Cooking adventures

Ok, so I love my food - I’ll be the first to admit it - and I’m not bad at making it myself. I work overnights, so I can’t just go out and buy Subway or some Sushi. Buying prepackaged meals is also expensive, not to mention loaded with empty kilojoules, even with the “healthy” options.

I decided a couple of months ago that cooking my own would be an interesting idea, starting with the one dish I could cook really well, which was pasta with my own sauce concoction. That worked really well, but wasn’t terribly healthy because it was loaded with ham, pepperoni and all sorts of fatty things. There’s no easy way to make it healthy, and to add a little variety I decided to change what I was cooking.

Devilled Sausages, Curried Sausages and a Chicken Rogan Josh were next. I made a few serves of each all at once, allowing me to have a single day of cooking for three weeks of food - easy to do and cheaper because I can buy the ingredients in bulk. The sausage meals were super-tasty, using Woolworths’ premium “heart smart” sausages which are amazingly tasty. Alas, the Rogan Josh was bearable, but I’m not going to do that again since it wasn’t exciting enough for multiple-meal goodness.

So I’d eaten all of those meals, and it was time to go shopping again. I thought that because I had a day or two to cook, and I wanted something good to eat, that I would hit up some recipe books and see what I could find in the “easy to make, freezable and good home cooking” category. I found Sausage Rolls and Chicken Parmagiana. I decided to make another small batch of Devilled Sausages because they were cheap, easy and tasty.

I made the Chicken first, since it’s really easy to make. I’ll make a recipe page and link to it from here. I cooked up the bacon with a nice big spoon of garlic, put it on top of the nice big chicken breasts, spooned salsa all over them, dumped the grated cheese on top and into the oven they went. Very simple, and very tasty. (Bob wasn’t impressed - he had to have a snack because he was hungry after just smelling them)

Chicken ready to go into the oven	Chicken cooked and lying in oily doom!
You really do need to drain off the leftover liquid from the combined forces of oil and liquid from the ingredients.
Leftover oily goo from Parma	Parma draining of ooze

Parma ready to freeze

While the chicken was cooking, I started on the sausage rolls (something I also need to make a recipe link for) They are simple also - mix up some milk and breadcrumbs and let that soak while you chop up two onions and two carrots really finely. Mix in about a kilo of premium beef mince (because it’s tastier) with the aforementioned ingredients and about a teaspoon of mixed spice, then make into rolls with puff pastry.

Sausage Roll breadcrumb mixture	Sausage roll filling
Stick them in the oven on a tray for half an hour or so at about 150 degrees to cook the filling, then 220 until they are nice and crispy brown. Perfect!
Sausage rolls fresh out of the oven	Sausage Rolls in a freezer container
Container stack	Mini Leftover bits

I had a bit of leftover mince and a bunch of pastry offcuts, so I made these mini snacks, cooking them the next morning for breakfast. Goddamn they’ll taste good for dinner

My next experiment will be to make blueberry and apple muffins - as much as I’d like to use ‘em instead of apples, bananas are too expensive at the moment