Yeung chow fried rice 🍚

Another pinch of nom recipes, this tastes amazing!

I love using up left overs to make a new meal and this is perfect to use the last bits of my honey and mustard glazed ham!

Considering Mr H is not a fan of rice dishes he loves this one.

• 150g pork loin strips
• 200g rice
• 1 beaten egg
• 100g frzen peas
• Sliced spring onions
• 1 carrot cut in thin strips
• 100g cooked ham
• 100g cooked Prawns
• 1tbsp soy sauce

Cook the rice and allow to cool. Heat a wok and scrable the egg then put to one side

Wipe the wok add oil, add pork on high heat and fry for 5min. Add peas. Spring onion, ham carrot and Prawns and fry 1 minute

Add the rice, egg and soy and fry til rice is heated then serve and enjoy

Eggs Benedict

This is my take on eggs benedict just without the muffin. Mr H loves asparagus so as soon as it’s in season he eats it with anything.

I though I’d do a brunch using his beloved asparagus and did eggs benedict. I’ve mastered the art of poached eggs and I’m getting the hang of hollandaise now too!

I was quite impressed with the end result, Parma ham, asparagus, poached egg and hollandaise 😁

A trip to the local farmer’s market!

I love a trip to our local farmer’s market at Stokesley . I always want to buy everything but then realise I won’t find time to cook it!

The sausages we bought are actually from pigs reared just a couple of miles from home. I always admire the saddleback pigs as I pass, soon to be on my plate!

Wild mushrooms were for my fricassee of wild mushrooms, cabbage for Sunday lunch, duck eggs for any occasion and dried wild mushrooms for later. The scotch egg was just amazing and I will buy more next time. The cheese is just to eat! 🧀

Best beef burger ever! 🍔

I know it’s often said that burgers are best with a mix of beef and pork mince, however, I prefer beef as it’s less fatty. I know burgers are cheap enough to buy but if I make my own I know exactly what’s in it and with a great local butcher I know where my meat is from too!

A good burger is so easy to make, I add an onion and mixed herbs to the minced beef and flatten them into patties and grill them, also using the healthier option of brown buns. This burger was less healthy with the addition of a fried egg, bacon and cheese. Although it did have tomato and lettuce!

Breakfast for Tea!

Mr H loves a good old English breakfast. I’m not so keen, I’m never hungry enough on a morning. So while we were meal planning, he suggested we have this for evening meal one night. It didn’t sit right with me but by adding chips it was perfect for tea! It will feature on our meal planner in the future.

Omlette

You know that feeling when you look in the fridge and there’s nothing there to eat, that! Look again, if you’ve got eggs, you’ve got a meal with bits and bobs from the fridge.

Mr Hyde loves a good omelette so my attitude is if it’s in the fridge it’s in the omelette! It always turns out great 😊

Dippy Egg and Soldiers

Who doesn’t remember having dippy eggs for breakfast as a kid? I remember my dad always had two. He would eat them both then turn one upside down and offer it to me as a full egg, as you can imagine when I went to take the top off the egg was empty and I’d be so shocked as how that could happen.

Sometimes, it just has to be a dippy egg.  When you can’t quite manage a full English or there’s nothing much in the cupboards, a dippy egg it is!

So many people say how hard it is to get a good dippy egg.  It’s simple, boil the water (add a bit of vinegar to stop the egg from cracking), once its boiling add the egg and take out after 5 minutes!

I like to serve it in my retro Garfield egg cup with good old fashioned soldiers!

Cadbury’s Cream Egg

With Easter looming and the shops stacked with chocolate I recently bought a Cadbury’s Creme Egg.  It seemed smaller than they used to be and certainly didn’t taste the same.   After a quick check on social media I found that I wasn’t the only one to think this. Apparently Cadbury’s no longer use Dairy Milk for the eggs as they used to.

After my disappointment faded, I happened to catch a glimpse of a television programme making a copy of the original Cadbury’s creme egg. I egg-citedly (sorry, couldn’t help it!) checked on-line for the recipe then realised I had no egg moulds.   The joy of eBay meant that one landed on my doorstep within a few days.  I’ve adapted the ITV recipe as their eggs were quite large and my moulds are around the size of the Cadbury’s ones.

