Unicorn burger

Mystical creatures turned into burgers. The only possible upgrade I could think of would be narwhals, but let's face it, nobody's going to catch one of THOSE.

Alright, I admit it. I didn't actually make those burgers with unicorn meat. I wouldn't want to look like Voldemort anyways. But those burgers are a cute treat for a kid's birthday party (or the kid inside everyone)

Yes, bad picture quality, we didn't have a camera and only an old phone. But you get the idea!

Yeah, the picture isn't too pretty and I'm aware that the stove is a mess - but that was JUST after I transformed a burger into a unicorn, so cut me some slack!

As you might see, a unicorn with its thin legs and horn might not be the best creature to turn a burger into, but the technique works on pretty much everything. All you need is a cookie cutter. The Doctor gave me a unicorn one because he knows I'm into that stuff. But we're both not really cookie eaters. I made delicious cookies last christmas and they pretty much stayed in the box until they were too hard to eat.

So instead, I decided to use it on other food. And since we were making burgers that night, I had my project! Cookie cutters aren't normally very deep. I first tried to just cut it all out at the same time, but that didn't work at all. It's why the unicorn is missing a leg and its horn on the top. I then lifted the top and just did the rest and made sure most of the smaller ingredients (like tomato, onion, pickle) are inside the cutter.

That worked better. I cut along the edges with a sharp knife and did the same to the top on its own to try and make the best of what was left.

The downside is that there's a lot of burger parts left afterwards that look weird. But if you use a bigger cookie cutter in an easier shape, for example a big heart or star or even christmas tree, that shouldn't be too big of a problem.

It definitely turns burgers much cuter than just shoving all the greasy meat inside your mouth! It's still greasy, but that way it looks cute and you've got something to admire. You can also pretend that the grease will give you a pimple on your forehead that gradually turns into a unicorn horn. No sane person would never do that, of course. Definitely not me. Oh no.

Stuffed pork loin with rosemary potatoes

Yum! We were so busy apartment-hunting yesterday that I didn't even have time to post the recipe for my awesome lunch. We had about five minutes to eat it after I finished it, because we had appointment after appointment, but those five minutes were amazing.

What do you need?
Pork loin/pork fillet. If you roll the meat, you can use steak, too. (Use as much as you need for the people you're cooking for, I used about 400 gram for 2 persons that love meat)
150 gram cream cheese
100-200 gram bacon bits
1 green onion
4 potatoes (you can use more potatoes, of course. Rosemary potatoes still taste great, even when they're cold)
Rosemary twigs
Salt
Olive oil
Butter/Margarine for roasting the meat

The recipe is fairly simple but delicious. I started with the potatoes while the Doctor was off to buy cream cheese. I cut them into slices (they get crispier the thinner you slice them), put them into an oven pan and cut the rosemary. I didn't cut it into small pieces but left them big on purpose. They are tasty to eat when they're out of the oven. I spread those over the potatoes, added salt (more than you'd normally use on potatoes, so every potato has salt on it) and then poured olive oil over them.

The stuffing for the pork loin is simple as well. While I put the meat on the stove to roast it lightly (just for the colour and so the pores would close), I simply mixed the bacon bits, the cut spring onion and the cream cheese. Already done! I cut the pork loin in the middle so I had room for the stuffing and then spread it. You can see the pictures of that below.

Roast it for only a minute on high heat so it gets the roasting aroma but stays raw on the inside, then add a deep cut in the middle for the stuffing

Mix the ingredients until there's enough cream cheese to cover all the bacon bits and spring onion. You can vary the amounts to your liking

Spread the stuffing in the cut, you can add as much as you want here, I added enough so it filled the cut and not more because I didn't want it to spill all over the meat

Now that that's done, you can continue a few different ways. You can leave the cut open and put it into an oven dish. Or you knot thread around it so it stays shut. Or, and that's what I did, you cover it in aluminium foil. Make sure there's some pressure on it when you wrap the foil around the meat and twirl the ends so it looks a bit like a bonbon. That way, the meat juice stays inside and doesn't spill on the bottom of your oven (we don't want to make a huge mess, do we?).

This is what it looked like when I put it in the oven. You can see the aluminium foiled meat in the back and the potatoes in front. I left it in the oven at 200°C/350°F for about 40 minutes and then served it. If you want a bit more crisp to your meat, you can open the foil and leave it in for another 10 minutes, maybe even add some sprinkled cheese if the cream cheese isn't enough for you. However, we hardly had time to eat after it was done, so I skipped that step.

