Cooking Club: Favourite Dishes

Saturday night just gone was our latest Cooking Club. This time our theme was 'Favourite Things To Cook' and we had a range of delicious food to try.

To set the table, I stuck to white and an aqua blue. Some graph paper material I had bought a while back off Etsy made the perfect table runner and went well with some placemats I already had. My centrepiece was a fern which usually lives in our laundry and on either side, I had two little juice bottles which I'd covered with paper and ribbon to hold some simple flowers from our garden.

My spot prize this month was a butterfly cookie cutter, a ready made 'hot chocolate spoon', a bar of stainless steel soap (for removing cooking odours from your hands) and some recipe cards (which I printed off and made up after finding them available on The Pretty Blog).



Our menu this time consisted of the following...

• Chicken Breasts with Sage Butter & Prosciutto
• Spinach Salad
• Red Prawn and Mango Curry
• Homemade Pizza (of Little Caeser’s fame)
• Chocolate Mousse
• Caramel Dumplings
• Chocolate Mudhoney Pizza
• Lemon and Pistachio Slice



Our next catch-up won't be until mid November, after bub has arrived and I've settled into life with a newborn. At this stage, we're going to do a Pot Luck theme again as it was good to have a range of dishes to make up our night's menu.

For those who are interested, here's the Nigella Lawson curry recipe which I'm hoping to make tomorrow night for tea...


Red Prawn and Mango Curry

Serves 2-4

1 x 15ml tbs wok oil
1 spring onion, finely sliced
1½ x 15ml tbs red Thai curry paste
200ml coconut milk
250ml chicken stock (made from concentrate)
2 tsp fish sauce
1 x 350g pkt butternut and sweet potato cubes
200g king prawns
1 tsp lime juice
150g mango cubes, diced
3-4 x 15ml tbs chopped fresh coriander


Heat the wok oil in a large, heavy-based frying pan and fry the sliced spring onion for a minute, then add the curry paste. Whisk in the coconut milk, chicken stock and fish sauce and bring to the boil. Tip in the butternut squash and sweet potato cubes and simmer, partially covered for about 15 minutes or until tender. Drain the prawns under running water to remove excess ice and tumble them into the pan. Let the sauce come back to the boil. When it does, add the lime juice and diced mango and cook for another minute or so until the prawns are cooked through. Sprinkle with the chopped coriander as you serve over plain rice or wide rice noodles, or even both.


NB. If you don't have access to the ready-peeled cubed pumpkin and potato, this recipe suggests alternating them for some drained chickpeas and some pineapple.