Valentines Day Cheesecake

I was having a grumpy Valentine's Day, because my Valentine was away all week. So I planned a great dinner for us for Friday night. Some nice nibbles, lamb shanks with lemon and thyme and green beans, followed by individual berry cheese cakes for dessert.

The berry cheese cakes were inspired by some leftover berry syrup in the freezer. I wanted to make something pink for Valentine's Day, and this seemed perfect. It also seemed like a good fit for this week's romantic Leftover Tuesday!

Your basic mini-cheesecake recipe goes like this:

Cream 1 packet cream cheese with two eggs and some sugar. . Make a base out of biscuit crumbs and butter (or slices of cake, or vanilla wafers). Put base on the bottom of your greased patty tins, and top with cheesy stuff. Bake in oven at 170 for 10 minutes, then allow to cool before removing from pans. Easy.

I creamed all the first stuff, and then decided to split the mix. In the first half I added a good slosh of Baileys and a quarter cup of brown sugar. In the second, I added two tablespoons of icing sugar and half a cup of the berry syrup. I think it was a bit too much syrup, because the mix was very runny, and pieces of the biscuit base floated to the top.

In the end, they weren't very pretty, but they tasted very, very good. And to top it off, just as I pulled them out of the oven - Ryan arrived! A whole day early!

I hope you had a good Valentine's day too.

Gozleme Recipe

I have re-written this post a heap of times. I'm not sure why, but the gallery software I use is having a heart-attack over the photos. Then the internet connection would die, and it wouldn't save my edits... It's latest attempt to frustrate me involves rotating the photos 90 degrees when it uploads them. Gack!

Gozleme are Turkish flatbread that are stuffed with something good. Usually spinach and feta, although there are a heap of variations. I found a great recipe here. The dough is just flour and yoghurt, which is pretty healthy, and really frugal if you make it with home-made yoghurt. Once you've made the dough (which is soft and stretchy and very forgiving) you form it into pasty kind of shapes, and fill it with good things. In my case, that was leftover chilli con carne, and leftover vegetables and gravy from a Red Rooster Classic Roast pack. I'm not sure why I had that hiding at the back of my freezer, but never mind. Anyway, I thought the gozleme would be a great entry to Project Foodies' Leftover Tuesday #7.

Enjoy!

Layered Shepherds Pie

I am one of those odd people that plans to have leftovers. Most of our leftovers go straight into lunch-size containers and into the freezer, so we never have to buy our lunch at work. Sometimes though, I plan leftovers to be eaten in another meal. Lamb roast becomes lamb fritters or Greek souvlaki wraps. Roast chicken becomes chicken risotto, which becomes arancini. (yum!)

For this Leftover Tuesday, it's a bit different. We bought a whole side of lamb a month ago. I made stock with the bits I couldn't identify, but I rescued all the meat that got boiled up. Sounds appetising, I know. But this meat is so tender, it deserved to be rescued. And Leftover Tuesday was a good excuse to use it. This recipe would work equally well with any leftover roast meat, or chicken, I think. I'm sorry it's such a loose recipe, but it doesn't really need a lot of measuring. Trust yourself!

Layered Shepherds Pie

Dried shittake mushrooms

An onion and a clove of garlic, diced

Left over meat, chopped as finely as you can

Tomato paste, soy sauce, vegetable stock powder (whatever seasonings you like, really)

Assorted root vegetables (I chose 4 small potatoes and a renegade beetroot. The beetroot had somehow escaped from being roasted earlier in the week)

Two big leaves of silverbeet (leftover from Ryan's spinach and ricotta

Milk and butter for the mash

Grated cheese

Boil the kettle and soak the mushrooms. Meanwhile, chop the potatoes (and beetroot) and put them on to boil. Heat some oil in a pan and add the onion and garlic, stirring until the onion is soft. Add the lamb, just to heat through. If you have any other vegetables to add, now is the time. Capsicum or tomato (finely diced) would be good.

When the stuff in the pan is all heated through, throw in the mushrooms with their soaking liquid. This is the base for the gravy, so add a tablespoon or so of tomato paste, a dash of soy sauce, and any other herbs or flavourings. Let it simmer for 10 minutes, then take it off the heat.

When the potatoes are soft, drain them and mash. Adding the beetroot made for a funky pink version, and added some depth of flavour. Chop the silverbeet finely and then steam it briefly (just until it darkens in colour slightly).

Finally put it all together - the meat at the bottom of a casserole dish, topped with the silverbeet, topped with the mash and then cheese on top. Heat in a medium oven until the cheese is melted. Enjoy!

Thanks for hosting this Pam!

Lamb Souvlaki Wraps

This is one of my favourite left-overs recipes. I've only ever tried it with left over lamb roast, but it could be pretty good with chicken too. So I'm having my very own left-over Tuesday.
Lamb Souvlaki Wraps
Slice up any left over roast lamb, as thin as possible. Marinade it as long as you can with garlic and olive oil. You can add a thinly sliced onion if you like.
Meanwhile, drain and rinse a can of white or butter beans. Mash them with a fork, but leave it a bit lumpy. Mix in some lemon juice, crushed garlic, cracked pepper and some finely chopped parsley if you have some.
Fry up the lamb and onion. It really only needs to be warmed through, but I like it a bit crispy (like kebab meat). Then assemble - spread your flat bread with the bean dip, top with salad and lamb. Roll it all up. If you're feeling very gourmet, you can toast it in a sandwich press. Ta dah! Instant dinner.

Pancake Day - a traditional Leftover Tuesday

Last Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday - otherwise known as Pancake Day or Fat Tuesday'. It has long been a great day for left overs - people made pancakes to use up all the rich ingredients they couldn't eat during Lent. Lent is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter, where in many Christian traditions some form of fasting takes place. Any excuse for pancakes, I say.

In our house, it was a great excuse to use up some left overs in the freezer, and a good excuse to join Leftover Tuesday, hosted by Rachel at Rachel's Bite. The leftovers in question were some cooked chicken (from my last batch of stock) and some homemade cream of mushroom soup. I thought we were the only weirdo's in the world who would make such a thing. I don't think I'd ever eaten mushroom by itself before, though it featured often in my first cooking adventures (things like tuna casserole). And it only ever arrived in a can. But Ryan saw a recipe in Donna Hay one day, so we made it. And I've recently discovered we aren't the only ones - tiger fish at Teczcape has a great recipe too.

But back to Tuesday. I made up a generic crepe recipe (there's a couple on www.taste.com.au if you don't have one), and while it was sitting I threw an onion and some garlic in a pan. When it was all nicely translucent, I added the mushroom soup and the chicken, and let it simmer until it looked like dinner. I took it off the heat and stirred through some baby spinach.

Looked appetizing, didn't it? It smelt much better. Ryan made the crepes - he's much better at flipping things than me. I rolled the chicken mix up in the crepes, then heated them through in the oven, with some grated cheese on top. The final product looked pretty good.

Crepes are great like that, you can wrap up just about anything, and they make it so much more interesting. And they don't taste too bad either...