Celery, green pepper/capsicum, my massive jar of garlic which I never thought I would get through which is now 2/3 empty, chopped anchovies, carrots next door to them, zucchini on the blue plate, olives, mushrooms fresh from the freezer.

With The Other Half going camping, this is a great opportunity to use ingredients he does not enjoy eating but I love eating. Chicken Cacciatore is #1 on my list to make when he is away.

Firstly because I can make a big saucepan full of awesomeness. Secondly because I can add in mushrooms, anchovies and olives not at the *end* of the cooking process but in the correct places – as I would have to if making it for The Other Half to consume.

Thirdly because this is the kind of meal that gets better each day it remains in the fridge. Fourthly, I can pack it full of vegetable goodness when nobody is looking.

I added some celery in this time. Not a normal addition to my recipe but I had some in the fridge and the chooks apparently do not like to eat it.

I think everyone has their own version of this – the traditional one has capers but I did not have any of those on hand. Mine has always had anchovies because I love their saltiness.

I always start by frying the anchovies and garlic in a combination of olive and coconut oil. Then I add in all the vegetables to sweat in the hot pan for a good 10 minutes, stirring regularly.

In a separate frypan I poach the chicken in white wine, covering with a lid. One can do it in the same pan as the vegetables. I just prefer to poach the chicken separately to save a little cooking time. I like to do this while the vegetables sweat, then add everything – chicken and remaining white wine – in with the vegetables.

Once the vegetables have had their steam bath – towards the end you can throw in some red wine to make it extra steamy – you add in the chicken then your tomato elements and extra red wine if you like it. Today I used passata and chopped tomatoes, sometimes I will put in some tomato paste as well.

Now the tricky part, at least for me. I like to let this simmer on the stove for a good couple of hours before eating. This would be easier if it did not smell so awesome. If like myself you cannot resist, a small bowl of this topped with parmesan may tide you over until the flavours have merged together.

This is not really a traditional recipe because I am not giving you amounts or telling you exactly what to put in here. This is the ultimate in fly by the seat of your pants cooking.

Add in what you like in the amounts you like, and it will still work. Don’t like anchovies? Just fry garlic then add in the vegies. Don’t like X vegetable? Don’t add it in. Don’t like to cook with wine? Don’t use it. Don’t want chicken? Add in the meat of your choice, or no meat at all if you prefer. Find the tomato sauce a little thin? Add in tomato paste.

Happy Making It Your Own! :)

Those of you in South Australia can think yourselves lucky. And you are incredibly lucky, but maybe you do not recognize it the way those of us who are formerly South Australian know and understand it. Yes, we can sometimes get a Vili’s pasty. In fact I buy boxes of 12 pasties at a time, from a local cash and carry type place.

Yes, Farmers Union Iced Coffee is available in other states now, even in a 2 litre container in the supermarket. Yes, some Beerenberg products can be found by us on various shelves around the place from time to time.

But the list of things we cannot experience unless actually present in your state is long. I would love a proper Vili’s sprinkled donut SO MUCH. I miss the soup of the day at the Vili’s Cafe. I miss my Barnacle Bills. Crazy as it might sound you cannot get anything comparable here in NSW. My go-to was the two in one snack pack. Fishettes, I miss you! And those sweet, juicy prawns.

Until a year or so ago, I could easily get a Fruchoc here. But with Coles recent booting of many items from the shelves and other stores revising their ranges, it became harder to find them. One recent weekend I tried everywhere I could think of, only to fail. The reason I was looking was because I had found a site with a recipe for Fruchocs and I was hungry for them, but not hungry enough to actually make them myself. Or so I thought.

Once I failed at finding them on the shelves, I had no choice. I had to make them. But even that was more difficult than I expected. The recipe called for dried apricots and pears. Dried apricots are somewhat easy but I did not want ones from Turkey as I find them to be flavourless, I wanted Aussie dried apricots and not a single store I went to had those. Dried pears seemed to be an absolute impossibility. I tried Aldi, Woolworths, IGA, Coles, the local fruit and veg shops, nothing. Though I did find some yoghurt covered fruit bites at IGA which satisfied my craving momentarily.

Imagine my surprise when the answer to all my searching was the Berry Treat Factory. Like many unexpected answers it arrived as a surprise in a local group where someone was looking for some pickling salt, and another member suggested to look in the downstairs area of the Berry Treat Factory.

That’s funny, I thought. I did not know they had a downstairs area. It turned out after over 10 years of living here I had never been to the REAL Berry Treat Factory which is off the main street and hidden away behind the train station, at the very back of some commercial units.

