The Thursday Thoroughly Tantalizingly Tasty Tutorial To... Cooking

T⁷C: Tortilla Bowls

Hopefully this will need little introduction, as it sort of follows M⁷R, apart from instead of reviews it just simple recipes (and since it's me cooking they're normally going to be quick and simple recipes which will probably need improving). Anyway as the title suggests this week i made tortilla bowls. There is a pic below if you want to know what the heck a tortilla bowl is, but if you want to know why i made them, then that's simply because they sounded awesome. I served them with texmex minced beef, guacamole, and some tortilla chips on the side.

Ingredients: 

Flour Tortillas

Minced Beef

2 Avocados

An Onion

A Tomato

Lime Juice

2 Garlic Clove

Pepper

Cumin

Cayenne Pepper

Paprika

BBQ Sauce

Cheese

1) Scoop the insides of the avocados into a blender, and blend thoroughly, add half the onion chopped, a garlic clove, and lime juice (to taste) and blend again. Finally add the tomato chopped into chunks.

2) Find some oven-proof bowls that a tortilla can be shaped around and sandwich one tortilla between two bowls. Cook at 180° until golden brown.

3) Cook the minced beef with chopped pepper, onion and anything else you want to throw in. Add the cumin, cayenne pepper, paprika and BBQ Sauce to taste, and the garlic clove.

4) Dollop the beef into the tortilla bowl (having removed the bowls after taking it out the oven), sprinkle cheese on top and top with the guacamole.

 Having made these i can say whilst the bowls do look pretty cool, i'm not sure they're actually better than the other tortilla cooking methods, for this recipe it's probably better served with just plain uncooked tortillas or as quesadillas (fried in frying pan). However i think the bowls are probably very good for other situations, maybe parties due to their quirkiness. So that's that for this week really, simple eh? Tune in next week for another recipe, which i would say what it is but i don't know actually... 

Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy (actually not that easy)

As you may know i am one who likes cooking, and so again i will be posting another one of my recipes (although this is the first time I've cooked it, and we'll have to see how it turns out) Anyway if you're not into food, then i have a music suggestion instead and if you like both then feel free to take both. So over the last few days I've revisited the music of Bat for Lashes, i found their music a few years back whilst watching Jools Holland and haven't regretted that moment since. I don't know what more i can really say about it though apart from it is quite a uniqu-ish style so instead of me trying to explain, just give them a listen, you never know you could actually like it.

Lemon Fried Chicken

1. Marinade chicken with soy sauce (either light or dark or even a mix of both)
2. Make the batter with an egg and roughly a tablespoon of flour, then add water until desired consistency (can't explain what this really is but hopefully you can decide for yourself) (optional chinese five spice can be added at this point)
3. Chuck all the chicken pieces into the batter and cover thoroughly, whilst warming some oil in a pan.
4. Once the oil is hot, chuck the battered chicken into the pan, and break up the pieces from each other
5. In another pan add chicken broth, lemon juice, lemon slices and sugar, simmer for some time
6. Serve the chicken with rice or noodles and pour the lemon sauce over.

Yeah, after making it the sauce really didn't turn out well. However fear not for the recipe still works as fried chicken, or infact any batter fried meat/vegetable/object you wish, and i will work on the lemon sauce to make it work or at least taste reasonable.

Ready, Steady, Cook (Like a Student)

Amazingly i'm actually going out tonight. That combined with the fact that i have to cook dinner for the family tonight means that i actually have little time to waste, and so instead of a normal blog post this is just going to be a quick recipe for some top notch student cooking.

Flatbread Pizza

1. Mix together 110g self-raising flour with 55g butter, dash in some parsley/ any herbs you can find and bind together with water.
2. Roll out into a rough circle-ish shape.
3. Grab any vegetables you can get e.g. peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes (yes, i know there not vegetables but frankly it doesn't matter), and cut them up and fry with garlic and any tomato based sauce you can find (i managed to find some salsa) and of course oodles of cheese.
4. Remove veggie mix from pan and fry the bread for a few minutes each side (try not to break it when flipping)
5. Place veggie mix on top of bread, and there you go. And if you're one of those weird people who like to eat healthily, I've been told salad can go with it.