Special Basil = Pesto with a touch of balsamic vinegar

This has to be the food that doesnt look nice on pictures. Obviously I dont have special lighting equiptments to give me some nicely brightly lit up place to get a natural-ly lighten place even though it’s dinner time and the existing room is just lit with normal warm light.

*how come I forgot about using flash* … bah

Anyway….

I know, it looked like a bunch of something brown and something green with a dash of bright orange. uh, don’t u reckon? Thats’ the best cause I couldn’t wait to munch it down my stomach.

This recipe’s from Jamie Oliver’s jamies dinners. With so many cookbooks hanging around, PLUS, new to the family, Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, I just tend to forget about some of the food in the book.. Every now and then, I flip them again, and see if I could find anything interesting, fair enough, this was pretty intersting

Its relatively easy to make. I don’t know, but I tend to be able to tackle western food better than some chinese food. Well, chinese cooking do need some skill tho, which I probably don’t have ….. YET!yes.. yet.

*the weather’s pretty hot huh ?? I might need to buy a fan soon…*

Oh, back to the lamb cutlets.. So Jamie suggested that these lamb cutlets are best cooked on a hot barbecue with wood or charcoal, or a preheated ridged griddle pan. I just seared it on a pan.

Recipe (serves 4, which I then quartered down the recipe to feed just myself)

12 lamb cutlets
small handful of fresh thyme
extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
400g mushrooms
small handful of flat leaf parsley
1 lemon
2 handfuls of pine nuts
2 large handfuls of fresh basil
3-5 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Slap cutlets with the heel of your hand to flatten them slightly. Then bash up thyme in a pestle and mortar and add a little olive oil. Mix together , then rub the oil over the cutlets and season both sides of them. Put to one side

Cook the mushrooms dry on the bars of your pan. Once they are done, put them into a bowl and toss with teared pasley leaves, a drizzle of olive oil and squeeze in lemon juice. Then, put the lamb cutlets on the pan and cook for about 3-4 minutes on each side, until it’s cook to your liking. When done, put the lamb with the mushrooms and toss. Allow to rest while the flavour gets onto the lamb and mushrooms.

Meanwhile bash up pine nuts in a pestle and mortar until you have a musy pulp. Remove into a bowl and bash basil till its like pulp. Add to pine nuts and loosen with extra virgin oil so the sauce easily drops off at the end of a spoon. Now, balance it off with some balsamic vinegar, that gives it some zing.

Serve with salad and mash if u’d like. I made some carrot mash. Just blanch carrots and mash with fork with some butter. You could add some orange but I reckon it would clash with the lamb, so I omitted. I didn’t have oranges anyway, haha.

HAHAHA….

Just incase you didn’t know what was what …

Well, the special pesto sauce was quite good. It kinda goes well with the carrot mash, eh. Mushrooms were nice, with some nutty taste and a zing of lemon. Lamb would probably have some herb flavour because of the thyme. I always think that thyme goes well with carrots, so whenever a recipe calls for thyme, I’ll make either carrot mash, or just blanched carrots.

So.. Yeah..

Next up ……

Brioche and Croissants … wtf, bread…..

again…