My husband loves this picture of Nanny Clarke

Hi everyone

I have been offline for some weeks now and I’m sorry if I haven’t responded to your comments or been to visit your blogs.

It’s been a turbulent April/May which has sadly included a family funeral.

My husband’s Nanny passed away after a few tough months of poor health. She is in a better place now and while I wasn’t close to her, it’s upsetting nonetheless to lose anyone you know.

In truth, April has never been a kind month in my books.

25 years ago, I lost my second brother (in April too) when he crashed my mom’s car late at night in Singapore. Before you think I’m sinking into morbid depression, I’m not. It has been 25 years, life does go on, and that’s what can be quite difficult to wrap one’s head around – that life does actually go back to ‘normal’, and quite easily too because how time flies!

My brother Linus – the best looking dude in the world

Anyway, during these past weeks, I’ve basically lost a bit of my cooking/writing momentum and decided a short break was needed to re-group, re-charge and re-energise myself, and I’ve used the time to re-think what I want thebigfatnoodle to be about.

To top it off, this coming weekend will see another two major milestones taking place because:

1) I turn 40 tomorrow;

2) a week or so after that, thebigfatnoodle blog actually celebrates its first birthday too.

On turning 40, I can’t believe I’ve managed to live this long and not killed myself from regular alcohol abuse (joke mum!) and general clumsiness.

On thebigfatnoodle, I also can’t believe I’ve stuck at the blog and have done what I set out to do, which was to start writing.

So, with all of these developments in mind, my post today is a look to the future and to what I’m planning to do for myself and for thebigfatnoodle.

Me and my husband just a few months ago. Tomorrow I will be 40!! )

I’ve been away but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking or eating. This is a fougasse I learnt to make last weekend when I went on a baking course.

On thebigfatnoodle…

In all honesty, I was running myself a bit ragged trying to post 3 recipes a week and I’ve decided that’s really not what I want to keep doing. I love what I do but I don’t want to burn out here just trying to keep up to my own rigid schedule. So, I’ve decided to cut back on the recipe blogging and only post recipes when I think I’ve hit on something really, really special. The first of these will be posted next week, after I’ve recovered from my 40^th celebrations this weekend.

This is Maria, my baking teacher. I went on her baking course and I can safely say that my day out learning to bake with her was what got me out my doldrums and back onto my computer and thebigfatnoodle.

The other reason why I’m going to cut down on the recipe blogging is because I’m thinking about trying to run a food stall this year at one of our local food festivals or at a farmer’s markets. I’ve a couple of bigfatnoodle recipes and products I’d like to test out on the public (real people… eek!) and I’m still trying to psyche myself up to do it. I therefore need to devote some time to learning about food health & safety, food production, applying for a stall, getting enough food cooked, etc

If I don’t give it a go now, I’m never going to, so here goes…!

The big 4-0

Seriously, I’m only turning 40. It’s really not a big deal for me. Frankly what’s more depressing is that with the retirement age currently hovering at around 65, I’ve realised I haven’t even worked half the amount of time that I’m meant to. I’d take getting older over working any day. Besides, getting older is hardly something one can control anyway, right?

I made these banana cupcakes after we came back from the funeral. They were lovely and I will post the recipe soon.

But what I do want to do is keep making sure I try new things and keep my mind as active as possible, hence my idea about trying to run a food stall.

I’m also going to turn my hand to some other kinds of writing, and in the last 3 weeks, I’ve started to outline a book I want to try and write. I’ve even written the opening chapter already… Typically, I’m going to say no more to you about this until I actually get this book completed. It might end up nowhere but I’m quite excited about it, which feels great. Again, wish me luck!

We’re going to visit some mini schnauzer breeders. I pulled this picture from this website: http://bit.ly/IxPKHC

Last but not least, some of you already know that it’s our intention to find a puppy to join our family this year. Our search continues and I will continue to keep all of you updated. We have struggled to find a local breeder to visit but someone nearby has finally gotten in touch, and we’re off to see the mummy and daddy dogs in late May.

I also made a chocolate strawberry pavlova recently which I’ll share with you in due course too.

Which takes me full circle…

With so much to do, and so little time, I just wanted to end by saying hello again.

