October 2002 - Kumara Jackets with Chilli Butter

A new month and another slow start, oh dear. Well only a slow start on the posting. I have been cooking away. Although I have to admit that I have jumped an issue so I am limited as to what I can post at the moment. I will have to get my act together and get the recipe from that issue done so that I can continue on with my posts without too much more delay. 

I had hoped that for one of the months I would be able to do a month of cover recipes. Making each of the recipes from the front covers of each issue. The main problem with doing this with delicious magazine is that there is a high proportion of dessert recipes on the front covers. This month half of all the issues had desserts on the front cover. While I am all for having dessert, I could not make that many in one month. I make dessert once or twice a month at the most, five would be way too much for me especially when it can be a lot harder to reduce dessert recipes down in quantity. I haven't yet looked at the November issues but given past trends I doubt there will be a covers recipes month.

Speaking of desserts, my eye was caught by Valli Little's Fresh strawberry jelly. I like jelly but don't think that I have ever made it from scratch before. I even have the leaf gelatine in the cupboard to use in it. I bought some a while ago from Dutch Foods but have not used it yet. The leaf gelatine can be very hard to source locally, in fact it is pretty hard to find online too and when found it is usually quite expensive but the price was reasonable from Dutch Foods. I also love the Droste cocoa powder from there too. The jelly looked easy enough to make but it used a whole kilo of fresh strawberries. That is a lot of berries even when they are on special. Plus the kilo only makes 4 1/2 cup serves. I would get a lot more serves out of the fresh fruit. So I decided not to make the jellies. 

What I did end up making was Valli's Kumara Jackets with Chilli Butter. This was really easy and made a very nice side dish which I served with chicken breast pan fried with a creamy mustard sauce and steamed broccoli. I didn't have any fried shallots or peanuts to top it with but I think that it was just fine without. The chilli added a little bit of difference to the dish. I would definitely make it again.