Sometimes Food

This really has been a 'sometimes food' weekend. As I sit here blogging and ebaying, I've polished off a lunch of leftovers, including half a chocolate twister bread roll, a sliver of chocolate tart and some cold arancini with dip. YUM! 

To put this into context, I spent a lot of yesterday cooking. Tim and I both had the day off to await the arrival of our good friends Darren and Jayne from the UK. Oh, and let's not forget little Lucy who Ladybug just doesn't quite get. We think she thinks Lucy isn't exactly a person like mum and dad are, but more like some weird kind of hairless dog complete with her own cool toys that she doesn't like to share. All at once the new kong isn't cutting it. But I digress...

Besides the usual pre-houseguest cleaning and shopping, I made a whole lot of food for the weekend. Last night we also had the lovely Penny and Nathan over. The following was served: antipasto plate of char grilled artichokes, baked ricotta, baba ganouch and arancini, followed by a pot roast and baked veg. If that wasn't enough food, we had chocolate tart and vanilla ice cream to finish up.. Even the blokes were struggling so I consider it a job well done. 

This was after I'd made chocolate twister bread from Jamie Oliver's 'Return of the Naked Chef' recipe book, for afternoon tea. Another 'sometimes food' that has gone down extremely well. The premise is to take a basic bread dough recipe, roll it out, spread it with butter and then sprinkle chopped up chocolate and nuts. It's then rolled into one big sausage-like roll, and carefully chopped into rounds. These are baked to perfection. The result is heaven. 

I won't go through the basic bread recipe because it's quite long. It's a great recipe all on it's own, and I used spelt as usual too. Here are the ingredients for the chocolate part.

200g soft butter (although I used slightly less)

200g hazelnuts (although I only had 150g almond meal available)

310 g dark chocolate

I put the chocolate and almond meal in the food processor and whazzed it up pretty well. It was just out of sheer laziness but it worked. 

See pages 222-3 and 226 of The Return of the Naked Chef if you want Jamie's instructions.