gift it!

We've all got old shopping bags piled up somewhere in our houses...no? well i do. i don't know about you but i find it hard to throw them away because i may use them someday which i never do. So instead of keeping them only to throw them all away one day how about you gift it!

You'll need

a shopping bag

fabric

a pair of scissors

a glue stick

all purpose adhesive

Take the shopping bag apart carefully and lay it out flat over your fabric then cut the fabric around the bag. Make sure you leave enough room around the bag to work with.

Run the glue stick all over the back of the bag and lay it on the fabric. Make sure the fabric is flat and has no folds anywhere then press the bag down all around. Apply some all purpose adhesive along one edge of the bag, turn the fabric onto the glue and trim off any extra neatly. Repeat for the remaining three edges. 

Fold it back up and glue it closed. Its important to study the bag when you're taking it apart so you know exactly how to put it back together.

Poke holes in the fabric where the old holes were, pass the handles through and tie them.

peppers + meatballs

A couple of weeks ago i caught an italian cooking show on bbd food which is one of my favourite channels. I really can't remember what the show was called but on the day i caught it, the host was making a roasted pepper sauce to go with meatball and polenta. Apparently italians traditionally eat meatballs with polenta and not spaghetti. I'm not sure how true that is but thats what she said. Now i didn't write down her recipe but i got the general idea and decided to do it my way.

I won't call this a recipe but rather a list of the ingredients i used. Unlike baking, cooking is not necessarily an exact science and things can be added or removed based on personal taste without affecting the end result too much. So feel free to add more garlic, less...some ginger if you decide to try this out.

one green pepper

three red peppers

half an onion

six or seven cloves of garlic

one chilli pepper
sea salt
olive oil

I LOVE pepper so a whole one may be too much for some people in which case you can use half or remove the seeds of the chilli to reduce the intensity of the heat.
All the ingredients were cut, put in a baking tray and sprinkled with some sea salt(regular salt will do) and drizzled with olive oil.

 I put it under the grill for about forty minutes(or till the peppers were slightly charred) then blended it. 

It was a little too thick for me so i added some tomatoes which made a difference. I've made this a few more time and i added a few tomatoes to the roast. I also remove the stems of the peppers now which i didn't do the first time.

For the first time ever, i tried polenta. Its really easy to make. Polenta is a cornmeal and is very similar to garri(a cassava meal popular in West Africa) in texture and preparation method but with a much milder taste. The polenta was stirred into boiling water(with a pinch of salt). 

The final touch to this dish is meatballs.

minced beef
green pepper

red peppers

onion

garlic

chilli pepper
salt
italian seasoning mix(thyme, oregano, sage, basil, marjoram, rosemary, savory)
ground ginger
olive oil to fry

The charring of the peppers gave this sauce a very unique taste which i really liked and also the texture and consistency make it great to put in a jar and stick in a fridge to use whenever. My husband wasn't fond of the polenta so i made him some pasta to go with it.

S.A.B.T

When i started this blog in 2011, it was meant to be a way of documenting a project i had. I baked through the entire hummingbird cookbook and wrote about each recipe. I really enjoyed the challenge and commitment to finishing something i had started. I didn't hurt my palate either. I got to try so many things i hadn't tried before, and do things i had done before but in different ways. I learnt a whole lot and its a journey i'm glad i took. When i completed the cookbook, i didn't really have anything in particular to blog about. I love to bake of course, and so i continued to blog about that but i was doing random recipes i came across and lacked focus which i felt like i needed. I enjoyed the structure i had when i was following a cookbook and had a goal. I began to realise that i felt like blogging about other things in my life. It started out as a blog strictly for baking and confections but now i'd like to share a lot more.

tastes like christmas

2014 was a great year for me. I went through a few changes, biggest one - I got married!!! Planning my wedding took over my entire life and unfortunately my blog suffered. I'm now settled and ready to get back into blogging a lot more. This post was actually meant to go up last year but I didn't get round to posting it for some reason so this is kind of a flash back post.