I am ‘back’ (albeit in a slightly different form in the months to come), and I hope you’ve all been keeping safe, warm and well in the meantime. I promise too to visit all your blogs soon, and reply to all the comments that have been left these last 3 weeks – I have felt horribly guilty for being absent but at least now you know why.

With love

Thebigfatnoodle

PS – while I was on my mini blog ‘sabbatical’, Thelegaltart nominated me for the Kreativ Blogger award. It’s the second time I’ve received this and I’m genuinely very touched so thank you!

Perfect TV or party snack food.

Easy as long as you don’t mind the washing up

I’ve had a can of chickpeas sitting in my cupboard for almost a year – that’s how long it’s been since I’ve wanted to try making my own hummus.

Sooooo many people have said that hummus is easy to make but when you work a busy nine to five, it’s not always ‘so easy’ to want to get your food processor set up, measure out all of the ingredients and then deal with the washing up when you know any supermarket or corner shop will have tubs that you can buy.

I’ve also always known that home-made hummus must taste so much better, I’ve read enough blogs and recipes that say so, but I finally put it to the test myself last weekend.

I’ve based my recipe on a very, very simple one I found on the BBC website, and what I’ve discovered I like most about making my own hummus is the fact that there’s so much leeway to tinker with the taste. I’ve already made two batches to test out on my friends.

I've finally found a good use for the extra toasting racks that came with our toaster

That said, while I will definitely try and make hummus from scratch from now on, I can’t say that I won’t still pick up a tub or two from the supermarket simply because if I’m in a rush, it’s just more convenient. It’s not so much the making of it that’s the hassle, it’s the cleaning up!

I love eating hummus with fresh carrots and celery sticks but my favourite is to eat it with some toasted wraps. I often find pita bread far too doughy or thick for my liking, and I love the seeded wraps I can get so what I do is cut my wraps into strips and simply toast them to make them crispy and crunchy.

It works a treat and people are always surprised by firstly how they look, and secondly how tasty they are. The strips are the perfect receptacle for scooping the hummus off the plate and into my mouth!

Most people won't realise these are simply toasted wraps. My favourite are these seeded wraps.

Lots of love

Thebigfatnoodle

Click here for a printer-friendlier recipe.

A healthier way of snacking. Home-made hummus made easy!

Easy peasy home-made hummus

1 can chickpeas (approx 200-220 grams), drained and washed – retain about 1 tablespoon of chickpeas)

100ml tahini

2 teaspoons ground cumin (though I preferred my first batch, which used 2 teaspoons of whole but toasted cumin seeds)

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 cloves garlic, peeled

4 tablespoons water

½ teaspoon hot paprika

1-2 good pinches of salt

Black pepper

Extra lemon juice for squeezing over the finished hummus

A pinch of sweet smoked paprika (to sprinkle on the finished hummus)

2-3 tablespoons of good olive oil

Easy peasy hummus.

In a good processor, put your chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, paprika, water, hot paprika, cumin and a good pinch of salt and blitz for a couple of minutes until smooth. Taste and season with more salt, lemon juice and pepper as required.

In a small saucepan, heat your olive oil and then gently fry your remaining chickpeas with a good pinch of salt.

Ladle your blended hummus on to a plate, top it with your fried chickpeas and pour all of the olive oil over the hummus as well. Finish with a squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkle of sweet smoked paprika and black pepper.

A heady mix of gruyere, cheddar, brie and parmesan

Sticking to the tried and tested

Heston Blumenthal made a TV programme all about cheese recently and one of the dishes he ‘re’-made was the humble but utterly delicious cauliflower cheese. I went online to look at his recipe but in all honesty, I don’t have 5 hours spare to make all the component parts of his recipe. Maybe I’ll attempt his recipe one day because I’m sure it’ll taste like the best cauliflower cheese ever, but for now, our tried and tested recipe has never failed to delight.

My husband swears that a traditional cauliflower cheese needs to be flavoured with some dried mace so we always use it. Ever since eating a cheese fondue after skiing in France, I also always make a cheese sauce which uses white wine and some kirsch – the kirsch just adds a depth to the sauce that is simply irreplaceable.

