Cauliflower & Bacon Macaroni Cheese

This is fairly close to the recipe in the August 08 issue of Australian Good Taste, but I'll give you what I actually did, and not what it says. ;)

350g penne
1/2 cauliflower, broken into small florets
2 tbsp olive oil spread (or marg, or butter)
175g bacon, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
250g cream cheese (that's one "brick")
2 1/2 cups milk
1 tbsp Dijon mustard (but I used a big squeeze of dijonnaise)
160g grated tasty cheese

Cook pasta in salted water until not quite done. (8 minutes, or whenever you have finished chopping cauliflower). Add the cauliflower to the pot, and cook until desired done-ness of pasta (in this house that means almost soggy, definitely past 'al dente').
Melt butter/marg/spread in a saucepan, and cook the bacon, onion and garlic until the onions are soft. Whisk in the cream cheese, milk and mustard.
Place pasta and the grated cheese in a baking dish, retaining about 1/2 cup of cheese to sprinkle on top just before baking. Mix through, then add the bacon sauce, mixing that through as well. Sprinkle remaining cheese on top.
Either place under a grill for 5 minutes, or if your grill is too small, like mine, place in a 180°C oven for around 10 minutes, or until the cheese melts.

Feeding the family

Both kids emptied their plates. Miss Two had seconds. I had enough for the freezer to feed both kids on a night when dinner doesn't happen for whatever reason. And everyone was happy. We like our veggie dishes in this house. Now I just need to go and wash all those cheese dishes :(

Hay, Hay, It's Donna Day: Triple Choc Pancakes

I've learned quite a few things since starting food blogging. One of the most useful (and weird to outsiders - ie DP) is something I picked up from Stephanie over at Dispensing Happiness. Whenever she gets a new cookbook, she goes through it with a stack of page markers, flagging any recipe she'd like to try. Now I don't get new cookbooks that often, but I do get 2 or 3 food magazines a month, and I recently received over 50 food magazines from my MIL who didn't want them anymore. So I've been slowly making my way through those, and when this months new recipes+ came out, I decided to flag everything I wanted to cook 'sometime' - not just write in what I wanted to cook this fortnight in the menu plan. And I'm glad I did, because when I saw the theme for this month's Hay, Hay, It's Donna Day (hosted by Home Gourmets) I knew exactly what to cook - these delicious chocolate pancakes. The strawberries at Coles didn't look too great for $2 a punnet, so I switched vanilla ice cream with sliced strawberries for chocolate choc chip ice cream. DP said that these must be quadruple choc pancakes then, but I think that's a bit of a mouthful... just like the pancakes were really.

Triple Choc Pancakestaken from September 08 recipes+ magazine
2 cups SR flour
2 tbsp cocoa
1/2 cupbrown sugar, firmly packed
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups milk
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup Nutino (or Nutella, or whatever the favourite choc hazelnut spread is in your house)
8 scoops chocolate choc chip ice cream

Sift flour, cocoa and sugar together into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre.
Whisk the eggs, milk and vanilla in a jug, and gradually whisk into the flour until just combined.
If you work the batter too hard, your pancakes will be rubbery, so keep a light hand.
Fry in a lightly oiled frypan over moderate heat. Use 1/4 cup of batter for each pancake, and cook until bubbles appear (about 2 mins) then flip and cook the other side for the same amount of time.
Spread with Nutino and top with ice cream, then serve.

Check out the round up here

Beef, Pepper and Mushroom Casserole

This made the house smell like pizza all day. I was tempted to add tomato paste and some pineapple. lol
Adapted from "Margaret Fulton's Book of Family Meals"

1kg braising steak, roughly cubed
3 tbsp flour
salt & pepper
3 tbsp oil
3 onions, chopped
1 large green capsicum, deseeded and chopped
1 1/2 cups beef stock
1 cup red wine
150g button mushrooms, quartered

Mix the seasonings with the flour. Of course, you could really use any seasonings you want, but don't go overboard, or you'll drown out the other flavours. Coat the meat pieces in flour. Heat oil in a frypan, and quickly brown meat on all sides, frying in small batches. Place meat in slow cooker, and turn slow cooker on low. (I always turn my slow cooker on once I've started putting ingredients in, to keep them warm while I do the rest of the prep)

Fry capsicum and onion in leftover oil. Add to slow cooker. Dry fry mushrooms to add a little colour if you like, or can be bothered. Otherwise just add straight to slow cooker. Mix stock and wine together. This may be too much liquid, I'll let you know once it's finished cooking ;). You of course can use any combination of stock and wine measures to make up 2 1/2 cups, I used 1 1/2 cups of stock because that is the smallest size my stock comes in. (I use alcohol removed wine for cooking btw, just in case you thought I was trying to make Master 4 a booze hound!)Use your liquid to deglaze the frypan, by added slowly at high heat. Once it is all in the pan, add any remaining flour and cook for a minute. Pour all this lovely gravy into the slow cooker, and put the lid on. Leave for as long as you usually leave a casserole on low, or turn it up to high, and leave it as long as you would on that. It's up to you really. I'm not a recipe nazi. After all, if it doesn't work, it's your family who has to eat it! ;)

This was nice, but not anything special. We arrived home from shopping five minutes before our regular dinner time, so I threw some two minutes noodles in with it. I don't recommend doing that btw. Take the extra 10 minutes to microwave some potatoes please.