Jerk Halloumi Salad

The second of my Habanero recipes is a Jerk Halloumi salad. I got the idea from Simon Rimmer's Barbecue Halloumi recipe which I tried it out at home once. It's very nice but Chayne thought it was a bit heavy so this time I made my own Jerk dressing and used the marinated Halloumi in a salad with sweet potato and sweetcorn instead.

Ingredients
1 block of Halloumi, sliced reasonably thickly
1 habanero chilli, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 inch fresh ginger, roughly chopped
1 tbsp thyme leaves
2 cloves
½ tsp ground mixed spice
1 tsp curry powder
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 sweet potato, peeled and sliced thickly
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
120 g Herb Salad (Sainsbury's is good)
1 tbsp chopped coriander leaves
1 small can of sweetcorn
1 tbsp lime juice
3 tbsp olive oil

Recipe
1) Pre-heat the oven to 200c. Begin by making the jerk marinade. Slice the Halloumi reasonably thickly as If you slice it too thinly it can break up. Set aside in a large bowl. Then chop the chilli, garlic and ginger, and put this all in a mini chopper or a blender with the thyme leaves, cloves, mixed spice, curry powder and salt and pepper. Blitz this and pour over the Halloumi. Mix gently with your hands making sure the cheese is all evenly covered.

2) Peel and slice the sweet potatoes, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle the chilli flakes over the top and roast in the oven for 20 minutes or until soft.

3) While the potato is cooking, get your salad ready. Put the leaves in a bowl, add the chopped coriander leaves and the sweetcorn. Make the dressing by mixing the lime juice and olive oil. Season with salt and pepper.

4) Heat a griddle pan until very hot and add the Halloumi. Cook until brown on both sides.

5) Season the salad, reserving some dressing to drizzle over the Halloumi and sweet potato. Put a good few handfuls of salad on each plate. Then place Halloumi slices and sweet potato on top. Drizzle with the dressing and serve.

Hot Sauce (The chilli plant part one)

Two songs went around my head as I was making this. As I started chopping the Habanero Chillis I was happily singing 'I'll bring the hot sauce', a line from Unhappy by Outkast. However, half an hour after finishing chopping the chillis, the chorus from Kasabian's Fire came to mind as my hands started burning. The lesson? Wear gloves when chopping habanero chillis. We have an abundance of habaneros on one of our chilli plants at the moment and unless you're one of those people who goes for the hottest thing on the menu at an Indian restaurant it is tricky to use them all up. So I decided to preserve them in a Tabasco-style hot sauce. You may not want to have it on your chips but it's great splashed on a cheese feast pizza. This is the first of four recipes using the habaneros. I have also made a vegetarian chilli (which is very much like my other vegetarian chilli), huevos rancheros and a jerk halloumi salad. Recipes for those coming soon...

Ingredients
85 ml water
25 ml red wine vinegar
2 habanero chillis
1 red pepper
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tsp salt

Recipe
1) Grind the cumin seeds in a coffee grinder or bash them up in a pestle and mortar. Chop the red pepper and habanero chillies and put in a saucepan with the water, red wine vinegar, spices and salt. Bring all of the ingredients to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.
2) You can either transfer this into a food processer and use the stick blender to puree the mixture. I'd recommend using a food processor in order to avoid hot sauce splashing into your eyes.
3) Sterilise a 150ml jar by washing it in warm soapy water before putting it in a low oven (100c) for 10 minutes. Then pour the hot sauce into the jar and seal.

Hot Dog and Chips

Right, this isn't technically a recipe but if Jamie Oliver can include a Fish Finger sandwich in one of his books than I can write about hot dogs. This might sound like an advert for Quorn but their hot dogs are really good. They actually taste like real hot dogs. Of course whether that makes them really good is a matter of opinion but we love them with lots of onions, mustard and ketchup. I do think that vegetarians have to remember liking hot dogs if they ate meat in their youth to fully appreciate them.

This is what you should do. Slice an onion and slowly fry in oil until golden brown. Then cut some soft white finger rolls of the lowest quality in half and divide the onions between them. You boil the hot dogs in the packet for 10 minutes and once they're done, put them into the rolls and cover with yellow mustard (none of that posh Dijon nonsense!) and ketchup or tomato relish. Serve with oven chips.

Rhubarb Crumble

Paternity leave has given me a bit of spare time to write up some recipes so in between changing Herb's nappies and watching the snooker I managed to find time to make something using the first produce from our garden - rhubarb. Apparently Delia's Waitrose recipe for rhubarb creme brulee has led to a rhubarb shortages across the country. Well there is some in our garden but only enough for a rhubarb crumble for two. I've seen recipes around various food websites which use things like cinnamon, star anise or ginger but when I suggested these to Chayne, she pulled a face so I just went for a classic crumble. And I wouldn't even dare serving it with cream. Custard all the way.

Ingredients
200g Rhubarb
20ml water
120g caster sugar
60g butter
90g flour

Recipe
1) Pre-heat the oven to 200c. Cut the rhubarb into 3cm pieces and place it in your serving dish. Then add the water and 40 grams of the sugar before tossing it all together.

