Quiche Lorraine

Adapted from Mary Berry “Cookery Course”

Difficulty: Easy

Serves: 6

Prep time: 20 min

Cooking time: 10+30 min

Ingredients

  • 200g unsmoked streaky bacon rashers
  • 125g Gruyere cheese, grated
  • 1x large onion
  • 10x cherry tomatoes
  • 4x large eggs
  • 250ml crème fraiche
  • Short cut pastry sheets, ready to bake

Special Equipment

  • Oven proof quiche dish, preferably rectangular to match the pastry sheets size
  • Small non-stick frying pan
  • Bowl

Preparation

  • Step 1 – Oven
  • Preheat the oven to 220oC / 200oC fan
  • Step 2 – Onion and tomatoes
  • Peel and chop the onion into small pieces
  • Slice the cherry tomatoes in two
  • Step 3 – Bacon
  • Cut the stirps into small pieces
  • Step 4 – Pastry
  • Remove the rolled pastry sheet from the fridge
  • The pastry sheet comes rolled in baking paper, keep it attached as you unroll it
  • Roll out the pastry sheet onto the quiche dish, baking paper side down, pastry side up, covering the sides.
  • Pres into the sides. Trim any excess with a knife
  • Prick the base and sides of the pastry with a fork (to prevent air bubbles form forming during baking)
  • Line the base and sides of the dish with baking parchment paper on top of the pastry
  • Fill dish with baking beans to hold the paper down

Cooking Pt1

  • Step 1 – Bacon
  • Crisp the bacon in frying pan over medium heat for 10 minutes
  • Remove and keep aside
  • Keep frying pan ready for onions later
  • Step 2 – Pastry
  • Put the quiche dish with pastry prepared above in the oven
  • Bake for 10 minutes
  • Take out of oven
  • Remove the baking beans and parchment paper (keep the beans)
  • Trim any overhanging pastry
  • Reduce oven temperature to 180oC / 160oC fan
  • Step 3 – Onions
  • Cook the onions in the bacon frying pan for 8 minutes over medium heat (or until golden)
  • Remove Onions and add to quiche dish

Cooking Pt2

  • Step 1 – Quiche
  • Arrange the bacon bits evenly in the Quiche dish
  • Add the onions, similarly
  • Add the cherry tomatoes
  • Sprinkle the cheese all over
  • Step 2 – Cream
  • In a bowl, combine the eggs, cream, salt and pepper
  • Wisk with a spoon until fully mixed
  • Poor evenly inside the quiche dish over the other ingredients already there
  • Step 3 – Bake
  • Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden and just set
  • Be careful not to overcook (or the filling will become tough and full of holes)
  • Step 4 – Serving
  • Cut into 6 portions
  • Serve with a salad

Karen’s tips:

Put quiche dish on a baking tray to avoid bits falling at the bottom of the oven and provide more heat

Instead of cutting it, roll any excess pastry protruding over the edge inside the dish border, it will make for a thicker crust

Lazy Prawn Stir Fry

From Marks & Spencer

Difficulty: Easy

Serves: 2-3

Preparation: none

Cooking: 15 min

Ingredients

  • 600g vegetable stir fry mix
  • 400g fresh fine egg noodles for stir fry
  • 160g fresh king prawns
  • Any stir fry sauce (sweet soy, garlic & ginger for example)
  • Toasted sesame seed oil

Special Equipment

  • Large metal wok
  • Pyrex dish with lid
  • Microwave oven

Cooking

  • Step 1 – Noodles
  • Break-up noodles into 4 smaller portions
  • Put all of them in a pyrex dish, cover with lid
  • Put in microwave oven for 2.5 minutes (850W)
  • Remove and keep warm by keeping lid on
  • Step 2 – Prawns
  • Put some sesame seed oil in the bottom of the wok
  • Use medium/low heat
  • Cook prawns until change colour, then turn them over
  • All done when they have all turned pink
  • Put prawns on top of noodles, cover with lid to keep warm
  • Step 3 – Vegetables
  • Increase heat to medium
  • May need to add a bit more sesame seed oil
  • Add the vegetable mix to the wok, spreading all the way up the sides
  • Cook for 3 minutes, stirring and tossing regularly
  • You can cover the wok to help with cooking (if you have a suitable lid)
  • Step 3 – All together
  • Add the noodles and prawns to the wok
  • Add the stir fry sauce
  • Mix thoroughly with vegetables
  • Stir and toss the mix until all is nice and hot

Easy meal, ready very quickly!

