Creamy Cauliflower Soup - The South Beach Diet Quick and Easy Cookbook - Recipe # 1

The soup-loving Mr. T. picked this recipe out of the "30 minute" South Beach Cookbook. This book was bought to add some tasty, but low calorie recipes to Toasty's repertoire, rather than with any intention of following the South Beach diet. Many of the recipes in this book look very appealing, with a small number of healthy ingredients that seem like they should go together well. Others, however, are of the "1/2 cup of sugar substitute" variety that Toasty has no interest in. I would much rather try somethig new that is naturally low calorie than have a "full figured" recipe tortured into a low calorie travesty.

So... back to the soup. Cauliflower soups often involve cream to soften the rather strident flavour of the cauliflower and to give the soup a rich body and silky texture. This South Beach version uses reduced fat sour cream instead. All in all the sour cream works quite well, although Toasty had to double the quantity as otherwise the soup was too mushy and wasn't pulled together flavour-wise. Even doubling the sour cream doesn't add too many calories to the recipe.


Creamy Cauliflower Soup

1 cauliflower

1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 small onion, sliced thinly

1/4 tsp salt

4 cups water

1/4 cup (or 1/2 cup!) reduced fat sour cream

1/2 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

salt and pepper


Cut the cauliflower into florettes and slice the stems into 1/4 inch pieces, slice the onion.

Heat oil in a heavy saucepan over medium heat and fry the onion for 5 minutes, until softened. Add the cauliflower and the salt, cover and cook for 5 minutes.

Add the water, bring to a simmer and cook, covered for about 15 minutes, until the cauliflower is soft.

Puree the saucepan contents until smooth. Stir in the sour cream and nutmeg. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Tarragon Chicken - The Gourmet Slow Cooker - Recipe #1

Slow cookers are strange beasts. Many recipes using them simply involve throwing a bunch of stuff in, switching them on, heading off to work and returning to a warm meal. Sadly, in Toasty's experience, warm is about the only positive adjective that can be applied to most of these dishes. Other adjectives he finds coming to mind are "mushy" "overcooked" and "bland".

A second breed of recipes use slow cookers essentially to replace oven casseroles in classic dishes. Generally these recipes end up tasting great, but involve significant prep such as browning meat, frying onions and celery etc. They often also involve shorter cooking times, so that they don't work well during a workday.

Anyway, "The Gournet Slow Cooker" falls squarely into the second camp. It has recipes organised by country for France, the UK, Greece, India, Italy etc, with about half a dozen recipes for each. The ingredient lists are reasonable in size and many dishes look interesting.

Based on repeated references to the dish in positive reviews of the book, and also because Mr. T is a gastronomic Francophile, Toasty chose the tarragon chicken recipe as the first thing to cook from this book. Additionally, due to a new horror of factory farming, Toasty bought a free range organic chicken and cut it into portions for the recipe. Picture large sharp knife hacking at big wet bird with tendency to skitter about the cutting surface. Mottled grey dog was VERY interested in the possibility of chicken parts falling on the floor anywhere near her muzzle.

Being thrifty, Toasty froze the gibblets and offcuts (backbone etc) to make chicken stock at a later date. We shall see what comes of that.

The final dish was a hit, with a rich and savoury sauce and very tender chicken, which was served over noodles and accompanied by oven roasted asparagus. However, the tarragon taste was a little muted for Toasty's taste. This is likely due to the amount of cream in the recipe, as cream tends to dull flavours. Similarly, Toasty thought the dish needed a little acid to to balance the sauce better, so perhaps a savignon blanc or muscadet would work better in the recipe than the chardonnay that was actually used.


Tarragon Chicken

3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 chicken, cut into serving pieces and skinned

2 tbps unsalted butter

2 tbsp olive oil

1 yellow onion, finely chopped

1cup dry white wine

1 cup chicken stock

6 sprigs tarragon

1 cup heavy cream

Put 3/4 cup flour in a sealable bag and coat a couple of chicken pieces at a time by shaking them around in there.

Fry the chicken in the oil and butter over a medium high heat until golden on all sides. Place in the slow cooker.

Add the onion and 2 tbsp flour to the pan. Saute for ~ 10 minutes until lightly browned. Slowly add the wine, scraping up the gooey bits stuck to the pan.

Add the stock and cook, with stirring for 10-15 minutes, until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

Put 2 sprigs of tarragon in with the chicken and pour the onion/sauce over.

Cover and cook on low for 5-6 hrs until the chicken is just falling off the bone.

Pour in cream and cook a further 10-15 minutes.

Remove the tarragon sprigs.

Coarsely chop the remaining tarragon leaves and add to the slow cooker.

Serve immediately.

Baked Red Cabbage with Raisins - Great Cooking Every Day - Recipe #1

As mentioned in the last post, in the past Toasty bought several "diet" cookbooks in order to find tasty low calorie recipes to add to his repertoire. One such book is "Great Cooking Every Day" which is a Weight Watchers title, and seems aimed at slightly "restaurant styled" rather than "homey" dishes. In other words, the pictures looked great in the store!

Toasty hadn't previously tried anything from this book (so hurrah for this blog). One thing that looked good was a very simple sweet and sour "braised" red cabbage dish, which seemed like a great side dish for the herbed pork tenderloin Toasty had already decided to cook. Toasty has a weakness for a similar dish served along with Schnitzel and curry fries at a local German pub....

