Pinoy Hubby

Monday - fish and veg for me, gammon and mashed potato for him Tuesday - steak and chips Wednesday - homemade chicken nuggets from The Takeaway Secret Thursday -spaghetti Bolognese for him; bikini Bolognese from Inspiralized for me Friday – the Other Half is at Star Wars Secret Cinema so back late. I will have a stir-fry Saturday lunch – my parents coming to stay. Going to do a full English breakfast at lunchtime. Dinner- chicken korma using recipe from the Takeaway Secret. Dessert: apple and pear ricotta parfaits with pistachios, from Inspiralized Sunday lunch- French toast cheese toasties Dinner – family BBQ (will need to work out the menu separately!)

    These double-wall glasses, as they are apparently called, are great for hot and cold drinks and also a nice way to serve desserts.   I was sent a set of Curva Artisan Series double wall glasses by Ozeri (£24.96 on Amazon at the moment or 33 euros on the Spanish Amazon site ) to review. So as well as using it for drinks, I created a yummy layered chocolate dessert recipe (see below).       The glasses came in an attractive box that I thought would make a nice gift, and each glass was individually wrapped in bubble wrap to protect it.       The double wall keeps cold drinks insulated and free of condensation, and also means hot drinks won’t feel as hot through the glass- I made a cup of tea and after I poured in boiling water the glass still felt cool! It did heat up after I left the drink a while of course but it makes quite an elegant way to serve a fruit tea or even a coffee I think.     The glasses were surprisingly lightweig...

    There’s a reason why wedding cakes cost hundreds of pounds – the ingredients alone for a cake of that size are pretty expensive, and they are a LOT of work. I took a wedding cake decorating class at the beginning of 2015, and we only completed two cakes over the 8 weeks. But I discovered I was fairly good at it, and wondered if I would ever get the chance to make a wedding cake for real….       For those of you who know Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker I’m thrilled and a little bit scared to announce that she has asked me to make her wedding cake! She is a good friend so I think it’s just wonderful to ask someone you know to make your cake, though it is a little bit daunting as I will be watching it all the way through the wedding hoping it doesn’t collapse! Also, making a cake for someone who is such a good baker herself is a bit of a challenge… so of course I wasn’t going to do it without a practice run!   I’m not going to show you the wh...

This year’s trendy kitchen gadget is the spiralizer, which turns vegetables (and fruit) into spaghetti-like strands. I’ve already used it to make these sweet potato waffles which were much tastier than I expected, and really healthy. I hadn’t successfully made ‘spaghetti’ out of it yet – I did spiralize a carrot, and bring the strands to the boil, at which point they turned to complete mush. Lesson learnt! This time I had a courgette (zucchini) in the fridge left over from making vegetable kebabs for a barbecue and remembered that courgetti was one of the first recipes I came across for the spiralizer – courgette spaghetti. You can serve it with whatever you like; I also had some tomatoes and red pepper left in the fridge from the barbecue and found this recipe from Hemsley and Hemsley, two sisters who have a healthy eating website and recipe book. They recommend eating the courgette raw but I didn’t really fancy that as I don’t even eat courgette at all normally, so I decided to fry...

I made this for a barbecue and thought it was so good I wanted to share the recipe. I used boneless chicken thighs instead of wings and drumsticks, and cooked them in the oven then finished them off on the barbecue. It's a good idea to marinade the chicken overnight if you have time but it still tastes good even if you don't do that. The original recipe is from the BBC Food website . You need: 10 boneless chicken thighs 2 tbsp. clear honey half a teaspoon of ground ginger 1 tsp Chinese five spice powder 2 tsp soy sauce 3 tbsp. orange marmalade grated orange zest from 1 orange (optional - I actually left this out as I didn't remember to buy a fresh orange) I tbsp. olive oil Mix all the ingredients apart from the chicken, and toss the chicken in the marinade to coat. Leave overnight if time. Line an oven tin with foil and cook at 180C for about 20 mins, depending on the size of your chicken pieces (mine were quite small). Finish off on the barbecue.

I’m more of an occasional cereal eater and for breakfast usually have a yogurt or occasionally eggs, with cereal reserved for the times when I want something more substantial than a yogurt but don’t have time for a cooked breakfast. I have to admit a weakness for sugary cereals which probably stems back to my childhood when Frosties were the only ones I would eat! Now, I alternate between something healthy like Special K, a nutty muesli from Jordan’s or Dorset Cereals, and the occasional treat of something like Krave!   I was recently sent some cereal called Keep Me Going . Richard Paterson from Freedom Cereals, the  independent company behind the product, said it was developed " after noticing just how much sugar and salt were in the cereals my 3 children, in particular, were eating. The idea was to develop healthy nutritional products with functional benefits too (like low Gi) but which could be as competitively priced as the brands from Kelloggs and Nestle (Cereal Part...

Did you know that only 25 percent of the people who buy Quorn are vegetarians? The rest, like me, buy it for health and diet-related reasons. Quorn is low in fat and calories and is a very healthy source of protein.   I often have Quorn sausages in a sausage sandwich while my boyfriend has the full-fat kind, but when it comes to barbecues, I never go meat free. Quorn just isn't a patch on a juicy burger - or so I thought until the brand invited me to an event at the London Barbecue School. First a few words about the London Barbecue School . I was amazed I'd never heard of it before but then owner/head chef Alastair said it had only been going for a couple of months. They have an outdoor space in a courtyard just across the road from Peckham Rye train station (easily reachable from London Bridge in less than ten minutes), round the corner from the Rooftop Cinema I've heard so much about. The London Barbecue School uses a ceramic barbecue called a Kamado Joe – I’d never hea...