What I don’t do when I make cauliflower cheese is that I never boil the cauliflower. I hate soggy vegetables so I blanche my florets in boiling water for 5 minutes, drain them thoroughly before microwaving them for four minutes. I find that this leaves the cauliflower with a tiny bit of bite as it’s not pumped full of water.

Blanched and just cooked vegetables keep them soggy-free.

I had a tiny bit of broccoli left so I bunged that in as well – no point wasting good veg.

Smothered in unctious cheese sauce.

I’ve made enough sauce for today’s cauliflower cheese recipe with a little left over to have over some macaroni too. Bonus!

Our four cheese cauliflower cheese.

Have a great week.

Lots of love

Thebigfatnoodle

Milk flavoured with bay leaves, peppercorns, cloves and mace.

A four cheese cauliflower cheese

Click here for a printer-friendlier recipe

1 large cauliflower, cleaned and cut into large florets

100 grams grated gruyere cheese

80 grams cheddar (a strong mature cheddar preferably)

50 grams ripe brie (I took the skin off but feel free to leave it on)

50 grams grated parmesan

½ cup white wine

1 teaspoon kirsch

Salt & pepper to taste

1-2 bay leaves

This is my kind of soul food.

1-2 pieces of dried mace

3-4 cloves

A few black peppercorns

700 ml milk

60 grams butter

60 grams flour

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees celsius.

In a saucepan, put your bay leaves, mace, peppercorns, cloves and milk onto a medium heat. Bring the milk up to boil gently (but don’t let it boil). Just when the milk is about to come up to boil, take it off the heat and allow your milk to steep for at least 15 minutes (ideally 30 minutes). Strain your milk and retain the mace, discarding the bay leaves, cloves and peppercorns.

In another saucepan, melt your butter and add your flour, mixing well. Cook your flour for 2 minutes before gradually adding your flavoured milk and mace. Use a whisk to ensure that the flour completely dissolves into the milk.

Add the gruyere, cheddar and brie and stir well to ensure the cheese melts into your sauce before adding the white wine and kirsch. Season to taste.

Pour the cheese sauce over your cauliflower florets, top with the grated parmesan and bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes until golden brown on the top.

Cauliflower cheese made with four different types of cheese.

We love our roast beef very rare and very pink, with plenty left over to make cold roast beef sandwiches.

Couldn’t have asked for a nicer accident

On Easter Sunday, my husband and I roasted a rib of beef. Our butcher threw in a few veal bones as I wanted to make a bone marrow gravy to go with the rib of beef.

As there’s only two of us, we had plenty of roast beef left over so on Monday, I set about baking a loaf of bread so we can have some cold roast beef sandwiches.

I love baking bread, which is weird because I don’t actually really like eating bread that much, apart from traditional French baguettes. I’ve actually signed up to attend a French bread making course in a couple of weeks and I can’t wait!

I didn’t really fancy using my loaf tin so I decided to let my dough rise and spread naturally on a baking tray. I was hoping it would come out like a round farmer’s loaf but what ended up happening was that it split slightly, turning out to become a sort of heart-shaped loaf. Naturally, I told my husband that I did that deliberately just for him… it’s obviously not true but might win me some brown nosing points which I can redeem against the next time I get into trouble, LOL!

Our heart shaped loaf - a happy accident.

I made this milk bread with a mix of flour because I didn’t have enough bread flour in the oven but it’s turned out perfectly fine. What’s also good is that it doesn’t need to be proved twice – it just needs one proving and only for 30 minutes, perfect for impatient bakers like me.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

Lots of love

Thebigfatnoodle

Um, this was might be a round loaf until it split and became heart-shaped.

Milk bread recipe

Click here for a printer-friendlier version.

500 grams strong white/bread flour

250 grams plain white flour (with at least another 100 grams extra for kneading)

1 sachet dried yeast (7 gram sachet)

2 teaspoons salt

85 grams cold butter, cubed

1½ teaspoons sugar

300 ml full cream milk

150 ml water

Preheat your oven to 200 – 220 degrees (Celsius).

Start by rubbing the butter and salt into the flour until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add sugar and dried yeast and mix well.