Did they have Fruchocs? No, that would have been too much to hope for. They did have a lot of chocolate covered items like sultanas and nuts. Most importantly in the famed downstairs area they did have Aussie apricots AND dried pears, which I had almost feared I would never find anywhere. They also had a huge range of all kinds of awesome treats. We will be going back, time and again.

This recipe seemed easy but it is the most difficult thing I have ever made. There are no photos of the process, I was too busy! I need a better food processor. I need something that can chop up dried fruits without needing liquid added. I ended up giving up on my food processor and using a blender. Unfortunately this did not work especially well, even with melted coconut oil added. I tried adding water to get these two ingredients to blend together and all that happened for the most part was the dried fruits soaked up the water. This was a happy accident to be honest because the end result is so deliciously juicy. I would definitely add water to the dried fruits again!

I also used Nestle dark cooking chocolate mixed with some Aldi dark chocolate with sea salt, melting the two together to make an unbeatable combination of awesomeness. Next time I would double chocolate coat them. And once we were done coating fruchocs, we coated some caramel peanuts and some of my Wasabi and Seaweed Macadamia nuts which turned out great.

It would have been easier and probably cheaper to just order some Fruchocs and have them shipped to me. It seems you can now get them in a dark chocolate coating and that would be my pick I expect.

I did once try to enquire if it would be possible to purchase some Barnacle Bills prawns in a frozen state so I could cook them for my mother, for her birthday. Nobody ever replied to my email. This is probably a good thing because if I could get them I would order several trucks worth.

Warning – this post contains some images of raw chicken, a bit further down in the post! My apologies but I wanted to show you the chicken pocket. ;)

Sometime in the later half of 2016 we did a run to Lenards at Warrawong to pick up our big order of chicken. We would usually order 12 mini roasts, a bunch of kievs and filos, and other assorted things. We would bring it all home, foodsave it, put it in the deep freeze, and cook it over the following three months.

When we arrived to pick up our order, they informed us they would be closing at the end of October. When I went online to check other locations, I discovered there was nothing nearby and the closest location would now be Menai in Sydney. We did run up in February or so and grab a bunch more chicken, but since then we did some experiments and created our own version of the Chicken Kiev.

Though our version is not a real chicken kiev by any stretch of the imagination. If you do want to make a “real” one, I suggest this video of the Jamie Oliver recipe.

Ours are not crumbed. My kiev does not contain any garlic at all. The Other Half gets a Jamie Oliver inspired bacon and garlic butter with cheese which I wrap in ham. My kievs are seaweed, wasabi, olives and feta cheese wrapped in ham.

How do I make the Bacon and Garlic butter filling? I cook the bacon in the oven first then chop it. I use ground garlic and minced garlic to cover all the garlic bases and I use proper butter but you can feel free to use any kind of margarine spread you like if you prefer. I put the ingredients into a bowl and mash them together. With the butter I do suggest taking it out of the fridge ahead of time and if it is particularly cold as it was on this day, you may need to pop it into the microwave for a short burst before attempting to mash it.

With the feta mix, you can use seaweed and wasabi of any kind. I like to use the Danish style feta as it holds together once you have mixed it, the Greek style is a bit more crumbly and difficult to work with for this recipe. I am lucky because I have a wasabi and seaweed powder which I have sourced from a local nut roasting company, so my powder mix also has macadamia nut oil. I chopped up some olives to add in, as well.

Then I lay out the mix onto a couple of pieces of ham, roll these up, and stuff this into the chicken pocket.

The other half gets some cheese added in because he likes it that way.

Probably the hardest part of this entire recipe is making the chicken pocket. If you do not cut enough of a pocket you can’t fit everything in. If you cut too much, you might create a hole where you do not want one. But once you have done it a few times, you become a bit more confident. On this day we made 18 kievs in total – we like to do this job in bulk.

The kievs were then paired up into foodsaver bags, vacuum sealed, and then placed in the freezer.

There is no reason to stick to any kind of kiev rules here, folks. I once had a chicken kiev which was filled with black cherries and Camembert. I’ve thought about doing strawberries, balsamic vinegar and feta, perhaps wrapped in spinach. The only limit is your imagination and what flavours would go well with chicken. I believe almost any flavour suits chicken. In summer I might try mango and avocado salsa of some kind.

Doing this job in bulk – which took us an hour and a half but we also cut up chicken strips during this time – means that we can eat kievs for the next 9 weeks and all I have to do is take them out, defrost them a little, pop them into the roaster, cook them for 42 minutes, and prepare some vegetables to go along with this great dinner. :)

Oh S**t, said I, one Saturday evening as we were preparing to make sausage rolls. We forgot to get more tomato sauce. On checking the bottle in the fridge, there was not enough. We will have to run to the shops. No, said the other half. I will just go without sauce. ARE YOU CRAZY, said I. If you don’t want to go, I will just do a quick run to IGA. You can start shredding the veg then add in the mince and the egg, if you like. And so he did.

