Salmon dog biscuits and Lemon Drizzle cake

Goldensunflower asked for my recipe for salmon dog biscuits.  It's dead simple, it's basically just short crust pastry with a 75g jar of salmon paste added, plus some salmon oil.  We bought a 500ml bottle of salmon oil from the Approved Food website, but you can get it in pet shops.

So it's 225g flour (I use plain), 50g butter, margarine or lard or a mixture of them, the jar of salmon paste (you know, the jars of sandwich paste from a supermarket), and a tablespoon of salmon oil.   I put it all in my food processor and whizz it up to breadcrumbs, then trickle in a little cold water, just a bit at a time, until it suddenly all clumps together.  Take it out and knead very briefly, just to amalgamate it into a ball.  Flour the work surface and roll the dough out to about the thickness of a pound coin.  You can then use a cutter of your choice to cut it into shapes, or do as I do and just cut it across into strips about an inch wide.  Dc had a good suggestion, to use a pizza cutter - great idea, but mine broke a while back and I've never got round to replacing it.  Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment and bake in a medium hot oven until golden brown, about 10 to 15 mins or so (can't be more precise than that, it depends on your oven).  Put them on a cooling rack, then break up into appropriately sized bits when cool.  Store some in a tin, enough for your dog to eat within 3 or 4 days, freeze the rest.

Before they went in the oven

Instead of salmon paste, you could use another flavour if your dog isn't a fan of fish.  Or peanut butter, Marmite or cheese spread, or grated cheese....Betty likes all of these.  If you haven't any salmon oil, you could use the juice out of a tin of salmon, or sunflower oil from tinned tuna.  Or just leave it out, in which case you'll probably need a bit more water.

Cooked - they're actually darker golden brown in real life

As to the cake....I'm sure everyone has their own favourite recipe for Lemon Drizzle cake, here's mine.  Again, it's dead simple - I go for simplicity every time!  It's more or less just a Victoria sponge batter, with a couple of variations.  And I use old Imperial measurements, simply because I've been making this cake for years and years, and have just never bothered to change it to metric measurements.

6oz butter or margarine
6oz ordinary granulated sugar (I reduce it to 5oz)
6oz self raising flour (or plain with 2 tsp baking powder)
3 eggs
Zest of 1 large or 2 small lemons

For the drizzle:  Juice of the lemon/s, 3 or 4 heaped tsp white sugar

For this cake this time, I also added a tablespoon of orange marmalade.

Beat the butter and sugar together (I use a hand held electric mixer) for several minutes, until well mixed and fluffy.  Crack in 1 egg at a time, with a tablespoon of flour, mixing well before adding the next egg.  Along with the 3rd egg and spoonful of flour, add the lemon zest and marmalade, mixing well again.  Then add the rest of the flour, don't use the electric whisk though or the flour will fly everywhere, just mix in carefully with a large spoon until no flour remains in sight.  The batter should be a soft dropping consistency, if it's a bit stiff, add a few drops of milk.  

Scrape into a loaf tin (preferably lined, unless your tins are super non stick ones, not battered old ones like mine) and bake in a medium oven for about 3/4 hour or so.  Sorry about the non precise times, I just basically cook things until they're done!  To check it's done, either press on the surface with your fingers, it should feel firm to the touch, or stick a knife or skewer in - there should be no cake mix on it when you pull it out.  

Whilst the cake is in the oven, make the drizzle - simply mix the sugar and lemon juice together in a cup or small jug, the sugar doesn't need to dissolve.

As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, make a load of holes in it whilst it's still hot - use a skewer or bamboo stick or something similar, I use a 2-pronged metal meat fork.  Then spoon the drizzle over the surface of the cake - leave the cake in the tin to get cold.  Job done.

Making the holes

With the glaze added

Chicken & roasted veg, Jacket spuds, beans and mystery rissoles

Yesterday I did a tray of roasted Mediterranean veggies...red and yellow peppers, courgette, aubergine, mushrooms and our last home grown butternut squash.  I added 2 sliced chicken fillets and tossed it all with Cajun seasoning, olive oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar.  When it was nearly cooked, I crumbled over some feta cheese.  We had it with some roasted Kalettes….have you seen them?  They're like mini kale-type cabbages, I suppose, or Brussels sprouts that have blown and not formed hearts, Lidl sell them, other supermarkets probably do.  I don't actually like kale (or most dark green veggies, come to that), but husband fancied trying them (he'll eat anything).  As the oven was on, and we like roasted sprouts anyway, I put them on a tray, sprayed with oil and roasted them - they do very quickly.  They are, surprisingly, delicious.

Today we're having an easy meal - jacket potatoes with baked beans and grated cheese, plus some homemade rissoles I found in the freezer.  They're just labelled rissoles, I do have a vague memory of making them weeks and weeks ago, but cannot for the life of me remember how I made them or, rather, what's in them.  I hope they're nice!

