OK, so no points for my woeful iPhone photography on this one, but trust me it was rather delicious, and took under 30 minutes to make. Weeknight dinner score!

Lemon Chicken

1. Take 2-3 chicken breasts and cut into thirds
2. whisk an egg in a bowl, coat chicken with egg
3. cover chicken in flour after the egg
4. put oil in a pan, wait until it’s really hot, drop in all the chicken at once
5. brown both sides while keeping the heat high
6. after brown, pour out any excess oil (leave a little) and then add 1 glass water with chicken stock cube
7. squeeze 3 or 4 lemons into the pan
8. put lid on, simmer on medium for about 10 minutes
9. turn down heat and turn chicken over. Let sauce reduce and thicken

Serve with cous cous and quickly sauteed broccoli, zucchini and peppers.

I’m a week and a half into my Australian summer christmas holiday. It took a few days to get into the vacation vibe; but now I’m waking early, baking & listening to music, swimming at the beach, napping, hanging with the fam & watching tonnes of movies. Christmas in the sunshine is great!

So the title of  this post was a bit of an excuse to post some pictures of the newest member of our family – little Caio. He’s 10 months old and it was hilarious fun snapping him mid bawling! he’s actually a really happy kid, more like the photo below. way too cute!

So, on to the recipes! when I visit my mums, I always bake up a storm. This time, the favorites by far were the cranberry & macadamia cookies and the apple cinnamon muffins. Recipes below.

CRANBERRY & MACADAMIA COOKIES

ingredients
- 2 cups plain flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup butter, melted
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups (chopped if needed) macadamia nuts
- 1 1/2 cups dried cranberries

directions

1. preheat oven to 190c (375f)
2. in a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking soda & salt and set aside
3. Beat together the melted butter, brown sugar, white sugar. Beat in the egg, then beat in the vanilla
4. gradually add the flour mixture to the sugar mixture, until just moistened. stir in the macadamia nuts and cranberries by hand
5. roll into tablespoon size balls and drop onto a greased or lined baking sheet, and press down the cookie dough with a fork to flatten (but not too much!). sprinkle with brown sugar if desired
6. bake 12-15 minutes or until edges look golden brown. cool on baking tray for 5 minutes before transferring to a rack

APPLE CINNAMON MUFFINS

ingredients
- 2 cups plain flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups chopped apples
- 1/3 cup brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon plain flour
- 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon butter

directions

1. preheat oven to 190c (375f). grease muffin tin or put paper cups in tin
2. in a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda & salt and set aside
3. Beat together the butter, sugar and the eggs until smooth. mix in the vanilla
4. stir in apples and gradually blend in the flour mixture & spoon into muffin cases, filling almost to top
5. in a small bowl, mix brown sugar, flour and cinnamon. cut in the butter until mixture is like coarse crumbs. sprinkle over tops of mixture in muffin pan
6. bake 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until toothpick inserted in the centre of a muffin comes out clean. allow to sit for 5 minutes before removing muffins from the pan. cool on a wire rack.

yet another gf bbq has been and gone and as usual – was good times! on the cooking side, i’d wrestled with the idea of making a pavlova for aages but was always afraid something would go wrong… it somehow seems too easy to mess it up. but, i’d been eating lovely peaches for a few weeks (they’re in season and super sweet!) and i saw a recipe for a peach melba pav and decided. it was time. check out the photo – it was gorgeous!

Peach melba pavlova

GF BBQ peeps

And finally, i just wanted to share this recipe that’s been on high rotation lately. i love it because it takes about 10 minutes to prepare, it makes you feel good ‘cos it’s healthy, and even my little brother liked it (after saying it would taste better with meat).

