Fully Loaded Nachos - the turkey version!

I'm a bit of a novice at the Fully Loaded Nachos game, however I do love them!  This evening's version was so good, its recipe definitely requires blogging.  Well, I say "recipe" but in truth it's more of an assembly job than a recipe!

Along with the luscious goodies that are included in this turkey version, I also contemplated adding things like beans - red kidney or cannelini - sweet corn, fresh coriander, avocado and sliced red chilis.  All the kinds of things that you might find in a Mexican dish.  While I can see all of those things working, I'm glad I didn't add everything because it would have been far too much - so hark to my word of caution that Fully Loaded, whilst encouraging heaps of ingredients, can easily become too much to eat!  As it is, these nachos came in at around 725 calories per portion which required some jiggery pokery of the other meals, in order to fit it in without exceeding my daily calorie limit!

Anyway, the best thing about this meal is that you can include or exclude whatever you like.  So long as there are nacho chips and cheese, whatever else you add is entirely up to you.  My recommendation is that you use this recipe as help regarding how you make the dish, but free wheel about what you include.

Oh and it's worth knowing that these are like iron filings to a magnet for teenagers.  They just can't resist!  :D

FULLY LOADED (TURKEY) NACHOS   (serves 2)

Ingredients :

1 tbsp rapeseed oil
1 small red onion, chopped finely
half a bell pepper (any colour), diced
250g turkey mince
a pinch of sea salt
a pinch of freshly ground black pepper
sufficient barbecue sauce to coat
half a tsp of hot smoked paprika
150g or thereabouts, of nacho chips
100g of grated cheddar cheese
100g of grated Mexicana cheese
2 small tomatoes, sliced finely
sliced jalapeno peppers, to taste
100g approx of tomato salsa
150ml of sour cream
2 spring onions, finely sliced on the diagonal
crispy fried onion bits (optional)
fresh lime wedges.

Method :

Pre-heat your oven to 180degC/350degF/Gas 4.

Heat the rapeseed oil in a frying pan and add the onion, bell pepper pieces, salt & black pepper.  Cook over a moderate heat until the onion is softened and the bell pepper has begun to soften.  Move the vegetables to one side, increase the heat to high and add the turkey mince.  Fry until the mince has changed colour by 90% and stir in the vegetables.  Continue to fry until all the liquid has gone and the mince mixture is beginning to caramelise.

Reduce the heat to moderate and add the barbecue sauce & smoked paprika.  Stir everything together and cook until you have a fairly dry mix, which should only take a few moments.

Remove from the heat and set aside.

Take two baking trays and cover each with a sheet of baking paper.

Arrange a handful of nacho chips in the centre of each sheet, in a relatively flat layer.  This is the "plate" upon which the dish will be built - so don't take it too broad or you'll use too many chips, or too high or you won't fit the end result in the oven!

Next, sprinkle on a quarter of the cheese onto each bed of chips.

Then, heap on a quarter of the mince mixture onto each bed of cheesy chips.

Arrange the tomato and jalapeno slices across the mince mixture.

Dollop on the salsa, dividing between the two batches of chips.

Take another handful of chips and heap them on top of everything, on both trays.

Add the remaining quarters of the mince mixture, balancing it on top of the piles.

Sprinkle everything liberally with the remaining cheese, again dividing it between the two trays.  You can even add more jalapenos at this stage, if you're keen!

Carefully place the two trays into the oven for 10-15 minutes.  Keep an eye on them at half time, as you don't want the chips to burn.

When the cheese is melted and the mince is sizzling, remove the trays from the oven and have some warmed plates waiting.

Taking the baking paper, make it into a chute and slide the nachos onto the warmed plate.  They should go in one fell swoop, so be brave!

Add dollops of sour cream, sprinkle with the sliced spring onion and crispy onions, if you're using them and add the two wedges of lime, for squeezing at the table.

Prepare to accept the grateful and adoring thanks of the masses.  

Printable version

Bacon with Red Pepper Pesto Pasta - done in a twinkling!

What a success this one proved to be!  Mind you, I don't know why I'm sounding surprised because it uses three of my favourite things - bacon, mushrooms and Asda's ricotta & red pepper pesto.  To my way of thinking, it was a winner before I even took my knife to the bacon.  However, sometimes what seems like the perfect combination of ingredients turns out to leave a little to be desired in one way or another - but happily, not so here.  Plus, of course, it has the added bonus of being simplicity itself to prepare.