Serve preferably on plates that have been heated up

Cauliflower Steak

From www.healthyrecipesblogs.com by Vered de Leeuw

Difficulty: Easy

Serves: 4

Preparation: 10 min

Cooking: 30 min

Ingredients

  • 2 medium size cauliflower heads
  • 1/2 tsp back pepper
  • 1 tsp of paprika
  • 1 tsp of coriander

Special Equipment

  • 1 large or 2 smaller shallow baking tray
  • Heat resistant parchment paper

Preparation

  • Step 1 – Pre-heat oven
  • Pre-heat your oven to 220oC
  • Step 2 – Cut the steaks
  • Wash the cauliflower heads, remove the outer leaves
  • Trim the very bottom of the core, but keep the core intact
  • This is the tricky bit: delicately slice each head into 3/4 inch (20mm) thick “steak” slices with a long sharp knife
  • Plan on only getting three “steaks” out of every cauliflower head as the outer slices will fall apart as florets (that you can roast together with the steaks)
  • Step 3 – Arrange the steaks
  • Line the baking tray with parchment paper and spray it with olive oil
  • Arrange the steaks in a single layer on the paper in the baking tray. Scatter the florets around them.
  • Spray (or paint) the top of the steaks with olive oil and sprinkle them with half the seasoning spices

Cooking

  • Put the baking tray(s) in the oven
  • Bake the cauliflower pieces for 15 minutes
  • Remove tray from oven, and carefully turn the steaks over
  • Spray their tops with oil and sprinkle the remainder of the seasoning spices
  • Put tray back in oven and bake until browned and fork tender (10-15 minutes)

For the perfect vegetarian meal, combine this as the “meat” together with the kale and mushroom risotto (see other recipe here) as a vegetable (as shown on picture).

Mushroom and Kale Risotto

From www.foxeslovelemons by Lori Yates

Difficulty: Easy

Serves: 4

Preparation: 35 min

Cooking: 25 min

Ingredients

  • 1000ml of vegetable (or chicken) stock
  • 3 garlic cloves
  • 0.5 onion (red preferably)
  • 250g brown mushrooms
  • 1 cup (240ml) arborio (risotto) rice
  • 2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
  • 1/2 cup (120ml) dry white wine
  • 250g shredded kale
  • 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Special Equipment

  • Small pan
  • Large high-sided frying pan

Preparation

  • Step 1 – Kale quality check
  • Inspect the shredded kale and remove any hard bits of stalk
  • Cut any large bits into smaller pieces
  • Wash the kale thoroughly
  • Step 2 – Stock
  • Prepare stock in saucepan over medium heat
  • When simmering, turn off heat and keep covered
  • Step 3 – Onion and garlic
  • Peel, halve and slice the onion into small bits
  • Peel and finely chop the garlic
  • Step 4 – Mushrooms
  • Wash the mushrooms
  • Cut in slices, and halve again to roughly button mushroom size

Cooking

  • In large high-sided frying pan, melt some butter over medium-high heat.
  • Add onion and garlic, cook for 2 min, stirring frequently.
  • Add mushrooms and thyme, cook 8-10 min or until mushrooms are deep golden brown, stirring frequently.
  • Reduce heat to medium, add the rice, cook 1-2 min or until rice begins to become translucent at edges of grains, stirring constantly.
  • Add wine and pepper, stir constantly until wine is mostly absorbed.
  • Add 1/2 cup hot stock, stir frequently until mostly absorbed. Add additional broth in 1/2 cup increments, stirring after each addition and cooking until broth is mostly absorbed before adding more. Cook for 18 min.
  • Then stir in kale and cheese. Continue cooking 2-3 min longer or until rice is tender, stirring frequently and adding broth as needed (you may not need all of the broth).

Finishing

  • Serve on preheated plates.
  • Sprinkle some parmesan on top.

For vegetarians, make sure that you use vegetable stock.

In addition, for vegans, make sure that you omit the parmesan cheese.

Get a new, younger… computer! – 3

Part 3 – Swapping the hard drives

This is part 3 of my instructions for transforming your old laptop (or desktop) running Windows 7 into a Windows 10 version that works. Today we are going to perform the hardware related tasks.

Now unplug the USB external hard drive. Unplug the power from your laptop and turn it upside down so that you can see its back. You should see usually two separate covers, held by screws. One will let you access the memory, the other will let you access the hard disk. It this later that you need to open. Note that on some laptops, you remove the entire back cover to reveal all of the innards.