But of course IGA was out of stock, so was Coles – this was the first time I got a hint they had removed it from their range of products they stock. But they still had Beerenberg chutney so I was able to grab that. It is almost the same as the sauce, just chunkier. Luckily Nowra Fresh stocks it and they were stocking the shelves when we arrived for a bulk meat buy-up, so I now have 3 spare bottles in the cupboard plus one in the fridge and I will grab more when I next see them.

Any South Australian who has ever experienced Beerenberg tomato sauce knows that you cannot settle for a lesser sauce. I normally keep two bottles on hand and replace one when we use the first one up, but we have been enjoying a lot of pasties, sausage rolls and pies just lately. It is winter, and I made a huge batch of chicken sausage rolls a few weeks ago. We ate some, most went into the freezer, where they keep being retrieved and eaten for small lunches or dinners.

Have you ever seen how much sodium is in the shop bought sausage rolls? I have, and it is unlikely that The Other Half will ever be allowed more than a very occasional one now that he has to watch his sodium. We do have some Vili’s in the freezer for emergencies, but at 649mg of sodium when his daily goal is 1000mg.. that leaves him very little for other meals.

And the best thing about making our own – I can pack them full of vegetables. We usually put in carrot and zucchini – this time we added in leek and brussel sprouts as well. I do not use any filler at all – zero breadcrumbs – and the recipe is super simple – it is purely mincemeat of your choice, one egg per 500g of mincemeat, then the vegies. Plus an extra egg for the egg wash.

I take a sheet of puff pastry, cut it in half, lay it on my baking paper, egg wash one side and place the sausage mixture on the other side. Then I use the baking paper to roll the sausage up into the puff pastry. I hand it off to The Other Half, who cuts it up into 4. These get placed into a baking tray lined with baking paper and egg wash the top.

We even make our own chicken mincemeat these days. We just take chicken breast and put it in the food processor. Things are getting very back to basics around here! But in the case of beef mince, I usually get the 5 star from Aldi and it is excellent. We will make our own one day just to try it.

Any leftover mince meat can go into a muffin pan. Just spray the tins with cooking spray of your choice, top them with a little cheese, and they make great meatballs. If you are not feeling like the puff pastry deal these meat and vegetable muffins can be a very easy dinner. Just put everything into the food processor, spoon it into the muffin pan, top with cheese, cook for 30 minutes and dinner is served. Since we tried these muffins we have made them a few times, so easy, quick and so tasty!

If you want to make a non-meat “sausage” roll version, a mix of ricotta and feta with the vegetables would be awesome. I would add in some olives and also some spinach. Maybe mushrooms but lately I have been part cooking them first before putting them on pizza and draining them on paper towel as they seem to be full of excess moisture.

This was the second Chinese dish I ever learned how to make – the first being Chicken and Sweet Corn Soup. For some reason – probably laziness and the fact that KanTong makes a sweet and sour sauce in a jar – I stopped making it from scratch. I would love to know why that is, did I think this was harder to make than it actually is? Never, ever again will I use that jar sauce because this recipe is so simple and easy and incredibly delicious. It is taken from the Golden Circle website but I have changed it slightly to suit ourselves.

You will need –

600g chicken breast fillets chopped how you like them.
your choice of cooking oil to cover frypan (I use half coconut/half olive)
1 leek (chopped how you like)
1 green capsicum (chopped how you like)
2-3 carrots (chopped how you like)
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tin pineapple (somewhere between 400-500g) – reserve the pineapple juice
1/4 cup Beerenberg tomato sauce
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tbsp low sodium soy sauce

First cook the chicken – you can dust the chicken in flour if you like, you will find that thickens the sauce slightly. I’ve done it both ways and probably won’t flour it again. Remove the chicken from the pan once browned.

Then sweat the garlic, leeks, capsicum and carrot for a few minutes. While this is sweating, into a bowl place the reserved pineapple juice, the tomato sauce, the white wine vinegar and the soy. There, you just made your sauce! It will look brown and that might seem odd.

Once your vegies have sweat up a storm, add in your chopped pineapple and stir around a bit, mix it all together.

Add your chicken back in. Pour the sauce in, allow to simmer. You will see the sauce change colour It will go from brown to that traditional pink-red colour..

