopped), and continue the recipe as above.

Tasty Tuesday. Pumpkin and choc chip muffins

Pumpkin and Choc chip muffins from Michelle.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins.
3 cups white sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
8 eggs
3 cups pumpkin
1 cup water
6 cups all purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoons ground cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 cups semisweet mini morsels

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400*. Grease and flour muffin pan or use paper liners. (I just PAM it)Mix sugar, oil, eggs. Add pumpkin and water. In separate bowl mix together the baking flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt. Add wet mixture and stir in chocolate chips.Fill Muffin cups 2/3 full with batter. Bake in preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes.

These muffins are so delicious. I made 120 mini muffins and they are all gone. I thought I would have enough for the week but I will have to make some more tomorrow.

I thought the fat content would be a bit to high for Tom (our diabetic child) but the dietician said it was fine. The sugar content is a bit high so we will be substituting a cup of choc chips for 1 cup of dates and putting in one cup of splenda and two cups of sugar with the next batch.

Tasty Tuesday. Yummy Chicken Fettucine.

Tonight I cooked Chicken Fettucine for tea. Since everyone told me how yummy it was I thought I would share the recipe.

500 gms chicken.
1 large onion.
3 sticks of celery
1 tin of cream of chicken soup.
1 tin of cream of mushroom soup.
1 tin of light evaporated milk.
1 pack of dried French Onion Soup.
500 gms fettuchine.

Boil water for fettuchine
Spray frying pan with olive oil and cook onion.
Add chicken, celery and French onion soup.
Stir occasionally until chicken is cooked.
Add chicken soup, mushroom soup and evaporated milk. Bring to the boil stirring occasionally.
Cook fettuchine and when tender add to chicken mixture. Serve. A tossed salad would go well with this dish. Next time I will definitely have a salad to go with this.

Serves 8.