By special request, here's my Limoncello recipe

I've been making Limoncello for a good few years now after I was given a complimentary glass in an restaurant in a small town in Umbria.  The owner served it to us straight out of the freezer and the bottle had ice on the sides so heaven only know what the strength was (beware if you're driving, especially in Italy!!!), however it was delicious so when I found a recipe for it I had to try it.  This is my version, there are no extra herbs, just the gorgeous lemon flavour.  I hope you enjoy it if you try some yourself.

Ingredients:

1 wide preserving bottle such as a Kilner jar, it must be able to hold 1.5 litres of liquid!
6 unwaxed lemons
1 bottle of  Vodka - the real deal uses pure alcohol but I can't get that.
225g caster sugar
500ml bottled water

Method

Wash the lemons and dry them.  Next remove all the rind from the lemons making sure you don't get any of the pith as it makes it taste medicinal.  I use one of these tools for this as it produces lovely thin slices of rind so lots of lemon flavour is steeped into the vodka.

Once you've got all the rind off you'll have a pretty good plateful of lemon rind and six bald lemons :)  I juice the lemons and keep the juice in the 'fridge as I use it for bread to keep it fresher longer, but you could also slice the lemons and keep them in an airtight container in the fridge for the G&T's or even candy them if you want to add to the Limoncello.  So, to return to the recipe, you'll have a plateful of lemon ruind something like this:

 Now you need to prepare the Kilner jar.  I do this by boiling a full kettle of water and adding it to the jar, making sure the hot water touches all parts to sterilize the bottle - be careful you don't scald yourself though as the water is very hot and tends to build up a slight head of steam!  Alternatively you can put the jar into a hot oven for 20 mins to sterilize it, but make sure you leave it to cool thoroughly and take the rubber seal off too or you'll ruin your oven :)  Once the Kilner jar is sterilized and cooled, add the lemon rind and pour in the vodka:

Leave this for 21 days in a cool, dark place (I add a reminder to my phone otherwise I forget!).  Next, put the sugar in a saucepan with the water, bring it to the boil and dissolve all the sugar.  Leave it to cool and when cold add it to the Vodka and lemon rind, strain the mixture into sterilized bottles (I reuse a couple of wine bottles washed and sterilized as above) and leave for a further 7 days in a cold, dark place.

Once the 7 days is up, server cold or even frozen as an aperitif or an after dinner drink.  You could also try adding a shot of Limoncello to a glass of Prosecco at Christmas for a nice Christmas aperitif.

Good Food and Good Friends, what more can you ask for?

Well, what a busy weekend, lots to do and lots to cook too.  Friday and Saturday I cooked some Chinese food, we're making the most of it while our eldest daughter is away as Chinese is one of the few foods she doesn't like very much, but the rest of us love it.  Both recipes came from Fuchsia Dunlop's book, "Every Grain of Rice..." which I can highly recommend, all the recipes so far have been easy to cook and absolutely lovely.  Here's a picture of Chicken with Chestnuts, Pak Choi with Chilli and some fried rice.

On Sunday we had a lovely day with friends.  The weather was really bad with pouring rain so what better to do on a Sunday Lunch time but have some Lancashire Hotpot with the traditional accompaniment of pickled onions and pickled red cabbage.  That hit the spot nicely and Suzanne cooked a wicked rhubarb and custard crumble pie for dessert, that was the highlight of the mean I think :-D

Today was a bit of a rush so it had to be something quick and easy, so I tried cooking Madrid style pork steaks - very yummy they were too, the pork was marinaded in lots of crushed garlic, paprika, thyme and oregano held together with a little olive oil, then flash fried in a griddle pan on each side.  Served with wilted spinach and mashed potatoes it all went down very well.

Tonight I couldn't be bothered to make Chicken Kiev....

So I did something easier!

This is my easy Chicken Kiev - the girls loved it and commented that if I didn't put it on here we'd never have it again as I'd forget it - they're absolutely right!

Ingredients

3 good sized potatoes
Olive oil for baking
3 small chicken breasts cut into bite size portions
5 cloves of garlic - yes, really, 5, trust me!
1 beaten egg
Approx 50g Parmesan, grated as finely as you can
A dessert spoon of plain flour
Salt and Pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 220 C.  Peel the potatoes and cut them width ways into 1 cm slices.  Boil these for 5 minutes in salted water then drain.  Add salt and pepper to taste and coat the slices in olive oil.  Next, put them in a shallow baking tray lined with foil (the washer-up will love you for this!) with just enough oil to stop them sticking, then bake in the oven on the top shelf for 40 minutes until nicely browned.

While the potatoes are cooking, prepare the chicken.  You'll need 3 shallow dishes for this part, one for the garlic, one for the beaten egg and one for the cheese/flour mix.  Crush the garlic into the first dish, beat the egg in the second then mix the grated Parmesan and flour in the third.  Slice the chicken into 1cm strips removing the fat and tendons as you go then add the chicken to the garlic and mix thoroughly with your hands.  Next, add the garlic coated chicken to the beaten egg to coat it, then transfer to the Parmesan/flour mix and make sure you coat it as well as possible.

