Luke Mangan's Spring Lamb Loin with Peas, Fetta and Pine Nuts

For my birthday I received Luke Mangan's new cookbook - 'At home and in the mood.' It's full of so many fabulous recipes and I've pretty much dog-eared the whole book!

Tonight I came home and wanted to cook something a bit more special, but still relatively easy. This dish looked like it would fit the bill...

Spring Lamb Loin with Peas, Fetta and Pine Nuts

6 X 150g lamb loins, trimmed

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 cups fresh or frozen peas

4 tbsp fetta cheese

30g pine nuts, toasted

good handful of mint leaves, chopped

1 lemon

sea salt and cracked black pepper

Season the lamb loin and drizzle over some olive oil.

Heat a BBQ grill or frypan to a high heat and cook the lamb loins 1 minute on each side. The meat should not be overcooked, but pink in the middle. Leave to rest.

Cook the peas in salted boiling water until tender. Drain and crush with a fork. Add the fetta and crush further to combine. Add the toasted pine nuts and mint, a squeeze of lemon and a good splash of olive oil and pepper.

Spoon the crushed peas among individual serving plates. Slice lamb loin into about 5-6 slices and arrange on top of the crushed peas. Spoon more crushed peas and mint on top. Drizzle with a little more extra virgin olive oil and serve.

The ingredients for this recipe were fairly easy to source. Most of them I had already, other than the mint and the fetta. I decided to use Dodoni fetta, which is a Greek fetta and incredibly creamy. It contrasted really well with the crushed peas.

I also still had an abundance of lemons from my mother in law's now defunct lemon tree!

I cooked the lamb for a minute on each side as Luke suggested, however, it was still incredibly rare. I love my meat medium rare and still pink, but this was a wee bit too raw for me! I put the lamb back in, but unfortunately it ended up quite tough in areas when I came to serve it. I think the lamb loin may've been a bit thicker in some parts than others.

I also used frozen peas because to be honest, who wants to shell peas when they're hungry and wanting to eat quickly!

When arranged on the plate, this dish looked quite beautiful with the brilliant green of the peas. I served it with plain buttered couscous, which, when combined with the pea mixture, was a really yummy mix.

I thought this dish was very tasty, however, perhaps a tad dry. It really needed some yoghurt with it or something to add a little bit of juice. Brett wolfed it down, so it must have impressed the husband... I would make it again, but with yoghurt as mentioned.

Gingerbread house disaster!

I purchased an Ikea Gingerbread House for a bargain $4.00 last Christmas to satisfy my need for building a Gingerbread House from scratch. I wanted to create the best first 'married' Christmas ever and felt the need to adorn our flat with baked Christmas goods. This was the cheats way, but perhaps cheating wasn't the best idea I'd had...

A couple of years ago, whilst living in London, my housemate and I also purchased an Ikea Gingerbread House only for the mice to find it and devour it's walls before we even opened it. I was determined to build this one before any creature got it's mitts on it.

This time around, I carefully unwrapped my house from it's box to discover that the walls were already broken! NO! This may've had something to do with the fact that whilst at Ikea, I was quite nearly crushed by hundreds of Gingerbread Houses when an Ikea staff member crashed his cart into the already unstable tower of boxed gingerbread walls... After I pulled myself from the wreckage, I fished out a boxed house that didn't seem to have been damaged. Wrong.

This brings me back to the fateful afternoon when I tried to put the house together. When I discovered that the sugary walls were already broken, I figured I was clever enough to put them back together. I followed the Ikea instructions on the side of the pack to make the 'glue' that would hold the house together. The instructions were simple - 'melt sugar in a pot and stir constantly.' Ok... I could do that, even though it sounded odd. Surely it needed water? Oh well, I'd follow the instructions - the good people at Ikea must know better.

After what seemed an eternity, my sugar finally started to melt ( I cheated and added a bit of water..). I got to work extremely quickly and attempted to put a wall back together. It worked... sort of. The sugar was drying up faster that I thought it would! I tried to glue two walls together, but with my sugar quickly becoming toffee, it was hard to brush and on and hold walls together at the same time.

A few minutes later, frustration growing, my sugar was officially stuck to my beautiful Circulon pan and had set hard as a rock. At this point, my house's walls also collapsed leaving me with a gingerbread mess! Christmas frustration took over and I decided to destroy the house, which left me with a lovely platter of gingerbread 'shapes.' Very festive indeed....

I was left with a platter of gingerbread bits (which weren't even that tasty!) and a saucepan full of hard sugar... Thank God for Circulon though! Amazing products - the sugar came right out after a bit of soaking and didn't even damage the pan!

After two failed houses, I don't plan to buy another one this year. Those Ikea branded houses may be a bargain, but it's not much of a bargain if you can't see the results and gasp at the splendour of an iced Gingerbread House complete with M&M's for decorations!

This year I'm leaving it to the experts.

Bill Granger's Spaghettini with Prosciutto, Lemon and Chili

I love Bill Granger cookbooks and his style of cooking. His recipes are so fresh and healthy and very simple to make. I ate at his cafe in Surrey Hills, Sydney - his ricotta pancakes with banana and honeycomb butter were sensational!

Anyway, this is what I made for dinner.....


Spaghettini with Lemon, Prosciutto and Chilli

Ingredients:

1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 small fresh red chillies, seeded and finely chopped
12 slices prosciutto, cut into thin strips
1 Tbsp grated lemon zest
250g rocket leaves, shredded
400g good quality dried thin spaghettini

Method:

1) Whisk the lemon juice, olive oil, chilli and some salt and pepper in a bowl to blend.

2) Put the prosciutto, lemon zest and rocket leaves in a bowl and toss to combine.

3) Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Add the spaghettini and cook until al dente. Drain and add to the prosciutto, rocket and basil. Pour the dressing over and toss to combine.

4)Transfer to a large serving dish or divide among four bowls. (In this case, it served two very hungry eaters and a very hungry man for lunch..)


I get home at about 6pm every night from a pretty tiring work day. We usually go for a run when I get home and then the race is on to prepare dinner quickly so that I'm not washing dishes and cleaning up at 10pm! I like to cook things with minimal ingredients so that not only is it easy to prepare, it doesn't cost the earth either.

This dish is from 'Bills Food' - Bill Granger's first cookbook. I have all of his books and use them pretty regularly. Brett (my husband) and I like to eat a lot of pasta after our runs and this dish was great!

Not a lot of preparation was required. I love it when there isn't too much chopping involved and in this case, I only needed to chop a couple of chillies up from our garden. My new mother-in-law had recently loaded us up on lemons from her now defunct lemon tree, so it was a good chance to get rid of a few of those!

I also added two chopped tomatoes that I had sitting around and substituted the rocket for baby spinach, as Brett isn't a big fan...

The pasta was able to boil away whilst I cut up the prosciutto. I used fettucini as opposed to spaghettini, as we had an open packet that needed using.

Once the pasta was cooked, everything was tossed through.. too easy! I found that the prosciutto stuck together a bit though I probably should've added it slice by slice.

Mine didn't work out exactly as Bill's looked in the book... No surprises there..

All in all, however, a great success! It was quick to make (no more than 20 mins), contained no tricky ingredients and wasn't an expensive meal to produce. I'll definitely make this one again.