Birds Eye Crispy chicken recipe

A year or so ago a new restaurant opened just up the road from us. It was one of those all you can eat Chinese buffet restaurants, the kind where you pay £14.95 each and get to stuff yourself silly with sesame toasts and teeny tiny puddings. We were very excited. What normally happens though in these places is that you get overexcited, eat a plate full of chicken balls, worth about 78p, and then suddenly get too full to eat anything else.

Whenever we’ve been there, Belle has pretty much just eaten crispy duck and chocolate fountain. (Not at the same time.) She loves those little pancakes, and I love her eating them because they are one of the only things she eats that includes protein AND a vegetable.

Hoorah for teenagers eating balanced meals!

When Birds Eye got in touch then, asking me to create a 20 minute, family friendly recipe using their Crispy Chicken, I had a moment of inspiration – I could make my very own buffet restaurant pancake experience, switching duck for chicken!

I know. Genius. View Post

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I remember once seeing a kebab pizza in Iceland. (The supermarket, not the country.) An actual pizza, with kebab toppings.

I guess in my head, that’s exactly what Iceland was all about – cheap frozen food, that perhaps wasn’t the most gourmet choice going. When I told people I was working with Iceland, reactions seemed to reflect a similar sentiment – raised eyebrows, Peter André jokes, comments about having to defrost my dinner, that sort of thing.

Oh how wrong I was!

I went along last week to an event with Iceland to have a sneak preview of their new autumn collection and my MIND WAS BLOWN.

Here’s the menu, which was created for us by Iceland’s head chef Neil Nugent, all using ingredients currently available at Iceland, or coming out in the autumn:

Iceland new autumn collection

YOU SEE??

That’s not what you expect from Iceland is it? I’d never even HEARD of a deep fried avocado, let alone tried one alongside a crab taco. In fact, I didn’t even know that frozen avocado was a THING, so that was a bit of a game changer. Safe to say I was pretty excited on the train up to London, looking forward to getting my mouth around a warm Welsh cake ice cream sandwich. View Post

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Can you believe it’s nearly FOUR WHOLE YEARS since I made my list of 40 things I want to do before I’m 40? It’s come around pretty quick hasn’t it? I’m 39 next week, which means I only have a year to finish the list.

If you click on the link you’ll see that I’ve updated the original post, and have so far completed 23 things on the list. Not too bad you might think, but the last 17 are rather on the expensive side – buy a house, get married, ride on the Orient Express, that sort of thing.

All totally doable in a year right?

*ARGH!*

To make me feel a little bit better about things, I thought I’d tackle one of the items that didn’t involve booking flights and cook a cheese soufflé.

I put ‘cook a soufflé’ on the list because it has always held a certain mystery for me. Soufflés are one of those things that are notoriously difficult to make, and they feel so grown-up. I don’t especially go in for dinner parties or anything, but if I did, I would be the envy of all the other dinner party hosts if I whipped out a soufflé to start.

It turns out though that soufflés are actually pretty easy, unless I just had beginners luck, so why not have a go and become a soufflé master? View Post

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Looking for a healthier way to eat conveniently? Read my Everdine review and get a £25 discount code* for your first Everdine order. (*It’s actually £25.20, which brings the cost of eight boxes down to just £30. Got to be worth a try for that surely?)

I must confess that I’ve not spectacularly leapt onto the ‘clean eating’ bandwagon. To me, clean eating means putting your toast and chocolate spread onto a clean plate rather than just brushing the crumbs off a plate you find beside the sink.

I don’t think that’s the standard definition though, and it’s certainly not how Everdine defines it.

Clean eating is actually about eating as much ‘real’ food as possible – food in its natural state, unprocessed and unrefined. It’s essentially about going back to basics and eating as nature intended. I think. Although it probably helps with the general ethos to have a clean plate as well,

Recognising my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to food preparation, I’ve been trying out a new food delivery scheme from a company called Everdine.

Everdine review discount View Post

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A couple of weeks ago I did a REALLY LOVELY THING. I went to the HelloFresh headquarters in London, made a terrarium of my very own and then drank champagne and ate the best dauphinoise potatoes I have ever tasted. (Seriously, they were so good. If you’re a fan then you definitely need to read on to find out more about the HelloFresh Easter box.)

Basically I got invited to spend a couple of hours doing my FAVOURITE THINGS.

It was awesome.

We started the fun with a tour of the HelloFresh offices from Patrick, Head Chef at HelloFresh. Their space, as you can imagine, is pretty cool. Imagine that Google did food, and had meetings in an indoor potting shed, just next to a massive library of vintage recipe books. It’s like that.

HelloFresh Head Chef

HelloFresh Head Chef View Post

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Looking for unusual smoothie recipes? I have four for you here, so read on…

Belle is definitely a creature of habit.

