Experimenting with New Recipes

Anyone who knows Simon and I will be aware that we both love to cook. And if you don't, you clearly need to wrangle your way into being invited over for dinner. I'll admit, we haven't experimented with too many new recipes in the last month or so, since we've been busy sitting exams and house-hunting, but we took the opportunity last week to try three new recipes. 

On Tuesday we adapted this Orzo, Feta & Pepper Salad by adding cucumber, radishes and cherry tomatoes. This allowed us to use up vegetables that we knew we'd bought for other meals but wouldn't need all of, and finish up the half bag of orzo that had been sitting in our cupboard for months. We actually didn't make the dressing suggested in the recipe as we discovered a bottle of Cochrane Cottage Chilli Balsamic Dressing in the cupboard that looked like it would go perfectly with this salad. I bought this dressing for Simon for his Christmas and it's a pity we haven't used it until now! This is an excellent summer meal, made even better by the fact that it was warm enough to eat outside on the patio. 

On Wednesday we decided to make Chicken Enchilada Pizza as we had chicken breasts, shredded mozzarella and dough already in our freezer. We're really trying to work our way through everything remaining in the freezer before we move house in July, so this was a great opportunity to clean out part of it. We made our own enchilada sauce using a carton of passata as the base, and we made a few small changes to the pizza. We cooked the tomatoes on the pizza instead of sticking them on at the end, stuck with one type of cheese and skipped the lettuce and sour cream. I described the pizza to my incredibly picky teenage brother over the phone and he immediately asked me to email him a link to the recipe, so it's definitely one to check out.

As Friday is typically our Date Night of the week, Simon always likes to try something unusual, and this week it was Sardines Escabeche with Baked Potato Slices. This was actually my first experience of sardines and I think it'll take a while to get used to the oily flavour. We'd definitely tone down the cider vinegar next time as it was a little overpowering, but otherwise this was an interesting blend of flavours. Asda weren't stocking thyme last week, so we subbed some leftover mint from the orzo salad and it worked fine.