Turkey kofta

I am attempting to lose weight at the moment, this is very hard for me as I love food and I am not prepared to give up cooking, entertaining and eating out.  Therefore I have been going to the gym a little more, not something I really enjoy and trying cut down on calories.  So far 10lbs down, but 10lbs more to go. I have been eating less beef and more lean pork and chicken and trying new ways of cooking that use less olive oil and butter. This is a dish that I came up with last week that fits all the criteria and tastes good too.

Lamb kofta is something I love and make quite regularly, but ground lamb and beef for that matter are really not in the cards right now, so I tried making kofta with ground turkey.

1lb of lean ground turkey
1/2 onion chopped
1 garlic clove grated or finely chopped
2 sprigs of mint finely chopped
1 sprig of flat leaf parsley finely chopped
1 sprig of basil finely chopped
1 teaspoon of cumin
1 teaspoon of coriander
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
Salt and pepper to taste.

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well.

To make sure you have enough seasoning, I put a teaspoon of the mixture on a plate in the microwave for a few seconds and taste.

Garden Bay pub

The Garden Bay Pub is not very far as the crow flies from my friends place at Pender Harbor but a long way by road, but well worth the drive as it turned out.  Four of us decided to walk up Pender Hill on Saturday morning and then thought a pub lunch was in order.  The walk was straight up I do not know the height but it seemed like a long way, up the view was spectacular and the pub was at the bottom.

So at the bottom of the hill waited a cold drink and a good lunch on a patio over looking the marina, life doesn't get much better than that.

The deck of the Garden Bay pub

Preserving summer - hot pickled green beans

We had got into a bit of canning frenzy on the Labour day weekend and looking for more things to can. We decided to do some hot pickled green beans, as Nancy's husband really likes them, and the local market had some wonderful fresh green and purple beans.

We decided to add some carrot as well for colour.  We had cooked some of the purple beans the night before and rather disappointingly they had turned green when cooked, so we were interested to see what happened when pickling them.

This is what happened they went a mottled half green half purple not the lovely vibrant purple they were before but I can attest that after the requisite week of pickling they tasted wonderful.

Roast rack of pork

The butcher at the Oak Tree market in Pender Harbour had some beautiful racks of pork on sale on the long weeken and Nancy bought an 8 bone rack for dinner.  She searched on epicurious.com for recipe and she came up with Roasted Double Rack of Pork with Morel Mushroom Pan Sauce

Of course we did not have any morel mushrooms, but we did not let that deter us. we bought some other dried mushrooms at the IGA and started to make the sauce, but I am afraid if you want to see how to make this sauce you will have to follow the above link, as instead of taking care it we were doing this.

Preserving summer - Blackberry Jam

I spent the Labour Day long weekend at my friends house up at Pender Harbour on the sunshine coast. The weather was the best we have had all summer and the blackberries were epic.

I have never seen so many, and another friend could not stop herself from picking for hours at a time with no thought to her own safety.  By the end of the weekend we had buckets and buckets of blackberries and she was covered in scratches all up her arms and legs.  Some were frozen but 12 cups were turned in to jam.

Into a large pot went 12 cups of blackberries after carefully washing and removing all the bits of blackberry bush.

In my happy place

Enjoying a weekend at Pender harbour sun,food,walks and wine.

Rosemary roasted potatoes

On Sunday my husband dug out one of our potato plants to see how the potatoes were doing. Finally they have grown large enough to really use.

They are not quite as large as they look next to those carrots, those carrots are mini carrots really too small to be taken away from their mother.  But the potatoes were spectacular and enough to feed five for dinner and a couple of small ones for two of us another evening.