Everyday I wake her up at the same time, and then again ten minutes later, and again ten minutes later, until she finally manages to drag herself out of bed. Whilst she gets dressed I go downstairs and make her a smoothie, a sandwich for her packed lunch and get her out a multivitamin. Although I realise that she is perfectly capable of blending her own fruit, it makes me feel like I’ve ticked off ‘parenting’ for the day, and I can then go about my business with a clean conscience.

Her smoothie of choice is banana and strawberry, with a dash of Naturya lucuma powder, which she says tastes of apricots. I also slip in a little bit of liquid evening primrose oil in a bid to reign in her hormones, although I have to say I’ve not noticed the difference.

Belle is not impressed if I deviate from this and try out any unusual smoothie recipes.

I, on the other hand, love variety, which is why I love writing a blog for a living. In the last fortnight I’ve written about my pelvic floor, baked rice crispy cakes in Camden, riden around London in a Volvo watching TV, and made a terrarium in the Hello Fresh offices, all in the name of ‘work’.

Hahaha! Someone is definitely going to cotton on one day and make me get a job at the council.

But smoothies.

Smoothies are a super-duper way of getting a bit of variety into your diet. It’s dead easy to experiment with a smoothie, as you can just chuck in any damn thing you please. I’ve been having a play over the last week or so with the Breville Blend Active Pro personal blender. It’s one of those whizzy little blenders (quite literally), that act as a blender and flask in one. All you have to do in the morning, or before the gym, (ha!), is to pop your ingredients in the Blend Active Pro, whazz it up, and then pop on the lid. You’re good to go! View Post

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I had a rather fun day in London on Monday. In the afternoon I was driven around London while I got a sneaky look at the first episode of Big Little Lies, (read about it here), and in the morning I whipped up some Easter treats with the very lovely Olivia Wollenberg, founder of Livia’s Kitchen.

If there was ever a day when I felt incredibly lucky to make my living from blogging, then Monday was that day. (Also, having a whole box full of treats to share made me very popular with the film crew in the afternoon.)

Olivia has recently moved Livia’s Kitchen into a new kitchen office space near Camden. It’s Instagram heaven – lots of light streaming through big windows, white walls and cute kitchen gadgets. I was slightly nervous when I turned up, as Olivia is pretty successful, and I thought she might be scary, but she was anything but. As she told me the story of how she went from being a neuroscientist at Great Ormond Street to cooking up crumble in her parents’ kitchen, I think I may have fallen a little bit in love with her. She was just so genuine and warm and lovely – I want to buy all of her stuff now, just to make sure her business thrives.

Livia's Kitchen

Olivia’s approach to her business really resonated with me, as it felt so similar to my own. When I started my blog back in 2009, as a marketing tool to help establish myself as a journalist, I had no idea what I was doing. Literally no idea. I went into WHSmiths, wrote down loads of email addresses from magazines, and just emailed editors. View Post

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unusual frozen foods

Frozen foods get a bit of a bad name. If you’re my age – the Findus Crispy Pancake generation – you’d be forgiven for associating frozen foods with that cheap and cheerful kind of tea – fish fingers, chicken nuggets, that sort of thing.

Frozen foods have come a long way though since the ‘minced beef’ pancake of the 1980s and there are a lot of benefits to choosing frozen foods. Keeping a well stocked freezer saves you money, time and waste, and there are actually nutritional benefits too. You might not have thought about it, but the fact that food is frozen means they don’t need added preservatives, and so there are often fewer extra ingredients.

Take frozen mashed potato for instance. (Who knew that was a thing?) I picked a variety and looked at the ingredients – potato, butter, milk, salt and pepper. That’s it. Just like you would make at home.

Cool Cookery is on a mission to get people more excited about using frozen foods, so to inspire you, here are nine foods that a lot of people don’t even realise you can buy frozen and some tips on how to use them: View Post

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Kingsmill toast

Ahh!!! Toast.

Who doesn’t like a good piece of toast?

Toast is there for you through good times and bad. It’s cheap, it’s warm, it’s tasty – it’s everything you ever wanted in a snack. (And possibly a boyfriend, although probably not the cheap bit.)

I especially love toast because it makes me think of my Gran and Grandad. When I was little I used to spend quite a lot of time at their house, playing Monopoly with my Grandad and practising trigonometry with my Gran in the school holidays. (I was such a geek). Our meal of choice was tinned baked beans and sausages on toast.

I say ‘on toast’ but it was more ‘in between toast’. My Grandad and I would have two pieces of toast each, cut in half and arranged around the outside of the plate, making four walls for the baked beans and sausages in a steamy square in the middle of the plate. The toast was always just slightly overdone, which gave it a very particular smell. Thirty years on the smell of singed toast always takes me back to my Gran and Grandad’s dining table.