While rooting around in the freezers, I also found lots of odds and ends - tubs or bags of leftover cooked veggies, single portions of leftover meals...chilli, stew and the like.  Next week I shall do 2 or 3 days of freezer meals - meals made up of leftovers.  Pastry or sauces may need to be involved, to stretch things or make them into a more cohesive meal.  That should get my imagination working, as well as creating more space in the freezers.

Thank you for comments....Goldensunflower (lovely name) I'll post the recipe for the dog biscuits tomorrow.

Faggots (meatballs!)

Yesterday I made faggots - for overseas readers, faggots are the name given to large meatballs made from offal, usually pork, with other meats and a filler of some kind added.  It's a cheap but very tasty meal and the quantities make a lot of faggots, so plenty to freeze.

I started off by blitzing a whole pack of cooking bacon (600g) and pack of pigs liver (about 550g) in my food processor, until they were chopped small.  I tipped it into a large bowl and added a whole pack (500g) of minced pork, along with 2 x 170g packs of sage and onion stuffing - the dry mix, I didn't make it up with water.  Used my hands to squish it all together - messy, but hands really are the only way to go with this, it's so much easier than using a spoon or fork, say, and much more efficient at mixing everything well together.  And of course hands are the original implement!  You could use breadcrumbs instead of the stuffing mix - you need something dry to bind it all together, as it's a very wet mixture - but we love the flavour of the stuffing mix.  I put the bowl in the fridge for an hour to firm up the mixture.  

I then took lumps of the mixture and rolled it into balls, about the size of a satsuma....you need to squeeze them quite firm, otherwise they'll fall apart when cooking.  It made 22, it would of course make more or less depending on the size you make them.  I put them in a couple of roasting tins (they need to be deep ones, not flat trays, as you'll be adding gravy later) and part baked them in a medium oven for 30 mins.

  

Meanwhile, I made onion gravy - a lot, about a litre per tin.  I fried off quite a lot of red onion (it was about 3 large ones, I guess - I buy a big bag of pre-sliced fresh red onion from the supermarket), then added 2 litres of thick gravy made with granules, with tomato puree, balsamic vinegar and a splash of Worcestershire sauce added, along with some dried rosemary, oregano, parsley and garlic granules.  I took out the two tins, poured in the gravy, covered the tins with foil and returned them to the oven for another 30 mins.  

We had 2 faggots each with mashed white and sweet potato and buttered Savoy cabbage, mushy peas also go well with the faggots.  The rest of the faggots when cool were put into bags, along with some gravy, and frozen.

They're absolutely lovely, filling and cheap, loads of meaty texture and taste miles better than the readymade frozen Brains ones.  We had some of those last year, having not had them for years, and weren't impressed at all - they had a strange very soft mousse-like texture and tasted of nothing much.  

Thank you for the comments, particularly those suggesting I write a cook book!  I won't be, but thanks for the vote of confidence.  I just love to cook and experiment.

Meat-free Monday - Feta salad, Veg hash with eggs

This should have been posted yesterday, but I got sidetracked ;-)

Incidentally, I have no (nearly said beef but that's not very appropriate under the circumstances!  haha) grumble, quarrel, problem etc with vegetarians or vegans, each to their own.  As I said, we do try to have vegetarian meals a couple of times a week (yesterday being a case in point)….we probably don't have many vegan meals though, unless it's by accident.  So vegetarians and vegans are welcome on my blog, but only polite comments will be published.

Anyway, yesterday's lunch was salad, as it was a warmer day.  It was mixed leaves with cucumber, cherry tomatoes, peppers and grated carrot, topped with crumbled feta and a blob of mayo.  Ok but a bit boring, to be honest - I'm not really a salad lover, but husband is.  I'd have liked some olives but didn't have any, and husband's not a fan of those anyway.

For dinner, I did a sort of veg hash thing.  Had some roast potatoes and parsnips left over from the Sunday roast, I diced them, along with a small orange pepper, some mushrooms and a large courgette.  I fried them all in a little oil in a non stick pan, then made 4 dips in the mixture and cracked an egg into each dip.  Cooked for a minute on the hob, then put the pan into the pre-heated top oven for another couple of minutes.  Pulled it out and sprinkled on some grated Cheddar, returning it to the oven for another 5 minutes.  Lovely.  

Today I'm making faggots (sort of large meatballs made from pork, liver and bacon all minced together - I whizz it all up in the food processor - and mixed with dry sage & onion stuffing).  The mixture should make a lot, so plenty to freeze.  We'll have them with mashed white and sweet potato, Savoy cabbage and the onion gravy that I'll be cooking the faggots in.

We did our first shop for this £100 food shop challenge yesterday, went to Lidl and spent £22.31, which I was pleased with.  I discovered they do boxes of 40 Redbush teabags, which is my favourite tea, for 75p - amazing price, it's usually £1.80-£2.15 in other supermarkets...different brand admittedly, but I expect it tastes much the same.  I got 2 boxes, which was all they had....I'd have bought more if they had them.  They're doing 6 weeks of opening offers (the store is a new one which opened around last Christmas), you get a free product every week for the 6 week period if you spend £20+.  We missed the first 2 weeks as we didn't know this offer was on...it hadn't been publicised anywhere, well, not that we'd seen.  The free thing this week was a 1l bottle of olive oil, price £2.89 - I use olive oil often for cooking so was happy to be given that.  Next week it's soap powder, apparently.