Combine the milk and water and heat either in the microwave or in a saucepan.

Pour this into your flour mixture and use a wooden spoon to mix well.

This creates a very sticky batter but it will come away from the bowl after a well.

Turn the dough out onto a well floured table and start kneading.

You’ll need to keep re-flouring the surface because of the stickiness of this dough but keep kneading for at least 10 minutes.

Either put the dough into a large loaf tin (900 gram loaf tin at least) or like me, shape it into a ball on a baking tray. Cover it with oiled clingfilm and a wet tea towel and allow it to prove for 30 minutes.

Bake this in the oven for 30-40 minutes (it’ll double in size) and allow it to cool on the tray or in your tin for at least 15 minutes before turning it out to cool completely.

easy-to-bake milk bread.

Roasted on a bed of fennel, carrots, onion and shallots.

The bones hold all the flavour! 

This Easter it’s just been me and my husband last weekend. No friends, no visitors, just him, me and the cats for company.

Sadly, it was a bit of a miserable weekend in terms of the weather, full of blustery, cold wind and the ever present drizzle – not enough rain to stop the hose pipe ban in the Southeast of England yet wet enough to put one off from leaving one’s house. It just leaves one feeling… meh.

At times like this, I’m really grateful that I love cooking because the off putting weather means we just have to find our entertainment indoors, which for me means the kitchen.

We opted to get a single rib of beef for Easter Sunday, thereby ensuring that we would have plenty of cold roast beef to put into sandwiches this week.

A single rib of beef and some veal marrow bones from our butcher.

I’m not posting the recipe for the beef – this was simply roasted on a bed of fresh fennel, carrots, shallots and onions – but thought I’d share my bone marrow gravy today.

We like our roast beef really pink and rare, so the meat itself is only roasted for 40 minutes and then allowed to rest for 30 minutes – the perfect amount of time to allow the vegetables its been sitting on to caramelise in the oven.

I don’t think people use enough of a whole animal, and most butchers are happy to give you extra bones if you ask. Our butcher gave us these veal bones, packed with marrow, which I simply roasted with some sea salt for the same amount of time before I dropped them into my gravy.

Easter Sunday roast - rare rib of beef with a bone marrow gravy

This simple gravy is so easy to put together simply because I cheat by using a can of beef consommé instead of beef stock. Naturally, if you have beef stock to hand, by all means use that, but consommé is just convenient.

Bone marrow gravy - made with beef consomme and lots of vegetables and a combo of red wine and port.

It’s almost the weekend already (yay!) but wherever you are, I hope you’re having a good day.

Lots of love

Thebigfatnoodle

A simple bone marrow gravy

1 can beef consommé

2 small carrots, peeled and finely chopped

6 beef/veal bones & marrow, baked in the oven with sea salt for 40 minutes

2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped

1 large clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped

1-2 slices of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped

1 red onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 cup port

1 large stick of celery, finely chopped

1 cup red wine

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoonDijonmustard

1-2 teaspoons sherry vinegar

1 cup potato water (water from cooked potatoes)

Salt and pepper to taste

Start by sweating for the carrots, onion, shallots, ginger, garlic and celery under a low flame for 10 mins. Turn the heat back up and fry the vegetables until they start to brown. Add the beef/veal marrow bones and all the remaining ingredients, with 1 cup of water retained from boiled potatoes and simmer for 2 hours.

For all your chocoholics out there - hazelnut and walnut chocolate brownies

Crispy squidgy chocolate goodness

As some of you may know, I’m married to a chocolate fiend.

My husband has to eat chocolate every day and I’ve never known him not to.

So imagine my surprise when this Easter, he told me he didn’t want me to buy him an Easter egg.

I thought this was one of those trick question moments, when he says one thing but means entirely another. After all, this is the man who has not one but two secret chocolate drawers, excluding the glove compartment in the car…

I spent most of Friday and Saturday repeatedly asking him if he was absolutely sure he didn’t want an Easter egg but it seems he really didn’t. What he wanted was for me to bake him some brownies so that’s what I’ve made this Easter.

