Oxo Butternut Squash and Coconut Milk Soup

Oxo is pretty much a store cupboard staple for me – I always have Oxo cubes and use them in all sorts of recipes. Recently I’ve come across Knorr stock pots and branched out a bit, so was pleased to be sent a selection of Oxo stock pots to try recently – and they even threw in an Oxo cookery book!

Oxo is an iconic brand in the UK and has been around pretty much forever. Did you know that Oxo was invented in the 1840s after a German chemist developed meat extract? And as official sponsor of the 1908 London Olympics, Oxo supplied marathon runners with fortifying drinks of Oxo (I can’t quite imagine drinking beef broth while running a marathon but never mind!). In the First World War, soldiers were given Oxo cubes in their ration kits.

The company has now launched three flavours of stock pots, which I would describe as a sort of concentrated gel. They are: garden vegetables with parsley and bay; beef with onion and rosemary; and chicken with garlic and thyme. They also do a range called ‘herbs and more’ of flavours like lemon and thyme, which are not stock but ‘flavour pots’, which I’d also like to try. The stock pots sell for around £1 for 4 from major supermarkets.

My only criticism is that once you open the pot, you have to use the whole thing – you could probably refrigerate the rest for a day or two, but as I only cook for one or two people, I often cut a traditional stock cube in half, wrap the other half back up and put it back in the box, and you can’t really do that with the stock pots. They do however add a real depth of flavour; you don’t have to boil a kettle and wait for the stock cube to resolve, as you can add them straight to a pan to melt. You do still need to add water or some other liquid (tinned tomatoes perhaps) as the flavour is quite concentrated.

They are really easy to use though and definitely gave a nice flavour to my recipe.

I was working from home one day just after they arrived so flicked through the Oxo cookery book and found something I could make from store cupboard ingredients: a spicy butternut squash soup with coconut milk. Be warned, it does have quite a kick from the coconut milk alone (so you could perhaps miss out the chilli).

To serve 4, you need:

1 tbsp olive oil

1 onion, chopped

1 small piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped

½ red chilli, finely chopped

900g butternut squash, peeled and diced (seeds discarded)

1 Oxo Garden Vegetables with Parsley and Bay stock pot, made up with 500ml boiling water

400ml coconut milk, reserving 2 tbsp to serve

1 tbsp chopped fresh coriander to serve

Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add the onion, ginger, chilli and garlic, and fry for five minutes until softened. Add the butternut squash, stock and all but the 2 tbsp of coconut milk you are reserving.

Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes or until the squash is cooked.

Blend in a blender until smooth (you may need to do this in batches). Serve in bowls with half a tbsp. of coconut milk swirled on the top and sprinkle with the chopped coriander.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 12

It's going to be a really busy week when I won't be home for many meals...

Monday
In Edinburgh on a training course, with a very early start and lunch and dinner provided

Tuesday
In Edinburgh on a training course with lunch provided then dinner in my hotel as I'm staying on for an extra day

Wednesday
Shadowing another team at my company's head office in Edinburgh (I do a similar but different job in London); will have lunch in the staff canteen and dinner will be at the airport

Thursday
Home in Surrey at last! There won't be much fresh food in the house though so will do something simple from the freezer like sausage and chips

Friday
Teriyaki salmon balls with ginger-pineapple rice from Inspiralized for me; something different from the freezer for the other half who doesn't eat any of that!

Saturday
Lunch fresh pasta and garlic bread
Dinner The beef pie I was going to make last week but didn't

Sunday
Lunch - with my parents - off to Wiltshire as my wedding venue has a wedding fayre; we've already booked everything but I want to show my parents around and where everything will be on the day
Dinner - not sure what time I will be home so either something on route or from the freezer

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Easter Mini Egg Ombre Pinata Cake

Making something very elaborate for a bake off at work is hard when you have to finish it on a weeknight after work and transport it by train and bus into the office. I thought about making essentially the same cake as last year's winning entry again, but with mini eggs – I still intend to do this, but thought it was a bit of a cop-out for the bake off as it was really just the same thing I’d done last time. As I won last time I also thought the judges wouldn’t award first prize to the same cake again – forgetting that last time the bake off was a departmental one, and this time was sort of company-wide (being held in 4 of our largest offices at the same time), with different judges who wouldn’t have seen my malteser cake!
 

By the time I’d remembered that I’d already decided to make something else though, that didn’t actually take that long to make and wouldn’t be too fragile to transport. I came across a brilliant Easter ombre piñata cake on Taming Twins, and essentially just copied that. So I’m not going to reproduce Sarah’s recipe and instead suggest you hop on over to her site; she’s even done a video showing you just how you get the mini eggs inside.