And even without that step, oh boy. It tasted amazing. I've never eaten rosemary potatoes before, so that was heavenly all by itself. But the meat was great as well. Because of the aluminium foil, it stayed really soft and juicy, we hardly needed knives to cut it. Below is a picture of the results.

Crispy potatoes, soft, pink meat and delicious stuffing. Definitely making that again. Not much work, simple steps - that recipe is a keeper. I'm trying a similar one sometime soon with chicken breast instead of pork loin and arugula, cream cheese and pine seeds. I'll post the recipe when I've done it

I hope you like this one and try it out!

Pumpkin soup that actually tastes awesome!

I'm not a fan of pumpkin. I never made anything pumpkin-related myself, but whenever I ate it, it was just.. not that special for me. The Doctor likes it even less. So when I bought a pumpkin today, I did wonder whether I might have hit my head in my sleep.

A good friend of mine, Toni the Canadian, told me about her pumpkin soup yesterday. It sounded easy enough to make and I figured I'd give pumpkin another try. The Doctor wasn't too psyched about it, so I decided to add some ingredients that he likes in order to make it taste awesome for both of us.

The recipe Toni gave me was easy enough. Roast onions in some oil, add flour, chicken broth, pumpkin and milk. So I looked around the kitchen to see what else we had. There were potatoes, bacon, garlic and cheese. Good enough, I thought, and started to work on the pumpkin.

Now, I assume most people have made delicious things out of pumpkins. But getting the seeds and all the weird strings and finally the meaty part out of it took me an hour. And even after an hour, I only had about 200 gr of it. That had to be enough, my arms already hurt like crazy.

I skinned the potatoes, onions and the garlic and cut it all into small pieces. (I used so many plates for all the different ingredients that the kitchen now looks as if we had a huge party with dozens of guests) I followed the Canadian recipe, but added the garlic right away. I roasted it in margarine with the onions, added flour and then a liter of water. I let it boil, added veggie broth powder (I didn't have any chicken broth powder on hand and I thought the veggie broth might taste well with the cheese I had) and then pushed the six potatoes I still had into the pot.

After about 10 minutes of slow boiling, I added the pumpkin. Another 10 minutes passed before I added soft cheese with herbs (I'm not sure if that's sold everywhere in the world). I assume, if you don't have that, sour cream or normal soft cheese taste great as well.While I let that boil together to make sure it was all soft, I roasted bacon bits, scooped them out of the pan with a spoon so the oil and the droppings remained in the pan and then roasted the pumpkin seeds. I didn't want to throw them away after all.

Finally, I pulled the pot off the oven and puréed the potatoes, pumpkin and everything else in the pot until it was really creamy and there were no big bits left in it. I added a pinch of salt and some pepper. I wanted nutmeg in it, too, but found out that we had none of it left. If you wish to add that, I'm sure it would make it taste even better.

I poured a portion of the soup on a plate and garnished it with the roasted pumpkin seeds and bacon and voilá:

It doesn't have that really orange look because of all the potatoes in it, but you can still -taste- the pumpkin. And let me tell you something, it tastes delicious. I'm glad I made such a big pot of it because even the Doctor ate more than one plate. Even though it's just soup, we're both really full (it's all the cheese!). Even though it was a lot of work (mostly because it was my first time with a pumpkin, I assume. No pun intended), I'd make that soup again anytime and I'm adding it to my recipe book!

Here are the exact ingredients I used:
1 onion
5 cloves of garlic
margarine for roasting
1/4 cup flour
6 medium sized potatoes
200 gr pumpkin
100 gr soft cheese (herb version) or normal soft cheese or sour cream
salt
pepper
nutmeg
bacon bits (as much as you want as it doesn't got into the soup)
pumpkin seeds

I hope you have fun trying this recipe!

Baked Potato Variation

Today I was feeling super confident because of the tasty garlic chicken I made yesterday. So I decided to try yet another recipe I found via Pinterest. The Food Pusher calls it "Baked potatoes... sort of" and well.. I don't have a different name for the variation I made today. I followed the recipe on the website, but added things here and there and made little variations.

Picture of the original recipe at Food Pusher

If you look at the recipe on the website, it's about twice baked potatoes. Instead of baking the potatoes, I cooked them. Only until they were just a little less tender, too tender to normally eat.

