Pork Ribs - 'Cook more'

Oi oi!

Welcome to the first blog post in… ahem… a while. This is a more detailed accompaniment to my January new years resolution video ‘Cook More’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihit3PW9ldU) . To illustrate me “cooking more” I filmed me making a bit of an effort with dinner… Pork ribs!

They were surprisingly easy really, but tasted great. This recipe comes from the Hairy Bikers’ family cook book (the Mum’s know best one) which is a lovely book that I have used plenty before.

Now, let’s get down to it.

Ingredients:

1 rack pork ribs

3 tomatoes (plum tomatoes work best)

1 finely chopped red onion

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 clove garlic (roughly chopped)

1 tsp ground mustard

240 ml ketchup

2 tbsp soy sauce

55g sugar

1 tbsp cornflour, mixed with 3-4 tbsp water

Salt and pepper

Method:

Slice to separate the ribs, and put them in a pan of boiling water for 3-5 minutes, then leave to cool.

 

For marinade, mix together all remaining ingredients except the cornflour and water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Then slowly mix in cornflour mixture until the marinade has thickened and pour it into a bowl/deep dish. Pop in the ribs, make sure they’re well covered in marinade and leave for 1-2 hours.

When you’re ready to cook, transfer ribs to a double foiled tray and cook in a preheated oven at 150° C for 1 hour. You can also barbeque them, but remember to wrap them in foil first. 

And that’s it! Finito! I also made potato and sweet potato wedges to go with my ribs which are dead simple, as well as salad, but you can do whatever you want to accompany them :)

I hope you like it, and let me know how you get on if you try this yourself! Stay tuned for my pudding recipe (pear and marzipan pie) and I shalt see thou anon. 

Love,

  Georgia

Banana Bread

More baking! 

This time it’s banana bread; the second loaf I‘ve made this week… is that a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn’t say… :s

Anyway, it really does taste (and smell) great, and the walnuts add a nice extra texture.

Now that it’s coming into winter (Christmas soon!) I thought something sort of rustic and autumnal would be a nice, cosy idea. It’s especially nice when eaten warm.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures, because I didn’t have a camera to hand when I was baking. Sorry! But it’s really quite simple, and you’ll just have to believe that it’s a beautiful golden brown loaf cake that rises a fair amount :P 

Ingredients

125g butter/marg

¾ cup brown sugar

¼ cup or 4 tbsp golden syrup

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ginger

1tsp cinnamon

2 eggs

2 ripe bananas, mashed

Handful of chopped walnuts (optional)

Method

Put butter, brown sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan and stir over a low heat until the butter has melted, then leave the mixture to cool for 5-10 minutes.

Sift all the dry ingredients into a bowl and make a well in the middle and then pour in the butter mixture, eggs, banana and walnuts. Mix until just combined and nice and smooth.

Pour the mix into a greased loaf tin (you’ll need a fairly large one) and pop into the oven for 45 minutes at 180⁰. You’ll know it’s done when you insert a butter knife and it comes out clean.

 Let it rest for five minutes before turning it out of the tin and onto a cooling rack. 

It should end up lovely and moist but pretty sturdy. It actually tastes really nice if you spread a slice lightly with cream cheese as well.

So, I hope you all have lots of good, autumnal fun trying this recipe out, and I’ll type to you later. Let me know how it goes if you make it yourselves. Bye!

Love,

  Georgia

Snickerdoodle cookies

I dun gone made some tastiness.

Haven’t written in a while have I? Ah well, to the biscuits.

This is the second time I’ve made this recipe (twice in one week… oops) and they’ve come out really well both times! (yay) 

I’ve been eyeing them up since I got the book the recipe is in; the hummingbird bakery cake days book. However, I had never tried them anywhere else (as in, made by any other fair hands except my own). But you’re just gonna have to trust me on this one guys… they be delish.

Another beauty of the snickerdoodle (we’ll get to baking in a mo, I promise) is that their ingredients are pretty simple as their only major, important flavouring is cinnamon, something most bakers (ok, pretty much ALL bakers) have in their cupboard anyways.

To the cookie creation! You’re going to need:

For the dough:

60g butter/marg

160g sugar

¼ tsp/1 drop vanilla essence

1 egg

240g plain flour

1 heaped tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon (more/less depending on your taste buds)

For the coating:

1 ½ tbsp sugar

1 tbsp cinnamon

Cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. (If you have an electric whisk/mixer great, but I just used a fork) then add the egg and combine fully.

Sift together the remaining dry ingredients and mix them gradually in to the butter mixture until you’ve got a soft dough. (Make sure the cinnamon is evenly distributed, not too streaky)

Cover your mixing bowl with cling film and pop the dough in the fridge to rest. The book says 40 minutes, but I got impatient and that didn’t hinder me, so leaving them in there until the oven’s heated up and the trays are ready, etc. is fine.

Preheat the oven to 170⁰C and line two trays with grease proof paper. 

Mix together the sugar and cinnamon for the coating in a small bowl (like cereal bowl size is fine). 

Take the dough out of the fridge and break off small pieces (approx. a large teaspoonful), roll them into balls, roll them in the cinnamon-sugar mixture and pop them on the baking tray, no need to flatten them.  Allow a bit of space around each one for spreading whilst they cook.

Bake for about 12 minutes.

Once they’re out of the oven, let them cool for a bit on the parchment before putting them on a rack.