2) You can use a food processor to do this but I like to use my fingers as you get nice little lumps in the crumble mix and it saves on washing up. Cut the chilled butter into cubes, add the flour and rub with your fingers and thumbs until your have a crumble resembling breadcrumbs with a few larger lumps in. Then add the rest of your sugar and mix together. Spoon the crumble mixture over the rhubarb to give it a decent covering. You might not need all of the crumble mixture and it's nice to have the odd but of rhubarb poking out of the top.

3) Put in the oven for 45 minutes or until the crumble is golden brown and the rhubarb is bubbling. Give it five minutes so it's not hotter than the sun and serve with custard.

Gnocchi with tomato, basil and mozzarella

I tried to make my own gnocchi last year. Disaster. First the mixture wasn't, as Greg Wallace would say, wet enough. Then I managed to get it together but it wouldn't roll out very well. Then when I'd finally managed to make some little potato dumplings, I stupidly put them on top of each other in a glass bowl ready for boiling. They all merged together. By the time I'd separated and cooked them, I had these misshapen, heavy potato blobs that tasted a bit floury. I want to give them another go but Chayne has outlawed it so far. So I bought some gnocchi from the shop and made this quick 30 minute tea. With potato, tomatoes, basil mozzarella and chilli I'm ticking all the boxes for my wife!

Ingredients
500g Gnocchi
1 small red onion, finely chopped
1 red chilli, finely crushed
400g tin of chopped tomatoes
1 ball of mozzarella
Handful of basil

Recipe
1) Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a saucepan. Add he finely chopped onion and saute for five minutes before adding the chilli and cooking for a further two minutes.
2) Add the tomatoes followed by the gnocchi, season with salt and pepper and simmer for 10 minutes until the gnocchi has softened.
3) Tear up the basil and the mozzarella. Stir the basil into the mixture and tip it all into a baking dish. Dot the mozzarella over the top of the gnocchi and place under a grill until the cheese is golden and bubbling. Serve with a green salad.

Steamed Treacle Sponge

It was my birthday last Thursday and Chayne treated me to a few gifts for our kitchen cupboard. Unlike the small pudding basins she bought me for Christmas last year, I'm determined that these gifts actually make it out of the cupboard and are put to good use. The tongs she bought me have already been used for a sandwich - the contents of which I shall not mention on this vegetarian blog - and on Saturday I used my new 1 litre pudding steamer from Lakeland to make this steamed treacle sponge. I could have made a fancy sauce to go with it and drizzled it over the top for the purposes of the picture but we cracked open a can of ambrosia custard. It was great and Chayne was so pleased with how it turned out she insisted that I pose with the pud.

Ingredients
175g butter
175g light muscavado sugar
3 large eggs
1 tbsp treacle
175g self-raising flour


Recipe
1) You need a 1 litre pudding basin for this. My new pudding steamer is brilliant You don't need to grease it and it has a lid which clips on the top so there's no need to faff about with string and foil. However, if you don't have one of these, you'll need to prepare a 1 litre pudding basin. Start by greasing it.
2) Now for the sponge mixture. Beat the butter in a bowl with an electric hand mixer until fluffy. Then add the sugar and continue beating until pale. Add the treacle and beat in the eggs one at a time, adding a tablespoon of flour with the final egg. Finally fold in the flour.
3) Spoon the mixture into your pudding basin and secure the lid. Or, if you don't have a lid, cover the top with a sheet of pleated buttered foil and tie it around the bowl with string.
4) Place your bowl in a large pan, fill with boiling water until it reaches half-way up the basin, put a lid on the pan and simmer for two hours. You may need to top up the water after an hour. Also, if you can't get a lid on your pan (this happened to us), cover the pan with foil.

Knickerbocker Glory

Before Chayne became pregnant we used a have a beer with our tea most nights but that's had to stop now. You would have thought that I would have lost weight in the last few months but her taste for beer has been replaced by a fondness for puddings! After finding some tall glasses at the back of the cupboard the other day, I decided to try making a knickerbocker glory but I didn't realise how massive they were until I filled them with raspberry compote, ice cream, raspberry sauce and squirty cream. No wonder I haven't lost any weight! This is scandalously bad for you and you could probably share one. We didn't.

Ingredients
210g raspberries
20g caster sugar
1 tbsp icing sugar
Vanilla ice cream (We used Carte D'Or)
Squirty cream

Recipe
1) Start by making the raspberry compote. Put 100g of raspberries in a small saucepan with the caster sugar and cook over a high heat until the raspberries start to break up. Remove from the heat and put the compote into a bowl.
2) Now for the raspberry sauce. Blend 100g of raspberries with the icing sugar and 1 tbsp water. Set aside.
3) Put a spoonful of the compote in the bottom of each tall glass. Then add a scoop of ice cream followed by a spoonful of raspberry sauce. Repeat this until you have almost filled the glass. Then add a swirl of squirty cream and plonk a raspberry on top of each one.