Tasty, healthy and lots of it

Perfect Hamburger Buns

Make perfect brioche hamburger buns at home, very easy and totally delicious

Brioche hamburger buns by candlelight – tasty, easy and firm enough to build your burger

You can scale your burger up or down the fancy scale, but store buns will always hold you back. Too soft, too crusty, too small, too large, too flimsy, too expensive, too often sold out on a Saturday afternoon.

Make your own brioche buns and you will never look back. This recipe is enough to make twelve 9cm diameter buns, or more smaller ones if you want. You can easily scale the quantities up or down as well.

Savoury butternut fritters

Using leftovers to make something special

Small butternut fritters, sprinkled with sesame seeds, served as a side dish

I hate throwing out leftovers, and sometimes you have to get creative.

I had:

3/4 cup Yorkshire pudding batter (very runny mix of eggs, flour and milk)

1 cup of roasted savoury butternut (garlic, chilli, fennel seeds)

I added a couple of teaspoons of baking powder and enough flour to make a fritter batter – still runny enough to slowly slide off a spoon by itself.

I dripped half a tablespoon at a time into a hot pan with a little oil, taking care not crowd the pan.

This made about 16 x 3 -4cm fritters.

Sprinkled them with sesame seeds.

I served these as a side with beef fried rice.

Crusty Bread in Four Hours

Freshly baked bread is a winner with a winter soup or hearty stew, especially if it is a crunchy crust, open-crumbed loaf that you can eat warm. Normally a bread like that will take a while, even overnight. But you can do this in around four hours.

The bread has a thick crust and a light, open crumb

Olive & cheese stuffed herb bread

Olive and cheese stuffed herb bread — A successful experiment – a different bread to go with pea soup on a cold and rainy day.

I wanted to make another kind of bread to go with the soup. Not pot, flat or any other kind of bread. So with a little bit of inspiration from my namesake son, I made this very easy, stuffed bread.

Falafel

Homemade falafel is an easy, healthy and cheap vegan dish. You just have to start yesterday.

Making Falafel is counterintuitive, because you don’t cook these hard little bean things. You soak it in cold water for 24 hours, then blitz in the food processor with loads of herbs, spices, garlic and onion. Then you deep or shallow fry these until they look like tough meatballs, but green on the inside.

Focaccia with chickpeas

Here is my recipe for a quick flatbread. I put leftover chickpeas on a focaccia bread, because I believe in using up things in the fridge. It was delicious. When I say focaccia, I refer to a generic flatbread with dimples and olive oil. I know there are many recipes for this and I am constantly experimenting.

Chunky tomato relish

Tomato relish make with fresh cherry tomatoes. — Chunky tomato relish. When you start with this, you cannot go wrong.

Here is a quick chunky tomato relish. I always use ripe fresh tomatoes to make relish, whole peeled or, in this case, halved cherry. You get a sharpness that just is not in tinned tomatoes, and in this version, you can create layers of texture and taste. I am still a fan of good tinned tomatoes though for something like pizza sauce or bolognaise, because ripe on demand is important.

Beetroot couscous salad

Beetroot and couscous salad, using up leftovers — Beetroot couscous salad, made with one leftover ingredient: leftover beetroot salad

Leftover food – two equally valid paths

I love a cube of leftover lasagna from the day before. Pop into the microwave and there you go. But what if your leftovers are a bit of this, a little tupper of that? Then you do this:

Vetkoek

Vekoek Recipe

To make vetkoek, use the basic white bread recipe, but leave out the oil.