 

makes 5

Ingredients:

 

150g Cadbury’s Dairy Milk
25g sugar
25g water
100g white fondant icing
Yellow or orange food colouring

Method:

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over boiling water.  the original recipe said to temper the chocolate but my moulds have a pattern so I didn’t deem it necessary.  Pour the chocolate in the mould, leave it for a few minutes, pour out any excess and place it in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile put the sugar and water in a saucepan and dissolve until syrup.   Grate 3/4 of the fondant icing and add to the syrup.  mix the remaining icing with food colouring for the yolk.

Fill each shell half with cooled white fondant then a dollop of yellow for the yolk and stick the two halves together with a little melted chocolate.

These are much cheaper to make than to buy, you could always put them in a cellophane bag with a ribbon as a gift!

Sausage and Egg Muffin

I love pintrest and often find new food ideas on there. I noticed a version of a McDonald’s breakfast and decided I had to try it! I only saw the picture not the recipe but thought it should be fairly simple so I tried it yesterday and Wow!

It was surprisingly simple to make so I made a couple of extra ones. These have been frozen and I will defrost the night before I want them and heat them in the microwave, a great breakfast to take into work.

Thinking of what they are, I reckoned an easy way to replicate would be to buy muffins, sausage meat, cheese and eggs. The muffin pack consisted of four muffins so that was how many I would make!

After I made them I realised I’d probably only used half of the ingredients I bought so I worked out if I had bought two packs of muffins rather than one including the pack of 8 pork sausages, 10 cheese slices I bought in Aldi and the fresh farm eggs in the cupboard, the whole lot of 8 sausage and egg muffins worked out at £4.16 which is 52p each! A significant saving of the cost at the restaurant and just as convenient!

Fresh farm eggs are always superior to shop bought eggs and a guarantee that they are genuine free range eggs. Always a better chance of getting a double yolker and the colour of the yolks are much more natural.

Ingredients for 8 make ahead muffins

2 x four muffins
1 pack of 8 pork sausages
Pinch of salt and pepper
8 fresh eggs
Pack of cheese slices

Method

Half the muffins and toast them, remove the meat of one sausage, add salt and pepper and shape onto a patty equivalent or slightly larger than the muffin. Grill both sides of the patty until browned, place on top of the muffin, add a slice of cheese. Fry the eggs in a metal ring again to comply with the size of the muffins. Once cooked add onto the cheese, put the top of the muffin on and there you go!

Once cooled wrap in parchment paper and pop in the freezer. When you want them, take them out to defrost overnight and put them in the microwave to reheat for 1and a half minutes!

Homemade Hollandaise

After a a lazy morning watching James Martin on Satuday kitchen (hey, you gotta have one secret addiction!) I decided to try out his Hollandaise sauce although I’ve never even tried it.
As I’d had a bad bag of asparagus from asda the other day, I’d returned it, got a full refund and a replacement product so had some hanging around, I thought I’d better use it.  I decided we would have asparagus, poached eggs and Hollandaise sauce.
Poached eggs are also something I’d not made before, and just to test me even more I was making them in advance and reheating them for the hubby coming in from football.  I cooked them in boiling water for two minutes then placed them in a bowl of iced water and popped them in the fridge until I needed them.

I gathered together the few ingredients for the hollandaise, surprisingly I had all of them and didn’t have to substitute any for a change, and started my masterpiece. It was so simple, egg yolks, melted butter and white wine vinegar in the blender and there was my sauce! I naughtily (I blame James Martin) cooked my asparagus in butter, popped the eggs in boiling water for a minute, then placed on top of the asparagus, added the sauce and a sprinkle of crispy bacon bits and spring onions and voila!

The end result!

 

Ingredients:
12 asparagus spears, trimmed

25g butter

1 tbsp white wine vinegar

4 eggs
For the hollandaise sauce:

2 egg yolk

2 tsp lemon juice

2tsp white wine vinegar
Place the asparagus in plenty of boiling water for 3-5 minutes (depending on the thickness of the spears).
Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and add the vinegar and make a whirlpool. Crack an egg in the middle and simmer for 2-3minutes, remove and either keep warm to serve immediately or if making in advance, place in iced water in the fridge (place in boiling water for one minute when ready to serve). Repeat with the other eggs.

Make the hollandaise by putting egg yolk, lemon juice and vinegar into a blender. Slowly pour in the melted butter and it’s ready.
Place half the spears of asparagus on the plate then top with 2 poached eggs. Spoon on the hollandaise sauce and serve.