Thank you for the comments on my last post.  

A genuine vegan? I don't think so

I want to say something, to make it clear and remove any doubt (as if there was any!):-  

Husband and I are carnivores, we eat meat and fish.  I've mentioned it in my blog header, so it's not like I'm hiding it - and of course I write about meat and fish meals I make.  We do have 1 or 2 vegetarian days a week.....for cost and health reasons.  We will never (or it's highly unlikely anyway) give up eating meat and fish, for the simple reason that we like the taste of them.

The reason I'm saying this is because I had an extremely rude comment (anonymous of course - why is it that nasty comments are always sent anonymously?  Because they're COWARDS, that's why!) over the weekend, from someone who made all sorts of nasty vindictive personal remarks about our meat food choices, and professing to be vegan.  

Now, I don't believe they are actually a genuine vegan, for a couple of reasons:-

1.  Why read a food blog written by someone who clearly states they eat meat, who gives a meat-containing meal in the title (the comment came on my Beef Curry post) if you're so dead set against meat eating that it riles you up so much?

2.  Why do it anonymously?  If you're a genuine vegan, why not be out and proud about it, like I am as a carnivore?  What have you got to be ashamed about?  Why hide behind your keyboard, anonymously spewing bile?  Because you're not a genuine vegan are you, you're just a common or garden troublemaker who just wants to make waves and stir things up, one of the rent-a-mob brigade who turn up to anything controversial, who want to get on telly but hide their faces with hoodies and scarves or masks because they're too COWARDLY to own up to who they are, and the fact that they're just a stirrer!

I have no problem whatsoever with anyone's food choices - it's a free country and we have freedom of choice, and it would be a very boring world if we were all the same.  I may not like the idea of the way somebody else eats (or rather, what they choose to eat/not eat), but I respect their choices and would never dream of making nasty comments about it, especially anonymously - how rude is that?  (And how COWARDLY!).

You needn't go to the trouble of making any more comments, because they won't be published - you will NEVER be published on my blog, because you're a COWARD and a troublemaker.  And no you didn't shock or upset me with your comments, I just laughed!

Low spend food month, beef curry

We have a few things coming up that we need to save money for, so have decided that we'll try and keep our food shop to £100 for February.  I've taken the cash out and will keep it in a separate compartment in my purse, and when it's gone it's gone.  In theory it shouldn't be hard to stick to that at all, after all, it's £25 a week and we have plenty of food in the freezers and larder cupboards, loads of dog food and toiletries/cleaning supplies.

In fact, the only things I can think of that we will need are soya milk (they had none in the supermarket when we went on Thursday), fresh veg and fruit and possibly some cheese and butter (possibly?!  Who am I kidding, we always need cheese!).  Oh, eggs as well, I expect, we get through a lot of eggs.

For dinner tonight I'm making beef curry.  An easy meal, I like to have an easy day on Saturdays.  It's the last of the beef we had at Christmas, some pre-sliced red onions, mushrooms and peppers, and a bought jar of jalfrezi sauce.  I buy the onions and peppers and sometimes the mushrooms ready sliced in Morrisons, it's what they use for their in-store pizzas and salads, they sell the leftover veg in huge bags for £1 at the end of the day sometimes, I always grab a bag if I see them and freeze them.  We'll have it with plain brown basmati rice.  I thought (for a split second!) about making flatbreads but decided against it....don't want the extra carbs and can't be bothered anyway, haha.  It's one of those days today.

Tomato & lentil soup, apple galette, chicken pasta bake and snow

Couple of recent photos:-

The quiche from Wednesday, with homemade coleslaw and fat chips.

Last night's savoury mince with Yorkies and roasted sprouts.  Rather than 2 big Yorkshires, I ended up making a dozen smaller ones in my muffin tin.  3 for husband, 2 for me, the rest frozen.

Today I'm doing dog biscuits, her favourite salmon pastry ones.  Bought some sweet potatoes to make her tuna, veg and brown rice food too.  

For lunch I shall make a tomato and lentil soup, I took some cheese dumplings out of the freezer, they'll be lovely reheated in the soup.  Chicken pasta bake for dinner tonight.  

Rather than making a cake with the disappointingly soft Cox apples, I've decided to do an apple galette instead (thanks for the idea, Gemma's Person!).  Will make suet pastry, as husband likes it and it's so easy.  

I'll be in the kitchen most of the day, but as it's cold and snowy out, best place to be!  Not nearly as cold and snowy as it is where some of our American friends are though....keep safe and warm (and preferably indoors) won't you?

And finally, a shot of our front garden this morning, with a blurry Betty who absolutely loves the snow:-