Granola Two Ways

Look what we made yesterday!

Our gorgeous golden cranberry and almond granola and decadent dark chocolate orange granola are packed and ready to go!

We are firing on all cylinders, preparing for our pop-up stall this Saturday. Our kitchens are a mess,  and we are covered in sugar, honey and chocolate but we couldn’t be happier or more excited!!!

Chargrilled Octopus and Orange Salad

I thought I’d try an ingredient I’d never worked with before and enthusiastically picked octopus as without any particular recipe in mind for this post. Having returned from the fish shop, I flipped frantically through my cookbooks for a while without much success. Thank goodness for Google, which yielded this recipe for a salad of char-grilled baby octopus and orange – what did we ever do without it?

Candied Orange and Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’m a very risk-averse person. Maybe it’s something to do with being a lawyer, but I’m overly cautious and any risks I do take are usually heavily calculated towards producing good results. Which is a long-winded way of saying I need to be a bit more adventurous… with life in general, and cooking in particular. I do believe, truly, that in cooking, as in life, the biggest failure is to be so crippled by the fear of it that one does not try anything new at all. And so, here I am, valiantly trying to stand up with the courage of my convictions and not let the fear of a badly chosen recipe or (even scarier) making up a recipe, stop me.

Pineapple and Ginger Marmalade

 

I’m quite new to the whole jam-making thing. I’ve made tomato chutney for years and have become pretty adept at that process, simply because I refuse to eat rice and curry without some form of condiment or the other, and this is my favourite. And I always have a bottle of homemade pineapple jam in the fridge, but this is little more than pineapple stewed until sticky. I hadn’t ventured towards other forms of preserves until I came across a recipe for pineapple and ginger marmalade in David Lebovitz’s wonderful book, Ready for Dessert. This looked interesting because: pineapple. And also: candied ginger. Not to mention: rum.