Avocado Salsa a la Nigella

Watching Nigella Lawson is part cooking show, part porn.  She is so passionate about every step of the cooking process and every ingredient is absolutely the best thing she has ever eaten - ever.  As she has said on Nigella Kitchen: "Every single mouthful has to be devilishly good."   So much so, the ooh's and ahh's can get a little uncomfortable.  But I love it!  The close ups of the good food do it for me while I'm sure the close ups of "the goods" do it for the other half.  Love when we can find a show we can both watch together - whatever the reason may be.

We were watching a little Nigella a few weeks ago and she made a simple avocado salsa to go with a Mexican lasagna.  I thought it might go nicely with tacos but having forgotten exactly what went into it, I had to wing it.  I chopped up an avocado, some spring onions and a bunch of coriander and squeezed half a lime over the entire mixture. For a little kick you can add some chopped jalapenos but we added these individually to our tacos.

To make the tacos, or assemble them, rather,  I used some shop bought shells, pork filling (leftover from these stuffed peppers), salsa, sour cream, jalapenos, cheese and lettuce.  The avocado salsa was great on it's own but every once in a while, I just shoved some into my mouth along with my bite of taco.  Take note - hard shelled tacos should not be eaten in front of anyone you want to impress.  They're messy and there's lots of slopping around, on your face, on your top, on the floor (unless this is just me and now I'm really embarrassed).  Anyway, I'm married now, so no need to impress and he loves me, taco slop and all.  At least I hope so.

Thanks to the lime juice, the avocado in the salsa did not go brown and went beautifully with my scrambled eggs the following morning.  Devilishly good.  Well...as far as healthy breakfasts go.

Pork Stuffed Peppers

We have a small group of friends (3 couples - including ourselves) who often get together.  We usually take turns hosting at one another's homes, sometimes making a 3 course dinner and other times we order a takeaway.  The point is to make time to see each other, catch up on the goings on in our lives and food, whether home cooked or not, is always a welcome part of that.

Very rudely, we were nearly two hours late for the last gathering over the Christmas holidays (for shame) but our very kind friends still let us in and fed us some fantastic food.  A cheese and onion pie, stuffed peppers and a Guinness cake to top it all off.  It was absolutely delicious - especially that cake!  I do plan on trying it out and sharing the recipe on here at some point but a few weeks back I was looking to make something with some pork mince that I hadn't used when making tourtière over Christmas, when the stuffed peppers came to mind.

I didn't use a recipe.  I just scoured the fridge and cupboards pulling out what I thought would work well.  The tomato sauce is the juice from a can of plum tomatoes and I used a half a jar of salsa- a can of chopped would do the same trick, I'm sure. 

I fried the onions, chopped green chilli and garlic in a little oil for a few minutes.

 

Then added the pork mince and once cooked, stirred in the tomato juice, salsa and added a little beef stock and let it all simmer.  I then added a couple tablespoons of dried stuffing mix to thicken it all up.  Rice would bulk this out nicely too, easily doubling up the filling to serve a big bunch.

Not it's most appealing stage but the final product did taste pretty darn good.

I cut the tops of of the peppers and sliced a little off each bottom so they would sit up in the dish and I used half of the mix to stuff them.  They were pretty big peppers - half of the mix would have easily done 4 small peppers but I was being greedy (as usual).  The leftover mix made another meal the next day which I'll share this week.  Gotta love a double duty dinner.

I popped them in the oven for about 30 minutes, just until the skin started to brown and bubble, and served them with my man's favourite side dish, cauliflower cheese. 

It might be our turn to host next - and I'll be keeping the menu simple, something that can be kept warm because pay back's a bitch.  And in the meantime, we'll work on our timekeeping!