vegetarian

Cheesy Sweet Potato Bites

/ Libby Millier / Leave a comment

 

A few weeks ago I noticed a post on one of my favourite blogs that sounded so good I just had to make it! Tina over at Carrots ‘n’ Cake was raving about a recipe she’d come across (How Sweet It Is) involving sweet potatoes, cheese and rosemary. They sounded so delicious I headed straight for the kitchen where I was thrilled to discover we had pretty much all the ingredients!

 

We didn’t have any parmesan so I used cheddar, and I used a whole egg instead of liquid egg whites because if I’m honest, I only remembered I was meant to use just the white after I’d put it all in! Hate when that happens.

They were so easy to make and made the house smell incredible as they were cooking! One thing I will say though is I added slightly too much rosemary and as me and my boyfriend were munching away on them in the garden, they started to get a bit overpowering and we had to stop. Which was probably a good thing as I could quite easily have demolished the entire batch and nipped back into the kitchen to repeat the whole process multiple times. So next time I make them I will go easy on the rosemary as it turns out less really is more! I urge you to try these out though, they make the perfect pre-dinner drinks accompaniment! I think they’d also be great really tiny as well, little bite-sized crispy mouthfuls!

 

Baked Camembert

/ Libby Millier / Leave a comment

 

This is one of my favourite dinners of all time. We only recently discovered the delights of baked camembert which is why I try to make up for lost time by making it as often as possible! I was searching for cheese fondue recipes and instead came across this super easy faux fondue. We just use a cheap Sainsburys whole camembert as we are far from cheese connoisseurs, but I’m sure if you used an expensive cheese it would taste very very good as well!

 

 

I tried to get an ‘innards’ shot! To make the camembert all nice and flavourful, I first carefully slice the top rind off and set it aside (don’t throw it away because it’s going back on!). I cut a garlic clove into thin slices and stuck them into the soft inner cheese, along with salt, pepper, a drizzle of olive oil and the top slice of rind. The cheese bakes in it’s box for about half an hour in a hot oven. When I took it out it smelt AMAZING and all the inside had fully melted, engulfing the now soft garlic slices and transforming the hard cheese into a gooey dip.

To accompany the camembert we usually choose a selection of goodies to dip in and top the lovely fresh bread we buy. On this occasion we have (clockwise, from top) roasted red peppers, falafal, Quorn roast beef slices (remember our Royal Wedding party platter?) sliced chorizo, coleslaw and sundried tomatoes. Seems like a bit of a medley but trust me, it works!

 

 

Although, to be honest, is there any food that wouldn’t be improved by a smothering of ooey, gooey, garlicky melted camembert?

Fried Egg on Potato Waffle

/ Libby Millier / 1 Comment

Just typing that title makes me feel a tiny bit ashamed, have you ever heard of a trashier combination of ingredients? Perhaps even more so when I say we didn’t even use Birdseye potato waffles (“they’re waffly versatile!”) as all we had was Tesco own brand…

We first came across this dish whilst watching BBC1’s Something for the Weekend on an extremely hungover Sunday morning. As soon as the words “potato waffles” left Simon Rimmers delectable lips we knew the recipe was a winner. His recipe was actually a lot grander than the one we have adopted; I think it consisted of (obviously) homemade potato waffles, poached eggs and possibly hollandaise sauce. We had to make do with aforementioned cheap frozen waffles and a dramatic substitution of cheese for hollandaise which worked surprisingly well. To be honest, what recipes are not magnificently enhanced by the introduction of cheese?

The combination of oozy egg yolk, crisp waffle and sharp cheese was like nothing I’d ever had before. My hangover disappeared instantly and we were ready to tackle Sunday as if Saturday night had never happened. We now recreate this dish pretty regularly with various substitutions, depending on what we have available. I have made Lea & Perrins a permanent fixture on mine as I love the savoury tang the sauce adds. Ben occasionally sprinkles a veggie version onto his that we found in Sainsburys (Lea & Perrins has anchovies in it. Who knew?) and we both shake liberal amounts of salt and cracked black pepper onto our yolks.

 

This past Sunday morning we once again recreated the faithful dish but with a couple of new additions as we were apparantly feeling adventurous!


We had the usual suspects of potato waffles, cheese and eggs but this time we had duck eggs! And they were amazing! Ben let me have the one with the biggest yolk and it was HUGE! I eagerly poured my salt on and gently poked it with my fork to release the liquid. I watched an episode of “The Best Thing I Ever Ate” on Food Network the other night and someone was raving about a pasta dish they had which was just ravioli filled with just cooked egg yolks, it looked so good! I can really imagine how amazing that would be as yolks are so rich, you don’t need a sauce! Although obviously we added tomato ketchup to our breakfast because no hangover breakfast is complete without it.

 

The plate I photographed is actually Ben’s as his looked a lot nicer than mine with the addition of a couple of slices of crispy fried Quorn ham (tastes just like Quorn bacon but a lot cheaper if you’ve already got the ham!) and a big spoonful of tomato salsa. We enjoyed our breakfast whilst watching Something For The Weekend, the show that started it all!