Day 2
[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/P8DybkRCp9o&hl=en_US&fs=1&]


Days 3 and 4
[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/5JKsmkC4k-Q&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Happy St. Paddy's Day to you all wherever you're celebrating! I'm in Beirut, Lebanon this week and celebrating here with my new Lebanese friends!

Apologies for the lack of recipe today, but I imagine the blogosphere will be jam packed with Irish themed or "Irish" themed food for you to enjoy. For now though I'm going to get back to the Lebanese cuisine I've been enjoying...

It was Rob's birthday recently and I couldn't help but make my Mac loving hubby an apple cake to celebrate....



... it's a Victoria Sponge inside (his favourite) so no edible apples unfortunately.

My parents, sister and her boyfriend were on holiday recently in a favourite place of ours - Gran Canaria - and they came back with a few little gifts, which included a big toblerone (which has vanished already), a bracelet for me, a photo album, some seatbelt covers for my new car and a lovely little box of saffron! The saffron made me smile because I had just used the last of mine the night before and was dreading spending a fortune on a little more, whereas this box was at least 100 times the quantity but about the same price!

I'm looking forward to trying some new recipes with this.... any suggestions or ideas anyone?

I really really REALLY hope this isn't the next Daring Bakers challenge..... or any one after that for that matter!!!

[埋込みオブジェクト:http://www.youtube.com/v/wOyibd6tDvo&hl=en]

Great video!

Today Rob and I are celebrating our first wedding anniversary! It's a year to the day when we stood in front of all our family and friends and became husband and wife, then went off and started cooking for them all!!!!



Only kidding, but it's one of my favourite photos from the day.

It's been a fantastic year! I've really loved being married and making a home with Rob. I'll share more tomorrow about our celebrations and what we did to mark the occasion.



Also I've been tagged again for the 6 word meme by Kimi at My plate My world. Ryan from Ryan's Recipe Blog completed his by asking his girlfriend for help so I've decided to ask my hubby for a few....

Caring
Loving
Funny

After that he gave up so the rest are from me....

Cuddle-able
Loyal
Weird

I'm not going to tag anyone seeing as I've already tagged 6 people for this meme

I posted a few days ago about RTE looking for people to enter a new show looking for cook of the year. I got a phone call from one of the show's organisers this morning talking through some of the details, but she also said they are still looking for people from the north to get involved! So if you live in Ulster please send an email to kathylittler@greeninc.ie and get involved.

You really don't have to be a master chef.... I mean look at me and I'm entering! You just have to enjoy cooking! It's just a bit of craic! So there's no reason not to!

See here for more details

Also, if you have some ideas and suggestions of a dish to bring to the audition, I would love to hear them. I have a few already but would love to hear some ideas from other people who love food too!

This was posted on a the jeenaskitchen.com forum:

"The Afternoon Show on RTE One is looking for a Cook of the Year. This is a nationwide (Ireland: North, South, East and West) search and we are looking for amateur cooks over the age of 18. The winner will take away prizes and cook, live on the show in the autumn. To apply, all you need to do is tell us why you should be the Cook of the Year and e-mail to kathylittler@greeninc.ie The closing date for applications is Friday 21st March and auditions will be held in the four Provinces at the beginning of April."


I've emailed out of interest and intrigue, and it'll be great to be challenged a little more in my cooking. Just thought I would share in case anyone would be interested.

I forgot to post this after last Saturday when we had friends over for dinner. We had made a bit of a mexican feast of tacos and fajitas and burritos to make up for ourselves. Well near the end of our meal Rob dared Paul to eat some toffee yoghurt with what he had on his plate and he did!



From what I remember it included hard shell taco, taco spiced mince beef, barbeque sauce, cheese and toffee yoghurt. If I've left anything out I'm sure Paul will correct me. But apparently it tasted good.

It sounded gross to me but then reminded me about how when i was a McDonalds employee I used to enjoy dipping my fries into my ice cream and still do occasionally now.

So what food combinations that sound odd together do you like then?

It's always good to hear when people like what you've cooked for them, but I got really excited and happy when a parent at church came to me asking how I made the Thai Green Chicken Curry at the Elders Dinner because her daughter loved it so much and whatever she does to try making it, "it's just not the same". I feel sorry for this mum who's been working hard trying to make her daughter happy, hopefully now everyone's happy now!