 

Look, mine look not dis-similar from the ones in the picture! Hurra!

And there you have it! Le snickerdoodle cookies. I’m sure I’ll be whipping them up again soon. Will you? 

The second time round, I added vanilla cream cheese icing and sandwiched some of them together, which tasted great however they completely stand alone as well. They would actually make a neat gift, wrapped in a box or cellophane; that is if you can keep from eating them all yourself… 

I hope you enjoyed this! Maybe I’ll write again next time I bake… who knows. I’m like a kitchen enigma! One minute I’m there, Imparting my culinary successes, the next I‘m gone; leaving only the virtual smell of warm biscuits (or muffins or cake or bread) behind me… and probably a line of crumbs…

Let me know how your snickerdoodles turn out, won’t you and I’ll see you never, but talk at you soon.

Love,

         Georgia

P.S. Has anyone got any idea why these biscuits have such a funny name?

Baking Belgian Biscuits

I made Belgian Biscuits today, and they were yummy. This is a half mixture, so it would work better if you doubled it (leaving the egg the same, just not particularly small)

Ingredients:
For the Biscuits:
112g Butter/Marg
112g Brown sugar
1 Egg, small
125g Plain flour
1 tsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Mixed spice
1 tsp Cocoa
1/2 tsp Baking soda
Some jam (any type you like, I used plum)

For the Tops:
10 Glacé cherries
120g Icing sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice

Method:

1. Cream the butter and sugar together, until light and sort of fluffy.
2. Add the egg and beat again, until combined.
3. Then sift in the dry ingredients and mix into a dough. you'll probably need a bit more flour, so don't be afraid to add that in as you need it.
4. Once everything is combined into a soft dough leave it to chill for at least an hour, preferably over night or something. 
5. Once the dough is suitably cold, take half out of the fridge and sprinkle some flour on a clean surface. roll out the dough on the flour-y surface to a reasonably thin thickness, as long as they're even it'll work out fine.
6. Take a glass, or round cookie cutter, and cut out circles of dough and put them on a pre-greased tray. then repeat this process with the second half of the dough. put them in the oven for 10 minutes at 180 ͦC. 

7. Whilst the biscuits are cooling make up the lemon icing. simply mix together the lemon juice and icing sugar until it makes a thick icing, adding more lemon juice as needed. Also halve the cherries. You'll only need half as many as there are pairs of biscuits.

8. Stick the biscuits together in pairs with jam, and then spread the top of each biscuit pair with the lemon icing and then stick half a cherry in the middle, making it all look very pretty and professional!

I have already eaten one and a half of these, and I finished making them literally 5 minutes ago. SO GOOD! Now I'm going to sit down with a cuppa and my book and eat some more ^.^ although I should probably do dishes... :S 

Anyway, let me know if you give this Belgian Biscuits a go!

   Love,

Georgia

End of NaNoWriMo

As it is mid December I thought I should probably get down to writing my end of NaNo blog post…

At the end of November my word count was 42,044

So I didn't finish. But I got a hell of a lot closer than last year! I am not looking on this as a defeat, and if you didn't finish either, then you should take the same stance on the situation as me.

 I got to over 40,000 words. That’s a LOT for only thirty days. At least now a good chunk of my novel is done, and the ball has started rolling. I hadn't actually written anything novel like since last year’s NaNo, and that attempt was pretty shameful.

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, will I be leaving my novel to gather dust in a corner? Of course not! I intend to keep writing it, and hope that the first draft will be finished by the new year. J

Me and my dad are actually planning our own mini NaNoWriMo for February; just like the original, but a bit easier. As we both have lots to do outside of novel writing, it will be a 45,000 word goal in six weeks. Many NaNo participants will probably scoff at this idea. However we wanted an achievable goal. If you want to join in, feel free!

If you did NaNoWriMo, did you finish? If not will you try again next year?

Leave ideas for future blog posts down in the comments!!

Love,

  Georgia

NaNo - tips n' stuff

Why hello, dears!

I'm (oh, the wonders of using abbreviations!) taking another break from novel writing to send you a quick update :)

My current word count: 17,267

The chapter I'm on: 12

It's going well, I think... I am a bit behind, but I reckon I can get the word count back up over the next couple of days :3

Tips for NaNo:

• Drink LOTS of water, it'll clear your head.
• Set goals, and take regular breaks (e.g. when I get to X amount of words, I will go and watch 10 things I hate about you)
• Early morning writing can really work! Set your alarm earlier than usual and write for an hour before starting the day properly.
• And finally, have fun. I cannot emphasize this enough!! NaNoWriMo is for fun, so don't worry if you don't get to 50,000 words. As long as you tried, you've achieved something. :D

I hope some of these tips have helped you in some way!!!

The NaNo site: www.nanowrimo.org

Love,

 Georgia

NaNoWriMo - 3 days in

Hi guys!

So I've just finished writing a rather dramatic bit of my novel, so I thought I'd take a break from it to talk to you :3

I think it's all going surprisingly well. This time last year, I think I was already behind, but second time round things are looking rosier :D

My current word count: 5,142
The chapter I'm on: 4

I thought for next times blog post I could write some tips for keeping your brain from exploding whilst NaNo-ing? Like break ideas, stuff like that. What do you think, would you find that helpful?

Also, if any of you are doing NaNo, please do add me as a writing buddie and we can discus our novels and such :3

Let me know if you get bored of these, because I don't want to bore you!

Love,
 Georgia