My Brother's Interesting Fantasy Story

Ok fellow foodies , so this is my little brothers blog, i promised i ll give him a shout out since he helps me so much the pictures of all the yummy food i cook for my blog. So here you have it

When she was young, her sister got murdered in playground of their neighborhood by some unknown being. Her sister is trapped in a state of limbo , suffering. Leil decides to risk her own life to save her sisters soul, going into the forest of Nehrgonar to find the mythical gate to the spirit world. Her journey is not easy, as the gate releases negative energy that corrupts anything and everything close to it.Some will mislead,lie and try to kill her others will prove to be helpful.

I

ts a weird, twisted world but Leil is determined .

Check out the blog : http://leilsavinghersoul.blogspot.co.uk/

You will find full chapters, original character descriptions, images/painting, an original theme song and previews of upcoming work for the story.

Attention Fellow Foodies :)

With the addition of ads finally to my website from October and onwards according to what feasible revenue i get i am going to commence small competitions with prizes such as cookboos as a reward but of course for this to happen i am going to need your help.Whenever you have the chance to view my blog if you could just simply click on one of the ads either on the side bar or the top of my blog it would mean a lot as each click only takes a few seconds of your time and a couple of pennies go towards bettering this site and giving me access to more produce for the recipes and ideas i come up with, cause after all i am a student on a student's budget and it would mean a lot if you could help me and my blog out by doing this.  One final request is that you become part of this blog more actively be giving me comments on my ideas and recipes and by subscribing so that we can start building up a small network of fellow foodies. Thank you so much for all your support and views on my blog so far and expect more to come very soon as i try to update my blog on a daily basis.So keep calm and keep on munching people! :) (here's a hint of what will be coming soon in October :) )

Sexy Roast Chicken Photoshoot

A couple of days ago i had the chance to cook a whole chicken. You can find them for anywhere between 3-4 pounds and theres enough meat on them for leftovers to make a chicken Caesar salad or even a simple sandwich. For my chicken i rubbed butter with herbs underneath the skin so that it could keep the meat inside nice and moist and make the skin nice and crunchy. I also stuffed my chicken with a whole onion for flavour and the spices i used for the rest of the chicken were thyme,dry bay leaves, salt, black pepper and paprika . I left my chicken to roast with all its juices and some baby carrots in the oven for about 1 hour and 30 minutes.Simple ,cheap and easy cooking that any student can handle and makes for great left over food . For extra flavour you can add some garlic to the chicken and drizzle it with some whit wine (and yes people alcohol can be used in food , its not only there for drunken nights out ;p) and lemon juice while its being cooked.

New Segment for the Blog

Ok so i am creating a new separate page for this segment of my blog. Basically this part of the blog will contain cooking that me and my very good Slovakian friend,  Jana Lacova, come up with or even recipes solely made by her that i ll be trying out. She is an excellent baker and so far her lemon and poppy seed muffins are some of the best i have ever tried. We only just started cooking today for the very first even though we ve known each other for quite some time, and we made Eggs Benedict for brunch and as posh as this may sound it literally just comes down to some toasted bread, a poached egg topped of with a creamy  Hollandaise sauce which is literally just egg yolks and butter whisked together Bain-marie style and i ll be posting pictures and further instructions soon fellow foodies :) You can find the link to this special segment on the top bar of the website.Check back regularly for new posts but i ll let you guys know whenever something new is posted on there. Enjoy!
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Pan fried Salmon with Sun dried tomatoes and Meat balls alongside a Jacket Potato

So for today's lunch , i had pan-fried salmon and meatballs alongside a cheesy jacket potato. For the jacket potato its as simple as just washing your everyday potato, giving it a few good jabs (pierce it) , and sticking it in the microwave for 5-6 minutes at full blast but it really depends on your microwave and size of your potato and when its done just load it up with cheese and stick it in the microwave for a couple more seconds to really get it to melt. For the salmon i just seasoned it with salt,mixed herbs,pepper, some lemon juice and then tossed it on to a sizzling pan with some olive oil in it. I pan fried it for 2-3 minutes on each side till it was nice and crispy and finished it off with a drizzle of white wine and there you have it. Salmon can be quite expensive in Glasgow , especially for a city right next to the ocean , but there are cheap alternatives in frozen form in shops like lidl and tescos which is way more ideal for students. I got my salmon stakes for about 2-3 pounds at lidl.

Black Pudding With Ellie Goulding

Okay, black pudding is my ultimate Irish delicassy . To give you a better more informative description of what it really is i ll quote wikipedia for you : is a type of sausage made by cooking blood or dried blood with a filler until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled . I love mine just simply fried till its crispy.

