Slow cooker Sichuan pork shoulder noodle soup

I saw this recipe and it looked awesome, so I just made it in the slow cooker. My recipe is adapted for my pantry and the slow cooker.
I used boston butt in mine (it was on sale), but I suspect it would work with other fattier, tougher cuts of pork as well.
It was very tasty and very spicy. If you're going to try this recipe and sichuanese food isn't your fave, I would cut wa-ay down on the chilli paste. My apartment smells like a chinese restaurant and it makes me really happy right now. Specially since its really cold and really grey and this is exactly what I would have wanted to go out for!
We cook a lot of chinese food so we already had toban jiang in the fridge, but its actually pretty commonly available at stores in the ethnic/asian section. If you have sambal olek that works really well too as a substitute, though I personally think sambal is a little spicier. We did not have black vinegar so I googled a substitute and balsamic+some other vinegar+sugar seems to do the trick. I also added a tablespoon of brown sugar instead of one of the tablespoons of white sugar. I have no idea if that helped. I first cooked it for 4 hours and the pork was very done, but not falling apart, so we let it go for another 45 minutes.
If I make this again, I would also dry roast and crush a few sichuan peppers and sprinkle them on the soup after it cooks.

Ingredients

2lbs pork shoulder-cut into 1" pieces
12 cloves garlic, chopped
3" fresh ginger piece, peeled and chopped
4 Tbsp Toban jiang
1/3 cup red vinegar+balsamic vinegar (or chinkiang)
4 Tbsp sugar
3 Tbsp soy sauce
3 Tbsp cornstarch
4 scallions

Method

1) Add a little oil to a pan and on high heat fry off the pork pieces. I waited till they were browned (5-6 minutes). Don't crowd the pan. I actually removed about a fourth of the pieces after they were seared and dumped them into the slow cooker and proceeded with the rest.
2) Toss in the ginger, garlic and chilli paste and toss the pork around to coat. Cook for about a minute, still at high heat.
3) Add in the soy sauce, vinegar and sugar and stir them around for 3-4 minutes until the sugar dissolves.
4) Add everything to the slow cooker along with 8 cups of water.
5) Cook on high for 4-6 hours.
6) Take out about half the liquid and boil it on the stove and add cornstarch dissolved in water until it thickens. Add it back to the rest of the soup.
6) Serve with noodles and chopped scallions.
7) If you prefer to remove some of the fat, let the soup cool either in the slow cooker or in the fridge and then skim off the fat from the top.

Slow cooker Moroccan chicken stew with butternut squash

This recipe isn't unique and a quick google search yields lots of variations, but this is how I make it, most of the time. It is moroccan themed and is warm and hearty. I probably shouldn't have added the raisins at the very beginning, but they were still yummy so thats an extra step cut out! I also added only a third of a cup of stock and the stew was quite thick, which is how I like it, but thats a personal preference. I used butternut squash in this but I suspect it would work just as well with pumpkin or acorn squash.

Ingredients:

1 Small butternut squash, peeled and cubed
1kg Chicken thighs (~8, bone-in, skinned)
2 small onions, diced
6 cloves of garlic, chopped
1" piece of ginger, chopped
1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1/3 cup stock
squeeze of tomato puree
Raisins
Spices (garam masala, paprika, chilli flakes, cumin powder, nutmeg, cinnamon)

Method:

1) Brown the chopped onions, garlic and ginger in a little oil on high heat (~7 minutes)
2) Add everything to the slow cooker. The only thing I was careful about was that the chicken wasn't on the very bottom.
3) I added the spices by eye, but it was perhaps about a teaspoon of garam masala, salt, cumin powder and 1/2 and teaspoon of paprika and chilli flakes and a shake of nutmeg and cinnamon powder.
4) On high for 3.5-4 hours.
5) Garnish with chopped parsley and eat with crusty buttered bread. It also works really well with couscous. 

Chorizo Apple Mustard Puffs

This recipe is from here. We modified it as follows but if I make this again (and I probably will make this again because it was yummacious), I will probably take the casing off the sausages, but won't separate the meat more than that. I enjoyed the pig in a blanket style of leaving the sausages whole but the skins were difficult to bite through.

Ingredients

Small pat of butter

1 apple, finely diced

8 small raw chorizo sausages

small handful parsley, chopped

400g pack puff pastry (4 plates cut in half)

1 egg, beaten

1tsp-ish Dijon mustard 

Method

1. Heat oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6. 
2. Put the butter and apple in a small pan and cook for 5 mins until the apple has softened, then cool. Then mash until its chunky but small chunks.
3. Mix in finely chopped parsley and a tsp-ish (more is probably better) of dijon mustard.
4. Thaw the puff pastry plates spread out individually until they are soft and pliable, but before they reach room temperature. Cut each one in half.
5. Add a spoon-ish of the apple mix and a sausage into each plate and then pull the plates and seal the edges around the filling.
6. Spray the baking tray down with butter, brush the tops with egg and then bake for 40 minutes. Around 15 minutes in, you should probably pull out the baking tray and remove the excess liquid and then pop them back in. 

Pineapple upside down cake

We both love this cake and it has turned into the standard birthday cake for us. It helps that we don't need to ice it and so its EZ! I have read some recipes that don't actually make a caramel in the first step, I suspect these are the ones that look very white in the end, I prefer this "old-fashioned" one that we found on simplyrecipes.com.

