Recipe number five: Cheese and tuna pasta bake.

This one is not very exciting, but it's quick and easy, which is something we like! I've adjusted it a bit from the original version - we've had it twice and the second time I added more tomato and cheese, which I think made it better - the approximate measurements from the second time are below.

Preheat oven to 375.

Cook 3 cups of fusilli pasta (or whatever noodle you like).

Meanwhile, heat 1 TB olive oil in a pan. Add 2 finely chopped red onions, and saute until soft.

Add a bag of spinach (300 grams - I have no idea what this is in cups or ounces!) and cook until wilted.

Drain the cooked pasta and add to the onion and spinach.

Stir in 2 cans of chopped tomatoes and two cans of tuna chunks. Season with salt and pepper.

Transfer the mixture to an oven proof dish. Top with about 8 ounces of mozzarella cheese (grated or sliced, depending on what kind of mozzarella you use).

Sprinkle with breadcrumbs.

Bake about 20 minutes until piping hot and bread crumbs have browned.

Taste scores

Mark: 6

Jessica: 6 (like I said, not very exciting!)

Ease of preparation: 10 (the only thing easier is picking up the phone and ordering pizza).

Do it again? Yes, and we already have...

Recommend? I would - but be warned, it isn't bland, but it's only a couple of steps away...

Recipe number four: Spanish-style chicken.

This was from a little while ago, but I wanted to catch up, and not lose track of the new recipes I'm trying as part of my New Year's challenge. I think I cut this out of a magazine, possibly one from a supermarket - I'm not sure. I have a blank book that I paste random recipes into, and this is just one of those. I made a couple of amendments, and I've also converted the metric to normal using my favorite online converstion site (which even has conversions for butter, which is just amazing!)

Spanish-style chicken

Serves 6

Whole chicken, about 1.6kg/3.5 lbs

50g/3.5 TB butter, softened

1/2 TB paprika

Large pinch saffron

6 tomatoes, quartered

4 chorizo sausages, skinned and sliced (this is a bit flexible - it says four, I bought two packages - each package had one chorizo that was maybe a foot long, but curved around in a horseshoe shape, maybe an inch in diameter? that's a really rough memory!)

2 cans butter beans, drained

6 garlic cloves, peeled

fresh flat leaf parsley (I think I forgot this when I did it)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees

2. Mix paprika and saffron into the butter with salt and pepper and rub all over the chicken skin (it seems like a lot of butter at this point, but it is worth it!). Place chicken in a roasting pan and put in the oven for 1 hour and 25 minutes (for a 1.6kg bird - adjust accordingly depending on size of chicken)

3. About 40 minutes before the chicken is meant to be done (so for a 1.6kg bird, this is about 45 minutes into the cooking time), take the chicken out of the pan and set aside, while you add the tomatoes, chorizo, butter beans and garlic cloves to the roasting pan. Place the chicken on top and baste well.

4. Continue to roast for the remaining time, basting occasionally.

5. At the end of the cooking time and when the chicken is finished, remove from the oven and let the chicken rest for about 10 minutes. Mash the tomatoes slightly into the sauce. Sprinkle with parsley (if using). Carve the chicken and serve with the chorizo-bean-tomato sauce.

It's pretty straightforward, and most of the time involved is the roasting time for the chicken. I can see how it can be adapted to make it even easier - using chicken breasts, for example, but I guess you'd just have to make sure that the tomatoes and chorizo had time to cook. The chorizo goes all crunchy and it's just really nice with the beans and tomatoes. It didn't seem too fatty to me, but it is pretty rich!

Taste scores

Mark: 7 (Mark says it was tasty but there are other things he likes better)

Jessica:  8

Ease of preparation: 8 (having to skin the chorizo is the only thing that keeps this from scoring a ten - I don't know if you could get away with not skinning at all...) 

Do it again? Yes

Recommend? I think so - if it isn't too rich for people...

Recipe number three: Everything bagels.

Continuing both my New Year's resolution to try out 24 new recipes this year and my obsession with making bagels from scratch, I tried out a different bagel recipe, specifically for everything bagels.