Kingsmill toast View Post

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food waste hacks

How do you feel when you throw away food? Is it a gut-wrenching, guilt-inducing event or do you not even notice? I tend to feel awful about waste in general, especially food waste. I’m forever going through the fridge, eating old bits of ham, just so as to make sure nothing goes in the bin.

Take last night for instance…

We are due a food shop, but I was loathe to buy new things when we had so many odd bits and pieces that needed using. I found a bagel which only had a tiny bit of mould on it, so I cut that off. There were four random, loose fish fingers in the freezer too – job done! Fish finger sandwich for Belle for tea.

Yum!

(Don’t tell her about the mould.)

The fact is though that a shocking SEVEN MILLION TONNES of food waste is generated by UK households every year and we need to do whatever we can to reduce this, even if it does mean scraping off the odd bit of mould. Naturally, there are also other ways to help. Eagle dumpster rental in reading can be a good service to model after. When you have to throw something away, you can rest assured that it will at least go to the right place

It’s interesting to think about the difference between my attitude to food waste and Belle’s. A new report from Sainsbury’s actually showed that a lot of the increase in food waste has to do with the change in attitudes between generations. Think about your parents or grandparents, living in the post war era. They wouldn’t have stocked the fridge with dozens of yogurts and raspberries, ‘just in case’, only to throw them away when they got to their use by dates would they? No way.

I haven’t lived in that era, but I have lived through times when money has been tight as a family, and I do attach value to food. Does Belle have that same awareness of the cost involved in producing, transporting, storing and consuming food? Probably not.

According to the Sainsbury’s report, which surveyed 5,000 people, the younger generations are much more likely to have a ‘live to eat’ attitude to food – with food as a pleasurable activity in itself. With this comes higher shopping bills and more food waste. Older generations however are more likely to ‘eat to live’ and have correspondingly lower grocery bills and less waste.

To try to tackle the food waste mountain in the UK, Sainsbury’s has invested £10million into its Waste less, Save more initiative, helping shoppers reduce the amount of food they waste at home. The Waste less, Save more initiative also aims to encourage families to pass down skills and knowledge from generation to generation, so that younger people are better equipped to keep food waste to a minimum.

In a bid then to help get your kids involved in reducing food waste, I’ve come up with 17 super cool food waste hacks designed not just to educate younger family members, but to show them that reducing food waste can actually be fun: View Post

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This dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe is inspired by my recent trip to Vietnam.

They have a lot of coconuts in Vietnam. We visited the Mekong Delta on day two, and went by boat to a tiny island where they make sweets out of coconut, grinding up the coconut and boiling it with sugar cane. We saw a lot of coconut based souvenirs too and, best of all, I got to drink a lot of coconut water. Pretty much everywhere you go you can order coconut water to drink, just like you might order a Coke – they just cut the top off a coconut and stick in a straw.

Not only does it taste amazing but it looks pretty cool too.

When Dole asked me if I wanted to try out their new frozen fruit packs then, I thought it might be fun to try and create a coconut smoothie recipe that you could actually drink out of a coconut, should you felt so inclined.

Pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

Of course you can just make it and have it in a glass like a normal person, but where would be the Instagrammable fun it that?! I realised too, when I came home and found myself ordering a massive cheese platter when out for lunch with a friend, that I pretty much ate no dairy in Vietnam, so I figured a dairy free smoothie recipe would fit well.

But first things first…

How to break a coconut in half

This was the challenge.

I’ve won coconuts at fairs before, but I’ve only ever eaten them by smashing them up with a hammer. You can’t display a smoothie just by pouring it over a smashed up coconut can you?

No.

I needed something a little more professional looking.

I watched a few YouTube videos and the best approach, should you not happen to have a circular saw lying around at home, (which I don’t), seemed to be to tap around the circumference of the coconut with a hammer. (Drain the coconut water out first, or you will make a mess.)

I did this for about three or four minutes and started to get worried as nothing was happening. I had bought three coconuts, just in case anything went wrong with the first one, but I didn’t especially want to fail at the first hurdle. I kept on tapping and lo and behold, just at the point when I was ready to throw it on the floor and stamp on it, a crack started to appear! I kept tapping, following the crack, and look what happened!

I felt pretty pleased with myself.

dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

Then the recipe – this is a piece of cake in comparison.

How to make a pineapple and coconut smoothie

It’s pretty straightforward to make a dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie, and the beauty of smoothie recipes is that you can be really flexible with them and adapt them according to personal taste or whatever you have in the fridge. For this recipe I used the following:

dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

I was making my smoothie just for me, so if you want to make it for more than one person you’ll need to scale up the quantities.

