Ingredients (serves 4)
4 tablespoons double cream
4-6 chicken pieces
225g frozen broccoli, thawed
298g can condensed cream of chicken soup
4 rounded tablespoons real mayonnaise
Half level teaspoon curry powder
50g English cheddar, grated

Instructions
1. Preheat a moderately hot oven (Gas 5, 375 deg. F, 190 deg. C)
2. Arrange the chicken and broccoli in a shallow baking dish.
3. Combine the undiluted chicken soup with the mayonnaise, cream and curry powder. Spoon this over the chicken and broccoli then sprinkle with the grated cheese.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the cheese is turning golden brown.

Ingredients

• Half a Cucumber
• Lemon juice
• Red chilli
• Yoghurt
• Coriander
• 2x Naan bread
• 2x Salmon fillets
• Salt & Pepper
• Korma paste (e.g. Patak’s)
• Olive oil

Instructions

Chop the cucumber into small chunks and put in a pyrex bowl, saving a few pieces for garnish. De-seed and finely chop the red chilli and coriander (save a little of each as well) and add to bowl. Add a couple of splashes of lemon juice and the yoghurt. Season with salt & pepper, mix up well and leave on side.

Warm your naan bread in the oven. Slice the salmon into chunks about half an inch thick. Heat some olive oil in a frying pan and add the salmon chunks, followed by 2 tablespoons of korma paste (more or less to taste). Mix up well as it cooks.

As soon as the salmon is cooked, place your naan bread on your serving plate, and spread out the cucumber/yoghurt mix around the large end of the naan. Add half the salmon on top, serve with the remaining cucumber, chilli and coriander on top. Yum.

Ingredients (serves 4)

• 3/4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 3 small courgettes, chopped
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, sliced into batons
• Tin of chopped tomatoes
• 12-16 on-the-vine cherry tomatoes
• 5/6 broccoli florets
• 8 baby corns
• Your choice of herbs, e.g. Basil+Marjoram, Bay Leaf+Thyme or Provençal herbs mix
• Optional – Lea & Perrins
• Optional – 300g long grain rice

Instructions

Prepare all the vegetables. In a large saucepan, heat some olive oil and add garlic and onions. After a couple of minutes, add in the rest of the vegetables except the broccoli. Add the tin of tomatoes on top and add the herbs you have chosen. Optionally add some Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce. Give everything a good stir. After a couple of minutes add all the cherry tomatoes and broccoli and give a quick stir and cover.

If you want rice, in another saucepan immediately after adding the broccoli and cherry tomatoes, boil some water for the rice. After 5 minutes, add the rice and cook everything for a further 15 minutes. If you are not doing rice, just cook the ratatouille for 20 minutes with the lid on. Everything should be ready all at once – which is something I never get quite right, but thankfully this is such a simple dish so it makes it possible!

Ingredients – serves 2

• Pre-rolled puff pastry
• 2 chicken breasts, diced
• 4-6 sliced mushrooms
• 150ml Double cream
• 1/2 pint vegetable stock
• Tablespoon of cornflour
• 1 diced carrot
• 1/2 chopped broccoli heads
• 1 chopped onion
• Plain flour
• Olive oil
• 2/3 crushed garlic cloves
• Splash of white wine (optional)
• 1 egg
  

Instructions

There is normally enough puff pastry in the pre-rolled packets for both the lid and outside. I normally slice the pastry in half with a sharp knife and roll one half big enough for a lid, and the other half big enough for the dish (make it slightly bigger for the sides of course!). Make sure you use plenty of flour to roll, and sprinkle a little flour into the dish before you put the pastry in. Leave the lid aside for now.

The pie filling is made by frying some onion and garlic in olive oil on high in a large frying pan. Add the diced chicken breasts until starting to go golden brown. Add the mushrooms, vegetable stock, optionally white wine, carrots, and simmer  on low/medium for 15 minutes. Add in the broccoli a few minutes before that is done. Add in cream and cornflour and stir continuously for another 5 minutes on medium heat until nice and thick. Let this cool completely on the side. Once it is cool, put into your prepared pastry in your pie dish and cover with a lid. Gently press down around the edges with a fork or your fingers, and decorate if you wish.

