Hearth and Soul Hop 28 February

Welcome to the Hearth and Soul Hop, the blog hop that shares food from the hearth to feed your soul. Recipes should include healthy ingredients and can be old or new recipes or posts. Articles on real food, slow food, foraging, herbal remedies, local food, sustainable food, organics, gardening or any healthy eating information written in a positive light are also welcome. 


To see last week's featured recipes, and to share your posts, please click here...

Easy Fruit Crisps for Meatless Monday

This is one of my favourite dessert recipes because it is so adaptable to seasonal fruits, and also because the fruit and oatmeal in it are good for you, so it doesn’t feel like quite as much of an indulgence as many desserts do.

You don’t often find fruit crisps in England. ‘Fruit crumble’ made with a topping made only from flour, butter and sugars is much more popular. I’ve eaten some lovely crumbles over the years, but I prefer the texture that the oatmeal adds to fruit crisps. Also, fruit crumble is usually served with hot custard poured over top, making it anything but crisp! 

My favourite way to make fruit crisps is with pears, which are in season here in England at the moment, but you can also use drained canned pears if that is not the case where you are. 

To read more, please click here...

The Gallery of Favorites 24 February

Alea of Premeditated Leftovers and I want to welcome you to our weekend blog hop, The Gallery of Favorites, a place for you to feature favorite posts from your own blog. Although Alea and I both spend a lot of our time writing about food, we do have many other interests and know that our readers do as well. The Gallery of Favorites is a place for all bloggers - not just food bloggers - to share their ideas, interests and passions.


To see our featured blogs and to share your posts, please click here...

Slow Cooker Blanquette de Veau

Blanquette de Veau (or veal stew in a white sauce) is a classic French dish with a slightly tarnished reputation. It used to be that all veal was from male dairy calves who were cruelly taken from their mothers, raised in horrendous conditions in tiny crates and then slaughtered after only a few weeks. However, veal crates were banned in the UK in 1990, in Europe in 2007, and the US and Canada, state by state and province by province, are following suit and banning them too. Crate raised veal is thankfully becoming a very rare commodity, and pasture raised or free-range veal (sometimes called Rose Veal) is no crueler than any other ethically raised meat. If you cannot get ethically raised veal, you can use pork shoulder in this recipe, but again do be sure it too has been ethically raised. This is also a more frugal option, and it does taste very good.

I will now get down off my soapbox and make a confession. 

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The Hearth and Soul Hop with The 21st Century Housewife February 21

Welcome to the Hearth and Soul Hop, the blog hop that shares food from the hearth to feed your soul. 

I want to let you know that I have joined Linky Followers, a free service to help us all stay in touch. I have added a button on the left side bar of my main blog page, and I would love it if you would follow me by clicking the blue ‘Follow Me’ link. You can visit  my main blog page by clicking here.

There were so many inspiring posts last week; thank you so much to everyone who shared them. To read more and share your recipes, please click here...

Meatless Monday - Chickpea and Veggie Couscous with Roasted Cashews (Vegan)

One busy evening not so long ago, I threw a few ingredients together for a hearty side dish. The results were delicious enough to merit further investigation, and when I tested the recipe again, I realised it was definitely something that could stand on its own as a vegan main dish. The couscous, chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and cashews all contain protein as well as fiber, and there is iron in the chickpeas and cashews as well. Of course the vegetables are good for you too, full of antioxidants and vitamins. The fact that everything is fairly lightly cooked makes it even more nutritious, as well as quick and easy to prepare. 


To read more, please click here...

The Gallery of Favorites February 17 with The 21st Century Housewife

Alea of Premeditated Leftovers and I want to welcome you to our weekend blog hop, The Gallery of Favorites. 

The Gallery of Favorites is a place for you to feature favorite posts from your own blog. There were a wonderful variety of posts last week, and we do thank everyone who shared them. 

To see this week's featured blogger, and to share your posts, please click here...

Orange Angel Food Cake with Orange Glaze

Until I made it for the first time a few weeks ago, I had not eaten Angel Food Cake for years. It really isn’t well known or popular in England and it never really crossed my path on our many visits back to Canada. And even though I love to bake cakes, I felt very intimidated about making this particular kind. First of all, there are all those egg whites to separate. Plus, everyone says cakes of this type can be very temperamental, and you to be careful about what pans you use to bake them in. (You need a tube or bundt pan without a non-stick feature, and it’s best to have an actual Angel Food Cake pan really.) But after over fifteen years without a bite of one of my favourite cakes, I got fed up with waiting and decided to go for it.   


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Molten Chocolate Babycakes

This is another recipe via the wonderful Nigella Lawson, from her book How to Be A Domestic Goddess. This has to be one of my most used cookbooks, and it is has the flour marks and batter splotches on it to prove it! If you do not have it in your cookbook collection, I urge you to get hold of a copy as soon as you can. Aside from the delicious recipes, Nigella’s writing style is a delight, and for me this book is as much a treasured reading companion as a recipe tome. But on to the Babycakes.

