Fresh February salad with apples, pomegranate and citrus dressing

This past Friday we had friends over for dinner. We kept it kind of light and made salmon with two salads; Sillas’ favorite quinoa salad and a new salad from a new cookbook I bought recently. It’s a Danish book called ‘amazing salads – all year round’ and it really is amazing. Full of great salad and side dish recipes. I especially love that there are recipes for fall and winter, because I usually can’t figure out what to put in a salad. The salad I chose for our dinner is a February salad called Gils Salad. Its inspired by a salad the author tried at a Israeli restaurant in Tel-Aviv.

Its quite simple, but very fresh and tasty. And I just love pomegranate seeds, they are beautiful, vibrant and full of flavor.

Ingredients;

Chili con Jamie – Jamie Oliver’s chili con carne

Another recipe is now done in me Jamie Oliver domestic project. I really love this project. Its quite a long process but its great its also great motivation. And the book, Jamie’s America, has so many great recipes, so it’s just a joy to work through.

Last night I cooked Chili con Jamie as its called. The recipe says to use beef brisket instead of minced beef. The meat just melts and falls a apart when you let the dish simmer for a few hours.

The dish did turn out quite bitter, which we didn’t really like. It must have been the coffee, so next time I’ll use a bit less, or not as strong coffee. And perhaps use more tomato and a tablespoon more of sugar.

It was however still full of wonderful and rich flavor and the meat was tender and yummy just like I like it.

Here’s the recipe as I cooked it last night;

Roast Chicken with thyme, rosemary, onion and garlic

Last nights dinner was a lovely, juicy and tender roast chicken with a side of fresh pasta and bell pepper and tomato sauce. Sillas cooked the pasta and sauce and my job was cooking the chicken.

We had some rosemary and thyme left from the other day, so I decided to stuff the chicken with them as well as onion and garlic. It might have been the best chicken I have cooked yet, it was so tender and full of flavor. And quite easy to make too. Wonderful!

Ingredients;

Homemade Cottage pie, a Gordon Ramsey recipe

Beef and mashed potatoes are two tings we looove in this household, so cottage pie is a sure success for dinner. The recipe I used here is from Gordon Ramsey. I haven’t cooked a lot of his recipes, but the ones that I have tried have all turned our great. And this is no exception.

I used to call this dish Shepherd’s Pie, but have found out that that is only when you use lamb or sheep’s meat. And when you use beef its then called Cottage Pie.

It is not a quick dish, but definitely worth the time spent in the kitchen. And I love dishes where I can have most of the washing done by the time the dish is finished.

Homemade beef and pepperoni lasagna

Lasagna is always a popular dish in this apartment. Its Sillas favorite dish and its definitely in my top 5,  o its on the dinner table quite often here.. We usually just make the whole thing from scratch, but these evening I decided to try one of Knorr’s sauce mixes and also added pepperoni instead of bacon, which gave it a great, slightly smoky taste.

I know that other countries have Knorr products, but I’m not sure if they carry the entire product line as we do in Denmark. If not, the I’m sure another company has made an equivalent product.

The lasagna turned out really well – 5 servings between the two of us good…

Ingredients;

January chopped salad with pesto chicken

This salad is very very simple, easy and full of good veggies. The pesto works really well with the chicken and adding warm chicken to a salad with mozzarella is just so tasty.

I can eat this salad any time of the year, but I think that it woks really well here in January after having eaten all of the rich and, well, fatty food over the holidays. Its very fresh, crunchy and fulfilling.

I brought a portion with me for lunch at the office today, and the salad is just as good served cold the next day.

Homemade potato soup

With this cold winter weather we’ve been having in Denmark the past few weeks, I thought that it was about time for a bowl of hot homemade soup. I wanted to make potato-leek soup, but the supermarket was out of leeks, so I added a few carrots instead.  This soup is quite thick, so if thats not your thing, just use fewer potatoes or more broth.