Beat an egg and brush the top of the pie with it. Pop the pie in the oven on 200 degrees for about 20/25 minutes until golden brown.

Ingredients

• Finely diced bread
• 50g butter
• Iceberg lettuce
• Scallops
• Chopped chives

For the dressing:

• 2tbsp Ground nut oil
• 175ml sunflower oil
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 shallot
• 1tsp English mustard
• Salt & Pepper
• 2tbsp white wine vinegar

Instructions

1. Heat white wine vinegar, nut oil, sunflower oil, garlic, shallot and mustard, cook for 5 minutes. Season salt & pepper.
2. Whilst that is doing, 25g butter in frying pan. Add finely diced bread and fry until crispy. Drain on plate with kitchen paper.
3. 25g butter in frying pan. Fry for 1-2 minutes on each side until cooked.
4. Serve lettuce on plate, put scallops on top and sprinkle with croutons. Top with the dressing. Sprinkle with chives.

A good confit de canard (duck confit) is hard to get hold of in England, but luckily as my parents live in the Dordogne region they sometimes bring over a tin. A confit de canard is duck legs that are kept in tins, covered in it’s own fat. This fat is great and should be kept after cooking for doing roast potatoes and so on. It’s really easy to cook the duck as well. All you have to do is put in oven for 35-45 minutes (for a good fan assisted, I’d stick to 35-40) at 180 degrees. I simply took the duck legs out of the tin, put them on a grill rack skin side up above a roasting tin to catch the precious duck fat. I poured more of the duck fat over to make sure there was plenty on them, and simply season with salt and pepper. Cook as above, until the skin is nice and crispy. It’ll make a bit of a mess of your oven, but it’s well worth it. After cooking, whilst the fat is still hot and pourable, pour into a container with the remaining fat in the tin and let it cool. Keep this fat in the fridge, and it’ll keep for a few months I believe, and you can use it for roasting potatoes etc. or anywhere where duck fat might be a tasty ingredient. I served ours with mashed potato, carrots and courgette, but traditionally duck might be served with some lettuce and sautéed potatoes.

Ingredients

• Carrots
• 3/4 pint Vegetable or chicken stock
• A white potato or two (depending on how thick you want it – I used 3!)
• Fresh coriander
• A bit of butter
• Optional – double cream

Instructions

Skin potatoes and carrots. Chop coriander up really fine. Remember – the more coriander you have, the more spicy it gets! Put a bit of butter in a large saucepan. Heat them on medium/low for about 5 minutes. Pour in your stock, and simmer for 15 minutes. Add coriander, and if you want, some double cream.

Let it all cool right down to a temperature that won’t melt your blender – you’re not blaming me if you put hot stuff in your blender and it melts! Then put it all in the blender and blend until really smooth. Once blended, pour back into your saucepan and heat… and as always, do not boil it as this may impair the flavour, and it’ll just be downright hot.

Pour into your bowl, and garnish with a coriander leaf. Serve with bread and butter. Yum!

Ingredients

• 2 skin-on Chicken breasts
• Mushrooms
• Rice
• Chicken stock
• Garlic
• Onions
• Double cream

Instructions

Follow instructions on cooking chicken, copied from the original post:

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Season chicken with Salt/Pepper. Fry quickly with skin down until golden brown. Flip over and cook for a minute. Take chicken, and put in an oven dish, and surround with the chicken stock. I put garlic in the stock as well as I love garlic. Cook for 20-25 minutes or until cooked.

While this is cooking, fry off some onion and garlic. Add mushrooms and fry them a bit. Add a little chicken stock, and the rice. Reduce. Add more chicken stock, reduce again. Repeat until stock is all soaked into the chicken. Once this is done, stir in some double cream.