The baked cabbage turned out quite well, although the mysterious dissapearance of the cider vinegar necessitated a switch with white wine vinegar. This is definitely a repeater, but needs both a little more sugar, and a little more vinegar, for Toasty's taste. Its possible that the cider vinegar would cure both these problems, although Toasty has an idea to try balsamic vinegar instead. Sadly, however, while Toasty liked this one the discerning Mr. T. was less impressed muttering imprecations about texture. Can Toasty bring him round??


Baked Red Cabbage with Raisins






1/4 cup cider vinear

3 tbsp packed light brown sugar

3 cupes finely shredded red cabbage

1/2 medium red onion, thinly sliced

1/4 cup raisins


Combine the vinegar and sugar in a shallow baking dish and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cabbage, onion and raisins and mix gently with the liquid. Cover with foil and bake for 30-40 minutes until soft. Stir after 10 minutes.

Makes 4 servings.

Herbed Pork Tenderloin - The Sonoma Diet - Recipe #1

A while ago, Toasty went through a phase of trying to find low calorie recipes that tasted really good, both to reduce his own saturated fat intake and to help his partner, the lovely Mr. T., to lose some weight.

Anyway, this is one low calorie dish that we have prepared before, and quite liked, from "The Sonoma Diet". Most of the recipes in that book look great (well there aren't any pictures but they SOUND great), and Toasty and Mr. T. have enjoyed several that we have tried, sometimes even the same ones! However, in Toasty's opinion, the recipes suffer from having far too many ingredients, making them very expensive and tending to muddy the taste. Here we had the herbed tenderloin along with braised red cabbage and baked potato and while Toasty enjoyed the pork, he is not as fond of it as he used to be as he felt there were too many flavours (to paraphrase the Austrian Emperor in "Amadeus"). On the other hand Toasty did fiddle with the recipe a little, making a more substantial pan gravy by adding red wine to the roasting pan at the end, and reducing down. Toasty also used dried rosemary and marjoram. The enigmatic Mr. T. loved this one.


Herbed Pork Tenderloin





2 12 oz pork tenderloins

salt and pepper

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp dry sherry

1 tbsp cracked black pepper

3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

1 tbsp soy sauce

2 3-inch sprigs fresh rosemary

2 3-inch sprigs fresh marjoram

2 3-inch sprigs fresh thyme

2 garlic cloves, minced


Season meat with salt and pepper and place in sealable plastic bag. Then, put together the marinade, consisting of the cracked pepper, soy sauce, vinegar, sherry, herbs, garlic and 1 tbsp of the olive oil. Pour into the bag with the pork and marinate in the fridge for 2-4 hrs with occasional turning.

Drain the meat and reserve the marinade. Heat the remaining 2 tbsp of oil in a frying pan and brown the meat.

Put the tenderloins in a shallow roasting dish and pour over the marinade. Roast, uncovered at 425 F for 15 minutes. Spoon the pan juices over the meat and contiue roasting until internal temperature reaches 155 F. Cover with foil and let stand for 15 minutes before carving.

Makes 8 servings.

Marmalade - How to Eat - Recipe #1

Some time ago Toasty bought a bunch of preserving jars at Ikea, which have looked decorative, in an empty kind of way, ever since. In late February a chance reading of a Nigel Slater column from the Observer suggested that these jars would look excellent filled with sunny bitter orange marmalade. A perfect antidote to winter blues.

Nigella Lawson had simple recipe for marmalade in her compendious "How to Eat", so that will be the first recipe from the first cookbook- Toasty hopes that Ms. Lawson feels special!

Seville Orange Marmalade

700g Seville (bitter) oranges- from Whole Foods in Feb. They freeze well.

1.2 litres water

juice of two lemons

1.4 kg sugar


Bring the oranges to a boil in the water, then simmer vigorously for ~2 hours, until they are soft. Remove the oranges, SAVING THE WATER, and cut up the pulp and skin into very fine shreds (unless you are a person of chunky marmalade, eugh!). The pulp at this stage is very soft and is attached to the skin- there is also a lot less of it than you might expect. Save the pips from the oranges and boil them in a small volume of water for five minutes.

Put the chopped oranges and lemon juice in a bowl and add the "pip" water, with the pips strained out. Then return the orange mixture to the original pan of water and warm at a low heat. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved (its a LOT of sugar). Bring to the boil and cook until set- allegedly you can test this by taking a teaspoons worth of the mixture and putting it on a cold saucer until it cools, if it sets it will wrinkle when prodded. Toasty found this test was pretty ambiguous and ended up slightly overdoing it, about 20 minutes was probably what was needed rather than the half hour the marmalade actually got.

Remove any surface scum and pour into warmed clean jars.

Toasty is very pleased with this marmalade, a nice balance of sour, bitter and sweet and perfect with the food of the Gods that is...... toast!

The Plan

Toasty owns a few cookbooks. Actually Toasty owns a LOT of cookbooks. These cookbooks are full of really great looking recipes, otherwise Toasty wouldn't have bought them, right? However, a good number of these books have never been cooked from, and its gotten to the point where their attitude on the bookshelf can only be described as sullen, or perhaps accusatory. They huddle together and look hurt.

In an attempt to make it up to his bookshelf, and to expand his culinary repertoire, Toasty has decided to cook first one, then two and eventually five recipes from each of these books. Oh, and then post here about each one, to keep him honest. We shall see what comes of it....