KUMPULAN MASTER BLOG

Watermelon and feta salad- a light refreshing salad, perfect for lunch or as a side dish. Sweet fruity watermelon with feta cheese, cucumber and fresh mint, drizzled with a home-made balsamic dressing. Jump to Recipe I absolutely adore watermelon. Nothing beats it for pure juiciness and it's not overwhelmingly sweet. That makes it perfect to be served with a savoury flavours. The classic combination of feta and watermelon doesn't need too much adding too it. I simply chop some cucumber and fresh mint and then add a little home-made balsamic dressing. And there you have it, the perfect salad for your next BBQ or a nice lunch on a hot day; quick and easy to make.

Slow Cooker Tomato Sauce made with Roma Tomatoes- a simple, no fuss, slow cooker recipe to make a delicious tomato and basil sauce with your crop of home-grown Roma tomatoes. We had a bit of a family competition this year to grow Roma tomatoes; one plant each, first to get a red one. It went a bit awry thanks to the UK heatwave though... Plenty of tomatoes all stubbornly staying green! They were hibernating, essentially, due to the very high temperatures. Once it cooled off into normal British temps for August, they finally all started to turn red. I didn't win unfortunately but I'm laying the blame for that firmly at the door of my suntrap, back garden! What to do with a big crop of Roma Tomatoes? Well, Roma are the perfect tomato for making sauces and chutneys because they are 'paste tomatoes' which are quite robust and have fewer seeds than other varieties, helping to make a nice, thick texture. This slow cooker tomato sauce is incredibly easy to make and is a perfec...

Smoked Paprika Roasted New Potatoes- the perfect way to jazz up your next dinner. Crispy, golden, roasted new potatoes with a kick of smoked paprika. I made a big batch of my Very Garlicky Slow Cooker Lemon and Rosemary Chicken this week and was looking for something different to serve with it. I tend to stick to the same old potatoes and veg side dishes with dinner, especially during the week, and I just get very bored of them. I had new potatoes in the cupboard- the perfect summery accompaniment, but I wanted to add more flavour. The smoked paprika roasted new potatoes that I ended up making were just perfect; crispy on the outside and gorgeously fluffy on the inside, with a bang of flavour from the smoked paprika and the chilli. The best thing is that they are very easy to make, with just 5 basic ingredients and virtually no prep, so you could easily do them on weeknights to jazz up any meal. If you love easy dishes that you just throw on a baking tray- these are for you!

Feta Cheese Salad with Balsamic Dressing- a simple feta cheese salad, quick and easy to make for lunch or a starter, with a home-made balsamic dressing. Jump to recipe With the warmer weather over the last few weeks (and the heatwave that I really wasn't a fan of), all I have wanted to eat is salad. That has encouraged me into looking for a bit more variety in my ingredients. Lettuce, tomato and cucumber on their own gets old fast, and there's really no excuse for a boring salad! This weekend, I was in the mood for something Greek-style and I had a block of feta cheese in the fridge. I added a few delicious salady bits to contrast with the soft saltiness of the feta, whipped up a garlicky balsamic dressing and hey presto- a simple feta salad. The feta really is the star of the dish. If you can't be bothered to roast the peppers you can either put them in raw, or buy roasted peppers in a jar. It's absolutely delicious served as a starter, or with some crackers for lunch...

Garlic Red Cabbage- a simple vegetable dish to add colour to your roast dinner. Red Cabbage and garlic with added zing from red wine vinegar. In winter, I usually get quite lazy about vegetables, rotating between carrots, peas and broccoli, carrots, peas, broccoli. Occasionally adding some sweetcorn to the peas doesn't really qualify as changing things up, does it? In the summer, there's all sorts of excitement with different types of salad, avocado, spring onions, so many colourful veggies! But in winter, I am often totally lacking in vegetable inspiration. One way of having a bit more variety, is to look at what's in season. The supermarkets tend to have everything in stock all year round, so it can be hard to eat seasonally. I find the Great Grub Club website as well as the BBC Good Food Seasonal section good for info on this subject. Red cabbage is coming into season now and will last into December, so it's a great choice as a dinner vegetable. It really brighten...

Maple and Thyme Roasted Carrots- sweet, sticky roasted carrots with thyme. Delicious as a side dish to your roast dinner. I made Maple and Thyme Roasted Carrots to go along with dinner this week. Carrots are hands-down my favourite vegetable because they are so versatile. Grated on a salad? Cut into sticks and dip into houmous? Roasted? Boiled? Put them in a cake? All good. They also complement a lot of different flavours and are especially good when a little extra sweetness is added to them. These Maple and Thyme Roasted Carrots have that sweet edge to them from the maple syrup, complemented by the garlic and the thyme. When you roast them and they caramelise slightly, they taste even better! If you don't have maple syrup to hand (we've still got some of the really good stuff from our holiday in Canada), then you can easily substitute it with honey. I served the carrots as an accompaniment to Lime and Ginger Turkey Steaks along with some new potatoes. They would also make a g...

