Lately, I’ve been craving Mexican food a LOT. I think it’s because the food is so fresh and I love all the spices! I’ve recently learnt how to make Chicken Fajitas which I have been making often because it’s so damn easy to make and it’s so damn delicious! I got my recipe from Jamie’s Food Revolution book which was a very simple and easy 20 minute recipe.

Chicken Fajitas

Serves 2

1 red bell pepper
1 medium red onion
2 skinless, boneless chicken breast fillets
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
A small pinch of ground cumin
2 limes
Olive oil
Sea Salt and freshly ground pepper
4 flour tortillas
1/2 cup sour cream
4 ounces Cheddar cheese

Salsa

2 fresh chillies
15 ripe cherry tomatoes
Small bunch of cilantro
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 lime
Extra virgin olive oil

1. First, start of by putting your grill pan on a high heat.
2. Halve and seed your bell pepper and cut into thin strips and peel, halve and finely slice the onion.
3. Slice the chicken lengthways into long strips (roughly the same size as the bell pepper strips)
4. Put the chicken, bell pepper and onion into a bowl with the paprika and cumin, squeeze in half a lime and drizzle a lug of olive oil. Season with a pinch of salt and pepper and mix well.
5. Marinate for 5 minutes. While we wait, we can now make our salsa.
6. Finely chop the chilli and roughly chop the tomatoes and cilantro (stalks and leaves together).
7. Put the chilli and tomatoes in a bowl with a pinch of salt and pepper and squeeze 1 lime.
8. Add extra virgin olive oil and stair the chopped cilantro.
9. Using a pair of tongs, put the pieces of bell pepper, onion, and chicken into the preheated grill pan to cook for 6-8 minutes (as seen in the above photo)
10. Warm the tortillas on a warm dry frying pan.

Red Pepper, Green Pepper, Onion, Chicken in the grill pan

Fresh salsa

Ready to add to the tortillas: Sour cream, cheese and salsa

Add to the tortillas

Wrap up your tortillas and eat away! Enjoy! :)

I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately (Masterchef Australia, Junior Masterchef Australia, Masterchef USA, Hell’s Kitchen, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Jamie’s American Road Trip, etc). One of my favourite all time chefs is Jamie Oliver, especially since his infamous TV show “Fifteen” and “Fifteen Melbourne”.

I recently purchased Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (The Cook Book) which is filled with quick and easy recipes which is great for a beginner chef like me.

I started off with my first recipe, spaghetti! I love Italian food and especially pasta. This recipe is so simple and yet so delicious!

Garlic, Basil & Tomato Spaghetti Recipe (Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution)

Ingredients
Bunch of basil
Garlic
Chilli
400ml of canned diced tomatoes
400g spaghetti
Salt and pepper

I also added: parmasen cheese, dry chilli flakes, and minced pork

Recipe
1. Cook the spaghetti in salted water for 12 minutes
2. Remove the basil leaves from the stalk.
3.  Finely chop the garlic, chilli and the basil stalk.
4. Add olive oil to the saucepan and fry the garlic, chilli and basil stalk.
5. Once the garlic is almost brown, add the meat to fry or skip to add the tomatoes and the basil leaves.
6. Cook on high heat for a minute and add salt and pepper to taste.
7. Once the spaghetti is cooked, strain the water and add to the sauce in the saucepan.
8. Serve and grate the cheese onto the plate and dried chilli flakes.

I had one of those moments where I was absolutely starving and I had no idea what to eat! I opened up the freezer and saw that I’ve had a packet of udon which has been sitting there for a long time now because I had no idea what to do with it. I knew I had to use this up soon (especially since it’s taking up precious freezer space) so I googled some udon recipes and tried to throw something together with the ingredients I had!

I started off by boiling the udon in a saucepan. Cook this until it expands a little and is nice and firm, yet smooth and a bit soft.

While that’s cooking up, I fried some onions, spring onions (green onions), shitake mushroom and beensprout in a frying pan.

Add some soy sauce and seaweed and mixed this up. Cook this for about 2-5 minutes.

Once the  udon is done, add this to the pan and mix. I also added some black pepper (because I love pepper so much)

Then serve! :)

This was actually surprisingly more tasty that I expected! Must be the flavour from the shitake mushrooms and the seaweed! When I ate this, I added some Shichimi Togarashi (Japanese spice) and it was amazing. Yum yum.

In light of ANZAC Day, I decided to make ANZAC biscuits (or biccies!). I’ve grown up loving ANZAC biscuits (and not just because ANZAC Day is my birthday) but because they are truly delicious!

They are popular in Australia and New Zealand, being made out of rolled oats, flour, coconut, sugar, butter, golden syrup, bicarbonate of soda and boiling water.

I’ve been asked numerous amount of times why these biscuits are called ANZAC Biscuits and I have to be honest, I did not know. I did know however that ANZAC stands for the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps and ANZAC Day is a national day that we hold in honourary memory of them.

Upon some internet research, I found that the biscuits were sent by wives to soldiers abroad because they were worried about the nutrition of their husbands, and also the ingredients do not spoil easily and the biscuits kept well during naval transportation. These biccies can stand up to months unrefrigerated!

What I love even more about these biccies is that they are extremely easy to make with very little ingredients. I used this recipe I found online. Enjoy!

INGREDIENTS
1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup desiccated coconut
1 cup plain flour
1 cup sugar
125g (4oz) butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 tablespoon water

Preheat oven to 300F (150C)

Mix oats, flour, sugar and coconut together.
Melt syrup and butter together.
Mix soda with boiling water and add to melted butter and syrup.
Add to dry ingredients.
Place 1 tablespoonfuls of mixture on greased tray (allow room for spreading).
Bake for 20 minutes.
Loosen while warm, cool on trays.

So the other day I got back home from work absolutely starving! I needed to cook something QUICKLY. I searched my fridge and I had some left over beef, onion and green peppers. I then searched my cupboard and I found a brand new jar of Black Pepper Sauce.

Perfect! I can make Black Pepper Beef, but one thing was that I had never cooked it before. But because it’s one of my most loved dishes (and also because I was so starving) I thought I would attempt to make something up. So here we go…

So in went the beef on the pan with some oil. Sizzle sizzle.

This is my Black Pepper Sauce I bought from T&T.

Once the beef is done, add 3 tablespoons of the sauce and 3 tablespoons of water.

Add chopped up onion and green peppers. (By the way, I wish I also had red peppers which would’ve been nice but at this time I was too hungry to care)

And mix it up!

And then serve!

Looking pretty tasty for such a simple dish, right?

I was pretty ready to gobble this up right from the bowl as seen above, but I try to keep my rule consistent: one meat dish and one vegetable dish to eat with rice. So I added some bok choy and some oil to the wok.

Add some soya sauce.

And then serve!

YUM.

I love easy simple meals… Let me tell you – this was soooooo good. I was a very happy girl after this. Hahaha.

In celebration of our new apartment living, Teren & I invited some friends over for Steam Boat.

Playing the wii.

Grace, Louise & I making funny faces.

Here’s the gang. L-R: Sammy, Tomomi, Teren, Andra, Mai, Grace, Ryan and Louise.

In all, it was fun. :)