Chickpea curry

Chickpea curry

ingredients
- chana masala spice mix (buy from asian supermarket)
- 1 brown onion
- 1 can chickpeas
- 1 clove garlic
- green beans
- mushrooms
- shallots
- red chilli
- cous cous

directions

this is assembled in three parts – the chickpea curry, the side of beans and the cous cous.
chickpea curry
- chop onion roughly, brown in butter in a medium saucepan
- once soft and brown, take out half of the onion and put aside for the cous cous
- add the can of chickpeas to the pan along with one and a bit cans of water
- let chickpea mixture come to the boil, lower heat and add spice mix (to taste, usually 1-2 tablespoons)
- simmer for anything between 30 mins to a few hours – however long you’ve got – stir occasionally and mash some of the chickpeas to thicken sauce

green beans
- slice 2 shallots, one red chilli & the garlic clove
- add to frying pan with butter or oil
- add green beans roughly chopped into thirds
- toss about on a medium heat until brown, the lower heat and let brown for about 10mins
- slice mushrooms thickly – about the same width as the green beans, leave whole or halved if small ones
- when about 10 mins away from finish, add mushrooms to beans along with some more butter if needed

cous cous
- if feeding 2 people, it’s about 150g couscous to 300ml water
- boil kettle
- add 1/2 tablespoon of oil to boiling water in a glass pyrex bowl
- add couscous, cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 5 minutes
- take off plastic wrap, fluff with a fork and mix in the cooked onion from before

serve in a bowl – cous cous in the middle, curry on one side and beans & mushrooms on the other

here’s a similar recipe if you want to make on your own.

Over pretty much anything these days… except maybe gardening. There’s also more than a few conversations where I’ve tried to describe my weekend and when ‘baking’ and ‘pruning’ get more of a mention than ‘gig’ and ‘pub/club/bar’ and I get a really strange feeling that I sound OLD. But that’s alright. I’m enjoying it too much to care, and when the baking is for a garden full of guests at our GF BBQ’s, it’s always worthwhile.

SO this weekend I made brownies, the recipe of which I’d clipped out of last weekend’s FT magazine. They were surprisingly easy to make, and were delicious – gooey on the inside and nice and flaky/crispy on the outside. Lots of compliments for these ones, which I served with jersey cream and fresh blueberries, blackberries, strawberries and raspberries.

FT Brownies

Oven at 180c, 8x4in cake tin, buttered and lined

Slowly melt together 185g dark chocolate (Lindt 70%), 185g butter (Lurpak unsalted)

Mix in 200g sugar (100g brown, 100g white caster), plus 1tsp vanilla essence

Beat in 3 large eggs

Mix in 125g of plain flour

Mix in one small bag of nuts (about 3/4-1 cup, I used walnut)

Pour into tin and bake 20-25 minutes

Too easy!

I also made meringues a few tipsy hours later, but that’s a story for another day! Right now I’m going to get back to rainy hungover Sunday activities, like recipe searches (next up: Brown sugar apple cheesecake), eBay purchases, newspaper reading and bad TV. The Perfect Sunday.

This recipe from Geoff Lawrance was featured in The Times magazine last weekend and I’m going to make it for a pot luck brunch tomorrow. Looks really really easy to make, and who doesn’t love apples and lemons… and then apples AND lemons put together?? Sometimes it’s the simple things that are the best.

Apple and lemon tart

Ingredients
250g Bramley apples
1 large lemon
1 large egg 75g granulated sugar
Sufficient short pastry to line a 20cm pie plate (about 250g)
10g butter

Method

1 Pre-heat oven to 190C/374F/gas 5.
2 Peel, core and coarsely grate or chop the apple. Add the juice and finely grated zest of the lemon, the beaten egg and the sugar. Mix thoroughly.
3 Line the pie plate with the pastry. Fill with the fruit mixture and dot with butter.
4 Bake for about 35 minutes until you can see that the filling is just beginning to caramelise.
5 Serve hot or cold with cream.

Ok, so, I made this and it was delicious!

I was going to be lazy and buy a premade flan case, but there weren’t any decent ones at my local supermarket so I made the pastry instead. I used this pastry recipe and I highly recommend it – it was easy to make and delicious. Don’t forget to blind bake it before adding the apple mix though!