This year, Rob and I celebrated our first Christmas as a married couple and had fun cooking our own Christmas dinner.


For starters we had crispy duck with chinese pancakes, hoi sin sauce and spring onions.


And for our main course we made Turkey, Ginger Glazed Gammon, Stuffing and roast potatoes, carrots and parsnips and had cocktail sausages and yorkshire pudding along with it all.



I even made doggie treats for Stewie
What a fantastic feed! We had a great day!

On Saturday afternoon (last weekend) I met up with some of the teenagers from the church I work in and spent the afternoon cooking for about 30. The idea arose last September when I met up with a few of the young people to talk about what we were going to do in youth group, and they suggested we cook dinner for the church elders. So invites were sent out inviting them to an "UnChristmassy Christmas Dinner" and had 20 out of 31 replies saying yes, then also had to count in our young cooks for food as well.

We met up at 2pm and decided to cook 4 dishes and have it as a buffet type night. We headed off to Tesco to get all our groceries, along with party poppers and some Christmas crackers. Then we got cracking with the cooking and by 6pm had made:

• 3 shepherds pies
• A lot of Thai green curry and rice on the side
• A crispy chicken bake
• A load of bolognese with spaghetti on the side
• Green leaf Salad
• Fresh fruit salad (to be served with whipped cream, ice cream and meringue)

I know I promised a new recipe a few days ago, but this week has turned out to be hectic so turning to old recipes I know off the top of my head with minimum cooking required so I haven't been able to do it just yet. I'm leaving tomorrow for a weekend away with our young people in church so won't be cooking again til Monday.... hold tight, it'll be here soon!!!!

Sorry!!!!

Last night we had one of our latest favourites - BBQ Ribs with some curly fries and it was great to have good home made food again.

Tonight I'm planning on doing a new recipe that I found in Easy Food Magazine which I'm pretty excited about cos I'm not sure what it will taste like but it sounds really interesting. Check out the blog tomorrow for a report on it!!!!

We're back from our honeymoon! And boy I'm glad cos I really missed being able to cook in my kitchen. We had a good time away, with lots of relaxation, but we were missing some food. We stayed in a lovely villa so we were cooking for ourselves some nights and we were really glad we took some meat out there with us cos there was very little meat available in the local supermarkets, they mostly stocked cooked meats and so on, so I'm real excited about going for groceries today and cooking tonight! Hmmmm I may need to get out more.

I bought some ribs yesterday with the idea of having BBQ ribs tonight.

While looking through other ideas for ribs i found this on www.cooks.com:


BBQ ribs
Take car keys out of pocket or purse. Get in car. Drive to nearest Applebee's Restaurant. Be seated. Order large "Riblet Platter", delete slaw, add extra fries. Wait approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Enjoy!


Made me laugh

I had a real busy weekend with very little cooking:

Friday dinner was a Cottage pie only with a wee change to the recipe in the link: carrots were changed to a tin of drained garden peas and the sauce mix was changed to beef gravy with some worchestershire sauce added.

Saturday was a packed lunch fo sandwiches seeing as we were on the road for about 10 hours total and dinner was a couple of pizzas from dominos.

Sunday lunch was leftover pizza from Saturday and dinner ended up being some take away chinese seeing as I had to rush back to work for the evening.

Therefore Monday lunch ended up being leftover chinese from Sunday.

Planning a little cookery for tonight with some defrosted meals I made last week.

I have some fresh ginger and mixed chillies in the fridge, bought on a whim thinking I'll find a recipe... however I have not yet had time to look. Anyone have any ideas what I could do with them for an easy recipe?

A friend, who has started reading his blog, has made me an interesting proposal of a challenge/night in. The plan is to each bring 5 ingredients to give to the other and then for each of us to come up with recipes from those ingredients and cook them for our evening meal! When she emailed about it, I got incredibly excited. I used to watch Ready Steady Cook all the time, almost everyday while we had our family dinner. As I watched I had always wanted to be able to just look at some ingredients and come up with a recipe, so this is kind of a little challenge that I've always wanted to take.

Can't wait!!!!!