Recipe corner: Desi omelette wrap

We’re trying to expand out breakfast repertoire at the moment.  You may remember that we did a birthday breakfast countdown around this time last year and enjoyed it so much that we have instituted Sunday Morning Breakfast as a Thing.  A Thing to be eaten at the table, to be accompanied by a good strong pot of tea and to be a little bit more special than toast and jam (not, I hasten to add, that there is anything wrong with toast and jam).

This is another dish inspired by our visit to Babu Bombay Street Kitchen in Glasgow.  I am really becoming enamoured of spicy for breakfast!  It’s incredibly filling so although the points appear high, if you eat slightly later on a Sunday (as we do) it really will keep you going all day.  

To lower the points, ditch the butter (saves 1pp per portion), swap full fat mayo for light (saves 1pp per portion) or try looking out for "low fat" wraps (generally these are slightly smaller than the standard.  The recipe below reckons on using a 5pp wrap - the WW own brand, for example, are only 3pp.)

Ingredients

5 medium eggs

1 onion, finely chopped

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

2cm (or so) piece of root ginger, grated

Tsp oil

2 tsp butter

½ tsp cumin seeds

½ tsp chilli flakes

Handful of roughly chopped fresh coriander

2 tortilla wraps

Tbsp mayonnaise

2 tbsp fat free Greek yoghurt

Handful of roughly chopped fresh mint

Tsp of mango chutney

Lettuce and cucumber to garnish

Serves 2, 14 pro points per portion

Get everything ready before you start – organisation is key here.

Preheat the oven to 100.  Place the tortilla wraps on a baking tray, ready to go in.  Chop your veg and measure out your dry spices.  Combine the mayonnaise, yoghurt, mint and mango chutney in a small bowl and season to taste.

In a small frying pan (check that the circumference is smaller than that of the wraps) heat the oil and then add the onion and fry for about five minutes until softening.  Add the ginger, garlic and dry spices and cook for a further couple of minutes until soft.  If things look as if they are catching, a small drop of water will help.

Remove half of the spicy vegetables from the pan to a nearby bowl and add half the butter.  Briskly whisk the eggs together, lightly season and pour half into the pan, swirling to evenly coat the bottom.  Cook until almost completely set.  Then, gently, slide on to the tortilla wraps so it sits in the centre of the pile, and place the baking tray in the oven.

Repeat the process to make the second omelette.  When it is almost completely set, remove from the heat (it will continue cooking in the residual heat while you prepare the first wrap).

Strew lettuce and cucumber the omelette and splodge over half of the mayo / yoghurt mix.  Tuck in the ends and roll tightly.  I would recommend wrapping in foil to serve, like a Christmas cracker, so that it holds its shape and makes less mess.

Slide the second omelette from the pan onto the second wrap and repeat.

Scoff.

MPM: 26th October 2015

Sorry for the radio silence.  Life, work…it gets in the way of the fun stuff sometimes.  Plus, with D away last week my meal planning was very loose to say the least.  I think that I ate pasta in some shape or form pretty much every day.  What is it about cooking for one that I find so very gloom inducing? 

There has been some cooking going on.  My first attempt at homemade pizza – I mean every element made from scratch – went very well and I am looking forward to trying it again.  Bread making in general is becoming more of a regular feature in my kitchen as I begin to lose my fear of yeast.  Partly because I have realised that my Kitchen Aid’s dough hook can do all the grunt work.  I thought that this might lessen the smugness that arises from producing a freshly baked loaf – but nope.  I’m smug and I don’t have to get my hands too dirty.  Win, win.

This week, very excitingly, we are off to Nottingham for a couple of nights.  One of which will be spent at Restaurant Sat Bains.  This is a joint birthday present from my parents and we are thrilled about it – it is somewhere that we have wanted to try for a very long time.  We’ll be spending a second night in Nottingham and probably dining somewhere slightly more cheap and cheerful.  I.e. basically anywhere. 