15 minutes before the potatoes are done, heat a little oil in a ridged pan over a medium heat and add the chicken pieces.  Lightly brown them on each side, about 3-4 minutes per piece, but go more by colour than time.  Once they're browned, take them off the heat and add them to a second foil lined baking sheet and put them on the middle shelf of the oven.

While you're waiting for the potatoes and chicken to finish off, cook the veg - we had frozen peas.  Finally plate them up and feel smug with a nice glass of wine!  Start to finish took me 45 minutes.

It's Wednesday so let's have some quick and easy pasta

Had to be a quick one tonight as it was a work day, so I decided to make a Chorizo and Red Pepper sauce with Conchiglione.  Turned out really well and a big hit with the family, so thought I should get the recipe down before I forgot how to do it!  Here it is, this serves three people:

Ingredients

2 Red Peppers sliced into thin strips and halved
1 Red onion thickly sliced
Olive oil
75g thinly sliced Chorizo cut into small squares - I used three quarters of a packet normally put in sandwiches
4 cloves Garlic, crushed and chopped
12 sage leaves chopped across their width
A tablespoon of red vinegar
3 large tomatoes, chopped finely
200g Conchiglione

Method

Preheat the oven to 220 C.   Line a deep sided metal baking tray with foil and add the Red Onion and Red Pepper.  Drizzle them with olive oil and a little salt, then once the oven is hot place them on the top shelf and bake until slightly charred, approximately 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat a small amount of olive oil in a frying pan, add the Chorizo and cook over a medium head for a few minutes.  Now add the chopped garlic and sage and cook until the garlic starts to brown.  Now add the tomatoes and the vinegar and cook until the tomatoes have broken down, most of the liquid has dissolved and the sharpness of the vinegar has gone.  Keep it just warm while the onion and peppers finish cooking.

Once the onion and peppers are just starting to brown, boil a pan of water and cook the Conchiglione - dried takes about 10 minutes, but follow the instructions on your packet.

Finally, add the onions and peppers to the Chorizo and tomato sauce, drain the pasta and then combine them together.  Serve hot and enjoy. - we did!

Tuesday is Fish day in the Ball household.

We have a market in Ware only on a Tuesday for some reason only known to the Council.  Now I din't work on a Tuesday I can go and see John the fishmonger and get some fresh fish.  Today there was aome lovely skate wings in so that's on the menu.  I also fancied a curry, so skate curry it is.

I cooked an Chana Masala, one of my favourite vegetable curries to go with it and instead of rice I cooked an Aloo Bogar.  We hadn't had this for years and it's made a welcome return to the table.

For the skate, I made a Masala spice mixture up for the skate from Atul Kochhar's recipe book, a lovely mix of ingredients that adds flavour without killing the flavour of the fish.  To finish it all off I made some Peshwari Nan breads.  it was a big success.

What to cook on a Monday?

I'm not at work today, but I've still been busy so I wanted something easy to prepare.  I had some nice pork loin from the local butcher, so what to do with that?  I know, pork with apples and cider always goes down well.

I browned the pork off in the pan and then cooked some chopped onion and garlic in the meat juices.  We've got plenty of apples in the garden so I grabbed half a dozen and peeled and sliced them up and added them to the pan with the onion and garlic.  Finally I chucked the whole lot in a casserole with a bottle of cider, a few crushed Juniper berries and some chopped sage leaves for extra flavour.  45 minutes later served it up with some nice mash and wilted spinach, hit the spot nicely, yum :-)

It's a horrible wet and windy Sunday, what better than a roast to cheer us up.

The weather forecast was not wrong, it's grey, windy and there's a lot of rain out there,  Just the sort of day too stay indoors and have a nice roast, so it's roast chicken today with home made sage and onion stuffing, roast potatoes, parsnips, sausage balls and some greens to go with it.

Made the winter vegetable soup today from the left overs of last night's meal and it's turned out very well indeed, better than I imagined.  I just sweated off an onion, threw in a couple of garlic cloves and added stock and whizzed it up, sorted.  I'll freeze it when it's cooled off and we can have it whenever we feel like it.  Home made soup is so easy to do, cheap and tastes much better than anything you can buy, I'm surprised more people don't make it.  No doubt there'll now be lots of you telling me you do make it!

Now back to roasting that chicken.  Bon appetit.

Today is the weekly shopping day!  As the cold, wet weather is back, this weekend is going to be spent indoors and what better way to spend time indoors than to cook :)

First off, I made some bread for the week ahead.  Home made bread, yum.  Delicious when first baked, but it tends to go stale very quickly, so how to stop that happening?  Adding a teaspoon of lemon juice to the dough helps here.  The lemon juice helps, but it still goes stale quickly, hmmm.  The answer is to freeze it.  Bread freezes really well but it's really hard to slice, buying an electric carving knife really helps here, it cuts really fresh bread into slices, then throw it in the freezer, then use only what you need straight from the freezer.  Problem solved!