Probably the most common way of cutting a carrot, slicing is a quick and easy way to prep a carrot.
Make sure your knife is nice and sharp as carrots are fairly dense. Lay the carrot flat on the chopping board and hold the large end with your hand and put the tip of the knife on the board and slice along the carrot.
For halves, simply cut it in half, for quarters cut a half in half.
You can also cut them at a 45° angle for a slightly fancier effect.
The Welsh for carrot is a moron, which is funny, but I like to eat them.
Vivid orange and natural sweetness are the first things that come to mind, but knowing how to prepare one (or 1000) is always a good thing to learn!
In this guide I’ll cover;
You can grate them too, like in coleslaw, but that’s pretty self explanatory (I hope?)
Let’s get to it!
Before getting a knife involved (unless you peel it with a knife) you need to get the skin off.
When I’m making soups or stocks I leave the skin on, and sometimes when roasting, but otherwise I’d generally advise to peel before prepping.
The Best bit of equipment for this is the trusty speed peeler, but any veg peeler (should) work. You can use a knife, but you’ll probably lose a lot more carrot unless you scrape the skins off rather than slicing them off.
Anyway! First thing to do is hold a carrot and get the hang of spinning it round 360° in your hand, like this;
You don’t have to practise this, but it’s easier if you get the hang of it first, rather than dropping the carrot all the time while you try to peel it.
Now get your peeler and peel from top to bottom, turning the carrot about 20-30° as the peeler reaches the bottom, return to the top and repeat around the whole carrot. Be sure to hold it firm enough as you peel, or you’ll drop it.
Now to top and tail, which simply means cutting the ends off (the top and the tail) now we have a carrot ready to prep 🥕
This recipe is a request from @rachaelireland on the Recipes & Stuff Facebook page (hope it works for you!)
The recipe is an adaptation of one that my partner found online and cooked for me a few times, after getting the recipe from her i made a few slight adjustments to personal taste.
She got the recipe from a YouTube video which claimed it was an authentic takeaway chow mein recipe but i can’t say 100% if it’s how it’s actually done in a chinese takeaway or not, it looked legitimate enough though and either way it’s still delicious!
The trick is plenty of soy sauce, as it contains natural MSG which really opens up the flavour.
It only takes about 20 minutes to make so let’s get cooking some chow mein! I’ll get some pictures uploaded the next time i make some (or send your own!)
Hope you enjoy! If it looks dry just add more soy/stock, it shouldn’t need any salt due to the amount of soy sauce, but I still usually put a few flakes of sea salt over the top 🙄
Costing this dish it comes in at about 90p a serving, or £1.80 for a size similar to that you’d get from a takeaway.
According to the internet, chow mein is a Romanized version of the Taishanese word chāu-mèn and it’s enjoyed mainly in Nepal, America, India and sunny old England.
From what I can find Westernised chow mein is nothing like they would have it in China, it seems over there is more of a soft noodle broth, kind of like a wonton soup but with no wontons.
But who cares!
Yum.
Keep an eye out for more recipes, I’ll try and get some more takeaway style ones up soon.
I’ve decided to do this post as a response to @jasonrichards on my Facebook page. He reminded me how much I love dirty fries 😂 (thankyou!)
This is the standard recipe I use though I’ve got a few variations I’ll post at later dates. I’ll also get some pictures/gifs up when I get round to making some.
It’s got a couple of different elements and they take about an hour to make, so let’s get to it!
Get your mince pies on this, treacle tart (that’s cockney for get your eyes on this, sweetheart).
A classic from way back in the 19th century; the treacle tart. Bought back to light through none other than Harry Potter, starring as his favourite treat at Hogwarts in the series of books.
Originating in England, this sweet treat was created by a lady called Mary Jewry, and contrary to common misconception despite being called a treacle tart it doesn’t actually contain any treacle at all, it’s golden syrup.
So enough chat, let’s get on with this treacle tart recipe!
So it appears it’s been in films before Harry Potter, the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang used it to lure the kids, treacle tart loves the spotlight, slag.
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t want to waste this luring kids(!)(I would just like to make it clear I have no intention to lure kids, I already have 1 and another on the way)
This is definitely a desert for those of you (like myself) with a sweeter tooth.
This delightful slice of heaven is best served warm or hot, with some kind of cream or custard (I recommend clotted cream or ice cream).
Traditionally the recipe contains no egg so it’s completely optional, if you made a vegan pastry then this could quite easily be made into a vegan desert.
More modern recipes also include the addition of cream, or using almonds instead of breadcrumbs, but why mess with the classic treacle tart!
More recipes soon..
I was taught this recipe by a chef who worked under professional Indian chefs for some time.
From what he told me it’s a basic, traditional curry sauce. It’s also vegan, unless you choose to use butter.
It’s made with an onion base and is nice and easy, so let’s get to it!
This sauce can be use with any kind of meat, veg or fish or you could just use it as a sandwich filler.
Simply cook the desired meat/veg/fish in a pan then add the sauce and cook through.