Tip: take a picture of the hard drive with your phone so you can remember how it was all setup. Unscrew and lift the HD end opposite the connector (with its anti-vibration protection if applicable – bright blue on picture). Then gently unplug the connecting cable to the hard drive (HD), noting which way the connector is lying. Remove the HD from the laptop, noting which way and how the connector is facing the cable.

Now install the new SSD in the place of the old HD (putting it first in the antivibration protection if applicable). Make sure the SSD is facing the same way as the old HD, so that the connector presents itself to the cable in the same way as the old one, gently connect the cable and push the SSD down in its location (or screw it in). Replace the cover on the back of the laptop.

Now try switching your laptop back on, and it should be the same as before, with Windows 7 , with no difference, except it was so much quicker to boot up! (and also closed down you will see).

This is one of the advantage of upgrading your disk drive is that you are not going to touch the old one. So should anything go wrong, all you need to do is pop the old drive back in, and you are back to where you started. So it is as risk-free as possible.

The other advantage of this setup is that at the end of the day, you can put the old HDD into the HDD case and can then use it as an external USB hard drive. A bonus for backing up data or for extra storage.

In my next post, I will explain how to upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10.

Get a new, younger… computer! – 2

Part 2 – Cloning the HDD to the SSD

This is part 2 of my instructions for transforming your old laptop (or desktop) running Windows 7 into a Windows 10 version that works. Today we are going to prepare the new hard drive.

We purchased a 2.5″ HDD enclosure. Following the instructions that came with it, slide the plastic cover. Insert the new SSD, making sure its the right side up so that the connector engages properly. Replace the cover. You now have a new USB external drive that you can connect to your laptop using the USB cable supplied.

Connect it to one of the USB port of the laptop. Let windows 7 recognise the external hard drive and load the driver. When you can see the device, ensure that the SDD is formatted. If it isn’t, then go to “Computer Management” and “Storage” and format it.

Now download the “Samsung Data Migration Software for Consumer SSD” v3.1 from this site onto your laptop:

https://samsung-data-migration.software.informer.com/3.1/

Normally, as per their instructions, you would download it from the Samsung site:

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools

But Samsung only has the new version 4.0 on their site at the moment, and it did not recognise my slightly “older” 860 serie SSD. This is a big miss by Samsung not to have left a link to v3.1! (how did I work that out? well experience from having done it before many times!)

Now use the software to clone your laptop’s hard drive onto the external USB drive, by following the instructions from Samsung. Note that you need to make sure that the USB drive has a larger capacity than the amount of data you are using on your laptop. If not, you need to remove some data files (music, video, photos) before performing the operation, or you should have bought a larger SSD !

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/global.semi.static/Samsung_SSD_Data_Migration_User_Manual_(ENG)_v.3.1.pdf

  • Select the source disk: your laptop’s hard drive
  • Select the target disk: the USB drive
  • Press Start

This will take a little while, depending on how much data you have. It will effectively transfer everything from your laptop onto the USB drive, making it an exact copy (a clone).

In my next post, I will explain how to physically swap the hard drives in your computer.

Slow Cooked Beef Stroganoff

From www.RecipeTinEats.com by Nagi

Difficulty: Very Easy

Serves: 2-3

Prep time: 15 min

Cooking time: 7-8hrs

Ingredients

  • 600g beef chuck cubes
  • 1x onion
  • 2.5 garlic cloves
  • 250g mushrooms
  • 1.5 tbsp Dijon mustard
  • 2 tbsp plain flour
  • 350ml beef stock
  • 100g (0.5 cup) sour cream

Special Equipment

  • Slow cooker
  • Large heavy-base frying pan

Preparation

  • Step 1 – Onion and garlic
  • Peel, halve and slice the onion into 1cm slices
  • Peel and finely chop the garlic
  • Step 2 – Mushrooms
  • Wash the mushrooms
  • Cut in medium slices

Pre-Cooking

  • Step 1 – Pan
  • Pour one table spoon of olive oil into the heavy pan
  • Brown the beef cubes all over, using high heat – approx. 4 minutes
  • Season to taste while cooking
  • Remove and put aside
  • Let the pan cool down a bit and then return to fire to cook the onion and only 1.5 (out of the 2.5) cloves of garlic – approx. 3 minutes or until softened
  • Stir in the flour and then the mustard
  • Add the beef stock and stir well, scrapping the bottom and sides, bring to simmer