I did take a few photos as I went along the way, so you can see how the cake came together and how I coloured each layer.

Adding food colouring to the cake batter and baking each layer:

Make a hole in two layers of cake cutting around something like a glass or an egg cup

Place a complete layer of cake on the bottom, spread with buttercream, then do the same with the two layers with holes in, and pour Cadbury Mini Eggs into the hole until the top is level. Then place the fourth complete layer of cake on top, with more buttercream in between each layer.

I mixed the same three colours (as one layer of the sponge is its natural colour) with some buttercream and spread it around the side of the cake, one colour at a time. It doesn't matter if the layers of icing are that neat, because you then take a spatula and spread the buttercream so it's even, blending the edges into each other.

Finally I put the cake on a board I had covered with fondant, where I'd stuck a yellow polka-dot ribbon around the edge which I bought from Fantastic Ribbons, which I thought was quite appropriate for Easter. I then spooned my remaining buttercream on top and fixed on a little heap of Mini Eggs.

I didn't know what the inside was going to look like until the judges at the bake off cut it open, so it was quite nerve-racking. It looked great the Mini Eggs spilled out and the other bakers were very impressed. However, the judges said I hadn't used enough buttercream between each layer which made the cake a bit dry, so I didn't win this time. I will have to come up with something better for the bake-off next year….

I'm sharing this with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabber UK, as her theme this month is Sport Relief and this cake was made for a Sport Relief bake sale.

I'm also sending it to Simply Eggcellent, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen; the cake uses quite a lot of eggs and of course the Mini Eggs are the star!

Another challenge I can enter this in is Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at the Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as their theme this month is Easter and Spring.

And finally because it's Easter, I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

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Spiralized Butternut Squash with Prawns and Mascarpone

I realised I hadn’t used my spiralizer for a few weeks and was inspired to get it out again by this recipe from Ros at A Twirly Whirly Blog.

 

It was absolutely delicious and something that I would definitely make again. You do need to oven cook the spiralized veg for about ten minutes so it was good that I had the oven on anyway to make dinner for my fiancé (I’m never going to get him to eat spiralized veg!).

 

I altered the recipe a little as I don’t like mushrooms and didn’t have any spinach (as I don’t like it much either). I was going to add in some broccoli but realised I had run out, so there was nothing green in my dish in the end. It probably would have benefited from some extra green veg but it’s still a vegetable-based meal and was very filling.

 

I spiralized half a butternut squash – as it’s a chunky veg it is quite filling. I laid out the pieces on a roasting tin lined with foil and drizzled with a little oil, and baked it in the oven for ten minutes.

 

Meanwhile I fried half a chopped onion with some chopped bacon – I didn’t have any pancetta either but did have bacon and prawns in the freezer, so this was a good meal to make without having to buy any extra ingredients. I stirred in some mascarpone cheese so it would melt, added the prawns (already cooked) and the butternut squash and stirred it all through. You can sprinkle the dish with grated parmesan as Ros did, but I think it’s perfectly nice without – and if you are counting calories, a little bit of mascarpone in the sauce is probably enough.

I'm sharing this via my Spiralizer Saturday challenge - please link up any spiralizer recipes!

 

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Tattered Lace Especially for You Pink Sparkle Card

Among the Tattered Lace dies that I received for Christmas (and then bought a few more of in the January sale) was this beautiful ‘especially for you’ die. It’s very pretty but what I didn’t realise is that it’s quite large; if you use it on a small card (this one is 6x6) there isn’t room for much else. But I didn’t just want to use the die cut on its own.

My Sizzix die cutter

I made the ‘especially for you’ die cut in pink, and realised it wouldn’t stand out on a pink card so used a cream coloured one instead. I had an off cut from a border which I stuck on the right hand side of the card, and used another die in my machine to cut out the shape of a butterfly, which I overlapped over the bottom of the ‘especially for you’ die.

It still looked quite one-dimensional so I decided to add some sparkle with tiny pink gems, which I dotted about the die cut and on the butterfly. Finally I added a little pink bow in the bottom right corner.

This is quite a girly card and I think one that my friend’s 7-year old daughter might appreciate more than the adults!

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Brush embroidery: a step-by-step guide

Last year I signed up for a wedding cake decorating course at Sutton College of Learning for Adults (SCOLA) – I’d already done a brilliant one at South Thames college where I decorated these cakes.

 

 

When I saw a course at SCOLA, which is actually my local college, that was aimed at an intermediate level I thought it would be a great way to practice and gain new skills. And then I got engaged and decided I was going to partly make and decorate my own wedding cake, so hoped the course would come in very handy!