I had previously made blueberry bagels, but since all I did was add dried blueberries to the original recipe I used for making bagels, it didn't really count as part of my 24. But this was a brand new recipe, taken from bakespace.com.

Everything Bagels Recipe

This was not the smoothest baking experience I have had. Nothing went wrong, but it wasn't as easy and straightforward as the previous bagel recipe. Part of the reason may have come from the fact that I doubled the recipe on the site (who wants to go to all the trouble of baking from scratch for only four measly bagels?). Mostly it was just I kept adding and adding flour and the dough still stayed tacky. I mixed for so long and added so much that it started climbing up the dough hook, so I took it out and kneaded and kneaded, adding flour all the time and it still remained a bit sticky.

I eventually gave up and continued with the recipe, and as a result after rising the first and second times, the bagels were all floppy and soft. It made it hard to boil them, since they kept slipping and sliding off of the spatula I used to get them out of the water, and they stretched all over the place. I got through it, and added all the toppings and got them in the oven.

They turned out fine, except I forgot to do the egg wash before adding the toppings, so basically every time you moved the bagel, or even looked at it, bits would fall off, like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. By the time you sliced it, put it in the toaster, took it out of the toaster and put it on a plate, you had about one sesame seed and a slight taste of onion left.

The garlic and onion pieces also went a bit black, so I'm going to cook them further down in the oven next time.

I am getting much, much better at ensuring that the hole remains - it just takes opening up a bit after they've risen each time, before you boil them.

So lessons were learned, and I probably won't use that recipe again. But they still tasted quite nice, which is, of course, the main thing.

Taste scores

Mark: no score yet - our toaster broke before he had the chance to try one

Jessica: 7 (I just love everything bagels)

Ease of preparation: 3

Do it again? Probably not.

Recommend? I still believe everyone should try making bagels, just not this recipe.

Vallentines' day in the snow.

On Valentine's Day, we went for a hike in the Breacon Beacon mountains, in Wales. It's not that far away from Clevedon (this hike was about an hour and 15 minutes from our flat).

It's one of those places that we always enjoy going to and when we get there say, "this really isn't that far. Why don't we do this more often?"

(To which the answer is, "we are lazy, lazy people.")

It had been a couple of weeks since the big snowstorm of '09, and the altitude isn't that high, but there was still a lot of snow - much more than I expected. It was fun, then kind of cold and wet then not fun, then really really not fun, then I ate a Snickers and it was fun again.

This was at the beginning of the hike, before we hit the real snow:



A scenic sheep:


A scenic Mark:


Mark checking the map:


Early on, the decision was made to go cross country, to cut off some of the distance. This meant much more snow, and pre-Snickers, this made for a grumpy Jessica, who went very very slowly (here you can see that I'm just barely edging ahead of the tree in the race to the top):


It was at this point that the snow hit the fan, the Snickers was deployed and then within about 30 seconds all was right with the world again, which you can tell from the fact that I'm smiling in the rest of the photos we took that day.

From these three photos, I think you can see how deep the snow was in some places:




We reached the top by hiking up a much steeper incline than this photo makes it seem:




And then it was time to start going back down again - this time following the path - which we think was under the snow somewhere.


There was a really neat dam in this valley, which you can kind of see through the low-lying clouds in this photo:



I kind of forgot how much effort walking in snow requires. Mark went ahead and I used the snow holes he made, but it was pretty exhausting and my knees kind of hurt for a couple of days afterwards...but I'm sure my heart appreciated it!

Snow, meet Clevedon.

A couple of weeks ago, the UK was blanketed with snow, and for once, it included Clevedon. We didn't get as much as some places that were really brought to a standstill, but enough to have meetings cancelled and a real kind of wintry feeling.

Here is the view from our window:



This was about the third day that we had had snow. Previously, it snowed overnight and then stopped in the morning - but on this day it was still coming down pretty heavily when we woke up, so we decided to walk down to the sea front to take a look.



