A quick potato salad recipe!

This is just a quick post because I was so chuffed with my potato salad that I had for lunch today - made out of the left overs in my fridge last night - that I wanted to share the recipe! Unfortunately I have no photos except a terrible one of the second half of the salad in it's Tupperware ready for tomorrow's lunch! But seriously, this is a real easy, really tasty potato salad that you can make the night before a miserable Monday morning to cheer you up later in the day - and it really did put a smile on my face at lunchtime!


So here we go... quantities are vague as ever - makes about two portions - but you can really just use up left overs for this recipe!

Ingredients

a couple of handfuls of small potatoes (or chop up a couple of bigger potatoes!)
about 100ml sour cream
a splash of white wine vinegar
generous twist of salt and black pepper
a handful of fresh dill, chopped finely (or just use about a teaspoon of dried dill like I did!)
1/4 red onion chopped very finely
1/2 cucumber, seeds scraped out and chopped
about 100g smoked salmon (or however much you can spare!)

Boil your potatoes for around 15minutes or until soft.

While they're boiling, mix together the sour cream, white wine vinegar, dill and seasonings in a large bowl.

Drain your potatoes and add to the dressing while still warm. Leave to cool while you chop the remaining ingredients.

Once cool, add the cucumber, onion and smoked salmon and mix through until everything is coated nicely in the dressing. Pack up in a Tupperware or two for lunch the next day, or serve with a green salad and a glass of cool white wine for dinner!

Variations

If you have a different combination of ingredients in your fridge or want to try a different potato salad then go for it! Why not swap the smoked salmon for some smoked haddock and go heavy on the black pepper? Or you could easily swap the sour cream for crème fraîche (maybe use a bit less as this tends to be a bit richer) or natural yoghurt, though the red onion works really well with sour cream. And if you're less of a fish fan, then go for some cut up smoked bacon or pancetta instead and swap your dill for some fresh parsley. The opportunities are endless... so Happy Monday... have a lovely week and enjoy!

Food experiences in Beautiful Bosnia

Interrail Stop 8

To round off our interrail tour of Eastern Europe before hitting the Croatian beach, we visited the beautiful Bosnia and Herzegovina. Definitely one of my favourite places on our trip, with amazing scenery, fascinating markets and welcoming people, but a country still feeling the after effects of the devastating war in the 1990s. We chatted to the locals and absorbed ourselves in the history, and, of course, sampled some of the food!

Sarajevo

We stopped firstly in Sarajevo and walked all over the city, visiting the many different places of worship and browsing the markets full of interesting items. Down one of these side streets we stopped for a bite to eat in a little cafe and shared a huge plateful of ćevapčići - tasty little sausages that are a national dish in Bosnia and Herzegovina and can also be found in some of the other Southeastern European countries. Served typically with a flat bread, raw onions and sour cream or soft cheese... it's a kind of kebab that tastes AMAZING!!


After having this for lunch in the cafe, we later found the hostel guys cooking it on a BBQ... which was soooo much more delicious! Less grease but still all of the flavour, and a great way to line the stomach before a night in Sarajevo!
 

Mostar

We then traveled down to Mostar, a city you might recognise by its Old Bridge (Stari Most), which proudly stands now as a handmade reconstruction of the same bridge that stood before the war and a symbol of Bosnia's recovery.


During our brief stay in Mostar we went on a trip in a small group to see the small village at the source of the Buna river, Blagaj and the Kravice Falls (the gorgeous scene in the photo at the top of this post). At the river, we we lucky enough to eat a traditional breakfast of Burek and Bosnian Coffee.

 

We had already sampled Burek on other stops, but this was a different dish again... with the pastry formed into a different shape and filled with either cheese or meat... it was a hearty breakfast for a day of walking, swimming and jumping in at the waterfall!

The Bosnian coffee was strong and rich - not my cup of tea (or coffee!!!) as I tend to prefer it super milky - but it was worth a try and I'm sure it would be delicious if you weren't a wussy coffee drinker like me!!


So there you have it... a brilliant end to our touring around Eastern Europe with some delicious food and some of the best sights. If you've ever wondered about visiting Bosnia, then stop wondering and just go!

Thanks for reading about the food we tasted on our trip! I can't wait to go and see some more amazing sights and try some new dishes some time soon! But for now, keep popping back to see some recipes, cookbook and restaurant reviews...

My best ever Fried Rice Recipe

The other night I made the best fried rice ever... it was tasty, healthy, cheap, easy and lasted me a dinner and two lunches! With just a few bits of veg I had left over in my fridge and a selection of Thai flavours I concocted this yummy dish, and I really didn't expect it to go quite this well... It was that good I probably won't be able to recreate it, but I've done my best to write a bit of a recipe for it here so that you can have a go and so I can try and remember how I did it!! Apologies for the big headedness - you will just have trust me that this was just THAT good!

Ingredients (don't trust these completely, alter as you wish, and feel free to add whatever veg you like!)