 

In the first session we covered brush embroidery, though I was a little disappointed overall. I have done this before and think that what we did at South Thames college was much better – both in terms of the design but also the fact that at South Thames, we covered a dummy cake with sugarpaste and did the brush embroidery on the cake itself, whereas at SCOLA, we did it on a covered cake board. I think doing it vertically is harder and looks a lot better than doing it horizontally and I wasn’t particularly proud of how it turned out.

 

Brush embroidery can look very pretty. You use royal icing – which can easily be made from regular icing sugar and egg white. We were advised to use egg white powder as it’s safer; you can buy packets of albumen or meriwhite – a powdered egg white substitute – from cake decorating shops, but as I only needed a small quantity and wasn’t sure I had time to order online, so I bought some Dr Oetker egg white powder from Sainsbury’s. You can buy boxes of royal icing sugar which you just need to mix with water, as there is egg white powder in it already, but my cake decorating tutor said it doesn’t dry quite as hard and while it’s convenient and good if you only need a small amount, for decorating a wedding cake she would always make her own.

The tutor provided us all with a template of a rose, which we were instructed to copy onto tracing paper and then to trace onto the covered cake board. I asked what we would do if it was going onto a cake to be eaten – I’ve been told before you can’t put pencil on real cakes, and instead have to do a very slow, painstaking process of marking out the pattern with a pricking tool. So I was surprised when my tutor said a small amount of pencil on a cake was fine – and I’ve since read online (eg on the Paul Bradford Sugarcraft School website) that using pencil on cake is perfectly safe. I’d be careful to make sure the pencil isn’t visible though – if you were serving the cake and someone could see the pencil marks they might worry! Other options would be using an edible ink pen, or using a cutter to make an impression on the fondant before it hardens – though I know you won’t always have a cutter in the shape of the design you want!

 

We folded our own piping bags which is hard to explain but very useful if you are able to do this (a lot cheaper than buying piping bags, and the disposable plastic piping bags I use for buttercream are far too big for royal icing work). We coloured some royal icing by spreading it onto a tile (just a regular bathroom tile) with a palette knife which was an interesting technique I hadn’t done before, and worked well.

 

You don’t need a nozzle in your piping bag, just snip off the end so you have a very small opening and can pipe a fine line. We followed the outlines of the rose which were numbered so you start from the outside and work in – apparently this helps give more of a 3D effect but I didn’t really notice it. They key to getting the brush embroidery right is to only do one line at a time. Royal icing dries very quickly and if you piped the outline of this whole flower, you would find the icing had dried before you could do anything.

 

So here’s what you do: pipe a line, and then take a small artist’s paintbrush and gently brush the icing inwards. Try to keep the edge of the line intact and brush from the middle – it’s not easy when you have a thin line but it looks better this way. When you’ve finished, pipe the next line and repeat.

 

 

I didn’t really like what I did for two reasons: firstly, when I mixed my green royal icing it was a bit thick so I added some drops of water, but added too much. You can see from where I piped the stem of the rose that the icing was a little too runny which means it filled the narrow stem without me being really able to do any brushing. Secondly, I think the template is too big – the outline of the petals are so large that you are barely able to see any of the brush embroidery and it’s mainly white space.

 

I think this cake looks a lot better where we did very small flowers (incidentally, we embossed these by using a patchwork cutter before the fondant set) – and I also think it looks better in white on a white cake, even though it’s harder to see from a distance. It looks more elegant and intricate and for me just has a better overall effect. Still, it was good to be able to practice brush embroidery again and has given me some ideas for what I can do on my own wedding cake!

 

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Restaurant review: Meatliquor, Islington

Several years ago I found myself queuing on the stairs of a disused east London pub, waiting for two hours to get inside a pop-up burger joint – and once inside, waiting two hours for my food. This was the last days of #Meateasy, a burger joint that started as a van called the Meatwagon. Moving around locations in London – largely in Peckham car parks as this was before the days of the streetfood markets – the Meatwagon’s reputation grew until it was almost legendary.

Sadly, the burger van was stolen, but without this turn of events we probably wouldn’t have the restaurant chain that we have today. The owner, Yianni Papoutsis, moved instead in early 2011 to the upstairs room of a pub in New Cross Gate that was closed for refurbishment. If memory serves, it was there for a few months, then had to close when the pub re-opened. At that point, nobody knew what was happening next – was this the end of Meateasy? So their final night – advertised on social media as the last hurrah as even the owners themselves didn’t seem to know if they would be able to reopen – was busy, and I mean busy.