Thus the weekend remains a little vague in terms of meal planning – Saturday night it will most likely be a freezer dive when we get home and Sunday, probably a roast.  The other three meals are as follows:

Aubergines baked with mushrooms and ricotta

Heck chickenItalia sausages with potato salad (I’ve been wanting to try these for a while)

Salmon with pasta pesto

More meal planning fun over at Mrs M’s.

World Mental Health Day 2015

Saturday was World Mental Health Day. 

It seems that there is a day for everything now.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing, although there is increasing danger of Day Fatigue.  Still, mental health is an extraordinarily important issue and one that is not always easy to talk about or to understand.

Depression is not glamorous.  It is not even, usually, dramatic.  It is invidious and draining and unrelenting, like a thick, pale fog.  And it is incredibly hard for those who suffer from it to explain it to other people. 

This is probably one of the loveliest, truest and best things that I have ever seen written about mental health and how it affects not only the sufferer but all those around them.  It popped up on my Twitter feed at the weekend and the original can be found here.  There is nothing else that I need to add.

MPM: 12th October 2015

It’s a proper Autumn day today, the kind where the air is so cold and sharp that it almost hurts to breathe and the leaves crackle under foot.  A perfect day for a stomp on the moors followed by a hearty slice of game pie in a remote pub.  Sadly, I am at work at a desk that looks over…the back of a cupboard. 

Unusually for us, there is actual social activity this week!  Regular readers of the blog might (quite rightly) have deduced that we are not particularly social animals.  I appear to be getting worse as I grow older.  It is not that I am a total misanthrope, rather that I like to be comfortable in my environment, and my most comfortable environment is my house with my beloved cat and a cup of tea (or glass of wine depending on the time of day).   D is just a misanthrope.

Anyway, on Tuesday I am out seeing a friend for dinner and Bingo (so D must forage for himself), and on Friday D is seeking out real ale in the wilds of West Yorkshire (so I will probably prick and ping).  And on Sunday he is off down to London for a five day training event so, clearly, I will be far too busy weeping into my pillow to eat.  That leaves us four meals to plan and they look a little something like this:

Hake withtapenade and pears – yes, this sounds very weird.  But it is surprisingly delicious; an old favourite that has dropped out of rotation for a while.

Leftover lamb biryani – the Sunday roast’s second innings.

Barolo and mushroom risotto – bumped from last week.

Home made pizzas – my first ever attempt at making pizza dough!  We’re designing a topping each – I’ll be sure to report back.

As ever, more meal planning fun over at Mrs M’s.

Weight Watchers update: September 2015

So, over the course of September I managed (drum roll please) to lose exactly nothing.  Exactly nothing.  I am the same weight to within a tenth of a kilogram.

It appears that I am really good at maintenance.  And that is no bad thing.  But I appear to have skipped over the getting-to-your-ideal-weight part.  Which is a bad thing.

To be strictly fair, September 2015 is not going to go down in the annals of all time good months.  At times it was rather hellish.  And we all know that in times of stress my ability to think (and eat) rationally gets sorely tested.  Also, there were two lunches out at the weekend which may have caused a bit of a bounce up this morning.

I've been at this too long to allow it to get me down.  It's an ongoing process rather that a finite journey to a particular destination.  But I would like that process to gain a little bit more momentum before the year is out.  Onwards and, hopefully, downwards!

MPM: 5th October 2015

What a shockingly gloomy day.  I have nothing against cold weather (I rather like it) but to unremitting grey dampness I do object rather strongly.

A quiet week for us; D has a medical appointment on Friday evening and has requested an Indian takeaway on the way home, other than that all meals are going to be cooked by our own fair hands.

Salmon with pasta pesto (perennial favourite)
Corned beef hash (bumped from last week)
Mushroom and barolo risotto
Butternut squash soup
Chilli con carne
Roast leg of lamb with assorted appropriate trimmings

More meal planning fun, as ever, at Mrs M's.