I haven’t eaten a brownie in years because I find the ones in cafes and supermarkets are simply too sweet. They might be gooey but they’re normally also really, really stodgy, which is why I think this recipe is the best. It’s actually quite a light brownie – it has a really crumbly top but a centre layer that delivers the gooeyness that’s essential in a brownie.

I made these with hazelnuts and walnuts but you can vary these with any combination of nuts.

Typically, this Easter bank holiday has been a complete washout weather wise so I’m back off to the kitchen to make the most of my day off.

I made a massive batch of 20 large brownies.

A tray of chocolatey nutty goodness

Really crisp and flaky and light on the outside but with a layer of gooey chocolate in the middle.

Hope you’ve had a lovely Easter break too!

Lots of love

Thebigfatnoodle

Hazelnut and walnut brownies

Click here for a printer-friendlier recipe

100 grams hazelnuts, roughly chopped (not too small)

100 grams walnuts, roughly chopped

150 grams dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)

150 grams flour, sifted

225 grams butter, cubed

5 medium sized eggs, beaten

500 grams sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

Are you tempted yet?

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4, 350°F (180°C).

Put your chopped nuts onto a baking tray and roast them for 7-8 minutes – keep an eye on them as they can burn quite quickly.

In a large mixing bowl, melt your butter and chocolate over a saucepan of simmering water. When it’s all melted, add the rest of your ingredients and mix well. You’ll end up with quite a gooey, sticky mess.

In either a non-stick or prepared baking tray, pour your mixture and level it out.

Bake this in the oven for 30 minutes and allow it to cool for at least 10 minutes before cutting them into squares.

Mary Berry - the Baking Queen.

The legend that is Mary Berry

I only have one recipe to post this week as I spent last weekend with friends and so I only made it into the kitchen late on Sunday night after everyone had left.

I was however determined to herald my husband’s return from his ski trip by making him a little treat, but with a bare fridge and cupboard, I didn’t have many options until I stumbled on a chocolate loaf cake recipe by Mary Berry.

As far as British baking is concerned, Mary Berry is the ultimate legend!

I actually have a Mary Berry recipe book but I found this recipe online. My only issue is that because I made this as night was falling, my pictures of the baked cake really didn’t do her simple recipe justice.

Dollops of vanilla cake batter with dollops of chocolate cake batter. Looks more like ice cream here!

As cake recipe’s go, this really is the easiest cake I’ve ever made. Why? Because you put almost all of the ingredients into one bowl and mix them up together all at once. No separate creaming of the butter and sugar beforehand, no beating the eggs in one by one – everything is just bunged in together either in your stand mixer (using the whisk attachment or you can use a hand held mixer) for 2-3 minutes of beating. How simple is that???

I’ve provided the recipe below (I added more vanilla essence) and her recipe originally also includes a chocolate glaze but I didn’t bother. This cake is perfect as it is. We’ve been eating it on its own but it’s simply brilliant toasted and eaten with some fresh fruit, or toasted with a dollop of crème fraiche or ice cream.

This cake is unbelievably light and fluffy, and I love the marbled vanilla and chocolate effect.

Mary Berry's Chocolate Loaf Cake

I’ll get back into my usual swing of blogging after the Easter Weekend. We’re staying put this holiday so I’m planning a huge cooking fest and can then hopefully have lots more yummy things to share in the next few weeks.

Have a lovely Easter weekend everyone!

Lots of love

Thebigfatnoodle

Click here for a printer-friendlier recipe

Click here for Mary Berry’s original recipe, which includes her recommendation for a chocolate icing for this recipe.

Ready for the oven.

Mary Berry’s Chocolate Loaf 

225g (8oz) butter, softened
225g (8oz) caster sugar
275g (9¾oz) self-raising flour
2 level tsp baking powder
4 large eggs
2 tbsp milk
½ tsp vanilla extract (I used a generous 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract instead)
1½ level tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp hot water

Preheat the oven to 160°C/325°F/gas mark 3. Lightly grease a 900g (2lb) loaf tin. Line with a wide strip of non-stick baking parchment to go up the wide sides and over the base.

Measure the butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, eggs, milk and vanilla extract into a large bowl and beat with a hand-held electric mixer (I used the whisk attachment on my stand mixer) for about two minutes, until well blended. Spoon half into another bowl and set aside.

