Sinful Chocolate, Pecan and Bourbon Pie

On the day I turned 16 and a half, my Daddy presented me with a beautiful book by Alice Medrich - it's all about how to cook with higher percentage cocoa/higher quality chocolate while preserving that gorgeous chocolate flavour and enhancing the subtleties of the chocolate or cocoa used... Needless to say, I LOVED it! And still do...

The following recipe for Sinful Chocolate, Pecan and Bourbon Pie is adapted from that gorgeous book...

A disappointingly blurry photo of the pie with a dollop of french vanilla ice-cream...

Unfortunately this photo doesn't do the pie any justice AT ALL... It's amazing - crunchy toasted pecans, smooth chocolate binding and smokey bourbon pastry that somehow manages to retain that alcoholic tang despite baking... Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! This pie is to die for!

-- Just as an aside, I'm off to India in a couple of days... I'm not sure how reliably I'll be able to blog while I'm  away - I'll do my best! But fear not, I'll back in full swing for the New Year... In the mean time, I hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday Season and an exceptional New Year, Love from Kat--

Recipe follows the jump... (trust me, you want to read this one!)

Marvellous Miscellaneous Muesli

I'm not a huge fan of breakfast - I eat it because I have to - energy and metabolism and all that, but I rarely want to eat breakfast first thing in the morning...

As such, I have to "trick" myself into eating - by making the food more interesting! Pancakes or scrambled eggs... Most recently Muesli has been doing the trick for me! In preparation for emptying the cupboards to make room for the housesitter - I suggested that I make muesli to use up some of our left over bits... As such, the following is not so much a recipe as a set of guidelines or suggestions...

Cottage Cheese Loaf

This is a surprisingly tasty little number... I'm never really keen on the idea of Cottage Cheese Loaf, but I'm old enough now to remember that I actually quite enjoy the reality of it...

OM NOM NOM... Oh Shit! Blog! Quick! Photo! Yeeeah... This is the Cottage Cheese Loaf when served with a Spicy Tomato-Mushroom Sauce and Cauliflower/Spinach Cheese...

This is a quick and easy meal full of protein... Originally it was designed to be a "loaf" but I've discovered that loaf cooking is NOT one of my strong points... And so I bake mine as more of a cake-type thing... Still tastes good though!

It tastes better than it looks - I promise!

I'm always promising people that it'll taste better than it looks - and people are always pleasantly surprised to find I'm right (Of Course! I'm always right! Except for when I'm not...)! The best thing about Cottage Cheese Loaf is that it's a blank canvas - You can add to it what ever you like - I haven't gotten any further than my secret ingredient - Nutmeg and a delicious tomato based sauce, but your only limit is your imagination!

Recipe after the jump...

Chicken Parma-Leftovers

Take a photo! Take a photo! Quick! Before I start eating...

I'm at home now... No longer Chef-Extraordinaire for a flat of four... But now the unemployed daughter of two fantastic parents who sometimes allow me into their kitchen to cook tea or bake (see Chocolate Chip Cookies) and create general havoc...

The Family and I are soon off to Auckland, Hong Kong and finally India... I imagine that posts will decrease around that time as I'll be busy relaxing... But with any luck photo's and remembered recipes will be available to occupy me and entertain you in the New Year.

As I said... Off to India we go! But before we can leave the fridge, freezer and pantry all need cleared of their perishables and to create room for the house-sitter and his wares. Thus, with a little imagination you have Chicken Parma-Leftovers it came out fairly well, I thought... Using up a tin of tomato sauce, some chicken breasts from the freezer, and a little left  over parmesan... I crumbed the chicken in corn-meal with visions of a cruchy shell giving way to moist, flavourful chicken... Alas the corn-meal didn't live up to my imagination, but the chicken was beautifully tender and moist! I think, that if I had only fried and never baked the chicken, I'd've got the result I was half-heartedly looking for.

Recipe follows the jump.

Chocolate Oat Spice Cookies

Finally!!! Something I've baked and posted in not just the same year, or just in the same month,  and not only in the same week but one the very same day!!! Yay me!

Aaand it's sweet... Aaand it's chocolately!! And it's so totally amazing that I'm all but going to refer to this little creation of mine as the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Everrr... But I'm not going to say that. 'Cause you have crisp cookie people and cakey cookies people and bite-sized cookie people and GINORMOUS cookie people and it's simply impossible to please them all! I fall into the "Dude, if it's got chocolate - it's gonna be AWESOME" catergory... We're easy to please.

This cookie is sort of an adaption from a family friend's recipe... But by the time I've halved the sugar, reduced the butter, increased the vanilla, removed the salt (I use salted butter...), changed the type of flour called for (and the oats), and added cocoa and a substansial amount of nutmeg... I think I can just about call it my own... Don't you?

I secretly feel that these cookies are almost healthy what with the dark chocolate, rolled oats, wholemeal flour and  reduced sugar/butter content... But that might just be wishful thinking!

Here the are:

The Best-Ever Chocolate Chip Cookies, According to Kat

Don't they just look gorgeous?

Recipie follows the jump...

Greek: Cheat

Back to online shopping fiascos... This one week I'd orderd a half kilo of pork steak so that I could make beautiful souvlaki for my flatmates... But they only showed up with 200 grams! Gah! Luckily I had a little pork schnitzel left over... Enter:

 Greek Marinated "Stir-Fry" on Cheat's "Greek Spinach Rice"...

Complete with Lemon Pip...

The original recipe comes from AboutFood.com - a brilliant website, everyone should have it bookmarked! And the rice recipe is inspired by a book we have at home, but this particular Cheat is all me!

Recipes follow the jump...

Kat Style Oven Fries

I'll be the first to admit that my homemade oven fries need a little work... I can never make them just the way I want! But... other people seem to enjoy them and you can tweak the recipe until it works for you... Although when it does you simply MUST let me know!

I serve my fries with burgers, chicken-fried steak, beef steak, cheese and chilli, fish... They're super useful! :)

Until then... the recipe for Kat Style Oven Fries follows the jump...You'll need:

"Tandoori" Chicken Burgers

What ended up being dinner for two!

When I started writing this blog - all of a month ago, I'd planned on it being full of gorgeous dessert-y things... The yummy sweets that I love! As it turns out, students have neither the time nor the funding to bake goodies and prepare dessert. That and I live with a house load of salt-cravers... Only my gorgeous boyfriend is a sugar lover like me... And even then he's mostly exclusive to chocolate! :)

What students do eat, however is dinner... Lots and lots of dinner! Believe it or not, this was another cupboard scraping recipe... With the tandoori paste left over from a vegan curry I like to make, and the yoghurt I didn't use in the tzatziki! The chicken surfaced from the freezer...

The recipe for Kat's Tandoori Burgers follows the jump...

Spanokopita - Kat's FAVOURITE!!!

OM NOM NOM!!! Spinach is my favourite food! This recipe is not a traditional Greek recipe, as it uses Savoury Short Crust pastry instead of the more difficult, traditional Filo (Phyllo) pastry... Furthermore this time 'round I was short on Feta - so I've added a little salted cottage cheese to make it go further! Note the reference to salted cottage cheese - I once tried to make Spanokopita with cottage cheese and no added salt, it was BLAND! I think that, in theory, cottage cheese should work as a Feta substitute



Clockwise from top left: steamed spinach and asparagus, last night's left over veggies (not shown: aioli for veggies), dinner plate soon to be filled, classy Spanokopita with a bow tie, tzatziki - Greek, garlic and cucumber yoghurt sauce...

The recipe for Kat-Esque Spanokopita follows the jump...