I really need to apologise to you all for my lack of WordPress activity over the last five months but I have an excellent excuse! I promise! You see, I’m expecting the stork some time in late May/early June and have been utterly and completely wrapped up in preparations for the new addition to the family. Yippee!!!
In the meantime, I’ve tried a few recipes from WordPress bloggers I follow that I do need to share with you as they were delicious!
The first is Macaroni and cheese with special features from Homemade Delish. I love my own recipe for macaroni cheese but decided to make this one in an effort to jam more vegetables into my pregnant belly. I made small adjustments to her recipe, as always, and took out the zucchini and interpreted summer squash to mean pumpkin (I’m really confused as to what Americans call pumpkin (big orange things to me) and what they call squash (small yellow/green things) and where summer squash falls into that terminology). Oh and my garden’s squash aren’t quite mature yet, though they are looking almost ready! Seriously exciting!
The second is Lamb Lollipops from Afternoon D Lite, a much sweeter name for the cut of lamb I usually refer to as lamb cutlets. I am far too messy to perform the elegant dipping-and-transfer-to-mouth that this recipe requires without dripping hot curry sauce all down my expanding front so I served the lollipops on a bed of rice with the smashed poppadoms on top (I love that Afternoon D Lite calls them pompadoms! Made me giggle!) Unfortunately I’m not supposed to eat jarred red peppers/capsicums when pregnant so I substituted with a whole red capsicum cut into itsy bitsy pieces and fried that in the pan with the lamb, chilli and garlic. This recipe gave me another opportunity to use my spring onions fresh from the garden and my limes! Yummo!
The third recipe was Walnut-crusted salmon from Rantings of an Amateur Chef which is the easiest of the three recipes and can be knocked over really, really quickly. I served this last night with a summer salad of avocado, orange and Dutch carrots:
Roasted carrot salad with avocado, orange and cumin:
2 tbs olive oil
2 bunches of Dutch carrots (use one bunch of the purple ones if you can get them!)
1-2 oranges
1 large/2 small avocados
1 pinch of dried chilli powder (optional, but it adds zing!)
juice of 1/2 a lemon
ground cumin
1. Trim and thoroughly wash your carrots (don’t peel them as they’re so tiny, you won’t have much carrot left!) then pop them in a frypan with 1 tbs olive oil and a good shake of cumin. Fry them over a medium heat until their skin wrinkle a little bit and they brown slightly. Shake the pan while cooking to keep the carrots turning in the cuminy-oily goodness (also means less utensils to wash up later!). Remove and set aside to cool.
2. Segment your oranges (easiest way to do this is to chop off one end and turn the orange so the chopped side is facing up. Then slide the knife down from the chopped end, just between the skin and the flesh until you hit the chopping board. Rotate around until all the skin is off, turn sideways and chop off the other end, then use the knife to extract triangles of orange flesh out) and place the segments in a flat bowl/plate.
3. Chop the avocado flesh into bite-size pieces and add to the salad. Add the cooled carrots
4. Make a dressing out of the remaining olive oil, chilli, lemon juice and another good sprinkle of cumin and splash over the delicious salad!
I ook forward to seeing what the stork brings. No wonder you have been missing for a few months.
i guess there not only baby blues but also blogging blues…..
keep sharing then!