Oh and as a little aside, have you noticed how often my food seems to turn out to be orange coloured? I don't try to make it that way, honest I don't, it seems as though my choice of ingredients has a marked lean towards the orange.  But then, the menfolk grumble if there's too much green on the plate, grumble again if I serve them "brown food" and would justifiably grumble at being served black food, so aside from white I guess that just leaves the red/yellow/orange palette as there's not too many blue foods out there!  So this one is following along in the tradition of being the seemingly man-friendly colour of orange. 

Now, let me recommend to you Asda's little pot of Ricotta & Red Pepper pesto.  This seemingly unassuming little jar contains one of the most delicious substances that I have used in everything from sandwiches to pasta.  Along with the rich ricotta and flavoursome red pepper, it also has a sneaky little bite from red chilli that just makes it glorious.  I would be very happy if you were all to rush out and buy some, love it and continue buying it, as that would mean it will stay around on the shelves for ever!

The pesto marries up with bacon perfectly, of course.  The celery adds a welcome freshness that prevents the dish from becoming too heavy on the palate and the addition of the small amount of sour cream helps to loosen the pesto into a sauce without impinging on the flavour at all.

I call this one a very definite win.  The empty bowls and enquiries as to whether there was any left, gave proof to that belief, too.  As a mid-week, easy, relatively cheap dinner, you can't go wrong.

BACON WITH RED PEPPER PESTO PASTA   (serves 3)

Ingredients :

1 tbsp olive oil
350g smoked back bacon, trimmed of fat and diced
1 large onion, diced finely
1 clove garlic, chopped finely
2 sticks of celery, diced finely
black pepper
half a tsp dried oregano
200g quartered mushrooms 
190g jar red pepper & ricotta pesto
1 tbsp sour cream
200ml water
250g dried pasta shapes - tubes are good.

Method :

Heat the olive oil in a large deep sided frying pan and add the bacon.  Fry over a high heat until all the moisture has evaporated and the bacon is cooked through.

Reduce the heat to moderate and add the onion, garlic and celery, along with a pinch of black pepper and the oregano.  Fry until the onion is transparent and the celery is beginning to soften.

Add the mushrooms and continue to fry until they are beginning to soften.

Three quarters fill a large saucepan with water and add a pinch of salt.  Bring to the boil and once boiling, add the dried pasta.  Remember to give the pasta a stir every so often to ensure it's not sticking to the bottom of the pan.  Cook for 10-12 minutes, or to manufacturer's instructions.

Add the contents of the pesto jar to the bacon mix, along with 100ml of water (you can use it to rinse out the pesto jar, so as to get every last little bit!) and stir to combine.

Once the ingredients are looking mixed, stir in the sour cream.  Simmer on a very low heat until the pasta is ready.  You may need to add a little more water from time to time to keep the mixture saucy.

Once the pasta is cooked, drain it well and return it to the hot saucepan.  Take the bacon mixture and decant it on top of the pasta and stir gently, but thoroughly, through.

Serve in warmed bowls with some garlic bread to accompany.

Printable version

Corn Chowder main-course soup style!

I think that sweetcorn (or corn-on-the-cob) has to be right up there on my list of favourite vegetables.  I love it in all its forms, even as polenta.  I used to make cornbread, up until it dawned on me how fattening it was, but a home-made chilli with cornbread was one of life's little pleasures for a while there.

One of our regular family favourite soups is the Smoked Haddock Chowder, which contains sweetcorn.  From there, it was a short step to finding a great recipe for corn chowder.  I found just the thing, by accident, on www.fresh365online.com.  The recipe contained potatoes, sour cream and most interestingly, a cupful of cheddar cheese.  I liked the idea of how that sounded as a recipe, but felt in order to turn it into a main course soup, it needed the addition of some meat - smoked bacon, to be specific.  I felt the bacon would "butch" up the soup, plus add a lovely smokey flavour.

Well, I wasn't wrong as although the sour cream and cheese help provide depth, the bacon just makes all the difference to how hearty the soup feels.

Do be careful though, not to use corn at the end of the season.  I have had corn cobs that have absolutely refused to cook so, if you decide to make this recipe out of corn season, my advice is to go for frozen corn.  It takes a twinkling to cook and the flavour really isn't that different.