Start with a big dollop of coconut yogurt in the bottom of a regular sized Nutribullet cup. Add a good handful of Dole frozen pineapple chunks. The benefit of using frozen fruit, other than that you don’t end up with mouldy fruit in the fridge because you forget to use it, is that you don’t need to add ice – the frozen fruit thickens the smoothie up a little and makes it lovely and cold.

dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

Top up your cup to around the ‘max’ line with coconut drink. I used Koko dairy free but you could use whatever you like. You could even try using the liquid you drained out of your coconut earlier if you are going for the full tropical experience.

dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

Then just whizz it up!

Now is the fun bit. If you’re just going to drink it, like a regular person, then go ahead! It’s yummy isn’t it? I was worried about the balance between the pineapple and coconut flavours but I think this is just about perfect. The Dole frozen pineapple gives it a lovely fresh, clean flavour and chills it too. This would be lovely with a cheeky splash of rum.

If, like me, you prepare all your food and drink with the sole purpose of taking nice Instagram pictures, then now’s the time to pour your pineapple and coconut smoothie into your coconut. (If you’re using the half with the three holes then don’t forget to plug them with something. I used blutac. Please don’t take that as a recommendation.)

I decorated my pineapple and coconut smoothie with tropical straws and toasted a little bit of flaked coconut to garnish. I did this just by tossing the coconut in a dry frying pan for about five minutes.

Tada!

dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

 

How to win your own Nutribullet

If you’d like to win your own Nutribullet, so that you can easily whizz up a dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie whenever you fancy it, all you need to do is come up with your own easy smoothie recipe, inspired by your own travels. Take a picture of your smoothie and post it on Instagram with the hashtag #MYDOLESMOOTHIE.

I’ve posted about the competition here on my own Instagram, to inspire you:

It doesn’t have to be a super fancy recipe, just something that you love, and that makes you think of a favourite holiday or adventure. The winner will be chosen based on a combination of creativity, quality of photography and the story behind the recipe. The competition will close at midnight on 31st December, so you have the holidays to get creative. (Full T&Cs at the bottom of this post.)

Good luck!

Like the look of my dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe? Why not pin the image below for later?

dairy free pineapple and coconut smoothie recipe

Produced in association with Dole. 

 

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I’m a bit loathe to call this a recipe, as the whole point of bubble and squeak is to use up leftovers. I don’t want you to look in the fridge and think ‘Oh, I’ve only got two leftover sweet potatoes, so I definitely can’t make this…’

That’s really not the point.

I’ll just tell you what I did, and then you can copy it, or have a look in the fridge and switch in other ingredients. I’m cool with that.

So, food waste. I’m actually pretty good at this, mainly because I’m so slack at doing the shopping in the first place that I never have enough in the fridge for dinner, let alone for leftovers. Since I upgraded my phone though, and no longer have to delete Twitter just to take a photo, food waste has become a bit more of an issue. I’ve rediscovered the joy on online food shopping you see, which means I get all over excited and order loads of things for actual recipes. Then I remember that I’m only home one night in the next four, and wonder what I’m going to do with it all.

This afternoon for example I’m leaving work early to make four steak and ale pies for the freezer (never done that before) because I have all the ingredients but we are going to my mum’s for tea.

Sainsbury’s is on a bit of a mission to reduce food waste too, with their #WasteLessSaveMore initiative.

Households in the UK waste a mind blowing 15 million tonnes of food and drink every year. To bring this to life, that includes 5.8 million potatoes, almost 6 million glasses of milk and an astonishing 24 million slices of bread everyday!

Not only is this a huge problem for our environment, but families are throwing away money along with food. In fact, the average British family wastes £700 per year on food that could have been eaten, but is thrown away instead, that’s around £60 a month.

Sainsbury’s is passionate about helping families waste less, and save more, which is why they’ve invested £10 million in helping shoppers reduce food waste at home. A big part of that is helping families make better use of their leftovers – which is where you come in!

The website is definitely worth a look as it has some great recipes for using up leftovers, tips on freezing food properly – loads of useful stuff. I love the look of their eight winter salads, especially the beetroot one. I love a bit of beetroot.

You can make a start on reducing food waste and saving money by using your leftovers to make me twist on classic bubble and squeak…

How to make spicy sweet potato and spinach bubble and squeak

I started off with one large sweet potato, which had been cooked the day before. Sweet potato is less starchy than regular potatoes, so it works particular well when they are genuine leftovers and have had chance to dry out a bit. If you’re cooking them fresh, make sure to drain them really well. Mash the sweet potatoes up with a little bit of butter, salt and pepper. You won’t need to add any liquids.

I used ground cumin and garam masala to spice my sweet potatoes as these are my favourites. I went with a liberal sprinkle – maybe around half a teaspoon of each?

spicy sweet potato and spinach bubble and squeak recipe View Post

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