{Project Recipe} 7 dishes I "tried" recently or Getting out of a food rut

I so loved trying out recipes last year and my goal for this year is also to try 25 recipes.

Ha!

We'll see if that happens, but I did very well during August and September

So I thought I should tell you about those recipes to encourage you to also try/ toss the recipes you're never going to make :)



1. Well, I told you about the disaster that was the cauli-pizza....

2. And then there was a microwave chocolate cake for my birthday.

There's a story to this. The kids wanted me to do little cakes for them to decorate with caramel and smarties, and I thought I'd try this for my birthday. But I used a dish too small so we had a little microwave incident... and so two cakes - one rock-hard and one kind-of okay but basically, I still won't try that ever again.

(my colleague said to me at work, "I still don't know why you'd even TRY to do a MICROwave cake" so there's that, and I agree. God made cakes to be baked in an oven and that's the way we will do it from now onwards... once I recover from the microwave incident)

3. Fudge with white chocolate

I have a really, really bad track record with fudge. Really bad.

I followed Se7en's instructions but I think I may not have stirred and cooked long enough (who has an hour to stir?!). Anyway my fudge didn't set and I can't throw out perfectly good tudge (toffee/ fudge) so I left it in the fridge.

Last year I rescued a batch by turning it into fudge brownies. Gosh that was delish. But this time I scraped it back into a pot, chopped up two slabs of white chocolate, stirred that in, and lo and behold, the fudge set!

It was DELISH.

Never fear, Se7en and I have big plans to make fudge one day. And if it works, I am "retiring" on a good story :)

That was August!



And then in September, my kids went off mushrooms.

Now D and I have always had chicken a la King in our regular rotation, and I make it really nice too!

But suddenly the kids don't eat mushrooms so I said to them, "listen, Daddy and I eat chicken with mushrooms, and you two have eaten it for 6 years so since you don't eat mushrooms now, which vegetable would you like? And they both said, "BROCCOLI!" (like twins... together....with equal enthusiasm)

So I picked up a packet of that Knorr cook-in dry sauce and made a

4. Chicken and Mushroom Pan

(it had BROCCOLI - lots!)

I cut the mushrooms small and they had a big moan at first, but I told them to just taste the sauce they wouldn't even notice the mushrooms.

Thankfully, one said, "this is DELICIOUS" and the other one did too, and that solved our little problem.

I have another packet in the pantry....

5. Thai Chicken Curry

This was another cook-in sauce and while acceptable, it wasn't WOW so I won't buy it again. Though, EVERYONE ate it without complaint (but we each had a big glass of water because it's spicy) and all was well in the world.

6. One Sunday I made doughnuts (every time I make them I use a new recipe on the internet!) - they're all good.

Unsurprisingly the kids were eager to get the Sunday photos done so they could have their tea and doughnuts :)



And last but not least....

7. Sausages with tomato and baked beans

Laura's been inspiring me with her Weigh-less meals. W-L encourages lots of legumes and I do love it, so I experimented and made a dish with onions, sausages, two cans of tomato and a can of baked beans. It made a TON - we've had this meal twice from the same batch with very generous servings (my kids love anything with sausages and tomato), and I have a big helping left.

Only thing is I can't tell you exactly which spices I used - probably garlic, salt, sugar, this Ina Paarman spice and possibly some Robertson's Italian herbs.

This is a definite keeper.

So out of two months and 7 recipes, 2 wins is not bad as stats go :)
Have you tried any good recipes recently?