Recipe 44 – Homemade Basil Pesto

Can anyone guess where this recipe came from? Yep – Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals again. My fiancé and I were celebrating it being exactly a year until we got married, and I had made a special Italian meal of tomato, mozzarella and basil salad for starters, followed by Cannelloni. Although the basil pesto recipe was part of another recipe in the book, I thought it would go well with the starter.

It was simple to make – just putting pine nuts, basil, oil and garlic in the food processor and blitzing. It tasted incredible – must better than the normal store bought pestos, and did go very well with the starter.

Recipe 43 – Indian Style Steak

Now this was a great recipe – again courtesy of Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute meals. Two of my favourite foods in life are a good steak and a good curry – and this recipe combined them both, and was so easy to do.

The steak was marinated in some Patak’s curry paste (Jalfrezi for me) and cooked as normal. I also made a curry sauce to accompany it – again using the Jalfrezi paste. The recipe was to add some coconut milk to this, but as I prefer tomatoey curry sauces I just added chopped tomatoes instead, and cooked it for a while to allow all the flavours to come together.

The steak and sauce were then served with some naan bread – done in well under 30 minutes and seriously delicious! Thank you Jamie.

Recipe 42 – Piri Piri Chicken and Dressed Potatoes

There may be a theme developing here as this is another 30 minute meal (although I missed 2 of the components of this one out, as I didn’t fancy them!). I first tried piri piri chicken in Portugal years ago, and instantly fell in love. I’d tried in the past to replicate the spicy chilli sauce here but had never managed to get the taste quite right, and whilst the restaurant version is nice it still doesn’t quite replicate what I’d tasted in Portugal.

The sauce in this recipe was about the closest I’ve come to a true Piri Piri sauce. It had a really spicy kick and was the right consistency. It was incredible even when I tasted it raw before pouring over the chicken!

I also love the dressed potatoes which went with this recipe – a mixture of regular and sweet potatoes were cooked, crushed and then mixed together chilli, coriander and feta cheese. I’d never thought about this combination with potatoes in the past but it was fantastic, and a great accompaniment to the chicken.

Overall this has actually been one of my favourite meals this year.

Recipe 41 – Jerk Chicken, Rice & Peas with Chargrilled Corn, Salad and Yogurt Dip

This is another of Jamie’s 30 minute meals and was excellent. There were quite a few parts to this recipe – cooking the chicken, making the sauce, getting the rice right, sorting out the salad and dip, but again I did manage it in 30 minutes. The jerk sauce was fantastic – it had a real killer kick, even with an ingredient missing as I couldn’t find any cheap golden rum in the supermarket, and this was brilliantly balanced with the cooling coriander yogurt.

I’m not normally a big salad fan but the dressing for this recipe really inspired me to try it, as it was made from grated red onion, mixed with lime juice, olive oil and coriander, and gave a really lovely extra flavour to the salad without the overpowering taste of onion. I also really enjoyed the chargrilled corn – something I’ve never tried before despite sweetcorn being one of my favourite veggies.