Serve over rice. This makes enough for us to have dinner plus 2 lunch serves. You could also double the amount of sauce and have that over rice as a snack or lunch, if you like. You could add in other vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, bok choy, snow peas, brussel sprouts chopped finely, zucchini, water chestnuts, baby corn, cabbage might be good, too.

If you look at the Golden Circle recipe it uses a much larger tin of pineapple, and it also says to use Worcestershire sauce. We do not use that, and it is fine without it. I think any more pineapple would be too much for us, and I would steer in the direction of adding other vegetables instead.

This meal is on the weekly rotation for a while because we are enjoying it so much. The only other recipe I need to learn to make from scratch is a version of Honey and Mustard chicken – I will be giving that recipe a try in future weeks. We used to use the Chicken Tonight sauce but it is far too salty for The Other Half to consume now. I would like to try some other Chinese style made from scratch sauces as well. ;)

I like to call this one “every herb and his dog” though that is not really true. If I used all the herbs I happen to own thanks to the great Aldi spice packs it would turn out weird I expect and it would take a long time to put the marinade together.

I have made this several times now and I believe this will be the final recipe though it could always change. The orange juice was an addition this week because we bought some – the previous attempts did not have it – but now that I have tried it I would always add it. If I switch some of the herbs it can make this a totally different recipe too. EG if you add in some cumin that would take this in a Mexican direction.

This makes enough chicken for the other half to have 220g of chicken for lunch for 5 days – I often make a potato bake to go with it, or he can have a boiled egg and some cheese and crackers. Plus a leftover bunch of chicken for me to have as a snack.

This is so simple, it takes me maximum 15 minutes to prepare the marinade then everything goes into a baking tray covered with alfoil for a couple of hours in the oven. Here’s what you need and how I do it.

2kg chicken breast – you can use thigh if you like but you would want to reduce the cooking time somewhat, if you used wings and drumsticks you might cook it slightly longer.

The marinade –

put the following together in a bowl –
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup orange juice
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 teaspoon of olive oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon mixed herbs
1 teaspoon chicken stock powder
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt – you can use minced garlic if you prefer
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon rosemary

Whisk ingredients together. Pour a small amount into the baking dish, layer the chicken on top of that, then pour the rest of the marinade on top. You can add up to 500mls of liquid chicken stock if you like. The liquid will reduce down as it cooks.

Cover baking dish with alfoil. Do not skip this step, it is super important!

Cook in the oven at 200C (390F) for one hour.

Remove from oven, flip the chicken over. Put the alfoil back on. Return to the oven at 200C for another hour.

So why do I cook it for so long? Two reasons – so that all the flavours can seep into the chicken creating major awesomeness – and so the chicken completely falls apart when you touch it with a fork.

I like to make this into “pulled chicken” and I do that in the pan it cooked in so the chicken can soak up the maximum marinade.

I hope you have some zucchini in the house. If not and you are in Australia, Aldi has zucchini on special this week so STOCK UP because once you make these zucchini chips you will become obsessed and want to make them over and over.

While you are at Aldi getting the zucchini, pick up the two different forms of Parmesan you can find in their fridge section. That is the only other thing you need to make these zucchini chips. I like the two different kinds because they have slightly different flavours – both are grated, but one of them is almost like a Parmesan crumb and I use it when I make the healthy chicken strips.

This may well be the simplest recipe I ever post here – so easy even those who don’t love cooking could easily create this (waves to Mitchell). It involves three simple ingredients two of which are cheese – plus you can add spices if you like – and you do not need any oil at all if you have baking paper handy.

1. Peel the zucchini if you like, chop it into chips. Lay it out on baking paper on your tray.

2. Sprinkle the Parmesan over the zucchini. Add any spices you like at this time.

3. Bake in the oven @200C for 20-30 minutes.

You can take them out at 20 minutes – which is the photo above. But if you leave them in a little longer the cheese gets more crispy. I have cooked them for 40 minutes before and they turned out great but that was with a full oven of chips on fish and chip night. Here they are at 30.

The first time you make them, try one at 20, if you like them take out a few, then leave the rest in for 10 more minutes. Then next time you will know how long to cook them for.

For some months now I have been working on creating the perfect oven baked potato chip. On Wednesday nights we always have fish and chips. There are a few secret tips which I stumbled upon as a surprise to myself, and now I am going to share them with you. I make potato and sweet potato, when I make chips.

1. Cut Them Thick

The thicker you cut, the better the chips will stand up to the following steps – and in your baking dish. Above you see the mistake I made with the sweet potatoes, these should have been thicker.

2. Par-Boiling Is Key.

It is also the step where you can go the most wrong and overcook the potatoes. First, you want to use water that is actually boiling and pour it over your potatoes.