Warm Smoky Bacon Couscous Salad- a warm couscous salad with fresh tomatoes, smoky bacon and smoked paprika. Makes a nice lunch or BBQ side dish. Jump to Recipe I am constantly looking for new things to have for work lunches, especially now my husband regularly works away and needs a packed lunch to take with him. I am very into couscous right now, because it feels summery and a bit lighter than pasta. The key thing with couscous is that, like many grains, you need to add lots of flavour to really make it work. It can be terribly bland otherwise. I wanted to add smoky flavours to this and serve it as a warm salad, so I added smoky bacon and smoked paprika along with fresh tomatoes into the giant couscous. The sweetness of the tomatoes went really well with the smokiness of the bacon. It's lovely warm, served fresh from the pan, but my husband liked it cold as well. As with most grains, make sure you cool this quickly to be safe, and then keep cool. If you do that, it will be safe to...

Tuna Crunch Pasta Salad- a twist on the classic tuna mayo with sweetcorn. Chopped fresh peppers and spring onion add some crunch to this summer recipe. It makes a quick and easy lunch and is Slimming World Friendly. Jump to Recipe Pasta salads get quite a bad rap at times- gloopy, bland and so on, but I love them, especially in summer. It took me a few years to realise how much I loved them though, due to bad experiences at school. This was because there were often pasta salads served in the summer and they were truly revolting; very sweet and always tasted the same, no matter what the ingredients were. I found out later that they had been making the pasta salads with salad cream... I know, the very idea is revolting. Can't believe I ever managed to eat it! Pasta salads can be absolutely delicious, if you get the balance right (and don't use salad cream!) Given that pasta is soft, it works best if you balance that with some other firmer textures. For this pasta salad, I wanted ...

Potato Salad with Bacon- new potatoes mixed with bacon and spring onions and dressed with mayonnaise. A quick and easy summer side dish for your buffet or BBQ. Jump to Recipe I love potato salad, really love it, especially if it's a delicious home-made one with new potatoes. The first time I ever had potato salad, it was a packaged one from a supermarket. Inside were little cubes of almost hard potato, pieces of white onion and a very watery, acidic sauce, which I am guessing was supposed to be mayonnaise. Needless to say, I didn't like it. I was quite young at the time and it was only a few years later, in a Home Economics lesson, when I made a real potato salad for the first time, that I realised it wasn't supposed to taste like that! Last weekend I was making a buffet lunch and I wanted to pep up the side dishes a bit. I started with the Lemon and Garlic Giant Couscous Salad and then moved onto the potato salad. New potatoes, check. Spring onions, check. Mayonnaise, che...

Home-Made Houmous- it's quick and easy to make your own houmous and this recipe can be adapted to suit your own taste. Great for buffets, parties and lunches. Jump to Recipe There's something about houmous... (or hummus if you're anywhere except the UK!) that really makes me feel like summer has arrived. The first time I ate some, I was totally wowed by the taste. It probably seems strange now, but houmous wasn't readily available in the 80s when I was growing up. It started to appear in the early 90s and now has entire sections of the "dips" section in the supermarket devoted to it. My first experience of houmous was of the plain kind with carrot sticks- gorgeous. Now, I hardly know what to choose from lemon and coriander, roasted red pepper, piri piri and so many others for my houmous fix! At university, I had a house-mate who made her own houmous and swore by it for warding off colds and minor illnesses. I don't know if there's any truth to that, b...

Lemon and Garlic Giant Couscous Salad- a fresh zesty salad, the perfect side dish for your buffet or BBQ. Jump to Recipe This giant couscous salad was one of my offerings at a family party. This weekend was supposed to be my husband's birthday lunch at a local restaurant. After all the organising to get everyone in one place at one time, at the last moment we realised it was the local regatta. Chances of finding a parking space for the booking we had made, were very slim, so on Saturday we cancelled and I started a bake/cook-a-thon to make lunch for everyone at home! I made home-made bread rolls with various fillings, lemon cakes , chocolate cheesecake brownies , home-made houmous , and potato salad with bacon. I was looking for something that would be suitable as a side dish and would double up for people watching their weight, as we had a couple of guests who were in that mode and I know it's difficult. I love side dishes. I am always attracted to them at BBQs, possibly more...

A recipe for Giant Cous Cous was one of the first I published here. I still cook with it regularly, especially in the summer. It's great for lunches. This spicy recipe is one I made for my husband when he started Slimming World. He was finding it hard to be inspired at lunchtime, when he was so used to having sandwiches. I tend to cook extra at dinnertime so there's leftovers for lunch, but on this occasion, there wasn't! It's delicious hot, but it's fine to have cold the next day too. He had it just as it is, but you could add some grilled salmon or left over cooked chicken to make it a bit more substantial. If you prefer it even spicier, then add a teaspoon of chilli powder as well. To make this Slimming World friendly and syn free, use powdered harissa and spray oil.