I mixed the sour cream, cream cheese and garlic in a different bowl, just because I like having different bowls for my ingredients. It makes me feel as if I'm star chef in a TV show. Before I added the butter to it, I let it melt a little in the microwave so it's easier to mix it and you don't have butter lumps in your dish. I also added a few twigs of rosemary because the Doctor really likes that herb.

I roughly mashed to potatoes so I had small bits of potato rather than "real" mash. I added milk to make sure the potato would go soft in the oven, then mixed the sour cream, etc., into the oven dish. Again, I didn't mix it until it was mash but just made sure there's sour cream all around the potatoes.

I was a bit confused by the "enough for 9-10 servings" in the original recipe, so I used 6 potatoes rather than 8. Spoiler alert, we didn't have to invite friends over. It was enough for the Doctor and me, but no third person.

After everything was mixed, I put it into the oven as instructed, waited half a hour and then roasted the bacon bits. Rather than leaving it in the oven for 40 minutes, I took it out about 5 minutes early and spread the cheese, bacon and green onions over it. I put it back in so it would form a bit of a crust and keep roasting the bacon. Bacon can never be over-roasted. Unless it's completely coal-like, I guess.

The end-result wasn't as crusty as I had hoped, but we could've left it in the oven for a few more minutes, if we hadn't been so super hungry, so that probably wouldn't have been a problem.

And let me just say... it tasted delicious. I never tried the "real mash version" of it, so I can't compare, but I really liked the potato bits in the dish. It tasted super creamy but still had a bit of a crunch to it and you didn't have to slurp it up like a really thick soup.

I believe this would be great for noodles instead of potatoes, too. In fact, the next time I make that one, I'll use noodles instead of potatoes and add minced beef to see how that works out. I'll report, of course.  But so far, I can definitely say that this recipe is recommendable. It's especially nice now that it's getting colder outside because it gives you that "warm on the inside, warm on the outside" feeling and makes you so full that you just want to lie on the couch under a blanket and cuddle a little. With a doctor. Or the rabbits that behave suspiciously well tonight. I should look into that and see what their true plans are.

Happy eating!

Heavenly chicken

I'm a good cook. I don't know why, but I just am. I never really cooked that much when I was still living with my family. Sure, I knew how to make things and when I cooked with recipes, the results were usually not too bad, but I never had the motivation to make nice food every day. It was more of a twice a year thing for me.

Well, that changed when I moved out. To the worse. I lived in a little studio apartment for a few months and I could never bring myself to cook just for one person. It was also a little sad, I like to shove my food into people's faces so they can compliment me on how awesome it tastes.

And then I moved in with the Doctor and all of a sudden, there was this super power inside of me and I managed to cook and cook and cook and it all tasted so amazing that I thought I might have a brain tumor or something. Turns out I'm a good cook.

Now, while it normally tastes great, it doesn't always -look- great. I once made cole-wraps that tasted as if they were made with minced angel, but they had this sickish green colour. I blame the cole. But today, it has happened. I made dinner that looked exactly like the picture in the recipe. Which is lucky, because the Doctor and I ate it so quickly that I had no time to take my own pictures. And here is the heavenly chicken!

 I still can't get over the fact that it really looked exactly like the pictures. And while you might think that this is super complicated to make, it's one of the easiest recipes I've ever had! I found it at Daydream Kitchen, it's called "Baked Garlic Brown Sugar Chicken." And the best part? That's really all the ingredients you need! You don't need tons of things you normally don't buy and it still tastes exotic, fresh and really, really good.

You can check out the complete recipe at Daydream Kitchen (click the link in the paragraph above), but I'll break it down for you:
You turn on your oven so it's ready when you are (better do that a few minutes before you start with the rest as it really doesn't take more than 5 minutes). Grease an oven pan just a little, spread the chicken breast in it. Heat olive oil in a pan, add the garlic, roast until it's tender. Take it off the stove, add brown sugar, spread it all on your chicken breast and put it in the oven. That's it. It's not even a real paragraph and still you just have to wait a few minutes until you've got super delicious dinner.

It's great for weekdays, when you don't have time to cook much, or even for dinner with friends. I'm sure they'd think you spent hours in the kitchen, when it's really so simple! I can't stop admiring this recipe and handing it out to everyone I know. If you're into garlic and chicken, this is your thing to do.