Salmon & Avo salad

When my mom came to visit a few weekends ago she brought me some smoked salmon and also an Afrikaans magazine from South Africa, rooi rose. This recipe is from this magazine. I was again too hungry to think of taking a picture of my delicious salad but here is the picture from the magazine:

And here's what you need for this salad:

Avocado

Smoked salmon

1 tin Mandarin slices, drained. (I couldn't find this, then found it last week but I've finished the salmon..)

1 tin grapefruit slices, drained. (I used a fresh grapefruit.)

Chopped pistachio nuts

Fresh watercress

Arrange on serving plate.

For the dressing, mix:

20 ml (4t) orange juice

60 ml (1/4 c) olive oil

5 ml (1t) Dijon mustard

2.5 ml (1/2t) ground ginger

Grated rind of one orange

5 ml (1t) fresh thyme

Warm Chicken Salad

For the past two weeks I've been eating a lot of salad. And I've been trying to be creative with it to keep it interesting. Most days by lunch time I was so hungry that I forgot to take a picture of each salad before eating it, but I remembered this one time!

You need some Thai red curry paste for this one. The recipe says to mix the chicken pieces and curry paste and refrigerate overnight. If you plan ahead and can do this, great, but I've made it many times by just mixing the paste and cooking the chicken straight away. This time though I did plan ahead! I planned so well, I planned for us to have chicken for dinner the night before so I could keep some of the chicken separate for my salad. But then had a change of plan the next day and had a salmon salad instead. So this time the chicken was WELL marinated for two days!

I didn't have lemon grass so just left that out. Same with the red onion and the mint. Also sadly didn't have the fish sauce this time so just made a little dressing with oil and lemon juice. But do try the fish sauce, it's delicious.

Oh and I don't heat the tomato and mint. So I cook the chicken and then just add it over a normal salad with whatever you like in it.

Try it!

WARM CHICKEN SALAD

500 g chicken breast

2 t Thai red curry paste

1 t chopped chilli

garlic

1 stem fresh lemon grass, white part only

1 red onion, chopped

2 tomatoes, cut into wedges

1/2 c chopped fresh mint

1/4 c chopped fresh coriander

400 g mixed salad leaves

Dressing:

1 1/2 T soft brown sugar

2 T fish sauce

2 T lime juice

2 t oil

1. Cut chicken. Mix with curry paste, chilli, garlic and lemon grass. Refrigerate overnight.
2. Spray pan. Cook chicken. Remove form pan. Cook onion. Return chicken and any juices and tomato, mint and coriander. Stir until heated and set aside.
3. Dressing: Mix all ingredients.
4. Toss all together.

PizzaPizzaPizza

I love pizza! I can eat pizza all the time! Especially home made pizza and I found this recipe for a thin pizza crust on another blog and thought I'll give it a try. The first time I tried it I thought it's not going to work... but it did and we made it again last night. I could have it again right now!!

So here's what you do. (It makes one pizza by the way.)

Combine:

120g flour

1/2 t instant yeast

1/2 t sugar

1/2 t salt

Stir in: 1/3 cup water (at room temperature). You might need to add some more water. Just at very little bits at a time.

It will be rough looking, not smooth and don't over mix.

In a small bowl poor 4 tsp olive oil.

Add the dough and turn to coat with oil.

Leave for 1 hour. It should double in size, but I don't think mine did...

Then remove the dough from the bowl and press it into a circle. Leave for 15 min. The first time I did this on some flour on the counter top and I had to scrape it off to get it on the oven pan. So last night I just pressed it straight onto the oven pan. Much easier and less to clean up afterwards.

After 15 min, press dough further into a circle. Cover with plastic (cling wrap) and leave 30-45 min.

Pre-heat oven: 220 C

Bake without toppings: 5 min.

Add toppings and bake another 5 min.

I almost forgot to take a picture of the finished pizza! Remembered just in time before we finished it all!

Enjoy!!

Mac & Cheese

I wasn't going to do a post about macaroni & cheese, but then I thought maybe like me, you also sometimes can't think what to make for dinner and we forget about these simple things like mac & cheese. I was reminded about this when someone posted on facebook that they're making this for dinner. So perhaps you're scrolling through blogs looking for ideas for dinner (like I do) and then I might just be able to help!

I don't know if it's common to add mince to this dish. I grew up with it only being macaroni and cheese sauce with some tomato. But we now add some mince too. Whenever I cook mince I usually make extra to freeze. To spice up the mince I add a can of tomatoes of course and then whatever I have in the fridge like mushrooms, green pepper, and sometimes carrots or zucchini or peas. Finely chopped of course except for the peas.. You can add some fresh tomatoes too and vegetable stock gives great flavour. (Try Ina Paarman vegetable stock if you're in SA.) And don't forget the herbs and red wine!

So you've cooked your pasta (I actually used penne instead of macaroni here), add your cooked mince and cheese sauce. Mix, grate some cheese over the top and bake.

I made this a while ago and I'm actually making it again tonight. We'll be home late so I'll be preparing the cheese sauce and pasta before we go out and the mince is ready anyway. When we get home all I'll need to do is stick it in the oven for about 25 min.

Roast beef - another one by André

We haven't had red meat since arriving here in der Schweiz. That's almost 2 months ago now. Well, André has some good lunches at work so he probably has had some, but we haven't bought any. It's only been chicken and veg and lots of pizza and pasta.

So yesterday we went to Sihlcity, a shopping mall in Zurich and the COOP there is huge! At first I got excited about seeing such a big grocery store, but then it got a bit overwhelming. I'm not used to so many choices anymore! And it took a long time. But then shopping with André usually takes a long time and we end up buying lots more than what's

on the grocery list. So that's how we ended up buying this great piece of meat. Sorry to the vegetarians.. We don't eat meat often but once in a while a good piece of meat is sooo good!

Doing a roast is not my specialty so I'm not even going to go into details about what Andre did. I enjoy cooking and I actually want to be busy doing something. Making a roast you just put the meat in the oven and wait. Ok, with some spices etc, but still, there's not much going on.

But it was oh so good! I'm already looking forward to having the left overs for lunch!

Andre's invention

When we came back from our weekend away at Engelberg André volunteered to cook dinner. I was his assistant. We had some potatoes that needed to be eaten and quite a variety of veggies in the fridge. So André put it all together and made us a delicious meal. He's quite good at cooking and his food is always delicious :-) Here's what he did:

He fried an onion and some garlic (always onion and garlic!) then added one chopped chicken breast. When the chicken was cooked he added some zucchini, chilli and mushrooms. I boiled the peeled potatoes. Made a mushroom sauce using half a packet of mushroom soup powder, mixed with milk and white wine. Poured this over the ingredients in the pan. It got quite thick so we added some water to get the right consistency. André is quite particular about how thick a sauce should be...

When the ingredients in the pan had done enough bubbling in the sauce, André arranged the sliced potatoes in the bottom of an oven dish.

Poured the veggie-chicken-mushroom sauce over the potatoes and arranged the rest of the potatoes over the top.

He added some salami and grated cheese.

In the oven until the cheese starts turning golden brown.

Mmmm... a good invention! I just had the left overs for lunch!