Dead Hippie and fries

My friend Geoff was a huge fan and loyal customer, and as I still hadn’t visited Meateasy by the time it announced it was closing, he took me on one of the last nights. He knew his way around which was a relief – and as we spent literally hours queuing, kept persuading me it would be worth it.

Once inside, I took in the dive bar décor, the menu scrawled on the wall behind the bar, the food that was served on paper plates and the music so loud you could hardly hear yourself speak. I ordered the Dead Hippie burger- which I’d heard had become something of a cult – and it was messy, juicy, artery-clogging, delicious. It’s a double cheeseburger with a secret sauce – so secret that in their cookery book-cum-autobiography, the recipe is blacked out so you can’t read it.

Yes, that’s right – it’s gone from the Meatwagon burger van to a pop-up dive (Meateasy) to a chain with its own cookery book which you can buy on Amazon.

Dead Hippie up close

Meatliquor opened in 2012 in a permanent location in the west end. By then, there were other ‘dirty burger’ chains opening in London, making me wonder if Meatliquor was still all that special. I took my boyfriend as he hadn’t been before; we went early after work and managed to get in without waiting, but when we came out there was a queue. The restaurant was grungy, noisy, and a good representation of the restaurant’s roots. I can’t remember all that much more about it as several years have since elapsed; it was the last time I ate there as I don’t like restaurants where you can’t either book or walk straight in, and there were plenty of other burger places I wanted to try (Patty and Bun, Shake Shack and Five Guys, to name just a few).

Fast forward four years and I was working late at a supplier’s office in Islington. As it was gone 8pm by the time that I left and it takes me nearly two hours to get home from there (welcome to London) I always grab something to eat before I leave. I was really excited to find a Five Guys on nearby Upper Street (I was introduced to the chain by an American boss and love it) so have eaten there a couple of times over the past six months or so, and have also tried a couple of other places. This time, I’d gotten off the bus on my way there in the morning a stop late – as the bus stop I wanted was closed – so I was further up the street than I’d normally go. As I walked back down, I did a double take – a branch of Meatliquor!

Looking at the website, I see the chain now has branches by slightly different names – I’m not sure what the difference is: a Meatmarket in Covent Garden, a Meatmission in Brixton and also a Chickenliquor in Brixton – which only serves chicken or chicken burgers, and surprisingly has a vegetarian option of a halloumi burger. I say surprising, because when I first went to Meateasy I’m sure I remember a fairly derogatory sign implying that vegetarians were in the wrong place! Even now, in the west end Meatliquor restaurant, the (small) vegetarian section of the menu is referred to as rabbit food.

Inside the restaurant

              

But I’m not a vegetarian and by the end of my long day at work I was ready for a burger. The Islington outpost is set back from Upper Street in an old garage; you have to walk down a small alley to get there which starts to build the atmosphere. Inside is even more grungy than I remember, with red graffiti on the walls – and the passageway to the toilets has to be seen to be believed. It was actually quite creepy!

I also spotted a photo booth against one wall, and on the menu tickets to operate the photo booth were listed at £3 each – so if you love your burger that much you can commemorate the moment perhaps!

With the graffiti, the loud music, the messy food (complete with rolls of kitchen paper on each table) this isn’t somewhere I would come for a date – but that’s because I’m a 30-something City worker who prefers slightly more refined dining! The place was busy with people of all ages (including a small girl of about three, which was a bit random). I only wanted a quick meal and didn’t want to spend too much, so nice as the cocktails and milkshakes sounded, I decided to stick with a coke – this didn’t seem the sort of place you would order a diet coke! I also decided to have a Dead Hippie burger as I couldn’t even remember what they were like.

The burger was described as two ‘mustard-fried beef patties’ with minced onions, cheese, pickles and lettuce with their mysterious Dead Hippie sauce. It’s not quite so big that I can’t finish the burger but not far off. The bun surprisingly didn’t go soggy either given how much the burger was practically dripping. I couldn’t decide if I actually enjoy the Dead Hippie more than I would just a normal cheeseburger – the sauce didn’t make my tastebuds explode, and wasn’t as tangy as something like burger sauce, but it definitely added something to the meal.

the corridor to the toilets!

The staff were surprisingly polite – I saw surprising, because the décor makes me think they would be deliberately rude or at least a bit rough and ready – but they were very friendly and when I asked about the cookery book advertised at the back of the menu, they brought me a copy to read while I waited for my food. I decided that since my fiancé hadn’t been able to come to Meatliquor with me, I would bring Meatliquor to him so bought him the book to take home.

If you’ve never been to Meatliquor or one of their outposts, you must try it once. Whether you go back again for the grungy atmosphere, the extensive booze list or the Dead Hippie is up to you.

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