Fish Package

This a very easy and healthy dish. Fish is a great substitute for meat, it´s healthy and often not expensive. My favorites are tuna and salmon, but I really like this recipe too.
White fish doesn´t have a strong fishy taste, so most people will like it.

ingredients:
- pangasius filet (or any kind of white fish filet)
- onion
- sambal or chili
- soysauce (or any kind of eastern sauce flavor you like)
- rice
- mixed chopped vegetables

Preheat teh oven to 220 C. Boil the rice. Cut 4 square pieces of tinfoil.
Cut the fish in little pieces. Chop the onion and mix it in a bowl with the spice and sauce.
marinate the fish pieces in the mixture. Spread the fish over the tinfoil and fold them into little packages.
Put them in the oven and bake for about 15 min. Stir fry the vegetables in a wok pan.
Serve the fish with the rice and vegetables.

Enjoy!

Simple Quiche

This delicious dish will do great on parties and is very easy to make. It seems quite fancy, but doesn't take much work at all. This recipe serves about 4 people or cut it in little pieces as fingerfood.

Ingredients:
- frozen puff pastry
- 600 gr. leek
- 4 eggs
- 150 ml milk
- 200 gr. brie
- 100 gr. grated cheese
- 125 gr. cremecheese with herbs

Preheat the oven to 190 C. Put bakingpaper on the bottom of a ovendish and put the puff pastry in it. Just fold around the sides and edges so that it covers the whole thing. Bake for 8 minutes.
Cut the leek in rings and fry in olive-oil. Put it in the ovendish. Whisk the eggs and milk together.
Stir the cheeses and salt and pepper through. Pour it on top of the leek and bake off for 30 minutes or until goldenbrown.

Spaghetti Carbonara

For this dish you need an absolute minimum af ingredients. It´s super fast and easy, but make sure you use fresh eggs!

ingredients:
- spaghetti
- eggs
- grated cheese (perferably pecorino, but really anything will do)
- bacon cubes
- salt and pepper

Boil water for the pasta. Fry the bacon cubes in a pan till they're all done.
When the pasta is done, pour out the water and put the spaghetti in the pan with the bacon cubes. Stir it all together and pull the spaghetti loose with a fork.
Mix the eggs and grated cheese and add it to the pasta. Give a quick stir, it's important that you don't let it stick to the bottom of the pan. Put the pasta onto a plate and add salt and pepper to your taste.
It's quite a heavy dish with the eggs and cheese so serve with some vegetables or a salade.

Enjoy!
Sophie

Leftover Pasta

If you have any left over pasta, don't throw it away!
There are some taste dishes you can make with it.

1. Pasta omelet: probably the easiest thing ever. You heat a little oil in a pan and add the pasta. Stir two eggs in a bowl and pour it over the pasta. Don't stir once it's in the pan! season with a salt and pepper. When the omelet in browning and dry it's done. Really good with simple ketchup.

2. Oven pasta: this works especially great with leftover spinach pasta. Put the pasta in an oven-dish. Add any left over boiled vegetables like brocolli, spinach even cabbage will work. Pour tomato sauce, pesto or any kind of sauce you have over the pasta. You can also add leftover meat like meatballs or bacon. Season and put some grated cheese on top. Bake at 200 C for about 20 minutes or till it lookes done.

3. Pasta salade: Put the cold pasta in a bowl. Put in some letuce, sliced tomato, tin tuna and mayonaise. Stir together with a little olive oil. You can really add anything you like in a salade even leftover chicken (make sure it's cooked) or bacon or something. Be creative!


I hope this gives you a few ideas of what to do with your leftovers.
Enjoy!
Sophie

Chilli Con Carne

Every student should know this recipe. It's perfect for leftovers, easy, tasty and cheap.
You can make a big amount and package freeze it. Chilli tastes just as good when it's re-heated.

Ingredients:
- minced meat
- canned tomato
- bell pepper
- kidney beans
- onion
- cilli seasoning or
- optionally green beans or corn

Chop the onion in little pieces and fry up in a pan. Add the minced meat and fry it till it's brown.
Cut the bell pepper and add it mix the kidney beans and tomato. If you like you can pretty much add any othe kind of vegetable you have lying around, but I like green beans and corn.
Stir it all together and add the chilli seasoning. Let it heat through for a couple of minutes.
Serve with rice, potatous, wraps or taco's. Top it off with grated cheese or sour creme.

Enjoy!
Sophie

Roti

This recipe is originaly from Suriname, wich used to be Dutch collony.
Very easy and really delicious. If you like curries, you will probably love this.

ingredients:
- potatoes
- chickenbreast
- green beans
- curry powder
- onion
- garlic
- tortillawraps

Cut the potatoes in pieces and boil them for about 15 minutes.
Boil the green beand as well and when they're almost done, cut them in pieces.
Cut the cickenbreast in little pieces as well and fry them in a pan for 3 minutes on full heat, till they're golden brown.
Add the curry powder and garlic and stir fry for a minute. Chop the onion, add and fry for another 2 minutes. Now add the green beans to the stir fry.
when they're don you put the potatoes in and add a little extra curry powder and salt and pepper.
Heat the tortilla's as read on the package. You eat it all together like a sort of burrito or wrap.

Enjoy!
Sophie

Deliciously Fancy Hamburger

If you´re craving a hamburger, but you want something better than the fast-food kind, try this.
It's a fancy version and you can complete construct it to your own taste.
Belive me, you'll love it!