Then you need to set a timer and when it goes off, get those potatoes out of the boiling water stat. For me, I give the white potatoes 12 minutes, and the sweet potatoes 8 minutes. Unless I have my cordless headset on and totally forget what I was doing, which is what happened this week, my bad!

3. Let The Potatoes Cool Down.

You will get a much better crispy outer shell if you have the time to let the potatoes sit and cool. Preferably not in the container you are going to cook them in, because the steam will create water droplets which are Not Great for crispy. Preferably not in colanders sitting in the pots you just boiled them in, because that will take longer. I put my colanders on Ikea plates on the benchtop to let them cool.

4. Use A Good Cooking Spray.

You can pick whatever kind you like – me personally I find the Rice Bran Oil spray does not seem to overspray as much as the Extra Virgin Olive Oil but that might be because I have increased in talent and skill at using these things over time. Make sure to spray the bottom of your cooking dish.

If you don’t have spray you can do this the old way – coat the bottom of the cooking dish in your choice of oil, then make sure every surface of the chip gets coated in the oil. Because these are chips, that can be a time consuming process. It is worth investing in a good cooking spray. Mine tend to last a couple of months.

5. Add Your Spices!

We like plenty of cracked black pepper. Rosemary is great, parsley and paprika are our favourites. I do not put salt on ours before cooking these days because The Other Half is watching his sodium intake. I do put salt on mine once they are cooked.

6. Cook in the oven.

I always cook mine at 200C (392F). I cook them for 60 minutes. I do not mess with them – no flipping the chips, no touching at all. Yes, that seems like a long time to cook them but we like ours crispy. I have taken them out at 40 minutes before and they have been fine. You can probably get away with 30 minutes, especially if you used a metal cooking tray instead of ceramic or glass. I would suggest you take one out at 30 minutes and try it to see if it is cooked how you like it.

60 minutes works best for me because they get 20 minutes on their own, then I put the fish in for 20 minutes on one side, and 20 minutes on the other. The end result is a perfect level of crispiness for us.

On this occasion, because I had smaller sweet potatoes than usual and cut some of those chips too thin, they got a bit too crispy. But guess what? Next Wednesday night, I get to try again, and I will make them thicker..

That is what I love most about cooking – if you get it wrong this time, you can learn from it and make it better next time.

UPDATE – And they did turn out better next week –

This is a recipe I have been making for 20 years. It is NOT an every day recipe. This is something you can have on a special occasion. However if you happen to be my other half I will make a big batch of this for your weekday lunches, maybe once a month or so. He will get baked chicken with it. I think the other half would tell you that this is by far his favourite of all my dishes that I cook.

You could easily swap out much of the cream for milk if you wanted. You could also steam and then whizz up some cauliflower and put it in with the milk/cream mix to make it stretch further and to add hidden veg. In fact if you were trying to healthy this up and make it a more regular menu planning option, you could probably replace much of the cream and milk with a chicken stock and veg mixture.

Again like a lot of my recipes, I do not have specific amounts for you to use here. I used all of the lite cooking cream and maybe a cup of milk as this time I was making a huge batch for weekly lunches. This particular potato bake served us for dinner that night, 5 lunches, plus one extra leftover lunch. Into the cream/milk mix for every 1 cup of liquid you add 1 teaspoon mustard powder, i teaspoon chicken stock, and as much parsley and black pepper as you like. You can of course herb as you wish. Turmeric, Rosemary and Dill might be great in here too.

On the bottom of your cooking dish put in a layer of the cream/milk mix, some bacon, and some leek. Then you will need potato slices to layer on top. The amount you need depends on how much of this you are making. You can also use sweet potato (yams) which I always do. You will need some bacon and leek. I used 6 rashers of short cut bacon and 1 leek chopped up and cooked.

On top of each layer you add some more milk mix, bacon, leek, then layer again.

I like to do a potato layer, then a sweet potato layer, then potato, then sweet potato. I keep going until I have layered all the potato.

When you get to the top, add on some cheese. If your baking dish does not have a lid, I do recommend putting alfoil on top for most of the time you cook it in the oven. How long should you cook it for? I am of the opinion that you make this about lunchtime then put it on at 160C for at least two hours. The longer it cooks the longer all the flavours meld together.

Before you serve it you will want to put a knife through and make sure the potato is cooked – you might find the outside area has cooked but the middle still needs more time. If that is the case, back into the oven with the whole thing. You might want to make this a few times and figure out how long your quantities take to cook. ;)

This dish is one I take whenever someone asks me to bring a side. Everyone loves it. I do a similar dish with chicken instead of potato, but that is a recipe for another day. :)