Day Eight

120 days and 115 recipes to go

Yesterday's menu
Dry Grilled Chicken with Ginger, Chinese Greens and Noodles in a Herb Broth
Lemon an Lime Cream Tart

Today's menu
Basic Tomato Sauce to make...
Meatballs
Boiled Asparagus with Any Interesting Melted Cheese

Yesterday's soup we made with our leftover chicken stock which we made on Wednesday for our Risotto. We made the stock using the leftover chicken carcass from last Sunday's Roast Chicken - so nothing got wasted which was good. I thought the soup might have been spicy but I was happy because it wasn't - I don't like things too spicy.

The filling for the Tart was really simple to make - but I think I should have whisked it for longer as the cream still had a few lumps in it. The tart is quite tart - lol - from the citrus juice in it but yummy. My grandmother told me that she thought my pastry was lovely and short - that's a nice compliment.

Today we made meatballs. We made some bread into crumbs in the blender, bashed some cumin and dried chilli in the mortar, separated the egg yolk (like an expert - and only my second time) and mixed it all together with the minced meat. I made them into lovely meatballs and fried them. Then into the oven covered with the Simple Tomato Sauce, basil leaves, mozarella
cheese and parmesan. Then we cooked some asparagus and tossed in through with some pecorino and parmesan. It was the first time I had tried asparagus and I really liked it. Mum eats it all the time but I've never wanted to try it before - next time she has it I will have some too.

Day Five

124 days and 120 recipes to go

Yesterday's menu
Fruit Crumble

Today's menu
Chicken Stock to help make..
the Basic Risotto Recipe to help make..
the Rosemary, Pancetta and Borlotti Bean Risotto

Day Three

126 days and 126 recipes to go

Today's menu
Minestrone served with Crusty Bread

Okay so we cheated with the bread and bought a loaf of "Bake at Home Turkish Bread"! But we didn't cheat with the tomatoes - we peeled and seeded 10 Roma tomatoes ourselves rather than taking the easier option of tinned tomatoes. I'd never peeled a tomato before, so that was something new. This soup was really yummy, packed full of vegies and great with some Parmesan Cheese on top. For dessert we had some leftover Chocolate Tart from last night ......mmmm!

Day Two

127 days and 127 recipes to go

Today's menu
Potato Salad with Salsa Verde
Jamie's Perfect Roast Chicken
Short Crust Sweet Pastry to make...
Simple Chocolate Tart

This morning we made the pastry for the chocolate tart- I had fun making it and Mum was very helpful, even though she had never made pastry before! We had to let it set in the fridge for at least an hour..... We took the pastry out and cut it to put in the two tart tins and froze it for about an hour before we baked it. We tried not baking it with a lining and that worked quite well. Next we made Salsa Verde which had lots of herbs and 2 anchovies....ew, we were supposed to
use six but I thought two would do. Tasted good though! Then I peeled some potatoes and mum cut them and cooked them .We made Jamie's perfect roast chicken - we made holes under the skin over the breast and stuck herbs in them and stuffed it with more herbs and lemon. We made some melted chocolate to put in the tart. We ate it and it was very nice.

Our Chook!

Day One

Day one and three recipes complete. 128 days and 132 recipes to go.

Today's menu
Fish in Salt
Baby Spinach, Fresh Pea and Feta Salad with Olive Oil and Lemon Dressing

We don't often have a whole baked fish for dinner and Mum forgot to get the fish monger to scale the fish. So we had heaps of fun scaling the Snapper. The scales went everywhere - in our hair, across the room, stuck to the kitchen window! The fish gets cooked in the oven covered in Sea Salt - you would think it would come out tasting incredibly salty - but it didn't - it was really nicely cooked - and yummy.

We had a family favourite with our fish - Jamie's Spinach, Pea and Feta salad. Mum has been making this for Christmas Day lunch since 1999 - so it's a family tradition now! The fresh peas Mum bought from the fabulous Hahndorf Vegetable Garden were scrumptious.

Tash cooking with Jamie

The challenge
135 recipes in 129 days
The book
"The Naked Chef" by Jamie Oliver, first published the year I was born.
The inspiration
I was inspired to cook my way through Jamie's first cookbook after watching the great movie "Julie and Julia" about Julie Powell's adventure of cooking her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". As well as this, watching Jamie's "Food Revolution" really inspired me - I couldn't believe how many kids were missing out on some really yummy food because all they ate was processed food.

So 129 days to cook 135 recipes. Lucky I've got Mum as kitchen hand! Can it be done .....watch this space!