Ingredients:
- bun
- hamburger
- tomatoes
- pickles
- sauces (ketchup, mayoniase)
- onion rings
- lettuce

Suggestions:
- cheese
- mushrooms
- mustard, chilli-sauce, curry-sauce

Grill the burger and frie up the onion rings. Slice the tomatoes and pickles and cut the bun open.
Put some sauce on one half of the bun and put lettuce on it. Add the tomatoe and pickle slices.
Put the hamburger on and top it of with the onion rings and the other half of the bun.
If you want a cheese burger, grill the burger on one side. Flip it and put a slice of cheese on the side thats done.
For mushrooms you just fre them up with the onion rings.

You can really put on whatever you like, that´s the beauty of hamburgers.
To make it really fancy you can use brie in stead of cheddar, or put grilled veggies like eggplant or zucchini on it as well. I really like taking fancy kind of buns instead of regular burger ones.
Those little things make all the difference.
Use your imagination, make it crazy good.
This one also works great for parties with all the different kinds of toppings.

Enjoy!
Sophie

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Fast Pasta Bolognese

Bolognese is an Italian tomato and minced meat sauce.
It's very easy, but in the original way you have to let it cook for quite a while.
So this'll be a fast version.
It's easy and really good.

Ingrediënts:
- pasta
- tomato sauce
- minced meat
- chopped vegetables
- herbs, salt and pepper

Boil water with salt for the pasta. Add the pasta and stir ones in a while to prevent sticking.
Fry the minced meat with a little bit of olive oil. Keep stirring and make sure it doesn't burn.
Whe it's brown, you add the vegetables. You can either use a bag of pre-done veggies or whatever fresh ones you like. Just make sure they are chopped up finely.
I usually make sure there's onion, leek and peppers in it. Courghette also goes very well with this sauce. Fry the veggies with the meat for about five minutes.
Add the tomato sauce and turn the heat down a little.
Let it cook for another five minutes, then season with mediteranian herbs, salt and pepper.
When the pasta is done, pour out the water and either add the sauce to it or serve seperately.

Enjoy!
Sophie

Quantities And Quality

I don't write quantities down in my recipes for a very simple reason:
I don't know them.

When I cook, especially one person dishes, I just kind of guess.
And this way you can easily addapt to a arious number of people, or your own taste.
Baking is a lot more precise, so with those recipes I will add quantities.

But, to make things easier and help you out a little, I've come up with a schedual.
Here you can see exactly how much of certain things you need per person.
This way you just have to figure out sauces and side-dishes for yourself.

Pasta: 100 grams/3.5 ounces
Rice: 75-100 grams/2.6-3.5 ounces
Cous-cous: 75 grams/2.6 ounces
Potatous: 4-5 potatous/ 200 grams/ 7 ounces

Enjoy!
Sophie

I'm Sorry...

Well, things have been a little bit buissier than I had foreseen.
I didn't reach my goal of a recipe a week, also thanks to being sick.
So for today I have two updates.

Besides this one.

I'll try to keep up, but I can't promiss anything.
Love, Sophie

Spinach Spaghetti

To kick things off: Spaghetti with Spinach-Creme Sauce.
Friday is kind of left-overs day for me and I'm kind of buisy with schoolwork, so I decided to make something simple.
This is one of my favourite things to cook, because it´s so easy yet so delicious.
I promiss you´ll love it too!
You can simply adjust the amounts to the number of people or how hungry you are.

Ingredients:
- frozen spinach (creme or regular)
- spaghetti
- pesto
- creme/yoghurt
- black pepper

Boil water with salt. Add the spaghetti and turn down the heat a little.
As the pasta gets soft, keep gently pushing it down untill it's all under water.
Put the spinach in a saucepan and heatit untill it's all defrosted.
Turn down the heat and add a little pesto and creme or yoghurt to your sauce.
Flavour it with some black pepper or any kind of spices you like.
When the pasta is ready, pour out the water and add the sauce.
That's it, all done!

As a variation you can add pieces of chicken or other vegetables.
I wasn't very hungry, but this goes great with any kind of meat if you're really making a whole meal out of it.
I'm also trying to lay low on carbs so I used relativly little spaghetti and extra spinach.
This recipe is really easy to alter to your own style.

Enjoy!
Sophie

My Apron

The item every aspiring cook should have: a cute apron.
This is mine, it was a gift from my dad.

He works at Slow Food Compony and he brought it home from a convention.

This will be my new uniform for the coming time.

Hopefully it'll serve me well.

So, What's Gonna Happend?

To start of this blog I'll tell you a little about myself and this blog.

My name is Sophie, I'm 19 years old and I live in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Last year I started a blog about my gap year, but as I travelled abroad I found it hard to keep it up.
Now I jus started in college (Liberal Arts&Sciences) and instead of blogging about my boring life, I will atempt something else.
I'm a hardcore food lover and I spend a lot of time on the blogs of professional cooks.
Now Im not bad at all, but I will not pretend to be as good as them.
No, my blog will have a completely different aproach.
Each week I will post a recipe, hopefully with an interesting background story, that I made in my crappy college kitchen.

As a description of my kitchen:
I share it (and the rest of the apartement) with three others. We used to have a waterboiler, coffemachine and toaster, but all of those are broken.
Luckely there's a working microwave, stove and fridge.
It's not the cleanest kitchen and not the best equiped one, I'm sure that anyone who went to college can imagine what it's like.

But as I said, I will try to post at least once a week an easy to make, cheap and tasty meal.
I don't always have time to cook or I'll be eating with friends, so once a week sounds do-able.
So, if you're interested, keep checking out my blog and maybe it'll inspire you to eat more than just P&B sandwiches or microwave food ;)

O, and requests are allways welcome. As are random comments, so don't hesitate!

Love, Sophie