Three Good Things - Week Three

Once again, I'm joining in with Liz at Margot and Barbara in listing my Three Good Things from the last week.

1. Sold!

We have definitely sold our house now. I will be sad to leave it, but we had to sell it in order to be able to move closer to my new job.

2. Lavender

The lavender in our garden has been lovely this year. I put some of it in a vintage glass inkwell (a free gift from Homebarn when I went to Cybher).

3. Pizza

This is the most delicious pizza - a Padana Leggera Pizza from Pizza Express. The sweetness of the caramelized onion and the tangy creaminess of the goats cheese, with a salad in the middle so it must be vaguely healthy too! I treated myself to this particular pizza to celebrate the sale of the house and starting my new job.

Peppers with chick peas and gorgonzola - a Nigel Slater dish for February

Farmersgirl Kitchen has launched 'Dish of the Month' which involves choosing one Nigel Slater recipe per month to cook and then writing a blog post about it. 

Last weekend I was looking through The Observer and I spotted a a recipe called 'peppers with cannellini and gorgonzola' in an article called 'Nigel Slater's bright and cheerful winter recipes' (17 February 2013). 

This looked like a lovely way of making a light lunch with very little effort so I thought I'd give it a go. I actually made 'Peppers with chick peas and gorgonzola', because I prefer chick peas to cannellini beans.  

Here are the ingredients for two portions:

With the help of my little boy, I stuffed the peppers with a mixture of the cheese, mushed-up chick peas and chopped chives before cooking in the oven at 180 degrees C for an hour and a quarter.

This worked pretty well with chick peas, and both H and I enjoyed eating the end result for lunch today. The peppers were soft and sweet and the gorgonzola made a sauce in amongst the chick peas.

I will definitely cook this again soon.

PS I think my friend Emily who blogs at amummytoo will like this dish, so I'm also joining up with her Recipe of the Week linky.

Onion Soup Without Tears - a Nigel Slater dish for January

Farmersgirl Kitchen has launched 'Dish of the Month' which involves choosing one Nigel Slater recipe per month to cook and then writing a blog post about it. Nigel Slater is my favourite food writer, bar none. So when I needed no encouragement to join in with this.

The dish I chose to cook for January is 'Onion Soup Without Tears' from the January chapter of 'The Kitchen Diaries'.

The idea behind this recipe is to roast the halved onions before chopping them up to make the soup, thereby reducing the tears involved in chopping the onions. The recipe also says that the other advantage of this method is that the onions smell lovely while they are roasting.

Well I tried it and it worked beautifully. The roasting onions smelled mouthwateringly gorgeous. Even better, the finished soup tasted absolutely delicious with toasted French bread and Gruyere cheese on top. It was a real treat!

(Sorry the photos don't do it justice - will use a proper camera next time)

Frankie and Benny's cocktail menu

There is a new cocktail menu at Frankie & Benny's. All the classics are there, including my favourite cocktail: the Cosmopolitan. This is described on the menu as follows:

A ladies favourite! The combination of Eristoff vodka, triple sec, fresh lime juice and cranberry, finished with an orange zest.

So it was with a happy heart that I headed the Nottingham City Centre Frankie & Benny's with a voucher in my handbag for two courses and two cocktails. I met up with 7 other local bloggers who also had the same vouchers and we had a lovely time.

I had two Cosmopolitans and they were delicious. Not too sweet and very refreshing, especially after a hard day at work.

The food was good too. I had the goats cheese and red onion wrap with fries and a mango sorbet for dessert.

Here are some photos of us enjoying ourselves:

Left to right: bloggers from Baby Budgeting, Alexander Residence, Super Lucky and me.

Left to right: bloggers from The Mummy Diary, Love Chic Living, MummyLish and The Ana Mum Diary.

We did have a few suggestions as to how it could have been even nicer:

• turn the music down, so that it is easier to talk without having to raise voices
• make the cocktail menu easier to read, the lettering was tiny and didn't show up clearly against the dark-coloured background
• for the cocktails with ice, more cocktail and less ice would be good.

But even with these minor quibbles, it was a fun evening, and a real treat.

Disclosure: I received vouchers for two food courses and two cocktails (or other drinks), and so did the friends I was with. All reviews on this blog are completely honest.

Thank you to Becky for the photos of people - I only remembered to take photos of the cocktails!

My first Slow Cooker Sunday

I want to do more home cooking but because I work full time it usually seems like too much effort. So I added a slow cooker to my Amazon wishlist and my dad bought it for me for my birthday.

The plan is that we can have a home cooked meal on a weekend day without spending the whole day in the kitchen.

Here is a photo of my new slow cooker in action:

The first dish we decided to cook was Chilli Black Bean Stew from Ultimate Slow Cooker: over 100 simple, delicious recipes by Sara Lewis.

There was a bit of preparation required (soaking the beans overnight then boiling them for 10 minutes, and the other ingredients were cooked for a short time on the stove before putting everything in the slow cooker) but after that it was a case of leave it on a low heat for 8 hours and resist the temptation to take the lid off before it was finished.

So what was the end result like? Well it was delicious. The beans were cooked to perfection and there was just the right amount of chilli to give it a bit of a kick without blowing my head off. We served it with rice, and it seemed like the perfect autumn comfort food.

So I think this method of cooking could be a good option for autumn and winter weekend meals. This particular dish was fairly cheap to make, and it was lovely to have a nice evening meal to look forward to without having to put much effort in during the evening itself. Plus we have a couple of spare portions to put in the fridge for tomorrow.

I'm linking up with this week's Slow Cooker Sunday at Mediocre Mum - check out what other yummy slow cooker food people have been cooking up recently.