Back of the fridge 1: Chorizo and Roquefort Spaghetti

(Back of the fridge will be an occasional post on recipe concoctions from random ingredients – often the best way to invent new dishes).

Came up with this one tonight – a right mishmash of cultures with Italian, Spanish and French ingredients. Pretty tasty though and mainly constructed from ingredients which last a long time – so a great ‘Back of the fridge’:

Chop an onion (I used a red one, which probably will work best for something like this) and sauté it in a small amount of olive oil with some garlic. Chop up half a Chorizo sausage – worth taking the skin off of course – I find it easiest to cut down the length of the Chorizo just a little bit with the point of the knife and then peel it. Chuck the chopped Chorizo in, along with some chopped peppers (I always keep a bag of frozen chopped peppers in) and sauté it all together until nicely cooked. Cook some spaghetti and when it is done, drain it, chuck it in to the sauté mixture and stir it round to mix it. Scoop some out, chuck it on a plate and crumble just a little bit of roquefort (or similar – but the saltiness of roquefort really sets it off) over the top. A dash of my favourite ingredient chilli jam sets it off nicely.

Very tasty, and probably ten minutes including prep time – nice!

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Blueberry Muffins (dairy free)

My darling daughter made me a cake at school the other day. I got home, late-ish, from work to see a note saying ‘I love you’ and a little cake sitting on the kitchen table. Very sweet! I thanked her the next morning, only for her to say ‘It would have been for Mummy, but it has some butter in it so she couldn’t eat it’! Ah, the fickleness of kids!

Anyway, on with the recipes. For those who are kind enough to follow me on Twitter, I posted a photo and promised the recipe, so here goes. Before we start, I must make a full disclaimer – the base of the recipe is shamelessly plagiarised from Vegan Family. Here’s my version of it which delivers awesome blueberry muffins. I swear you would seriously never know these were dairy-free. Reckon it counts as one of your five a day?

Dairy free blueberry muffins

Dairy free blueberry muffins

 

Oven: 180C

Makes 12 decent sized muffins, so you probably want a muffin tray with 12 holes for this! Iris loves putting the little paper cases in, although we do sometimes end up with more than one per hole.

300g self-raising flour

100g sugar

1 teaspoon of bicarb

Mix that lot together in a big bowl, make a volcano shape out of it and then chuck in the wet stuff:

200ml sunflower oil

200ml milk substitute – I use rice milk which works perfectly. Almond milk gives a bit of a denser texture for some reason. I guess you could use real milk, but then it wouldn’t be vegan!

A good glug of vanilla essence (technically probably most of a tablespoon but I love vanilla so be generous)

Once that’s all mixed up and a lovely texture, chuck some blueberries in (rinse them first and make sure there aren’t any stalks attached). Your call on how many you put in – Iris decided when we made them that about 3/4 of a punnet was right, and that worked out pretty well. Give it a stir to mix and use a couple of spoons to get it into the muffin cases. Bake in the middle of your oven for about 12 minutes…

Try it, and let me know what you think….