Cooking Crusade

I’m continuing my love affair with scrambled eggs. Flecked with parsley flakes, salt and butter, I am eternally yours.

Although it may be difficult to believe, I’m always trying to come up with new ways to stick fruit and vegies into my diet. I often get bored with steamed greens and wilted spinach is quickly becoming a fast favorite. Prep for this is so incredibly easy, too. No pesky peeling or chopping, just a quick wash in the sink and then onto a pan with a teensy bit of garlic and oil and bam, instant side dish of veg. It also goes so beautifully into scrambled eggs.

Scrambled Eggs with Wilted Spinach (serves 2)

• 4 eggs
• 1 tablespoon of butter (no margarine here, folks!)
• 2 good handfuls of washed baby spinach leaves
• seasoning, dried parsley flakes (optional)

Heat a non-stick fry pan over medium heat. Melt butter, crack eggs into pan and stir until scrambled. Season and add parsley if using and add spinach. Stir egg and spinach egg mixture until eggs are cooked and spinach has just wilted. Serve on well toasted bread (just the way I like it!). No need to butter the bread as the flavor of the butter in the eggs will flavor the toast just beautifully.

Wash this gorgeous breakfast down with a cherry slushie ; which is so simple to make that it’s.. well, it’s patently ridiculous.

Cherry Slushie (serves 2)

• 1/2 a cup of frozen, pitted cherries
• 5-6 cubes of ice (depending on how icy you want it. this turned out preeeetty icy so you may wanna knock it down a notch)
• 1.5 cups of milk (you can use whole or light or skim or soy or rice or almond or goat…. i promise, you can use whatever milk pleases you!!)
  Method

Blend all ingredients together in a blender, pour into a tall glass and drink with someone absolutely delightful (it makes it taste better… I promise!) This is basically a simpler version of my fave cherry smoothie which I have been enjoying on a regular basis now, but have yet to post about. Promise that one is coming (when I can sit still and photograph it for long enough instead of drinking it straightaway!) I don’t like to add extra sugar to this, but if you feel it needs just a bit more sweetness, you could add a dollop of honey to the blender after tasting. A tablespoon of vanilla extract wouldn’t go too far astray either, that would result in a cherry-vanilla slushie…. mmm.

Enjoy!

xox

Christine

Ah sugar cookies. With Valentines’ Day just around the corner, these are the perfect gift to bring to your loved ones! Make heart and flower shaped cookies, wrap them in ribbons, little cellophane bags or pipe sweet little messages on them. They are incredible versatile and this recipe can be used for a whole bunch of occasions, birthdays, Christmas and all kinds of other holiday celebrations. I’m sure if you baked a tray or two of them and took them to the office the next day, nobody would be complaining either

I used Bridget from Bake at 350′s recipe for sugar cookies, but i’ve seen it around other blogs, so it seems like its been around for quite awhile. This is the first time I’ve ever made sugar cookies but the results were excellent. The biscuits were deliciously soft with a strong flavour of vanilla. I also liked the combination of the crisp royal icing on the soft cookie. Next time I’ll try adding some lemon zest, juice, essence or oil (depending on which I get my hands on first). I’ve heard that royal icing with some lemon added in is quite commonly used and judging from my memory of tasting a friend’s Chrissy gingerbread with lemon royal icing, it’s pretty delicious.

You can try all sorts of cute romantic designs out on these cookies. I used my heart and flower shaped cookie cutters for this time around, but I would love to try and experiment with different cookie cutters. I’ve built up quite a collection of Christmas cookie cutters last year; I’ve got Chrissy bauble cookie cutters (still unused! Oh Christmas sale at David Jones, how you tempt me,). My grandmother gave me a set of Christmas tree cutters for my birthday in November, I collected a set of snowflake cookie cutters from Alfresco Emporium (one of my new favorite cake decorating stores). I also got a metal ring of more Chrissy DJs sales that includes a santa with a bag, a shooting star, a star of David and other assorted Christmas cutters. *Sigh* I wish it were Christmas now! The only non-Christmas cutters are a set of hearts and a set of stars from Chalet. I’ve been seeing a lot of gorgeous cookie designs online, like cake, ice cream cone, high heels and other adorable cutters that I would looove to pick up. All in good time, I guess! Getting back to the main topic, the only cookie cutters I used for this were the heart and star shaped sets.

