Cheese Fries casserole

I made a cheese fries casserole a la Betty's Kitchen to have with (leftover) chilli. I made few changes, notably:

1) I halved the recipe

I used regular frozen fries.

Diced onion.

 2) I used Gouda cheese (because this is what I had)

 

Snipped it up with scissors instead of grated it, for reasons of convenience.

 

 

3) instead of a crunchy border of cornflakes, I opted for an overall crunchy blanket of boxed bread crumbs.

 

We had it with heated-up chilli and a salad of rocket leaves, pecans, lettuce and balsamic dressing.

It turned out very well, creamy and cheesy, see here for recipe. I would like to make it again with this new Scotch Bonnet cheese from Tesco that's coming in the next delivery. It would go great with a new hot sauce we've got as well.

We went to an honestly pretty boring Christmas fair at the Barbican where we did two good things: eat some Greek Christmas biscuits, and discover Aunt Celia's Hot Hot Pepper Sauce.

Me and James agree that it's the best hot sauce we've had out of all the hot sauces we've tried, and we've tried loads - stuff by Blair's, CaJohn's, the You Can't Handle This hot sauce - first problem with many of the very hot hot sauces is the slight 'chemically' taste - maybe the taste of capsaicin, and the other problem is that if the sauce is too hot you don't get any other flavour. This hot sauce is impressively/scorchingly hot, but retains a beautiful Scotch Bonnet flavour. It's not a Tabasco-consistency hot sauce, the consistency's gloppier, like cheese dip. So far we've had it with fries and I've had it eggs and baked beans for breakfast (amazing!), but it promises to be a very versatile hot sauce.

Claypot chicken rice casserole!

The cat is still here. He likes 'ocean fish pate'. It's one of those cans with those tab-tops that break off. I had to use a can opener. The pate made him really excited.

We ended up not going out today and I cooked the claypot chicken rice casserole instead. It's amazing! You have to make it.

As always, I substituted with what I had: I used dark soy sauce with a splash of oyster sauce and cornflour (instead of cornstarch) in the marinade, and didn't use Chinese sausage.



Hob-cooking, just before baking in the oven.



Round cast-iron casserole from Procook. It's a pretty deep casserole for just the two of us and a little dish like this, but it'll be especially useful for cooking a large batch for lots of people.



What's left!