In a small bowl, mix the cocoa powder and hot water together until smooth. Allow to cool slightly, then add to one of the bowls of cake mixture, mixing well until evenly blended.

Spoon the vanilla and chocolate cake mixtures randomly into the prepared tin until all of the mixture is used up, and gently level the surface. Bake for one hour, until the cake is well risen, springy to the touch and starting to shrink away from the sides of the tin. Allow to cool in the tin for a few minutes, then turn out on to a wire rack, peel off the lining paper and leave to cool completely.

I almost burnt my fingers in my haste to cut a slice of this loaf to try

I wish I could get fresh calamansi limes here because they are my favourite citrus!

Certainly healthier than a kebab

With my husband away, I have free rein to eat all the things that he normally doesn’t like or tend to eat. I’d bought myself a lamb steak but with it being so warm and sunny last weekend, I really didn’t fancy a piping hot meal. I wanted finger food, something I could grab and eat with my hands while soaking up the sun in my deck chair.

Maggi seasoning with calamansi. YUM!

So I decided to cut up my lamb into small pieces, and marinated my lamb overnight in a simple marinade of rice wine vinegar (only because I couldn’t find any sherry in the house) and a new sauce I’d recently found at the chinese supermarket. It’s Maggi seasoning but with calamansi. Now, if you’ve never had calamansi, you really don’t know what you’re missing. They’re smaller than limes and normally have orange flesh, but the flavour is so unique. It’s impossible to find in the UK so when I saw one of my favourite sauces flavoured with it, I had to have it!

When I was ready for lunch on Sunday, I seared the lamb pieces for about 3-4 minutes in some olive oil, and began to build my wrap. I decided to make a lamb wrap with avocado only because the avocados we’d bought were creamy but sadly quite lacking in flavour but when the avocado was mashed in with some natural yoghurt, it created a lovely creamy sauce that worked perfectly with the saltier lamb pieces.

Seared lamb waiting for a drizzle of hot sauce before being wrapped up tight.

I prefer wraps to sandwiches, and these multi-seed wraps are awesome.

Ingredients

Seared lamb pieces (marinated in 2 teaspoons of maggi seasoning and 1 tablespoon of chinese rice wine)

1 multi-seeded wrap

4 cherry tomatoes, de-seeded and chopped

1 handful of fresh salad leaves

half an avocado

1 tablespoon natural yoghurt

Hot sauce of your choice

Squeeze of lemon juice

I could have grilled the lamb to make it even healthier but it was just easier (to clean) a fry pan than the griddle pan

Lunch for one - Lamb and avocado wraps.

My only regret is that I didn’t have any pickled green chillies to hand to add to the wrap. It tasted far more like a lamb kebab, only without the grease and the wrap was brilliant because it’s less doughy than the traditional pita breads that kebabs come in.

I ate this with a handful of vegetable crisps and an ice cold glass of fizzy water, sitting out in the sunshine in my garden. It was so nice I might have to make another one this weekend too!

Lots of love

thebigfatnoodle

My lamb and avocado wrap, served with a handful of veggie crisps.

I always use Lindt's 70% chocolate as that's my favourite

A bit too sweet for my liking…

It was Mother’s Day in the UK recently and this year, and I decided to bake some chocolate chip cookies for my mother-in-law and my husband’s Nanny. Nanny unfortunately has been really poorly and the day before Mothering Sunday here, we drove to see her with my husband’s family.

I’ve never made chocolate chip cookies before and I decided to try and make one of Nigella Lawson’s recipes – her Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Personally, I think they’re way too sweet! Her recipe called for 350 grams of chocolate chips (!!!) but I didn’t have that much so I only had 300 grams and they were a mix of milk, dark and fudge chips. The fudge chips probably didn’t help but even if I’d stuck to dark chocolate chips, I think these cookies were just too much of a sugar overload for me.

A mix of semi and dark chocolate chips with fudge.

As cookies go, they’re also massive in size and one batch produces only 12 cookies. At least the family seemed to like them enough but even my husband, who has a massively sweet tooth, found these too sickeningly sweet.

Nigella's recipe makes 12 large cookies. Here's the 'before' shot.