So for last nights supper i  had some sliced black pudding along with a slice of toast while enjoying Ellie Goulding live from the itunes festival. Black pudding and its quite rare in Scotland  sibling the white pudding are really inexpensive types of meat and should be in the fridge of any student meat lover

photo by my brother Ioannis Cleary

photo by my brother Ioannis Cleary

Importance of having herbs in your kitchen

fresh chives

fresh basil

Having herbs in little pots around your kitchen is a great way of brighting up the place and adding extra fresh flavour to your food. The pots are really cheap to buy and they last for so long. Plus its good to have some source of fresh oxygen in the house, especially when you live in Scotland and the only use for windows is to keep the awful weather out. In my collection of fresh herbs i currently have basil and chives, and hoping to expand the selection this weekend when my allowance comes through . Happy cooking :)

Peppercorn Pork Chops and Boiled Herb Infused Rice

Felt kind of bad not blogging about actual food , even just for a day, so for today i made some peppercorn sauce fried pork chops on a bed of boiled herb infused rice. Its a really simple dish and really filling at the same time. You first take the pork chops and bombard them with herbs, pretty much anything you like, i added mixed herbs , ground ginger, salt and black pepper. You then heat up some olive oil in a frying pan till its actually sizzling cause you want to get a nice sear on your pork chops(and they go dry really fast so you only really want to sear both sides for 2-3 minutes per side). You then add some quartered mushrooms to the pan ( i chose the chestnut variety cause thats what i had available in my fridge). I then added some white whine to the pan  and after that i added some whole peppercorns and finished it all off with some heavy double cream. I never really like using exact measurements for my cooking, i always let my taste buds do the work for me so thats why you have to constantly taste your food. As for the rice i boiled some water and added some salt, a vegetable stock cube, some fresh basil, dried mix herbs and some fresh chives, left my rice simmer for 10 minutes and it was done. Here are the pics ;)

Break for Dominos-Enjoy a quick music video

Have to apologize for today since i didnt really cook anything myself. After a long day at uni i literally did not have the energy to cook something fresh and since it was tuesday my food cravings gave into the easy solution of a dominos quick dial up pizza but i ll leave you with a music video i made for one of Lana del Rey's unreleased songs . I hope this satisfies some of your food cravings till tomorrow where im thinking of either cooking up some pork chops in peppercorn sauce on a bed of basmati rice or stuffing and roasting a whole chicken. Also lucky me will be visiting the hunterian museum at glasgow uni for a food exhibition they just launched! yay! :)  

Lana Del Rey - Put The Radio On Stop Motion Music video from Alex Cleary on Vimeo.

Gordon Ramsay's tips for making love to emm...food

Love the man, but thought this was worth sharing even though it doesn't entirely have to to with food. 

Home made Caesar Chicken Salad with Crispy Bacon and Grilled Fresh Corn

Recipe for home made Caesar salad dressing is you blend together : barely boiled egg, 2 cloves of garlic( i would suggest even less cause mine turned out quite spicy) , 1/4 cup olive oil and lemon juice, some fresh cream and any type of grated cheese . Grilled some fresh corn in the oven and then just got a knife and slid it down each side of the corn. Roasted the chicken for about an hour and a half  till the skin was crispy. mixed all of this along with some finely chopped crispy bacon and  some big iceberg lettuce leaves and small heirloom tomatoes and voila! there you have it. Delish !!!

cheap and yummy macaroni chicken soup

Boiled some water, added the pasta along with some salt, butter and dried herbs and once the pasta was ready i just added a couple of powdered chicken soup sachets topped off with some shredded halloumi cheese .yum!

Pan fried and the roasted cod in a sauce of fresh vegetables and herbs

Delicious fresh affordable corn

Great for grilling with some nice home made garlic butter with a hint of grounded cinnamon

Day at one of Glasgow's farmer markets

the farmers market

fresh organic fruit

free range eggs, organic

fresh bread

homemade fruity wine

homemade soaps

sunflower seed and dried apricot loaf of bread. Really fresh and delicious

Today's Sunday's lunch

All of today's food was provided by lidl at some really competitive prices. A packet of chicken drum legs,some onion rings, fresh sweet beans and carrots and ready to mix stuffing. All of it came to less than 10 pounds and this was a lunch for two including many left overs for even more cooking. chicken drums were doused in bbq sauce and left to cook for over an hour in the oven covered in silver foil, the veggies were slightly cooked in butter in a heated pan and voila , there you have it, a delicious sunday lunch.