The sauce itself is completely vegan unless you choose to use butter or cream to enrich the sauce.
When it comes to cost, this somewhat healthy curry sauce comes in at around 29p per portion!
Not bad for a freshly made sauce!
More recipes to come!
Having either garlic paste or ginger paste speeds up any recipe that calls for them as ingredients.
Another plus is that (I find) garlic paste especially nature’s over time. Though I wouldn’t recommend keeping it the fridge for more than a week or two, the longer it’s out the stronger it gets.
It’s also great for freezing as you can use it from frozen when cooking as it just thaws in the pot/pan, unless you need to for a marinade or to mix in with something.
It can seem time consuming, standing there peeling half a kilo (or more) of garlic or ginger, but when you get the hang of peeling it’s only really a ten minute job.
Think yourself lucky, I’ve had shifts before literally peeling mountains of garlic all day, that’s 8 hours of my life I’ll never get back 😂 but overall I would say it makes life a lot easier.
Having garlic paste, or ginger paste, to hand when needed is just so much easier than having to break new bulb, pick out 5-6 cloves, peeling and chopping, then deciding you may as well use the whole bloody bulb because there only 2 cloves left.. 😩😩
Also, I know it can be tempting, you’re in the supermarket and you spot tubes of quick and easy garlic (or ginger) above the fresh option, I’ve even done it myself before, and just said fuck it! It’s easier!
But there’s a few reasons I’d choose fresh garlic and ginger over the pre-smooshed alternative;
The main thing (for me) is the cost, eating well doesn’t need to be expensive!
So let’s have a look, I’m going to use garlic paste for this example but prices with ginger are practically identical. Going by today’s prices (20-02-20) online at tesco.com, the cheapest garlic or ginger paste I can find works out at £0.49p/100g
The most expensive garlic paste I can see however comes in at a massive £0.25/10g! That’s the equivalent of £25/kg
A quick search online tells me that a supermarket garlic cloves weighs on average between 4-7g, so we’ll say 5g and each bulb has about 10-12 cloves, so let’s say 10 cloves of garlic per bulb, making each bulb about 50g.
Now let’s look at the cost of fresh garlic on tesco.com, I can tell you that right now I could buy 1kg of lovely fresh garlic for a whopping £3.20, plus the oil and salt to make the paste that’s about £3.50 plus the electric to blend it say no more than £3.75
Compared to the cheaper pre made option (more on that in a minute) it’s still a saving of £1.15/kg which is pretty good, but compare it to the pricier option and you could be wasting as much as £23.85/kg!
If you’re anything like me and go through a lot of garlic and ginger that builds up to massive amounts of money.
It goes without saying, but fresh and homemade will beat shop bought every time unless you’ve had something prepared for you, fresh in front of you. (and even then it’s still not as satisfying as doing it yourself)
Making your own garlic or ginger pastes consists of 3 simple ingredients; garlic (or ginger), oil and salt. No more, no less, unless it’s a garlic & ginger paste.
Looking online at the ingredients of pre made garlic and ginger pastes some of them have sugar in (unnecessary), they ALL have some kind of vinegar in and some of them have citric acid it. The most expensive also has potassium sorbate, which I would expect from something that costs more (it’s a completely safe preservative) and it also contains xanthan gum (also completely safe) which I can only assume is to change the texture, which is completely pointless because there’s nothing wrong with the texture to start with.
So these are all food safe ingredients, which is fine, great in fact, and I know that they’re all for preserving qualities (and well done to the people who managed to build a business selling garlic at a ridiculous markup) but it leads onto my next point…
As I just said all of these pre made pastes contain vinegar, which is good to see a natural preservative, but over time it completely ruins the flavour and all you can taste is sourness!
All the more reason to make it yourself!
Stay tuned for more recipes.
Mincing is close to grating, but the onion retains a lot more moisture when mincing. It’s basically cutting it up really really fine so WTF! (Watch Those Fingers)
Start by finely dicing an onion.
Then all you need to do is finely chop it up.
So there you have it, the most commonly used way of prepping an onion.
If you liked this post please share the love and give it a share on social media etc, it doesn’t cost anything!
More to come soon!
First you need to peel a whole onion, then cut the top off.
Next simply slice the onion lengthways to create solid discs of onion.
To finish, use your hands to pop the ring out from the layers of the onion.
I like this the most because i think diced onion brings out the best flavour, also it cooks the fastest as the onion is cut into smaller pieces.
Start by taking half of a peeled onion and lay it flat side down on a chopping board.
If you look at the onion you should see faint lines from the root to the top of the onion, use these as a rough guide to slide along the onion, stay as close to the root as you can.
Turn the onion 90° and proceed to cut as you would if you were slicing it lengthways.
Et voila! The result is a pile of lovely diced onion.
This is pretty much the same process as above, but before dicing make 2 incisions into the onion sideways (keep the onion on the chopping board, i only picked it up to demonstrate)
Recipes and Stuff 