HOME BAKED FOCACCIA AND ROASTED SWEET POTATO AND GARLIC SOUP

Sooo since it's been so cold and rainy, I thought it was time for some autumnal comfort food!

This was the first time I baked bread, so I think it turned out pretty okay! It was a little too dense though.. I used too much flour and didn't let the dough rise enough. Poo. It was super yummy anyway, and this is what you get when you type focaccia into google:

Sooo.... serious win! :D Next time I'll use more salt, less flour, more olive oil, let it rise longer and spread it out thinner.

Gaaaah damn blogger keeps rotating my photos!

So the soup was delicious but the texture was something like baby food.... I don't know what I was thinking. I think there is a lesson to be learned here: LEAVE THE COOKING TO SAM.

Ingredients:

2 sweet potatoes

1 big normal potatoes

4 cloves of garlic

olive oil

1 cup of warmed milk

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 250°

2. Cook potatoes until almost tender

3. Drain and place on baking tray with unpeeled garlic cloves

4. Drizzle with olive oil and stick in oven

5. Roast for 5 minutes (this was my mistake, I roasted the hell out of them, making them gluey)

6. Squeeze the garlic from it's skin into a bowl or food processor

7. Add potatoes and milk and either puree using one of those puree sticks or blitz it all in the food processor.

8. Add salt and pepper to taste.

WILD MUSHROOMS ON TOAST, PURPLE SPROUTING BROCCOLI AND ROAST VEGETABLES

Another super yummy meal made by Sam!!

Pretty simple this time, to ensure the best flavours of the mushrooms are not spoilt or over-complicated. Just Puffballs and Parasols on toast. I fried them in the classic combination of garlic, shallots and butter, and turned up the heat at the end to make the fat puffball chunks nicely crispy.

Purple Sprouting Broccoli. I didn't even know you could get it before spring. Just tastier and sweeter than normal fatty broccoli. But still not as good as the fancy pants successful artist of the family (that cunt Romanesco).

And here just some roasted vegetables: butternut squash, sweet potato, shallots, courgette, parsnip, carrot and garlic cloves. Covered in a mix of vegetable and garlic oil, with some rosemary sprinkled over!

We LOVE roasting unpeeled garlic cloves, and then squeezing the gooey, creamy garlic out of the peel.... mmmmmmmm NOM.

SPAGHETTI WITH WILD MUSHROOM SAUCE, CHICKEN AND AVOCADO

SO here we have a very quaint looking basket of wild mushrooms I picked near Norwich Prison. That should be a clue enough as to where I was foraging, it's got a typically nonsensical Norfolk name. Ok yeah so we have a few Boletes, some beautiful Orange Grisettes (which my most trusted mushroom book told me were poisonous. But they aren't actually. They're pretty fucking tasty!) and a nice parasol. This was the first time I've ever found Grisettes, and there were hundreds of them.

OH HOW PRETTY, THAT'S OBVIOUSLY EXACTLY HOW THE MUSHROOMS HAPPENED TO FALL ONTO MY CHOPPING BOARD. Boletes and Orange Grisettes.

Yeah. Slices of Mushrooms. Parasols at the back, Boletes round the edge and Grisettes in the middle.

More attempts at me taking arty photos of chopped up mushrooms. Congratulations.

The finished meal. Yeah looks a bit grey and rusty but it tasted incredible. The avocado and mushrooms worked so well together, but the spaghetti was a bit unnecessarily slimy with the sauce. Potatoes would have been a better choice.

Sooo now that Sam got to write about his beloved mushrooms, I'm left with the fun task of writing out the recipe.

I won't do amounts though for the solid ingredients, use as much as you like.