Serve the chicken on the risotto bed. Should hopefuly be tasty!!

Update: It was tasty! Picture attatched…

Ingredients

• 2 skin-on chicken breasts
• Chicken stock (you can make this with Chicken Oxo cubes and hot water!)
• Mushrooms
• White wine
• Double Cream
• Spinach
• Tarragon (I had to get the Scwartz stuff as I couldn’t find any fresh)
• Garlic

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Season chicken with Salt/Pepper. Fry quickly with skin down until golden brown. Flip over and cook for a minute. Take chicken, and put in an oven dish, and surround with the chicken stock. I put garlic in the stock as well as I love garlic. Cook for 20-25 minutes or until cooked.

Melt some butter in a frying pan and add mushrooms until golden. Add white wine and reduce almost completely. Add cream, spinach and tarragon, and reduce by a third. While doing this, boil some rice.

To serve, put a bit of rice on each plate, chicken on top.  put the sauce next to the rice/chicken as I had a lot of mushrooms and spinach in mine. Yum.

Ingredients

• Strawberries
• Blackberries
• Juice (e.g. Summer berry juice)
• Ice cubes

Instructions

Well, there really isn’t too much to say about this – stick everything in, and blend until smooth… Drink straight away for a nice refreshing and healthy drink. Don’t forget to rinse the blender as soon as you can, otherwise it’s a nightmare to clean!

Ingredients:

• 750g Gammon (for 2)
• Honey
• English Mustard
• 1 Leek
• 1 Carrot
• White Cabbage
• A red onion
• Gravy – Bisto, flour, stock cube

Instructions

Loosely wrap the gammon in foil, sealing to ensure it’s airtight. Cook at 160 degrees for 50 minutes. Chop the veg and onion up. Mix a bit of mustard into some honey and put aside ready.

When 50 minutes is up, open the gammon, score it with a knife, and smear honey over. Keep it uncovered, and put it in for 30 minutes at 210 degrees. Steam the veg, caramelise the onion (cook it really slowly, about 30 mins or so on low heat – it tastes YUMMY!). Gravy mix is Bisto, flour, a stock cube and the gammon juices.

Simple, and (hopefully) very tasty!

Ingredients

• 2x Salmon fillet (steaks if you have lots of money!)
• Small jar of Pesto
• 4-5 British potatoes
• A courgette
• Milk
• Butter
• About 4 cloves of Garlic

Instructions

Prepare the Salmon by using a spoon to spread Pesto sauce on top in a thin layer (or if you really love Pesto, a thick layer!). Add a touch of salt & pepper. Slice courgettes, and dice up the garlic into tiny little bits, or use a garlic press… Peel and chop up potatoes into quarters.

Boil potatoes as normal until soft (I usually boil them slightly longer so they fall apart a bit easier). Mash with a tad of milk (or cream if you feel adventurous!), and butter. Salmon should be grilled for some time – I’m not sure how long as I undercooked ours last night, but use common sense here! Finally, fry the courgettes in butter for a minute or so, add the garlic, and turn up medium-high.

It’s a simple dish, but I still managed to undercook the salmon, oops!! Very tasty though.

Ingredients

• New Potatoes
• Broccoli
• 2 Pork chops
• About half a garlic
• Soy sauce
• Half a courgette

Instructions

As I said, this is a very simple dish. Steam the potatoes and broccoli (start the potatoes first as they take longer, and add broccoli later). Make several small slits with a sharp knife into the raw pork chops. Chop up the garlic into lumps, and just push them into the slits. Springle just a tiny bit of soy sauce on the chops. The rest of the garlic you can grind for cooking. Cut the half a courgette into medium thin slices. Heat up a frying pan and melt a knob of butter in it. Fry the courgettes for a minute or two. Move them to the sides of the frying pan, and put the pork chops in the frying pan. Cook for just a few minutes either side, and serve.

