FoodCocktail - Stories to tell and recipes to share

Breakfast idea with cucumber and feta cheese bites

January 25, 20131 comment

As you may see from the photo, this isn’t an actual recipe.

The thing is that there are so many mornings when I wake up and I’m super hungry but I have no idea what I want to idea. I’m not very good at planning meals so sometimes I open the fridge and just stare. And stare… and continue staring. But nothing magic happens most of the times.

But today I woke up knowing exactly what I wanna have for breakfast. And for me breakfast is very important, because I just can’t start my day right unless I take my dose of energy from this very first meal. I don’t drink coffee, I don’t smoke, so I don’t have anything else to give me a kick. Also, my mom “trained” me from when I was little to always eat in the morning, “Never skip breakfast” she kept saying, so that’s how I am today.

Okay.

cheese-and-cucumbers-breakfast

Cucumber and feta cheese bites

So today I woke up craving cucumbers and cheese. And I took a french baguette, I sliced it, then each slice I cut in half again. I placed a nice slice of cucumber over the bread and then I topped it with a small piece of feta cheese. Small cucumber and feta cheese bites. Simple and quick. And healthy. That’s a bonus.

Have a great weekend folks!

Oatmeal raisin cookies

January 22, 2013Comments: 2

Okay, so I think I may have a small obsession with oatmeal!I confess, so please don’t judge me! I love the chewiness oatmeal brings to cookies and I’m quite determined in using it as much as I can in the future.

Otherwise, I’ve been eating a lot of salads lately, nothing special or out of the ordinary so I’m having a tough time blogging about food, when I keep eating the same things every day. Sometimes this happens to me, I get hung up on a certain dish or pair of shoes and that’s all I want and need for a few weeks, until I get so bored with it that I don’t want to eat it or wear it for at least one whole year.

Does that happen to you too?

ingredients-for-oatmeal-raisin-cookies

About these oatmeal raisin cookies: they are quick to make, it takes about 5 minutes to prepare your ingredients and another 5 to mix all the ingredients. If you don’t like raisins you can easily substitute them with any dried fruit, just cut the fruits in smaller pieces if you use something like dried strawberries or apricots.

batter-for-oatmeal-raising-cookies

After mixing all the ingredients the results will be in the form of big crumbles, but if you take some in you hand and squeeze it will stick together and it will be easy to shape. Then just place the dough balls on the baking tray and flatten them with you hands. Easy business, what did I tell you?

oatmeal-raisin-cookies

Happy baking folks!

Sweet steak sauce with apricot jam and brandy

January 17, 20131 comment

This sauce is something that we tried a while ago, but then forgot about it. This week we had a big piece of pork meat – for us a 1,3 lb chunk of meat is big – and while I was thinking of ways to prepare it, this sauce came to my mind.

sweet-steak-sauce

My boyfriend is nuts about steaks served with a sweet sauce, so I thought he deserved something to his taste, after he has done most of the work involved for these toffee apple pies.

We usually use a lot of sweet chilli sauce but this time I wanted to make the sauce myself, since it’s easy and quick if you don’t make the mistakes I made. So listen close my friends.

steak-sauce-with-apricot-jam

Here are some tips:

Prepare the sauce in a sauce pan! Doh! I prepared my sauce in a non stick pan and then I needed to transfer everything to the blender.
Use a hand blender! I don’t know what I was thinking when I transferred my sauce from the pan to my Kenwood blender which is huge and just couldn’t do anything with such a small amount. So I had to transfer everything again and use the hand mixer and I lost a lot of the sauce from all these mistakes. So I’m telling you again, do yourself a world of good and use a sauce pan and a hand blender.

steak-sauce-with-brandy

Sweet steak sauce with apricot jam and brandy

Ingredients

1 onion, diced

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp apricot jam

3 tbsp brandy

1 tsp Dijon mustard

salt

white pepper

In a sauce pan, heat the olive oil and cook the onion for 2-3 minutes. Then add the apricot jam and the brandy and let it simmer for another 2 minutes. Finally, add the mustard and the salt and pepper (not too much if you also have some seasoning on your steak also) and remove from the heat. Puree the sauce in the pan using a hand blender.

Reserve and when you need it, just brush in on the steak that’s already almost cooked and let it in the oven uncovered for another 10 minutes, then serve.