After devouring that greasy-in-a-good-way soufflé and those sinfully delicious chocolate-filled doughnuts on the same weekend, we were definitely in need of something a little lighter. I have to say that I LOVE this recipe! It’s simple, tasty, healthy, and it even got Robin over his fear of zucchini. Mostly.
Check out these ingredients:
You can probably see why Robin wasn’t too excited to dive into this one at first, but he was willing to be adventurous, and the avocadoes helped a lot. First we chopped, seasoned, and roasted the peppers and zucchini
Then we decided that we might need to invest in a bigger roasting tray. Luckily, we had the classiest of red punch bowls at our disposal.
Those lentils were boiled in broth and then we combined them with the roasted veggies and tossed in sundried tomatoes, avocadoes, basil, chives, and lemon juice.
I knew I would like this salad but I was shocked to see Robin going back for seconds before I had even finished mine! Needless to say, this is a dish worth repeating. In fact, I’m in Denver for work and have been eating out every day, so this is just the kind of fresh, healthy meal I’m craving right now.
Over and out from Denver. Robin’s up next with soda bread!
It's been pretty smooth sailing so far on this voyage, but let's not get carried away - we haven't exactly been challenging ourselves. And that's by design: starting out with incredibly complex dishes wouldn't have been very smart. If the wheels are going to come off (to mix my metaphors) it's going to be with something like today's adventure: chocolate-filled doughnuts.
There is, after all, an entire industry devoted to selling you doughnuts so that you don't have to make them yourself. They're not something you just whip up on an impulse. And besides, if we all made our own doughnuts, where would the cops hang out?
But we're nothing if not foolhardy - plus, chocolate - so we gave it a shot. First step, making the dough. Flour and sugar were sifted together, then mixed with warm milk and melted butter, plus the all important yeast, which had been waking up in a small dish of warm milk.
With the dough made, we found ourselves with nothing to do for an hour. See above re: not an impulse recipe. Eventually though, the dough didst rise, and we were ready for stage 2: deep frying!
Before it could be fried, we had to cut the dough into "pillow" shapes - as you can see, I use weirdly shaped pillows. But they'll taste just as good!
So far so good, but these aren't just plain doughnuts, they're chocolate filled, so we need to have the filling ready to go when they come out of the pan. Luckily that's just a matter of pouring hot sweetened cream over chocolate chips and stirring. And yes, that's just as delicious as it sounds.
Into the fryer, then! It takes an unreasonable amount of oil to deep fry things, it turns out. Add that to the inescapable feeling that you're going to burn the house down, and you see yet another reason why you just don't do this at home.
Somehow we made it through without even a small fire (a little disappointing), and were left with just one more hurdle: getting the chocolate inside the doughnuts. Did I mention that neither of us has ever used a piping bag before? I think you can imagine the mess; it's amazing that our hands were clean enough to touch the camera at this point.
All's well that ends well, though, and all's even better that ends doughnuts.
Next time, we make up for these empty calories with a lentil and courgette salad - better than it sounds!
Gordon must have known when he came up with this recipe that cheese is the way to my heart...and possibly my heart attack. Seriously, there's so much cheese in this souffle that I got confused and thought we were making mac n' cheese at one point.
Sure, there were half a dozen eggs and some milk and flour in there too, but let’s get back to the good stuff:
The three (yes, three) cheeses we used were Monterey jack, cottage cheese, and cream cheese. And, yeah, I'm wondering where the pepper jack is too. The second, er, fourth best part (after all the cheeses, of course), is that the recipe was super easy - it's called a cheat's souffle for a reason. Just combine everything in a bowl...
...and bake until golden brown and absolutely delicious.
Boom baby.
Did someone say malt-chocolate doughnuts for dessert?
When we were planning this adventure, the first thing we did was to narrow down the selection to 100 recipes (unexpected, but it turns out there are a lot more in the cookbook than the 100 he promised on the telly!). That done, we broke them up by season - a lot of it was fairly arbitrary, but Curried Sweetcorn Soup was a pretty easy one to throw in the Winter pile. It's been a pretty miserable winter in Seattle so far - not cold enough to snow, just grey, wet, and cold enough to be, well, cold. A soup would be just the thing!
First up we had to make our curry paste - this was really going to be the backbone of the soup's flavour. Gordon was very clear on the importance of toasting spices before using them, and after a couple of minutes I could see - or rather smell - why. A raw coriander seed doesn't really smell at all, but given just a little time in the hot pan they were full of citrus and peppery goodness.
And then - into the molcajete!
Why use a mortar and pestle when you can use a dramatic hunk of Central American lava, that's what I always say. Because it's really uncomfortable, might be one reasonable answer. Anyway, it didn't take long before the coriander and cumin seeds had been ground down - throw in some garlic, curry powder, and a bit of oil, and you've got yourself an easy homemade curry paste.
Throw some onion and potato in the pan, add the curry paste and let it get all delicious before adding the stock and most of the corn. At this point you could basically just heat it and call it done, but it wouldn't be gourmet without one last touch. So, into the blender!
Lacking an immersion blender - another one for the list - we did it in batches, the old-fashioned way. Once it's a nice smooth bisque, back on the heat with it and add the last of the corn to give it back some texture.
And there it is! Still working on the presentation, but again - easy, healthy, delicious. It could maybe have used a little more spice, it was a little mild for our tastes, but easy enough to up the ante on that next time around.
Up next: a three-cheese souffle!