CORN CHOWDER  (feeds 4)

Ingredients :

2 tbsp rapeseed oil
1 pack (250g) streaky bacon, diced small
1 garlic clove, grated
1 onion, chopped
half a tsp of cayenne pepper
2 medium potatoes, diced small
500ml vegetable stock
5 cobs (kernels removed) of fresh corn or 800g of frozen corn
150g sour cream
a large handful of cheddar cheese, grated
black pepper to taste
2 spring onions, chopped fine for garnish
red chilli infused oil, for garnish.

Method :

In a large saucepan and over a moderate heat, add the oil and once hot add the onions and garlic.  Cook for 5-10 minutes, until the onions have softened but not gained any colour.

Add the chopped bacon and fry until the bacon is opaque and some of the fat has rendered.

Stir in the cayenne and potatoes and cook for another 3-4 minutes, stirring often.

Add the vegetable stock and taste for seasoning.  Add salt if necessary - I didn't need to, as the bacon and stock meant the mix was quite salty enough.  Add the corn and bring to a lively simmer and cook for 15-20 minutes, until the corn is tender.

Stir in the sour cream and cheddar cheese and cook for another few minutes, to ensure it has all melted and been combined.

Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary, adding some black pepper if you like.

Serve in warmed bowls with a sprinkle of spring onions and a swoosh or two of chilli oil over the top.

Printable version

Three taste sensations in one dinner! Pork with rhubarb BBQ sauce and baked sweet potatoes.

The three taste sensations are :

1.  The rhubarb barbecue sauce;
2.  The baked sweet potatoes;
3.  The chilli cream that went in the sweet potatoes.

(And the pork was pretty special, too!  The salad, well, it was salad.  What can I say?).

Let's deal with the barbecue sauce first.

I put "BBQ Pork" on the menu list for this week, fully expecting to do my usual chilli/soy/honey mix for the pork steaks.  However, in browsing food blogs during the week I spotted a recipe for Rhubarb Barbecue Sauce from IslandVittles.com.  As I am sure you will appreciate (from the title of the blog, if nothing else!) any recipe involving rhubarb and I'm interested.  (I've also bookmarked their Rhubarb Gin for future reference).

It looked, from the recipe, as though it could be a bit of a fiddle to make.  However, it was rhubarb and deserved further investigation.  In fact, I couldn't have been more wrong.  The recipe (available on the IslandVittles.com blogsite) is easy peasy to make, involving chopping rhubarb and onion, then a bit of frying and mixing (sugar and tomato paste), followed by boiling and simmering (with herbs & spices), then a bit more mixing (with Dijon mustard, cider vinegar and honey).  Couldn't have been any easier.  Because I was making a half-size batch, I didn't simmer mine for the full hour as it seemed to be quite thick enough at around a half an hour.

I, too, used a stainless steel tea ball for the bouquet garni ingredients.  Well, all except the bay leaf which was easy enough to extract at the end.  I didn't have a whole dried chilli, so just included some dried chilli flakes into the tea ball.  One other difference was that as I can't abide cloves, I used a star anise which also went into the tea ball.  I reckon that tea ball was a genius idea for using whole spices which you ultimately want to extract - and I may well use it again in curries.

The end result was a Barbecue Sauce of some considerable character.  Tasted on its own, it definitely made your taste buds sit up and take notice, but when smoothed onto pork steaks, it moved from "great" to "superb".

I heartily commend it to you, especially as we are in the height of Barbecue season.  We must be, it's raining!

So, the second taste sensation was the baked sweet potatoes.  Why have we never considered baking a sweet potato before now?  We kept asking ourselves this last night, as we were tucking into that gorgeous sweet orange flesh that went so well with the Barbecue pork.

After all, they are easy enough to prepare for baking - a simple wash under the tap and a good old scrub with a potato brush and they're ready to be rubbed in olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper and into the oven they go.  No different to a normal baked potato.

I was anticipating them taking around an hour, but in fact (as they were fairly small ones) they only took three-quarters of an hour to bake.  They looked a bit deflated and collapsed after baking, plus there was a worrying amount of baked-on sticky juice underneath them that made them look as though they'd been welded to the silver foil.  However, they came free from their moorings without any difficulty and held their shape to be transferred to the plate.  I had visions of them collapsing half-way.

Which brings about the next flavour sensation, which was the chilli cream which was used as a topping.  Boy, but did it go well with the sweetness of the potato flesh!  Goodness, but my mouth is watering with the memory.

