The Food Monologues

(Makes 12 cup cake sized muffins)

Ingredients

2 oz (55 g) of butter
7oz (200 g) plain flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
2 tablespoons of sugar
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of paprika
2 eggs
4 fl oz (125 ml) milk
2 oz (55g) of chedder cut into 1 cm cubes
4 rashers of bacon finely cut
12 cherry tomatoes skinned
4 oz (110 g) sweetcorn
1 tablespoon of chopped chives or 1 spring onion finely chopped

Method

Preheat the oven to 375 F or 190 C or Gas Mark 5 and grease 12 muffin tins or use paper cases.

Melt butter in a bowl and set aside.

Fry the bacon until crisp and allow to cool.

In a mixing bowl sift together the flour, sugar, salt and paprika.

Blend the eggs, milk, butter and chives together and add to the dry ingredients and stir until moistened then fold in the sweet corn and bacon.

Place a heaped spoonful of the batter into the prepared tins/cases and place a tomato and a few cubes of cheese over each and then cover with another spoonful of batter.

Bake until risen and golden brown (20 -25 minutes). Leave to stand for 5 minutes before unmoulding on rack and serve warm.

Labels: Recipe

Earlier this week my sister Lindsay made banana fritters for Tim for the first time. She made them at the shop - which is a good environment to make them in since they are deep fried. Tim liked them and told his family about them so this weekend's cooking challenge was to make banana fritters for Tim and his family. He said that they tasted like donuts with hot banana in the middle. His sister doesn't like banana, so I made her some pineapple fritters instead and some mars bar fritters, which their mum described as tasting like chocolate muffins when she ate them.

Recipe for Fitter Batter Mix
6 Tablespoons of Self Raising Flour
1 Teaspoon of Baking Powder
Enough water to make batter the consistency of pouring custard

Method
Mix all the ingredients together in a roomy bowl a couple of minutes before frying and heat oil to 190C.

Use this batter to coat and deep fry friut, or even bars of chocolate. For banana fritters, cut bananas each cut into 4 pieces each, dip into the batter. For pineapple fritters, drain tinned pineapple rings, dust with a coat of flour and then dip them int the batter.

Fry fritters until puffy and golden brown and serve with a drizzle of golden syrup.

To make Mars Bar or other chocolate fritters, its best to use fun sized versions of the chocolates as the contents will not leak into the oil. Fry until the batter is golden brown but don't serve with golden syrup, but some icecream would be nice instead - incidentally I am tempted to try deep frying a icecream bar next time. Hmm I wonder if it will work - Tim scoffs, but if you can make Baked Alaska in the oven, why can't you deep fry icecream - I've seen it in restaurant menus - Shogun Teppanyaki does ice cream tempura - an idea is forming and there no doubt be a blog entry on this in the future.

I've been eating a lot of fish recently - well you could say I am on a fish diet. Besides I do like fish. Today I tried canned sild or slid as I call it, much to Tim's amusement. Sild, I have discovered is a small herring, with silvery skin. I didn't like the taste of it much - perhaps because it was canned in sunflower oil? But it was very fishy yet had no flavour - a little too oily and the slid about (sorry bad pun).

Last night Tim and I went to the cinema and watched a documentary called Supersize Me - a film about a man who decided to embark on an experiement on living on nothing but fast food for a whole month. He started out pretty healthy before the experiement, but by half way through the movie, his doctors were urging him to stop the diet before it killed him. It was a satirical look at the fast food culture of America and enough to put you off eating fast food for months. I guess what suprised me most was the amount of food that was in a portion in America - they were huge and supersizing made them even bigger - they are not as big over here in the UK.

The last couple of weeks, I have been going to barbecues. Last week I went to one at my sister's house for one and yesterday I went to one hosted by my friend Nadine. When we got to Nadine's house we found her in the garden fanning the flames over the charcoal, streaks of soot across her face, and as the temperature rose, her face grew more and more rosy. There was a huge array of food - from the ordinary beef burgers, chicken marinaded with lime and corriander, and steaks to two varieties of fish (salmon with garlic and olives and tuna with rosemary and bayleaves), pork and vegetarian sausage kebabs, flame grilled potoatoes and bean burgers that Nadine made herself. She is vegetarian and is very inventive with her cooking. Some of the salads she made included cherry tomato and feta cheese in a mustard and raspberry vinegar marinade and cucumber with poppy seeds. The bean burgers were made with mashed butter beans, spiced with chilli, stuffed with slices of mozzerella and then rolled in oatmeal. For dessert there was fruit salad and a peach flan made by one of Nadine's house mates and icecream that Jinder was scooping up with a pasta spoon - an interesting sight! It was a lovely barbecue and it was perfect weather - nice and sunny!