Man in the kitchen

Sun dried tomatoes, pine nuts, rocca and balsamic vinegar Salad topped with parmesan cheese

Souvla- The essence of Cypriot Food

This is by far the most popular meat dish in the cypriot cuisine. Various parts of the lamb are passed through massive skewers and are left to grill over a barbecue grill which is affectionately called the foukou on the island of cyprus(cypriot word is derived from the greek word of fire which is fotia). This is the most commonly eaten food on the island of Cyprus and it plays a huge role in the Greek-Cypriots’s lives as it is eaten at times of celebration whether that is on someone’s birthday, on christmas and most importantly on Easter Sunday after the end of the Greek Orthodox’s fast.

Tahini or tashi (the perfect cypriot dip for chips )

This is a dish made by blending together some garlic, tahini,lots of lemon and salt , and a few squirts of water. Probably my favourite dipping sauce in the world for chips

Palm fruit just looks plain weird up close..have yet to buy or try one

Nothing more refreshing in the summer than fresh grapes

Yummy Figs

Kumquats .... smell amazing!!!

Dragon Fruit...tastes and looks like beet root ...need to find a recipe for this peculiar fruit

Passion fruit, the perfect summer’s compliment no matter how you use it :)

Garlic Honey Orange Flavoured Roasted Tatoes

Along with the wonderful fresh sea bream , i roasted some potatoes (they took quite some time in the over, about 2 hours in total) and after having removed most of the oil towards the end, i added some chopped up garlic, honey and squeezed half an orange over them and they were probably one of the best batch of potatoes i have ever made. Potatoes are sooo cheap and this is an awesome way of preparing some. They re so good you can even eat them on their own. I remember they ve been times as a student where i would only have a forgotten sack of potatoes left at home , so coming up with different ways to make something out of ‘em has nearly become a basic survival skill as a student . Enjoy! :)

Tsipoura (in Greek, sea bream in English )

Today for lunch i had the chance to cook with some raw fresh fish, and you can get it for a damn good deal if you live on an island where nothing ever really happens. So basically this is one of the most loved fish of Greeks and Cypriots and its called Tsipoura (sea bream in english) and i just basically oven roasted it for about 1 hour and 15 minutes at 180 C degrees after first having squeezed the life out of some fresh lemons over it , alongside some sea salt and mixed herbs. Goes perfect with some Ouzo diluted with cold water and ice . :)

Fishy Shrimp Soup (Warning!! recommended to die hard fish flavour fans)

This is a wonderful fishy soup i made with the remainder stock i cooked my shrimps in and their shells with added fresh tomato and parsley which was then all passed through a blender and left to simmer for about 1 hour. WARNING : The flavour is quite strong and reminiscent of lobster soup, so no wussing out of this boldly flavoured soup :)

Yummy Easy Panacotta

First thing i made today was a beautiful vanilla panacotta with a candied blackberry cherry liqueur sauce :




Ingredients :

3 packets of powdered gelatin

500 ml of fresh cream

500 ml of milk

3 spoons of caster sugar

2 vanilla pods sliced and de seeded







Instructions : Bring milk,cream,sugar and vanilla seeds and pods to a simmer. Remove the vanilla pods and then add the gelatin after having first mixed it up with a couple of spoons of warm water. After gelatin has dissolved let it cool down and then place into appropriate cups and shove them in the fridge for a good 2 hours.













For the sauce you can just go wild, i used blackberries and cherry liqueur and added some lemon for a nice bit of tartness . Basically you take loads of sugar and add it to a pan with hot water and after the sugar properly dissolves add your choice of fruit and maybe some liqueur ( if you dont want the sauce too sweet just add some fresh lemon juice to it ) and voila!, you ve got your sauce. The trick with the sauce is to add your fruit as early as possible to the mixture so that it caramelizes and takes this nearly candy-like flavour. Enjoy :)

Home-made (fresh or cheaply frozen)Shrimp Cocktail

If you ever get the chance to get your hands on some cheap price-knocked-down frozen or fresh prawns then you can do loads with ‘em . For example i boiled them for about 5-10 minutes in a broth of vegetable stock,chilli flakes, half a lemon,plenty of salt and a whole garlic clover. I then shocked them in a bowl with ice to help them cool down and also make their shell peel off a lot easier and made a wonderful shrimp cocktail on a bed of sliced avocado ,finally chopped lettuce and tomato with a sauce that was a mixture of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise and lemon and there you have a simple but hella yummy dish :) With the left over broth that they were cooked in you can make an awesome tasting fish soup if you check out my other post all about it

Stuffed Roasted Pumpkin

These are some pictures from my fully stuffed pumpkin with mincemeat and rice . Took 3 hours to cook but was totally worth it. So this Halloween why dont you stock up on one extra pumpkin and sacrifice it for a delicious supper. I will be posting the full recipe later on in October , just in time for All Hallow’s Eve.