Hairy Dieters Week 4

This week has been a bit of a strange week, I spent some of the bank holiday in the pub and some camped up in the lake district which left only a few meals to cook, I made another version of my baked frittata, same recipe but without the lemon and with different veg, I also made my favourite bolognese recipe, with some pasta, it’s not too bad at around 400 calories per portion (depending on pasta and portion size), unfortunately this was preceded by some of my arancini as we had the in-laws round for tea and of course I made three new meals from the Hairy Dieters book.

First up was the Hairy Dieters fish stew, I thought it was delicious, really full of flavour and really filling, especially with the garlic mayo ciabatta, I will admit to adding a splash of Tabasco to my portion to liven it up a bit, the Tabasco worked really well with the spices in the stew and didn’t kill the flavour of the haddock loin either. I’m pretty sure the stew would work with almost any fish, some chicken or maybe even some sausage if you didn’t want to be quite so healthy, the base for the stew would also make a wicked soup.

Next up was the much anticipated Sweet and Sour chicken from the TV program, the flavours weren’t much different to my hot and sour chicken but it was a lot healthier and had a few different ingredients in, the sauce was also thicker and more like the type of sauce you would get in a Chinese takeaway, the only two tweaks I made were I used a few mushrooms and also used a tin of bamboo shoots mixed with beansprouts because that’s all the shop had.

Finally we had the Masala chicken  with cumin crusted vegetables, it involved quite  a bit of effort and got quite messy as you have to butterfly the chicken then take the skin off and massage the sticky marinade into the flattened chicken.

It was well worth the effort and was delicious, the meat was tender and juicy and the rub added plenty of flavour. It worked perfectly with the cumin vegetables.

This week I’ve pencilled in the Parma ham Cod to see how it stacks up against my cod recipes, the lamb Tagine to see how it compares to my spicy lamb and the stuffed peppers that I cooked in week 2.