Chicken salad

It was too hot tonight for anything else besides salad so I made a quick chicken salad.

I made up a marinade using about two tablespoons apricot jam (or jelly for the Americans - in SA jelly = jello - not something you'd put on your bread.) Anyway this is the apricot spread you put on bread. Ok, moving on. Add about a teaspoon of mustard, a little bit of vegetable stock or chicken stock with a little bit of hot water to mix it all up. I like veg stock, it gives good flavour. I did not measure anything, just add as you wish.

Pour the sauce into a pan and add the chicken pieces. Here you can see how much sauce I had compared to chicken. You don't need too much.

I cooked it on medium heat. Then got impatient and turned the heat right up! The chicken went golden brown and the sauce cooks away to form a slightly sticky sweet sauce. Mmmm... I like sweet...

Let the chicken cool and add to your salad. We love the bread and cheese here so had some of that with our salad.

I actually started running today, because I've been enjoying the cheese and chocolates too much! Now let's just hope I can keep up the exercise!

Pasta with veg & pesto

I received this pasta and pesto in a parcel (see this video) from the bank in Germany when we got married. It was filled with interesting things to eat like chocolate (that's the first thing that came to my mind now! It was the most amazing chocolate truffles...) and olives and a bottle of red wine and lots of other goodies including this packet of colourful pasta:

and this sun dried tomato pesto:

André was a bit skeptical about the pesto. He apparently once ordered pasta with pesto and didn't like it. But I convinced him to give it another try, and this was a different kind of pesto anyway.

I knew he wouldn't be very satisfied with only pesto with his pasta so I added some chopped veg - zucchini, mushrooms, red pepper and garlic - fried in a pan with some olive oil.

Here's the final product: Colourful pasta, served with veg and pesto. And freshly baked (ready bought) bread rolls.

Nice and easy!

What's for dinner?

My husband and I both enjoy cooking. His specialty is pasta and I like to try any new recipe - not always a good thing! Often after dinner I've said, "I should have taken a picture of that, it was so good!" So now I've decided that's what I'm going to start doing. Whenever we've made something worth taking a picture of I'll post it here. And let me know if you try the recipe and how you like it. 

It won't always be fancy stuff, probably hardly ever. Mostly just the ordinary, but delicious.