Ingredients:

Wild mushrooms (or if you're not as adventurous, you can go play-foraging in the supermarket, where the mushrooms grow in a plastic tub near the vegetables)

Quorn chicken pieces

Olive oil

Garlic (we used three cloves)

250ml chicken stock

250ml cream

1 tbs mustard

Pasta or spaghetti, whatever you like

Avocado(s)

1. Fry the chicken in some olive oil. Season it with salt and pepper.

2. Remove chicken from pan and replace with mushrooms and garlic.

3. Cook those mushrooms until they're just tender, but not too mushy

4. Add the stock, cream, mustard and chicken. Make sure it's boiling gently and let it reduce until it's thick enough.

5. In the meantime, cook the pasta.

6. Slice some avocado into smallish chunks.

7. When the pasta is done, toss it all together, et voila!

This is a good dish if you like really creamy pasta things. We decided we would have preferred it without the sauce, but it's your decision.

SPINACH AND FETA FRITTERS

We stole this recipe from one of our favourite blogs, Closet Cooking.

http://closetcooking.blogspot.com/2010/07/spinach-and-feta-fritters.html

We change the recipe a little though, we use more than a 1/2 cup of feta cheese, and THEN we add some soft goats cheese. Oh hell yes. We also add some chopped garlic, because without garlic it wouldn't actually be food. That's our logic anyway.

Ours don't look as pretty, but they taste amazing. I could eat these for lunch everyday.

Oh and don't say, feta? That's not cheap! That's super shmancy! Well, we buy ours from Aldi for less than £1 a block.. it's even cheaper if you get the fake kind.

CHEESY BREAKFAST

Yeah, it's really corny to serve ones boyfriend heart-shaped shit for breakfast, but ya gotta show de bwai your love.

CHICKEN BURGER WITH SWEET POTATO AND BUTTERNUT SQUASH CHIPS

Sam made us an amazing dinner again.

Burger ingredients:

Quorn chicken burger

Brie

Banana ketchup*

Mayonnaise

Caramelised onions & courgettes

Don't think a recipe is really necessary here... just put the chicken burgers in the oven with the chips, then slap everything together.

Except, maybe you'll want to know how to caramelise the stuff:

1. Fry the onions and courgettes (sliced quite finely) in some butter until they brown a little bit

2. Add like a teaspoon of brown sugar - depending on how much stuff there is, we used a teaspoon for 1/2 courgette and 3/4 onion, but it isn't the biggest deal, improvise, play jazz. Just don't use too much

3. Turn the temperature up slightly and let it all bubble and do it's thing. The sugar should melt into the gooeyness.

Chips:

1. Preheat oven to 160°c

2. Cut butternut squash and sweet potato into thick chip shapes

3. Put em in a baking tray

4. Drizzle some vegetable oil over them, and add salt, pepper, chopped garlic and rosemary**

5. Use your hands to coat all the chips with all that stuff so everything is well coated

6. Stick in the oven for 15 minutes

7. Take them out and turn them around and stuff, maybe put more oil on if they look too dry

8. Put them back in for another 15-20 mins

9. If you want them to be really crispy, turn up the temperature (180°c-200°c) and put them on the top shelf for a bit

Salad Ingredients:

Rocket

Baby Spinach

Tomatoes

Spring onions

Red onion

Garlic - chopped up finely, obviously

Black olives

Green olives

Almonds

Carrot

Courgette

Lemon juice

Salt & pepper & olive oil!

Chop it all up - slap it all together!

Oh and no we didn't buy everything here just for the salad, we literally just took everything in our fridge that was getting a bit funky and threw it in.

* You're thinking: Banana ketchup? Oh yeah sure, I'll just get a bottle from my stash. Well, we discovered banana ketchup one night when Ava couldn't sleep and decided to read the Wikipedia page on ketchup. Then, at 3 am an impulse buy was made:

This stuff is incredible, it tastes a lot like normal ketchup just with ridiculous banananess. It goes with a lot of things, and gives everything....... Caribbean flair?!

You can get it on the internet, but lots of Asian and African food stores sell it, sometimes from different brands though.

** We're not snobs or anything, but we would like to strongly dissuade you from using dried herbs from shakers and things. They're shit. The thing is, what makes herbs taste good and herby are their oils.. once they're all chopped and dead the oils are gone and they just taste shit.

So if you don't have any rosemary in your garden, someone else in the neighbourhood is bound to. Steal theirs.