It's a simple enough recipe, simply take a pot of soured cream and add the grated zest from a lime, a chopped red chilli (I abandoned the seeds) and some chopped coriander.  Add a little salt and pepper and mix.  Hey presto - chilli cream for use in baked sweet potatoes.

With a side salad of mixed leaves, beetroot, cherry tomatoes, radish, olives and red pepper, we ate like kings last night - and I can't believe how good for us it all was.  The pork was trimmed, so was virtually fat free.  Hence, the only fat was in the chilli cream - which was a teaspoonful or so and the small amount of olive oil that went into the Barbecue sauce.  I suppose there was sugar in the Barbecue sauce and natural sugars in the sweet potato, but other than that, it had to have been good for us. If it wasn't, please don't burst my bubble.  *chuckle*

.
  

What to do with the other half of a chicken? Chicken Wraps!

I've given up oven-roasting a chicken for Sunday's roast dinner, these days.  Instead, I pot-roast it.  This involves oven-roasting for a half hour, then poaching for an hour or so in water with celery, carrot, onion, garlic, parsley - and any other vegetables or spices you might fancy at the time.

I've found that, not only does this produce a lovely moist bird for the primary meal, but the secondary meal (i.e. the other half of the chicken) benefits too.  The leftover meat from a roast chicken has that undeniably "roasted" flavour which can turn a bit sulphurous depending on how you treat it.  However, the other half of a pot-roasted chicken doesn't carry that sulphurous flavour.  As such, it makes it easier to find something to do with it!

One of my son's favourite dishes is plain old chicken wraps.  Now this involves leftover chicken, iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise and tomato salsa, which is okay but a bit under-achieving, I think.

We gave him a try with Fajitas, but it was just too complicated for his taste buds.  He liked them well enough, but they weren't deemed as good as his favourite plain old wrap.

In an attempt to strike a compromise between Mum & Dad's desire for spicier flavours and son's preference for the plainer, I came up with the chicken wrap we sampled yesterday.

Each wrap consisted of some Re-fried Beans, Iceberg lettuce, the mix of chicken, onions & red pepper, sour cream, salsa - and wrap.  Now, we'd previously always had Re-fried Beans beside our wraps, which left me without a context to eat the beans as either I was using a knife and fork, or fingers - for ease, certainly not both.  So it occurred to me, why not put the beans inside the wrap as the base upon which everything else sticks to?

I have to admit that son decided he'd have preferred his wrap without the beans, which is fine because when I do them next time, I'll just leave the beans out of his version.  No problem with that.

What I found was that the spicy Re-fried beans just about had sufficient flavour in them to cater for the spice requirements of the adults.  The onion/red pepper/chicken melange was flavoursome and juicy - and two wraps was almost more than I could handle.  (Almost!).

Oh and yes, those are curly fries.  ~hangs head in shame~  Don't blame me.  Apparently boys have to have curly fries occasionally or all their hair falls out - that's what they tell me, anyway.  ~shrug~  What was I to do?




SPICY CHICKEN WRAPS (feeds 3, with 2 wraps each)

Ingredients :

six large wraps (look in the Bakery part of your supermarket, rather than the "Mexican" aisle, for the larger size wraps)
a tin of Re-fried Beans (or make your own)
4-5 leaves of Iceberg lettuce, shredded
a red pepper, sliced thinly
a large onion, sliced thinly
half a cooked chicken, shredded
olive oil
sour cream
tomato salsa (or make your own).

Method :

1.  Take a large frying pan and heat some olive oil.  Fry the onion slices gently until transparent but not coloured (around 5-10 minutes).

2.  Add the pepper slices and continue to fry for another 5-10 minutes.

3.  Add the shredded chicken, stir to combine, then place on a lid (or a baking sheet, if your frying pan doesn't have a lid) and heat through gently.

4.  Heat up the wraps by dry frying, or popping into the oven for 6-7 minutes, or in the microwave for 6-7 minutes on full.

5.  Heat up the Re-fried beans.

6.  To assemble the wraps, take the Re-fried beans and smear some down the centre (from 12-6 o'clock).  Adjust quantity according to how much the recipient likes them.

7.  Sprinkle some lettuce over, then add some of the chicken mixture.

8.  Blob on some sour cream and salsa.

9.  To fold, take the lower edge and bring it up to cover the first third of the filling.  Take the left hand edge and bring it across, then do the same with the right hand edge.  Leave the top edge free.

Serve with fries and napkins!

.