Serves 2-3
two white fish fillets (I actually just used cheapo frozen white fish!)
1 portion of rice (about 1/3 cup)
1 large carrot, grated
2 teaspoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of white wine vinegar
2 eggs
olive oil
1 red onion, chopped
about half a broccoli (cut the florets into small pieces)
2 lemon grass stalks, chopped finely
1 garlic clove, chopped finely
1 chilli, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
3spring onions, chopped
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
1 tablespoon of Thai sweet chilli sauce
salt and pepper
a large handful of fresh coriander, chopped roughly

Recipe (or something similar!)

Bake the fish in the oven for 15-20mins depending on the size of the fillets. Boil a pan of water and add your rice. Cook until it is soft and then drain. Mix the grated carrot with the sugar and white wine vinegar. Crack the eggs into a jug and whisk with a fork. Leave all these to the side for later.

Put a dash of oil in your wok over a medium-high heat, then add the onion and broccoli and fry until the onion starts to soften a little.

Then add lemon grass, garlic, chilli and red pepper and fry for a couple of minutes.

Add the carrot mixture and spring onions and fry for a further minute before tipping the veg into a bowl, leaving the wok empty.


Put another dash of olive oil into the wok and add your whisked eggs. Keep moving it around with a wooden spoon until the eggs begin to cook, making sure that none of it sticks to the pan.

Add the ready cooked rice and mix in. Make sure all of the egg is cooked, then add your veg mixture.

Mix in your soy and sweet chilli sauces and season with salt and pepper.

Finally, throw in as much coriander as you like (it's my favourite herb and an essential flavour to this dish!), mix altogether and serve.

YUM!!!!!

Anjum Anand's Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

Anjum Anand 'I Love Curry'

This colourful curry book, published by Quadrille, has gorgeous full page photographs for every recipe. I'm quite a visual person so I like to see what my dish is (hopefully!) going to look like, and I often pick to cook recipes with a photo over those without.

The dishes all sound delicious, and I think I picked one of the least exciting ones (not out of choice, but down to the stock left in my Sainsbury's local at 7pm on a Tues!) - I certainly plan to cook my way through most of these.

With sections on 'To Start: Bites', 'The Curries' and 'Accompaniments', this book offers an easy meal plan as I always love to make a starter if I'm cooking for someone or for an occasion. And the curries and accompaniments are then broken down into several different chapters, so you can pick to suit ingredients you may have already got in the fridge.

I often whip up a curry with one of the Pataks curry pastes and either some chopped tomatoes or coconut milk... and this produces a consistently tasty curry. But this is a lovely, well laid out book, that I can see myself using every time I want to spend a bit more time over making a curry and fancy some more interesting flavours. (I should just say that I'm really not a fan of the cover - I think the colour combination makes the book look cheap and in-authentic, which it's not - but under the dust-jacket is a plain mint green that looks much much nicer!!)

Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

... in my case it was a turkey curry, but that's because I was making it on a budget! I think it would have been much more flavoursome with the chicken on the bone, as recommended in the recipe, but hey, it was pretty good anyway!

I also chose to add green pepper, because I wanted to bulk it out a little and so that we had a bit of variety as I was simply doing this with naan bread as a late dinner for me and a friend.


It's a long recipe so I won't write it out, but basically marinade the chicken/turkey in a mixture of plain yoghurt, garlic, ginger, ground cumin and ground coriander... and leave (for much longer than the 10mins I did!)

 Fry off the onion and cumin seeds, then add garam masala, chillies (and pepper).

 Add the marinaded meat.

 Add water and simmer. Add fresh coriander (which Sainsbury's had unfortunately run out of!) and serve.

Anjum Anand words it much better than that, and there are a lot of details that I have missed out, but this is the general idea!  And the result was good - maybe not 'the best Indian curry I'll ever cook' - but light, simple and tasty. A definite one for the future.

Quick Mid-Week Meal

Chorizo, Mushroom and Onion Omelette

Just a quick, easy, on-the-go meal but a really yummy one. I love omelettes because you can put just about anything in it and it will taste great. This one is not so adventurous, but will give a great result.

Ingredients

butter
1/4 of an onion, chopped
handful of mushrooms, sliced
2 eggs
splash of milk
few chorizo pieces (this version is done with sandwich chorizo, not the good sausage stuff)
black pepper
cheese, grated (optional)

Recipe

Put your chopped onion in a frying pan with a small amount of butter. When it is starting to soften then add your mushrooms.

While these are fying, crack both eggs into a jug and add the milk. Whisk 'em up good and proper with a fork. I always add a healthy sprinkling of black pepper in here, and mix that up as well.

When the mushrooms are looking a bit brown and giving off that great smell, add the chorizo. Shortly after, pour in the egg mixture and turn the heat down a tad.

Leave it a couple of minutes to cook through - not turning too brown underneath, but until it is starting to look less runny on top. Add the grated cheese.

Give it a little while more, then use a spatula to loosen around the edges, folding it in half, then serve!

Easy peasy, yummy scrummy, cook me an omelette, I'm in a hurry!!