Cooking

  • Step 1 – Slow cooker
  • Transfer all the content from the pan into the slow cooker
  • Add the beef cubes
  • Put lid on and cook for 7-8 hours on low (or 4-5 hours on high)

Finishing

  • Step 1 – Mushrooms
  • Melt some butter and fry the mushrooms over high heat until golden
  • Add them to the slow cooker
  • Step 2 – Finishing
  • Extract 1.5 cup of liquid from the slow cooker
  • Mix thoroughly with it the 0.5 cup of sour cream, before adding back to the slow cooker (not doing it directly in the slow cooker enable you to mix it thoroughly and also apparently avoids getting sour cream specs in the sauce)
  • Step 3 – Serving
  • Serve with rice or pasta
  • Sprinkle a bit of parsley on top for colour

Might try to experiment with adding a few spices to give it a more exciting taste when I next do this recipe

Get a new, younger… computer! – 1

Part 1 – Why and what to buy

Many people are still using Windows 7 and complaining that their computer is so slow and takes for ever to boot up or close down. Then one day, they are faced with one of their favourite software no longer working on Windows 7. So they come up with the obvious plan: I will get a new laptop computer and it will come with Windows 10 and it will be faster and better…

The reality is slightly different: YES you should move to Windows 10 and YES everything will run faster but NO, you don’t need to spend money on a new laptop. In this post, if will explain how to get 80% of the benefits for 10% of the cost.

First, lets get one thing out of the way: Windows 7 was released in 2009 and is no longer supported by Microsoft. This means that security vulnerabilities are no longer patched and that you are leaving yourself potentially open to the threat of hackers (and all computers on your home or business network).

Second point: Computer laptop technology has started to plateau in recent years compared to the amazing progress it regularly made in the past. If you take a mid-range laptop today, processor, bus and memory speed have all increased a bit in the past years – and more software now runs in 64 bit instead of 32bit – but what really makes it a much faster computer than an old one is one thing: its the hard drive !

As software programs became more formidable and nicer looking, they also become bigger. You need more memory for them to work and also more space on your hard drive to store them. When you want to use a program, the computer reads it off the hard drive and puts a portion of it in memory, then swaps more of it (or other programs) as you use them. These constant disk reads is what limits/dictates the speed of all the other components. So, in a modern computer, the old rotating plater Hard Disk Drive (HDD) has been replaced with a Solid Stated Drive (SSD) which uses technology more akin to RAM memory: computer memory chips that can be accessed much faster because no mechanical disk needs to start spinning. Another benefit is that they consume less power and so extend the all important battery life.

So, if you want to easily “rejuvenate” your tired laptop, the best way is to simply update the HDD (top in picture) and replace it with an SSD (bottom in picture). SSD used to be expensive and of limited capacity but they have now come down in price (and can reach 1TB) because they are used in all laptops nowadays!

A small caveat though: your laptop needs to have a minimum spec: a dual core (Intel i5) processor preferably (instead of i3) and have 8GB of RAM memory (or capable of being upgraded to 8GB). Otherwise the base laptop is too old and not really suitable for modern computing.

I have performed this upgrade “procedure” many times before, and again last week-end. So, if you want to follow me through the physical upgrade (in my next posts), here is what I ordered online. You can of course select different brands and different size SSD but these are the ones I used:

  • A 2.5″ SSD of the size you want – I used a 250GB Samsung 860 EVO one: £46.47 on Ebuyer.com
  • A 2.5″ SATA hard drive USB 3.0 enclosure – I used a Sabrent one: £8.99 on Amazon.com

So in total, I spent a miserly £55.46 – about 1/10th of the price of a new mid-spec laptop.

Note: that the SSD must have enough capacity to cover, not necessarily the capacity of your laptop’s hard drive, but the amount of storage that you are currently using, plus a bit of extra room.

250GB was enough for me here, but you may want to go bigger, or store your seldom used data on the brand new “Free” USB drive that you will get at the end of this operation…

Of course, the trick is in being able to pull off the upgrade…

In my next post, I will explain how to clone the HDD.