Followed by the 'after' shot. See how huge they become???

Nigella Lawson's Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies.

If any of you have a chocolate chip recipe to share, please send me the link. I’d like to get better at making cookies but I’m a bit fussy – I’m looking for something very chocolatey, with a good crunch but also chewy and sticky. Maybe I’m asking for too much?

The other challenge I faced was that the day I baked these cookies were not a good day for taking photographs. it didn’t matter what I did, they still looked like giant p**s so you’ll have to excuse the bad photos this week.

Here’s the link to Nigella’s recipe – the only change I made was to use 100 grams of semi-sweet chocolate chips, 100 grams of dark chocolate chips and 100 grams of fudge.

Lots of love

thebigfatnoodle

Loved the chocolate flavour but it was way too sweet for my liking.

Our ornamental cherry tree is just outside our living room window, so I can easily see it bloom before my eyes as I sit typing or watching telly.

In a pink frame of mind

As you may know, I’m fending for myself at the moment.

I spent Sunday making some spaggie boll sauce (as you do), most of which I will freeze but some which I’ll keep to re-heat quickly during this week. However, just because I had to cook for myself this weekend didn’t mean I had to forego cooking something special for myself, like a Sunday roast for one.

I don’t know what is going on with my taste buds but I’ve been obsessed with roasted vegetables at the moment. This is the fourth time I’ve made roasted vegetables in the last two months, and I made some more again this weekend to have with my Sunday meal of choice – this pan-seared salmon which I’m writing about today. I made this pan-seared salmon on Saturday, and the coral pink salmon seemed particularly fitting as the colours perfectly match the fragile pink/white flowers that have burst forth from our ornamental cherry tree.

I’ve spent the weekend looking out onto our cherry tree watching it literally bloom before my very eyes…

I took another picture the next day and there are much more blooms but it's hard to see from these pictures.

The first cherry blossoms this weekend. Spring has definitely arrived now )

With this unseasonally gorgeous weather, I should have been out in the garden clearing away the dead plants (that I should have done last Autumn but didn’t) but it’s been so lovely that I’ve not really done much apart from sit in the sun, play with the cats and read my book. It’s been exactly the kind of chilled out weekend I wanted. I have at least watered the garden, which from the look of my shrivelled hedge was long overdue.

Wild flowers are popping up everywhere in my garden.

I can’t really call today’s post a recipe, because there’s very little I’ve done to it. Good fish should be left alone as much as possible and I didn’t want to slather it in sauce, so I decided to infuse some butter and oil with lots of fresh ginger and garlic before searing my salmon in the fragrant oil.

I made a double portion so I just need to re-heat it on Monday for my lonely working week supper for me.

My roasted vegetables were simply a combo of 1 red onion, half a red pepper, half an orange pepper, some mushrooms, 5 baby courgettes, 4 baby aubergines and a handful of baby new potatoes which I tossed in some olive oil, cumin seeds (2 teaspoons) and sweet smoked paprika. After seasoning the vegetables with some salt and pepper, I roasted these in a 180 degree (celsius) oven for about 40 minutes.

Searing it in the infused oil provided just the right amount of flavour so you got a hint of ginger and garlic without them overpowering the salmon.

For the salmon, I infused 2 tablespoons of olive oil and about 10 grams of butter with 1 tablespoon of peeled and finely sliced ginger and 1 large clove of garlic, which I’d peeled and sliced very thinly. I heated the oil and butter on a low-medium heat, and gently fried the ginger and garlic for about 5 minutes before removing them with a slotted spoon.

To sear your salmon, whack the heat back up and place your salmon skin side down into the infused oil and fry for about 4-5 minutes (depends on the thickness of your fish), seasoning the flesh side with some salt and pepper while the skin is crisping up. You then turn the salmon over for another 2 minutes. A thick wedge of lime freshly squeezed over my fish and roasted vegetables was all I needed to make this one of the yummiest meals for one I’ve had in a while.

Pan-seared salmon - yum, yum!

Just needed a fork to slice through the salmon and show it's lovely, coral pink meat.

Have a great week!

Wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying this last week in March!

Lots of love

thebigfatnoodle