Roasted Garlic and Roasted Onions

The great thing about roasting a quantity of alliums, is that as well as softening the harshness of raw garic in recipes, and intensifying the sweetness and flavour of onions, you can then freeze them for future recipes.

They are sooo versatile too! Roasted garlic is delicious in dips, mayonnaise, soups, butter (roasted garlic butter rubbed under the skin of a chicken before roasting - yum!), mashed potato, and many other things.

 

Roasted onion (halves) are equally as versatile - all of the above (chopped up for some of them, obviously), and also on the side of roast dinners, sausage and mash, and too many things to mention! 

Cook in bulk to make the most of using the oven, and in order to freeze, squeeze out the garlic cloves first.

Easy Sweet and Sour Sauce

This is great for dipping things like spring rolls or prawn crackers in, or having alongside battered chicken or prawns etc.

Plus, when you make it yourself, you know it's not got artificial colouring in, and if you're gluten free, you can choose to use tamari sauce or gluten free soy sauce.

Added bonus - there's no chopping anything, you just need to plonk a pan on your scales, and weigh everything into it with a squidge of tomato puree!

Smoked mackerel pâté

A delicious pâté which is also great to use as a dip for crudités.

This has to be one of the tastiest fish pâtés! It's great for entertaining as a simple, prepare-ahead starter served with some home-made melba toast (see tips), or for dipping sticks of cucumber, peppers, carrot etc. as a healthy, low-carb snack - see bottom of tips for suggestions with calories: you can have a lovely selection of vegetables for one for less than 60 calories! 

If you want to lower the fat content, you can use lighter cream cheese and substitute the creme fraiche for Greek yoghurt.

This amount will serve four people as a light starter, or two gannets! (It will basically over-fill two decent sized ramekins - and one is perfect to share!)

Calories per portion: for a quarter portion this is 206 calories for the full fat version, or 138 calories if you're using lightest cream cheese (e.g. Philadelphia lightest) and 0% Greek yoghurt.

Simple Chinese Dip Selection

Put this selection of Chinese dips together in literally just a few minutes! Great for spring rolls, dim sum, satay skewers, wontons and more...

There's no need to faff about with these, a minute's chopping, and a couple of minutes mixing together, and you're there!

          

A selection of quick and easy dips which will serve eight people (we had more than twice as much as we needed for four people eating spring rolls!) and can be put together in under 5 minutes! 167 calories in total for all of the dips, if you're counting, so about 21 calories per serving if you share nicely. Everyone loves the peanut dip, so you might want to make more! If you're a fan of sweet chilli sauce and want to add that into the mix too, my recipe is here.

Tzatziki (also known as Cacik)

A delicious, creamy dip infused with garlic, salted cucumber and lemon juice, dressed with extra virgin olive oil.

I've given this its most popular name of Tzatziki, but my recipe and reason for posting it, is as a collection which go together (with some other Turkish recipes), remniscent of my favourite foods from there including this, the Turkish version known as 'Cacik'. They both contain essentially the same (or at least very similar) ingredients, and both vary slightly regionally, so I'd be hard-pressed to say for definite which was which from any given region or restaurant! The main difference is that Turkish cacik is slightly thinner than Greek tzatziki.

It's very easy to make, but the fundamental thing about Tzatziki is that it's not just cucumber grated or chopped in yoghurt, the cucumber has to be salted first to give it that authentic flavour.

Serves six, 54 calories per portion (or 38 calories per portion if using fat free Greek yoghurt, see notes).

If you fancy putting together a nice Turkish feast, with a shopping list and preparation plan, then have a look here!

Hummus - with Tips for Perfectionists

Well, I wouldn't dare to claim to have perfected hummus itself - that's far too subjective!

However, everyone's taste is different and I hope that here many people will find either a great recipe for fantastic-tasting hummus (100% of home tasters preferred it to Sainsbury's organic hummus in a blind test!), or you will find some tips to improve your own home-made hummus to something approaching perfection, as I did, when researching it. Certainly, having the olive oil drizzled over the top, rather than an ingredient of the hummus was a real eye-opener!

I think one of the best tips (when making your own hummus) as far as flavour is concerned, is to cook your own chickpeas, rather than using tinned. If that really is too much trouble, then search out chickpeas in jars rather than tins, and ones which don't contain any chemicals, for a better flavour (I find tinned chick peas deeply unpleasant in flavour, tinny and slightly fishy, and I've only ever tried making hummus with them the once! However that's my taste, and not everyone else's, so I've scaled my recipe to a quantity which will be compatible with one tin of drained chickpeas).

This recipe makes a quantity of 410 grams (400 by the time you've had a few tastes to get the seasoning right!), which gives you eight 50g servings of 86 calories each (78 calories if you don't add sesame or extra virgin olive oil to the hummus; then add an extra 41 calories for each 5ml teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil you drizzle on top of your serving), perfect to serve as a dip with crudites (raw vegetable sticks) and pitta bread oven-baked sticks / crisps etc.- see here for my spiced Pitta Crisps recipe, and maybe treat yourself and have some Tzatziki / Cacik to dip into as well...

Let's be realistic though - who's going to stop at 50g! [Calories in square brackets]

If you fancy putting together a nice Turkish feast, with a shopping list and preparation plan, then have a look here!