When Mr.K tries to achieve the target to reduce the time in between posts from well…6 months to less than 6 days, some shortcuts are inevitable.
Saturday cousin-come-dining was Mrs. K’s chinese stir fried “seasonal vegetables” a.k.a. sizveg and super yummy sweet potato mash.
Sunday on the other hand was grilled lamb chops braised in Mr’K’s secret sauce served with sides of jollof rice and dodo… let’s say we will need to hit the gym to atone for the digging in.
A perception about healthy eating is that the meals are boring and tasteless. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When Mr.K saw eggs in avocado in an online magazine, it was a matter of when not if we’d give it a go.
Give it a go we did and we ended up with a meal that was quick to prepare and as tasty as it was pleasant to look at.
Add salt and pepper, preferably to the avocado before breaking in the eggs, bake for 10-20 minutes on medium heat depending on how you want your eggs. We served ours with grilled mutton kebabs and doubled up on salsa and green chili. I imagine this would be amazing on toast or crackers or garlic bread
What happens when Mr. Kitchen goes on AWOL and refuses to complete a blog post 6 weeks after starting it? Apparently Mrs. Kitchen adopts the “siddon look” approach.
It’s a good day and i have decided to complete this post and hopefully open the floodgates to new posts. It’s an easy post though, because meat is one of my best words not unlike other African men.
How do you get the perfect meat? Read on for 5 easy steps
1. Start with good quality meat, you cannot perform magic on a poor quality cut
2. If meat is frozen, thaw to room temperature, rub with salt and pepper and let sit for about an hour
3. You have the option of using a grill or a pan. I used a skillet. Heat a skillet till it’s very hot and then oil the skillet or the meat. Place meat in skillet and seal the steak by cooking on high heat for 3 minutes on each side.
4. Continue on low heat to preferred tenderness (6 minutes each side for VERY well done). Serve with preferred sides and sauce (we had grilled sweet potatoes,salad and a Mrs.K garlic sauce
5. I don’t know what happened next but i got to the “T” very quickly
Hope your weekend was great and your week has got off to a good start.
We had a food-filled weekend, starting from date night on Friday evening. We had dinner at RSVP (our first time there) and we really intended to do a review but I wasn’t in the mood to focus on some details; I had had a crappy day so I really just wanted to drink. The food was very tasty, ambience was good but I found it pricey especially for how little the portions were.
We had the pulled pork sliders (a tad too much sugar) and the prawn machos for starters.
For our main, we had the jumbo prawns (provencale i presume, it says “provencial” on their menu) and the most amazing side ever – sweet potatoes and cheese (I forget what type) fritters.
Except you fancy really expensive “orijin”, you can skip the “Naija spritzer” cocktail. It was a mix of prosecco, angostura bitters and some fruit juice (or was it fanta?)…totally not a fan.
I had frozen a hand of bananas on Thursday night and some of it went into the blender on Saturday night with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, some milk and some ice cubes. The end result was a yummy banana milkshake; thankfully, the cup of indulgence cleared out our system and we repeated in on Sunday night for our family who gate crashed for dinner. Of course we warned them about the semi-laxative effect and we got testimonies later 🙂
Our milkshake brings all the…ugh…never mind!
For brunch on Sunday, Mr. K grilled potatoes in their jacket and sausages, I made the eggs, added a bit of mesclun leaves to our plates and it was a really easy-peasy enjoyable brunch.
Pancake Tuesday (Shrove Tuesday) is so exciting, but I can’t say the same for the 40-something days that follow. It marks the beginning of the beginning of lent (i.e. the day before Ash Wednesday) in the Christian calender and the countdown to Easter begins.
Tonight, Mr K and I would be making savory pancakes for dinner. We tried them once before and they were very enjoyable.
– We sauteed some peppers and shrimps and then added some smoked salmon bits
– Our pancake batter was the same as normal only with reduced sugar this time
– Then after spooning the batter into the pan, we added bits of the sauteed peppers and co. before flipping
We had them with some eggs and syrup…yum!
It was all sorts of yummy and we’re really looking forward to having them again at dinner tonight.
Lent couldn’t have come at a better time as I feel that we (Nigeria) need alot of prayers and supplications right now. May God answer our prayers.
Eku no-election and eku Valentine…lol! You know how we Yoruba people have a greeting for everything. We are sorry that we’ve been quiet for a bit, but we’ve still been cooking and eating up a storm.
So Mr. K and I found that we’ve been somewhat carb hungry in the last few days. We love love love our greens and salads and proteins and I look forward to my rice and stew or mashed potatoes once a week but this week, I just felt like I wanted to eat rice all the time and potatoes and all these delicious carbohydrate foods (we ended up eating pounded yam for lunch yesterday).
One evening this week, while making lunch for the next day which was originally meant to be sauteed vegetables and grilled chicken, I kept wanting to just make fried rice. Realizing that there was some left-over steamed rice in the freezer, I decided to switch things up a little bit.
I added a cooking spoon of rice to the sauteed vegetables and I don’t know if it was just my psyche but it was all sorts of amazing and fixed my carb craving without being an overload. It was pretty much a reverse fried rice 🙂 . There’s no recipe for it, just sautee your veggies as you like and add the little bit of carb to it.
One spoon of rice added to sauteed vegetables for 3 adults
I tried it again the next day by adding couscous to sauteed vegetables and shrimps.
Again, just one cooking spoon of couscous
By the way, our new favorite veggie is celery. It really does switch up the taste of everything.
Wishing you a wonderful Valentine’s (we are not fans) lifetime of love. Have a great weekend.
