Category: Ingredient of the Week
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Prawn, Feta and Roast Pepper Salad
I am rabidly particular about salad and will bang on about the sorry state of salads in Irish restaurants and cafes to anyone who will listen. A few tablespoons of tuna in a huge blob of mayonnaise is not a salad! One leaf of lettuce with a sad little squirt of bottled dressing is not…
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Ingredient of the Week: Frozen Prawns
Prawns are relatively expensive compared to some of the other ingredients of the week that we’ve featured. They’ll certainly cost you more per kilo than frozen spinach or a few slices of old bread. But if you get good ones, they add so much in terms of flavour and texture that even a small amount…
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Chunky Double Chocolate Cookies with Fairtrade Chocolate
These cookies are simple and easy to make – the batter is very quick to put together and doesn’t need to be whipped to any particular consistency. And they’re so delicious, the way they get crisp on the edges and the centre stays chewy. Oh boy oh boy. You should be able to get Fairtrade…
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Chocolate Chilli Bean Stew
Chocolate isn’t the most obvious accompaniment for savoury foods. However, it adds the most wonderful richness and depth to chilli-tomato sauces, and can also work well with meat and red wine sauces. This Chocolate Chilli Bean Stew, with a Cajun twist, is much cheaper than a choco-meat dish but it’s equally as impressive. Most of…
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Ruth’s Simple but Magnificent Chocolate Cake
My cooking hero Ruth Hegarty has very kindly supplied us with another recipe; this time for a simple but impressive chocolate cake. Chocolate Cake You cannot devote space and time to dark chocolate without getting people to make this chocolate cake. Every time I make it, people ask for the recipe and eat another piece.…
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Ingredient of the Week: Dark Chocolate
Chocolate has a long, dark history. The Olmec, Mayan and Aztec civilisations of modern-day used cacao beans as currency, while this ancient “drink of the Gods” was originally consumed in liquid form. Chilli pepper and vanilla were commonly added as flavourings. Enough odes to this intoxicating drug have been written already. Suffice to say, however,…
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A reader’s tips for stale bread
Our reader Marcella sent in these great tips for using up stale bread: In our house we all freeze the heels of sliced pan and make breadcrumbs with them. My 15 yr old daughter uses these to make stuffing ( with herbs from garden ) every Sunday and I also use them for lentil and…
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Stale Bread Recipes: Bread and Butter Pudding with Jam, Old Fashioned Herb Stuffing
Stale bread. It might not sound like the most exciting ingredient of the week. But rather than throwing it out, it can be used up to make a variety of comforting dishes and old favourites. Bread and Butter Pudding with Raspberry Jam An old dessert, but one that has stood the test of time, this…
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Ingredient of the Week, Bread: Country Tomato Pie
This would make a lovely lunch or a light dinner. It’s a good way of using up leftover brown bread slices. Most of the ingredients you may either already have; the rest can be easily bought pretty much anywhere. A cheap meal. This serves three.
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Stale bread recipes from Torino
When we decided to write about stale bread as our ingredient of the week, Peter immediately bagsed bread and butter pudding and stuffing. Which left me pretty much stumped. That’s all I’ve ever made with stale bread, and most of the time I just give it to the ducks in the Grand Canal. Luckily, my…