Columbo Chicken

Mashup of recipes from Vanessa Bolosier on “Sainsbury web site” and from Jean Francois Mallet’s book “Simplissime”

Difficulty: Very Easy

Serves: 2

Prep time: 30min + 2-8h

Cooking time: 60 min

Ingredients

  • 2x large chicken breasts
  • 2x large onions
  • 1x lemon
  • 1x bunch of fresh coriander leaves
  • 1 tbsp coriander seeds
  • 1 tbsp ground turmeric
  • 0.5 tbsp mustard seeds
  • 0.5 tbsp cumin seeds
  • 400ml coconut milk

Special Equipment

  • Metal oven baking tray
  • Mortar and pestle

Preparation

  • Step 1 – Columbo powder
  • Put the coriander and mustard seeds in the mortar, crush and grind them with the pestle
  • Add the turmeric and cumin powder and grind some more
  • Crush and mix them all together
  • Step 2 – Marinade
  • Put 1 tbsp of olive oil and the juice of 1 lemon in the baking tray
  • Add salt and pepper and 2 tbsp of Columbo powder
  • Add the chicken breasts and cover them heartily
  • Leave to marinate for at least 2 hours and overnight if possible
  • Step 3 – Oven
  • Preheat the oven to 170oC
  • Step 4 – Onions and coriander
  • Peel the onions and cut in small pieces
  • Chop-up the coriander leaves
  • Step 5 – Chicken breasts
  • Add the chopped onions
  • Add the remainder of the Columbo powder
  • Add the chopped coriander
  • Cover the chicken breasts with the coconut milk

Cooking

  • Place the baking tray in the oven
  • Cook for an hour,
  • Stirring a few times, if can be bothered

This is not a hot curry in any way shape or form !

Just a very lovely tasting chicken

3-2-1 Backup!

Have you ever cried over a “dead” hard drive? I nearly did last week when the data partition of my laptop suddenly no longer appeared. It took me a few very nervous hours to fix it, especially when I realised that I did not have a recent backup…

In a survey conducted by Backblaze, 54% of people said they either knew someone, or had themselves recently lost data. And everyone has heard of ransomware attacks where they encrypt your files (making them inaccessible) and demand a ransom payment (usually in untraceable cryptocurrency) to decrypt them. Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan file that the user is tricked into downloading or opening when it arrives as an email attachment.

All this got me thinking about backing up my data and it seems that the most recommended back-up strategy is the 3-2-1 method!

A 3-2-1 strategy consists of having at least 3 copies of your precious data: “two” of them local but on different media and at least “one” copy off-site.

Having “two” local data versions, your main one and an onsite back-up, is useful if your laptop hard drive crashes. You will then have a copy on an external hard drive readily available to get the majority of the data back or to use on another computer to continue operation. If you keep this copy up to date, then the data loss will be fairly minimal, as you will only have lost the files that were on your laptop but that you had not yet copied onto the external backup drive.

I personally use a mirrored hard disk strategy where all the data is simultaneously written to two “mirrored” hard drives. The second one stores an exact copy of the data from the first one in real time. This way, if one dies through hardware failure, then the other one is always there.

This may sound perfect, but it is not. This is where the “one” of the 3-2-1 strategy comes in. If your house catches fire, then both your data sources will be gone. Even if you are not as pessimistic, burglars often take laptops and removable hard drives (as they are easy to resell) and this would again leave you high and dry. Therefore, it is essential to always have another copy of your precious data in a different physical location.

This “off-site” backup can take the form of another removable hard drive stored at work or at your parents. Alternatively, it can be a remote backup on a server in the cloud. As the coronavirus lockdown as shown, getting to a second “offsite” physical copy of your data may not always be as easy as a quick drive away, so I have chosen a remote internet connected NAS as my off-site solution.

I hope this post serves as a reminder for you to think about your back-up strategy, but the important point to make is that any strategy is only as good as its implementation. Forgetting to update your backups for over a year will not help!

Establish a frequent back up schedule, based on your assessment of how much data you are willing to lose. It also depends on how often you generate updated data… Nightly backups in an office environment are the norm, but maybe only monthly is quite sufficient at home. Automatic scheduled backups are the best because you don’t have to remember to do them!

There are plenty of free and paid software around. Some keep multiple versions until you run out of a predetermined storage space. Some only update the changes so that they don’t take as long to perform. I personally use and like Allwaysync (https://allwaysync.com/). But make sure you start adopting good regular backup habits from now on.

PS: By the way, a big thanks to EaseUS (https://www.easeus.com/) for their great customer service on their Partition Magic Pro software that I used successfully to recover my missing HD partition.