REALEAT VS. QUORN - VEGETARIAN BACON WARS

Ever since I decided to stop eating meat (ever since haha, you'd think it had been years, it's not actually very long ago) I realised it wasn't really that hard to give it up. UNTIL I smelled the delicious aroma of bacon frying. OH BACON! Sweet bacon! It was my main staple ingredient for EVERYTHING before, so how would I actually live without it??

Admittedly, at one point I was like.... hmmmmm... can't I just be a vegetarian that eats bacon? And then I was like UM NO, NO I CAN'T.

So I looked for some alternatives, and found two in town.

Quorn bacon is made from the same mycoprotein stuff that all Quorn things are made from. This mycoprotein, is a fungal substance of course, and that means it's kind of spongy. This sponginess is really good at imitating chicken, but pork... hmm.. not so much. Especially because the most important thing about bacon is it's crispiness and chewiness. You can fry the hell out of this stuff, but it will NEVER be crispy.

So really the only thing that makes this stuff like bacon at all, is the flavouring, which is reminiscent of the kind of bacon flavour you'd find on smoky bacon crisps.

This may all sound really negative, but the stuff isn't so bad. Just don't make the mistake of trying to eat it on its own. On a sandwich with lots of other stuff, it's actually really, really good. It gives you the flavour that real bacon would have given you otherwise and does make a great replacement.

Now the second one:

This stuff looked really good as it had a sort of imitation rind, which was promising to be crispy. It's made from wheat and soya protein, and when I got it out of the box I was like, whoa, this does not look like the picture. It looks kinda gross actually, really dry and flaky.

It has a slightly stronger flavouring than the Quorn stuff, more smoky and a bit.... weird, but the crispiness totally made up for that.

Once again, don't attempt to eat it on it's own... only on a sandwich or something like that.

So overall, I guess there is no winner really. So next time, I'll combine the two!

ROMANESCO CAULIFLOWER

I'd been telling Sam about this fractal logarithmic spiral of a cauliflower for ages. It's been my favourite vegetable ever since my mom made it for me a few years ago, but it's so damn rare! I really wanted to show Sam, but I just couldn't find it ANYWHERE. I checked in a lot of greengrocers, I checked Waitrose, nowhere to be found.

So then the other day, in the most unlikely of places; a supermarket called "Roy's" in Wroxham, Sam found some!

So yeah, this stuff is obviously stunning visually, but we're not looking to decorate our houses with attractive vegetables, we want to make some good nom, so I hoped it would be as yummy as I remembered.

So we didn't make a super fancy dish. In fact we did something really lazy, we just boiled it and decided to have it with some Indian takeaway leftovers. Nothing particularly fancy there, but a good way to make a few leftover things into a meal.

Okay, sorry for the crappy photography, we just wanted to nom it fast. It was amazing.

Romanesco broccoli basically tastes pretty much like broccoli but just better - it's sort of buttery and milder.. sort of like a mix of broccoli and cauliflower - in my opinion. It's really yummy, you should check it out if you can.

Yeah this doesn't really display any cooking skills, but we just wanted to show you this crazy vegetable!

WHY THIS BLOG IS CALLED MANGO PRAWN

It's definitely a random title... especially seeing as we will NEVER make any sort of semblance of a mango prawn since we only make vegetarian stuff. Well, the mango prawn came into existence when everyone was sitting around really baked and... well... this happened:

Sam flicks something into Jamie's hair.
Jamie: "What did you put in my hair??!!"
Sam: (being stoned and silly) "Mango prawn."
Jamie: "MANGO PRAWN???? YOU PUT A MANGO PRAWN IN MY HAIR???"
Everybody asks what's going on as Jamie is frantically feeling his hair and screaming "WHERE IS THE PRAWN??!!!"
Jamie: "HE PUT A MANGO PRAWN IN MY HAIR!!!!"
Everyone says there's nothing there
Jamie: "WHERE IS IT?? GET IT OUT!!!.............wait.... there is no prawn.... THERE IS NO PRAWN!!!"

Well, there you go. We'll never forget it.

LET US INTRODUCE OURSELVES

Sam - Scroungefish

AVA - Dready baking bitch