Caramel Topping ingredients:

• 1 cup of firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup (113g) unsalted butter
• 1 can of pineapple slices

Cake ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 6 Tbsp cake flour
• 6 Tbsp of ground almonds (from about 2 oz of whole almonds)
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 3/4 cups of sugar
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature
• 4 eggs
• 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup sour cream

Steps

1. Preheat oven to 325 °F/165 °C. 
2. Make the caramel topping. Take brown sugar and butter and combine and melt in a saucepan on medium heat until sugar dissolves and the mixture is bubbly, this usually takes us about 10 minutes on medium with slightly cooler than RT butter. The mixture gets pretty frothy after the sugar melts, so we just gently swirl it to make sure the butter and sugar are combined. Pour mixture into a 10 inch diameter stick-free cake pan with 2 inch high sides. We used a spring form, these leak. Boo. 
3. Arrange pineapple slices in a single layer on top of the caramel mixture. 
4. Whisk the flours, ground almonds, baking powder, and salt in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, use an electric whisk to beat the sugar and butter together until light. Add eggs one at a time, beating between each addition. Whisk in the vanilla. Add half the dry ingredients then half the sour cream then the rest of the dry ingredients and the rest of the sour cream, whisking in between each.
5. Pour the cake batter over the caramel and pineapple slices
6. Bake cake until tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes (we sometimes have to microwave the cake in the end to get it firm, sometimes the center never gets completely firm, I suspect because of the juice from the pineapple). Cool cake in pan on a rack for 10 minutes. Turn cake out onto a platter. Serve warm or at room temperature. (We mos def prefer warm!)

Chicken pot pie

I've made this recipe twice now. Its brilliant because I can just use rotisserie chicken straight from the store and because it tasted wa-ay richer than it actually is while still feeling like comfort food. The recipe is from here although I do not use their crust at all. The first time we made it we used frozen butter pastry to enclose it, which made it much richer. This time we covered the top with biscuit and it tasted so wonderful that I suspect this is how we will be making it. The biscuit recipe we used is the one logged here. We should probably have a little more biscuit than what we made to cover the pie completely, but the calories are calculated according to the proportions below.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons oil

1 cup chopped carrot 

1 cup chopped onion 

1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme (I used dried)

3 cups fat-free, lower sodium chicken broth (I used water and a little salt)

2 1/3 cups cubed red potato 

1.5 ounces (about 1/3 cup) all-purpose flour

1/3 cup water

2 cups diced cooked rotisserie chicken 

1 cup frozen petite peas

1/2 teaspoon salt 

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Cooking spray 

Method

1. Preheat oven to 400°F or 200 C.
2. To prepare filling, heat oil over meduim-high heat. 
3. Add carrot, onion, and thyme; cook 8 minutes or until vegetables are soft. 
4. Add water, salt and potato; bring to a boil. Cover and simmer 10 minutes. 
5. Combine flour and 1/3 cup water in a small bowl; stir with a whisk until smooth. 
6. Return potato mixture to a boil. Slowly drizzle flour mixture into potato mixture, stirring constantly. Cook 1 minute or until mixture thickens. 
7. Stir in chicken, peas, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and pepper. 
8. Spoon chicken mixture into an 11 x 7-inch glass or ceramic baking dish coated with cooking spray. At this point we popped this in the oven and started making the biscuit dough since the filling should cook longer than the biscuit (40mins vs 15mins). After the dough was ready we pulled out the dish and carefully put the biscuit dough on top. 
9. Bake at 400° for 15-20 minutes or until golden and bubbly. Let stand 10 minutes.

Nutrition

As written, this dish makes about 8 servings of 470 kcals each. 

Tamarind and Tuna curry

I made this because I did not want to go and buy groceries. I had canned tuna and wanted curry. Google presented me with this perfect recipe which I altered to suit my ingredients. The recipe is redolent of laksa and I've already made it twice because the sour-sweetness of the tamarind perfectly complements the strong tuna flavors. It pairs perfectly with rice.

Ingredients

• 2 Cans Tuna (160g each, in water)
• 3 Onions, sliced
• 4 cloves of Garlic, sliced
• 1Tbsp Ginger, chopped
• 1 tsp Red chilly powder 
• 1 tsp Coriander powder
• 1/4 tsp Turmeric Powder
• 1/2 tsp Fenugreek seeds
• 1" square of Tamarind(Kudampuli), soaked in boiling water
• Salt to taste
• oil
• 1 tsp Mustard seeds
• Curry leaves

Method

1. Soak Kudampuli and keep it aside for 10 minutes
2. Heat 2tbsp oil in a pan and add mustard seeds
3. When the mustard seeds start to splutter add ginger and then turn off or turn down the heat. Add the garlic and curry leaves and after they are cooked, add the fenugreek seeds very briefly, max 30s.
4. Saute it till they are soft. I add salt at this stage to make the onion cook faster.
5. Add the chilli powder, coriander powder and turmeric powder to the pan and fry on a low heat for a minute or two till it smells less raw. 
6. Add the soaked Kudampuli and water. Bring it to boil.
7. Add the drained canned Tuna and cook on medium heat for 5 minutes and then leave covered with no heat for ~10minutes.
8. Serve with rice. 

Nutrition

This recipe makes 3 big servings of 293 kcal each. Of which 11g carbs, 15g fat and 29g protein. 

Biscuits

This is a very simple biscuits recipe from All recipes that I just converted to grams to make it easy to measure out with a scale.

Ingredients

• 250 g flour
• 10 g baking powder
• 2 g baking soda
• dash of salt
• 13 g sugar
• 113 g butter
• 175 g buttermilk

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 C.
2. In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar. Cut in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Mix in the buttermilk. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead 12 times (as little as possible to not activate the gluten). Transfer to an ungreased baking sheet, roll into a 6x6 inch square, and cut into 12 even sections. Do not separate.
3. Bake 15 minutes in the preheated oven, until a knife inserted in the center of the square comes out clean. Separate into biscuits, and serve hot.