I tried some pink royal icing on a white background. I tried out;

Polka dots (Easy – just outline and flood the background with white royal icing. Then when the white background is still wet, apply some thinned out pink royal icing in a plain tip, just pipe dots the size you want onto the cookie.)

Mini-hearts
Also very easy – just follow the steps for the polka dot cookie and then drag a toothpick through the dots from top to bottom (while the icing is still wet) to drag the royal icing into the shape of a heart. You can pipe a few dots in a line and then drag the toothpick through them creating a chain of hearts

Squiggly lines (Just piping pink royal icing in a squiggly line on the white background. I piped this onto a wet background and the pink icing was a little bit too runny, so you can see that it bled a little bit into the white.. oh well, no matter.)

Vines and berries (I saw a cookie, I’m not sure where with adorable vines and berries piped onto it. I wanted to try and recreate something similar here. Unfortunately it did not work out as I had planned… The green icing for the vines was too thin so it spread out on the cookie too much resulting in fat vines. I then made the icing for the berries too thick so they did not pipe as well as I had planned either. Ah well. Practice makes perfect!) Basically for this cookie, I outlined/flooded the cookie with white icing, then piped on green vines with a plain tip with royal icing and Wilton’s paste gel, then piped on small berries with a pink Wilton’s colouring paste. Then I practiced piping dots around the border in the pink and green colours. This was fun to do and a lot easier than I thought it would be (but of course as is with everyone, could do with a little more practice )

Wrapped up with a little ribbon, they make the sweetest little gifts!

Its no secret, my favorite way to eat eggs is scrambled.

It didn’t used to be this way. I used to looove my eggs sunny side up. And sure, I probably still do. But I can’t go past the delicious creamy goodness of scrambled eggs. I love flecks of herbs with a sprinkling of salt and the creamy buttery taste on freshly toasted warm, almost chewy bread. I looove it. I love it with mushrooms, onions or shallots but eggs are just perfect by themselves.

I’ll stop gushing.

Normally I just scramble my eggs with a little butter, dried parsley leaves and some seasoning on toast. However, fortunate happenstanced that there was some coriander in the fridge. I absolutely love coriander. One thing I do not love about it, however, is that it goes with so few dishes that I’m able to whip up with only a few ingredients in my kitchen. You always buy a bunch of coriander for one thing and then you’re left with a gigantic amount of fresh coriander that wilts and slowly dies in the fridge leaving behind a distinct sense of failure that you COULD have used them for something (but that something would probably have required you to buy another $20 or so worth of ingredients, not to mention ANOTHER trip to the shop. Hello, you just went out and bought coriander! You also did not have the forethought to buy enough stuff to also include coriander in another recipe..).

So, I decided to try coriander with my scrambled eggs. And……….it was amazing. I drizzled it with a teensy bit of sweet chilli sauce and that was wonderful too, although you could leave that out. I used a very mild flavored sweet chili and only the tiniest amount – it has a habit of overpowering at times.

I always used to overcook my scrambled eggs until Mike finally taught me how to do it. I’ve been taught to start out with a sizzling insanely hot pan to cook anything, but this always led to tough overcooked scrambled eggs. Mike said to start out with a cooler pan and then slowly stir the eggs until they cook. OHHHH. Well that’s how you do it. And it’s a million times better.

Ingredients for Coriander Scrambled Eggs to serve 1

• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon butter
• small handful of coriander leaves, washed and roughly chopped
• seasoning
• toast to serve – optional. I use chia bread from Bakers Delight

Preheat non-stick pan on medium heat. Melt butter and swish around pan to coat. Break eggs into pan and scramble using a spatula or a wooden spoon. Add seasoning and herbs. Continue to stir eggs on low to medium heat until cooked to your liking. (Will take about 60 seconds.) Stir eggs quite gently as you do not want to break the eggs into too many small pieces. Serve on delicious toast and drizzle with sweet chili if desired!

Enjoy this one!

Christine