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!