For some reason, I got a big kick out of this snow covered Smart car. Looking at it now, it doesn't seem so funny:



The sea wasn't frozen (that would have been something!) but the rocks were all covered, which is kind of a weird site, since even now I don't associate the "seaside" with the cold. Any way, here are a few more photos. We didn't attempt any snow ball fights or snow men, although I think some others managed it.

That is NOT a cookie I can believe in.

I was dismayed to read this in the New York Times:

Obama Woos G.O.P. With Attention, and Cookies

By JEFF ZELENY

Published: February 4, 2009

WASHINGTON — Can the shrill tone of Washington be changed through a presidential act of contrition? Or, perhaps, an enticing platter of oatmeal raisin cookies?

This week, President Obama has already served up both at the White House.

Can you believe it? President Obama supports raisins. RAISINS! Of all the cookies he could have had his White House pastry chef whip up, he chose oatmeal raisin. I mean, I don't mind if people want to eat them in their own home - that's their own choosing. It's a free country. But I think it's just WRONG for him to be using taxpayers' money to push his raisin-loving "preferences" down the throats of self-respecting politicians. At an official function, no less!

Ugh.

Credit crunch hits the Girl Scouts.

Has everyone already seen this?

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/012309dnmetgirlscoutcookies.1c01e735.html

Rising costs bite into Girl Scout Cookie portions

02:37 PM CST on Thursday, January 22, 2009

By DAN X. McGRAW / The Dallas Morning News
dmcgraw@dallasnews.com

If you seem to be tearing through those Girl Scout Thin Mints a little faster this year, it isn't you.

Really, it isn't.

Fewer cookies were packaged into Thin Mints, Do-si-dos and Tagalongs boxes this year and the Lemon Chalet Crème cookies were resized to compensate for the rising cost of baking staples. All other flavors remain the same, according to the Girl Scouts of the USA.

The alternative was to raise cookie prices or use cheaper ingredients — two options that were rejected, said Natalie Martin, marketing director for the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas. A box of cookies currently costs $3.50.

"We aren't talking about a drastic change. We are just talking about a couple cookies," Martin said, adding that the boxes themselves shrunk by only a centimeter. "People understand that we are all taking hits."

The Girls Scouts certainly aren't the first organization to alter product size and portions because of higher food costs.

Products on grocery store shelves throughout the nation have been reshaped, resized and repackaged in response to new marketing ideas, increases in food and gas prices and the downturn in the economy, said Lynn Dornblaser, a new product analyst at Mintel International, a marketing research firm.

"In the very biggest picture, it usually is about saving money for the manufacturer," she said. "You can do that in a lot of different ways by changing the quantity or the size of the product."

Those changes can save companies millions of dollars by reducing packaging material or shipping costs, she said. For example, a few years ago, Coca-Cola switched the plastic bottle caps on some products to one that uses less plastic. "For the most part, people didn't even notice," she said.

Dornblaser said she isn't surprised at the change in Girl Scout cookies.

"It is a reflection of them needing to keep the price in line with other products, but they also need to keep in mind the rising baking cost," she said. "You've got to balance it the best way you can."

The Girl Scouts faced double-digit percentage jumps for some ingredients from 2007. Martin said that flour increased by more than 30 percent, various cooking oils rose 40 percent to 187 percent and cocoa climbed at least 20 percent.

The rising costs forced the organization to make changes to the quantity, quality or price.

"We didn't want to pass on the cost to the customer because everyone is suffering right now," Martin said.

Carol Orbin, a cookie mother from Flower Mound, said the changes haven't stopped people from ordering, but that might be because most aren't aware of the changes. It could be different for booth sales, where customers can see the changes.

Cookie sales began Jan. 9. The booth sales will start up on Feb. 27.

"To me, their decision makes sense with the economy the way it is," Orbin said. "You can't change the taste of the cookies. No one wants to see the price go up either, so I am fine with what they did. It was a smart move."

Martin said the prices could change next year if things don't improve, but there are no plans for that.

"We don't want to go there," she said.