Ingredients

• 4 slices unsmoked English bacon
• 4-6 English potatoes (not big potatoes though!)
• Pot of sour cream (I used about 200g of crème fraîche)
• 1 onion
• Lots of garlic
• Mild cheddar cheese

Instructions

Peel the potatoes, boil or steam them until cooked (do the normal knife test, if it seems too hard, keep cooking). While they are cooking, slice up onions, bacon and garlic. Fry the onions and garlic for a few minutes, then add the bacon. When potatoes are cooked, let them cool down completely. Butter an oven dish. Thickly slice the potatoes, lay half of them in the dish. Put half of the onion/bacon mix in. Put half a pot of sour cream in. and spread til covered. Lay the other half of potatoes, then the rest of the onion/bacon mix, then the rest of the sour cream. On top of it all, cover it in sliced (or grated) cheese. Place in a very hot preheated oven (240 degrees in fan-assisted oven) and leave for about 10-15 minutes until the cheese on top starts browning.

• Add 6 slices of bacon or more to get the juices going better
• Don’t use the large tubs of sauce
• Don’t use too much pasta
• Use lots of garlic. Lots and lots of garlic. Add more garlic if at all possible. Add a garnish of garlic.

Ingredients

• 2 small-medium sized Chicken Breast
• Tin of sweetcorn
• Pasta
• Jar of Pesto stuff
• Olive oil

Instructions

Cook pasta for 2 in water with dash of salt. When cooked, drain water and place into bowl to cool. Add a drop of olive oil to make sure the pasta doesn’t dry up and stick together. Add sweetcorn and mix with hands or spoon. Leave to cool completely (not in fridge!).

Cut up chicken into cubes, and gently fry in olive oil until cooked. I like to turn up the heat full to give it a slight golden edge once cooked, but that’s optional… Add in jar of pesto (you’ll probably need the whole jar as it’s gotta mix with the pasta as well remember!) and stir until sauce is warm. Pour into the bowl with the pasta/sweetcorn mix and stir it in, leaving it to cool. Once cool, place in fridge until lunch time!

I recommend you store the final thing upside down. I noticed today when taking them out the fridge that all the pesto juicy bits had settled on the bottom. If you store it upside down, then when you come to eat it, it will all drizzle down through the whole dish.

English Pancakes

Ingredients

For the pancake mixture:

• 110g/4oz plain flour, sifted
• pinch of salt
• 2 eggs
• 200ml/7fl oz milk mixed with 75ml/3fl oz water
• 50g/2oz butter

To serve:

• caster sugar
• lemon juice
• lemon wedges

Cooking Instructions:
Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl with a sieve held high above the bowl. Now make a hole in the centre of the flour and break the eggs into it. Then begin whisking the eggs – any sort of whisk or even a fork will do. Next gradually add small quantities of the milk and water mixture, still whisking (don’t worry about any lumps as they will eventually disappear as you whisk).

When all the liquid has been added, use a spatula to scrape any elusive bits of flour from around the edge into the centre, then whisk once more until the batter is smooth. Now melt the of butter in a pan. Spoon 2 tbsp of it into the batter and whisk it in, then pour the rest into a bowl, using a wodge of kitchen paper to smear it round before you make each pancake.

Now get the pan really hot, then turn the heat down to medium and, to start with, do a test pancake to see if you’re using the correct amount of batter. I find 2 tbsp is about right for an 18cm/7in pan. It’s also helpful if you spoon the batter into a ladle so it can be poured into the hot pan in one go.

As soon as the batter hits the hot pan, tip it around from side to side to get the base evenly coated with batter. It should take only half a minute or so to cook; you can lift the edge with a palette knife to see if it’s tinged gold as it should be.

Flip the pancake over with a pan slice or palette knife – the other side will need a few seconds only – then simply slide it out of the pan onto a plate.

To serve, spinkle each pancake with lemon juice and caster sugar.

Source: http://www.britainexpress.com/articles/Food/english-pancakes.htm