Meal plans are easy to come by, there are 43 million just a Google click away. The challenge is that what tastes good for a blogger in California is absolute crap for the reader in Delhi, a tummy-reducing plan that works for the commuter in London would be tummy enhancing for the chauffeur driven house of reps member in Abuja and couch potatoes and gym rats require absolutely different meal plans.
That said, after years of healthy cooking and eating, we finally have enough meals in our repertoire to run on a meal plan and although the ‘program’ is only in its third week, it’s been very useful having and sticking to a meal plan. One of the most exciting things about the plan is that a sufficient calorie deficit over the course of a week permits the occasional luxury –SaltLagos marble cake, champagne or even a pizza!
Our meal plan aims to get enough proteins while maintaining fats and carbohydrates at a minimal level. It’s also worth noting that for both of us, we are only trying to maintain weight and stay healthy, well maybe lose 5kg between the both of us. We also maintain a fairly active lifestyle, averaging 4 hours of exercise a week.
Below is our meal plan for the week ahead, this is what works for us at this point in time. We welcome your thoughts and ideas. Happy reading! Happy cooking! Happy eating!
Hope 2015 has got off to a great start; we wish you the very best of the year.
Still in the festive mood, we invited our friends over for dinner on Saturday night. They were such lovely dinner guest as there were no leftovers in their plates nor in our pots.
The Menu:
– Smoked salad for the starter (I need to give that salad a rest, I’ve made it so many times in the last one month)
– Chicken alfredo for the main course
– Greek yoghurt and berries for dessert
Lemon, cucumber and mint infused water…so refreshing!Our “one nation” salad…lol.Our lovely guests, Tanwa & FemiMrs. K on the left. Where’s Mr. K? He was taking the pictures.Chicken Alfredo (recipe below)Blackberries, raspberries and Greek yoghurt. We don’t have martini glasses so we had to make do with wine glassesSomething new we learned: honey and yoghurt
The yoghurt was rather sharp, Mr. K likes it but I usually struggle with it on the first spoon and then ease into it; our guests were not in the mood for that kind of suffering, so they asked for honey, Mr. K and I tried it and it was sooo amazing.
Femi and Tanwa were such good company and since Femi likes to cook, we hope to have him share some recipes on this blog in the future.
By the way, we found out that quite a number of people have toyed with the idea of a Nigerian “Come Dine With Me” as we also have done for a while now, we think it will be a great idea…anyone else up for it? We can find producers and sponsors and maybe even get Dave Lamb to narrate as well (he’s hilarious).
Here’s the Chicken Alfredo recipe. I’m so bad at measurements and things like that but Mr. K has just bought a scale, so I hope I can give precise measurements soon.
For 4 people, you’ll need:
Pasta ( I used half a pack of Barilla Fusilli, so that’s about 250gms)
Chicken breast or any boneless chicken parts (as much as you would like)
Onions (1 bulb)
Butter (2 table spoons)
Garlic
Salt
Black pepper
Basil
Parsley
Vegetable / olive oil (1 table spoon)
Cooking cream (600ml) (I use the Emborg ones and they come in 200ml and 1 liter packs. You can find them at Goodies and Spar)
Parmesan cheese (about 50gms)
The method:
Cook the pasta and then drain.
Cut chicken into bite size pieces.
Heat vegetable / olive oil in a pan over medium heat; add the chicken, grate in some garlic, add salt and crushed black pepper. Cook until it’s no longer pink in the center for about 5-10 minutes. Remove from heat.
Melt butter in another frying pan over medium heat, add diced onions and grate in a bit of garlic. Fry for about 3 minutes until onions begin to brown slightly. Stir in the cooking cream and bring to the boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until slightly thickened, about 3 minutes. Add grated Parmesan cheese, parsley, basil, crushed black pepper and salt. Continue to cook until cheese is melted, which should take about 1 minute.
Stir pasta and chicken into cream sauce. Simmer until heated through for about 2 minutes.
Welcome to our blog. So we (more like I) tried to push this till the new year, but Mr. Kitchen was having none of that procrastination stuff. So here we are, starting a blog on the last day of the year. It is a food blog where we aim to share recipes and review restaurants and meals; we hope you share our love for food and that you enjoy this blog.
Oh, and the name…long story short, our favorite room in the house is the kitchen, we are always in there, if we are late for work, it’s because we spent an extra bit of time in the kitchen, we love experimenting with food, we like cooking our meals, we like eating out, it just had to be Mr. & Mrs. Kitchen.
To celebrate our first post, we’ll be sharing a simple refreshing salad recipe that I made for a family Christmas lunch. We both had an idea of what and what would go into the salad but the inner Martha Stewart in me toyed with the presentation and then bell peppers had to be added to the ingredient list.
Smoked Salmon Salad
1 serving
You’ll need:
1. Smoked salmon slice (1 slice will do for 2 people. You can get frozen ones from Spar and Goodies (in Lagos Nigeria). L’epicerie gets fresh ones weekly and they have them refrigerated).
2. Egg (hard boiled)
3. A mix of lettuce, spinach and rocket leaves
4. Cherry tomatoes
5. Bell pepper (any color will do)
6. Black pepper
7. Lemon
The method:
There really is no method, you’ll just have to put everything together as you would like it. My sister suggested i chop the smoked salmon in bits and just have a mixed salad, you could do that but I was fussed about the presentation.
– Toss the leaves together
– Slice the bell pepper (I had to get a perfect slice as I used it as the “container”) and stuff a handful of leaves through it.
– Roll the smoked salmon slice and place on the leaves
– Cut the egg in 2 vertically and place on the plate
– Add the tomatoes
– Sprinkle crushed black pepper on the salmon slice
Sunday on the other hand was grilled lamb chops braised in Mr’K’s secret sauce served with sides of jollof rice and dodo… let’s say we will need to hit the gym to atone for the digging in.
