One weekend recently my husband was away so I decided to spend the weekend doing my favourite thing…cooking! But not just any cooking…I had decided that I wanted to cook lots of recipes out of my “Union Jax” cookbook which I had bought during the summer. I hadn’t used it much because a lot of the recipes are quite wintery, so now that it’s winter it’s time to try out some more of her recipes!
On the Friday night there were still 3 of us at home so I made Smoked Fish Chowder…a very good wintry sort of dish! It uses milk rather than cream which I liked and had a nice lemony flavour but overall I think it was a bit lacking. The fish stock was only a small proportion of the liquid so perhaps some more fish stock and slower cooking might improve things a bit. In saying that, it was still a very pleasant meal, just not amazing.
For dessert I dipped into Julie Le Clerc’s book “Viva Food” for a tarte tatin recipe…this was very easy to make and delicious to eat. I will certainly be making use of this recipe again…and again!
Ever since I bought Jax’s book I’ve been dying to make her Jerk Chicken Pasties (I love jerk chicken!) but then recently I saw a really nice looking turkish lamb pasty recipe on a blog. I couldn’t decide which to make so I decided to make half quantity of each so that I could try them both and decide which was best. I thought I was going to like the lamb ones the most (they had lovely flavours of za’atar and sumac in them) and I was a bit suspicious of the use of curry powder in Jax pasties, but actually they were delicious and I liked the Jerk chicken pasties the best. They have curry powder in the pastry which is a really nice flavour boost. My husband and I took the leftovers as lunches during the week…scrummy.
For Sunday breakfast I decided to dip into another cookbook that I had bought just the day before – Nigella Express. She has a recipe for baked eggs which I wanted to try because I’ve seen similar recipes in a few of my other books too. They were nice except that I overcooked the yolk…she did say that she was using a hotter oven to make the recipe faster (it is Nigella Express afterall) so maybe I’ll lower the temp next time and slow the cooking a bit…or try one of the other recipes that I have for baked eggs!
But back to Jax…for Sunday afternoon tea I made a batch of her coconut scones (I love coconut!) which she serves with marscarpone cream and passionfruit pulp…woah! How devine! Good just with butter as well, not too sweet…very tasty.
I also spent a bit of time in the afternoon making some of Jax Chicken Liver Parfait. It turned out to be super easy and super delicious! I actually couldn’t believe how easy it was. No photo of this one unfortunately…too busy scoffing it to remember to capture it for posterity!
That night the hubby was home again (and very impressed with all my cooking…obviously!). After all the cooking I’d been doing in his absence I really couldn’t face cooking something else for dinner so we had…you guessed it – pasties! And for afters, some lovely mini apple and berry crumbles. During the weekend I had made up a big batch of crumble topping to keep in the freezer for crumble emergencies which I decided to put to immediate use!
So it wasn’t Jax for the whole weekend but I certainly managed to tick off quite a few of her recipes that I’ve been wanting to make. I’m looking forward to cooking some of them again and trying her other recipes. Fun fun fun!
for the love of cookbooks... 