I made these in honour of Valentine’s Day, and so I chose to use my heart shaped Le Creuset custard dishes. I can’t think of any dessert more appropriate for Valentine’s Day than something soft, voluptuous and chocolatey like this. 

To read more, please click here...

The Hearth and Soul Hop with The 21st Century Housewife 14 February

Welcome to Hearth and Soul, the blog hop for and about food that nourishes both body and soul. Recipes should include healthy ingredients and can be old or new recipes or posts. Articles on real food, slow food, foraging, herbal remedies, local food, sustainable food, organics, gardening or any healthy eating information written in a positive light are also welcome. 

Thank you to everyone who shared recipes and posts last week. To read more, and share your recipes, please click here...

The Gallery of Favorites with The 21st Century Housewife

Alea of Premeditated Leftovers and I want to welcome you to our weekend blog hop, The Gallery of Favorites. 

The Gallery of Favorites is a place for you to feature favorite posts from your own blog. There were a wonderful variety of posts last week, and we do thank everyone who shared them. 

To see this week's featured blogger, and to share your posts, please click here...

Creamy Beef and Pasta One Pot

Dinnertime can be tricky in our house. As a senior manager with a large corporate, my husband’s work schedule is packed and erratic. His day starts when he leaves the house just before 7am; he is rarely back home before 8.30pm. This leaves a window of about an hour for a family dinner and some time together before he heads back to work in our home office. Most evenings he has calls with the Americas late into the evening and sometimes even into the early hours of the following morning. My biggest issue is the fact that the time we eat dinner is never set, and can vary anywhere between 8 and 9.30pm. It’s more luck than judgement as to when I need to start preparing dinner to have it ready at the right time, so I try to develop recipes that will hold well if I happen to get the timing wrong. This is one of these. It does require a bit of chopping, stirring etc, so it’s fairly hands on to prepare, but you only need one pot, and if you turn the heat back and stir it occasionally it will hold for a while. I’ve even been known to transfer the whole lot from the pan into a casserole dish, pop a lid on it and keep it warm in the oven - at which point it becomes Creamy Beef and Pasta Casserole. I am nothing if not flexible. 


For the recipe, please click here...

The Hearth and Soul Hop with The 21st Century Housewife

Welcome to Hearth and Soul, the blog hop for and about food that nourishes both body and soul. Recipes should include healthy ingredients and can be old or new recipes or posts. Articles on real food, slow food, foraging, herbal remedies, local food, sustainable food, organics, gardening or any healthy eating information written in a positive light are also welcome. 

Thank you to everyone who shared recipes and posts last week. To read more, and share your recipes, please click here...

Scalloped Root Vegetables for Meatless Monday

If you have an organic vegetable or CSA box delivered weekly, you can be sure of eating in season foods. The only trouble around this time of year is that you sometimes end up with an awful lot of root vegetables. Nothing against root vegetables you understand, but it can be hard to think up new and different ways to serve them. Once you’ve exhausted mashing, roasting and making soup, it can get kind of tricky. Thankfully I don’t mind trying new things in the kitchen, and my family are very tolerant with my experiments.

My late Mom was famous for her Scalloped Potatoes, and it struck me one day that potatoes have a very similar texture to parsnips, turnips, swede and other root vegetables. I got to thinking about it, and after a couple of test runs, I came up with a recipe that we enjoy almost as much as Mom’s potatoes. It’s just as easy too, plus you can tailor it to your individual tastes and what you have on hand.

To read more, please click here...

The Gallery of Favorites 3 February

Alea of Premeditated Leftovers and I want to welcome you to our weekend blog hop, The Gallery of Favorites. 

The Gallery of Favorites is a place for you to feature favorite posts from your own blog. Although Alea and I both spend a lot of our time writing about food, we do have many other interests and know that our readers do as well. The Gallery of Favorites is a place for all bloggers - not just food bloggers - to share their ideas, interests and passions. Of course, recipe and food posts are very welcome too. 

Thank you to everyone who shared posts last week. To read more, please click here...

Apple and Onion Slow Cooker Pork - Cook Once Eat Twice

Photo credit Alex J Harris

I love to cook, but some days it is really nice to have a break, and get two meals out of one afternoon’s cooking. First time round, I usually serve this as a roast for Sunday dinner. A day or two later, I then serve Pulled Pork Sandwiches with Caramelized Onions. 

Photo credit Alex J Harris

There’s a bit work involved on the first day as I generally make mashed or roast potatoes to go alongside, as well as some other vegetables, but the nice thing is the pork takes care of itself in the slow cooker.  

To read more, please click here...