Blogging about food!  We bought a bunch of Good Food magazine recipe books from Amazon, and we’re very pleased with them.  I actually bought them for two reasons, 1. size and 2. one-pot-cooking.

The books are small, sort of a sqaure shape, near A5 but shorter and fatter.  Which makes them easy to store in our tiny, cluttered and space-lite kitchen.  Secondly, they do a one-pot-cooking recipe book and I’m all about the one-pot-cooking.  Each of the recipe books has 101 recipes, some of them look a little, er, curious, and there’s some overlap.  For example, we got the one-pot-cooking one which shares some recipes with the noodle and pasta one, but it’s a small amount of overlap and the books really do seem useful.

We’ve already cooked a bunch of stuff from them, changing our diet in the last three weeks from ‘same old rubbish’ to ‘a bit scary but fresh stuff’ almost overnight.  We’ll probably settle down to a few recipes we really like, but the books have provided some much needed inspiration for us recently.  They don’t really work well with Grete’s diet because I’m terrible at serving single portions, but as we get more used to them we’ll either cook less, or just serve less and hopefully they’ll help.  For me, as long as I’m careful about which ones we pick and their carb content they should be perfect, if I can avoid eating three portions worth.

Tonight I’m making the Chilli from the one-pot-cooking one, which feeds eight, so there’s going to be plenty to freeze for lunches.  I love Chilli, and it’ll be great to learn a new recipe for cooking my own with fresh spices rather than packet mixes.  I’m blogging this during the ’30 minutes of simmering’.  I know that good chilli’s need to cook for ages, but we really don’t have ages unless I cook it days in advance and we didn’t.  But it’ll be awesome for lunch tomorrow at work, and fantastic for keeping in the freezer.

Yesterday we made Lemon Chicken and Broccoli, which was just superb (from the noodle book, or maybe the meals for two).  One of the things we’ll need to get used to is the difference between truly fresh sauces and ingredients and our half-way-house packets or jars.  The lemon sauce was light, fresh and tangy.  Takes quite a bit of preparation although I guess that’ll get quicker with practice, but very little time to cook.

Other dishes we’ve made,

• Goulash – totally not what I was expecting, may have to play with this recipe a bit to get a dish we eat more often.  It was much more like a soup than I expected.  Was better a few days later for lunches.
• Vegetable Paella – was ok, not really my cup of tea (what, no meat?) but I think Grete really enjoyed it.  May mix it up with some chicken.
• Toad in the Hole (from the low fat book) – ruined this, although Grete managed to eat it.  Just didn’t get the oven hot enough and it was more gloop than yorkshire pudding.  May try again, liked the Mustard and Thyme mix in the batter.

We got the following books,

• 101 One-pot Dishes
• 101 Pasta and Noodle Dishes
• 101 Meals for Two
• 101 Low-fat Feasts
• 101 Cakes and Bakes

And may pick up a few of the others as well!

edit: And be thankful, because I almost starting taking pictures of the food, beginning with the goulash but decided against it!