My Home-Made Roasties

Hello lovely people,

So one of my New Year's resolutions was to cook more and this weekend I decided to put that into action by making a lovely home-made roast dinner! Not a typical roast dinner with yorkshire pudding etc. but I cooked a lovely pork joint and decided to make some roast potatoes and roasted carrots to go with it.

I was very impressed with how they turned out and I wanted to share them with you.  I always thought it was easier to throw a bag of Aunt Bessie's roast potatoes in the oven to cook, but it was so easy and they were so tasty, I couldn't believe it!

For the carrots, peel them, wash them and cut them into bite-sized pieces.  Put them on a baking tray (I drizzled some olive oil onto the baking tray before putting the carrots on), to try and reduce the amount of calories I was adding, I sprayed Fry Light (1kcal cooking spray) on top of the carrots, you can use olive oil if you want but I used this and it tasted great. I then sprinkled some Thyme on top and they were ready for the oven.  

I put the carrots in the over at 180 C for about 40 mins

For the Potatoes, I peeled, wash and cut them into quarters. I then part boiled the potatoes for 10-15 minutes. Once drained, I carried out the same steps as with the carrots and drizzled olive oil on the pan, then added the potatoes, sprayed with Fry Light 1kcal spray and sprinkled with Thyme.  These then went into the oven with the carrots for approximately 40 minutes.

Obviously, this timing is an estimate so if you are trying this yourself make sure you keep an eye on them and make sure you check them regularly. Now I wouldn't ever say I have good skills in the kitchen but I have to say these tasted great, the roast potatoes were crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.

Do you have any good tricks to make great roast potatoes?

My attempt at Peanut Butter Brownie Pumpkins!

Hello my beauties,

Recently I have been enjoying so many new and great blogs and they have given me so many good ideas I want to try out. Now I have to admit I'm not a great lover of cooking, I do enjoy it when the mood takes me but on a day-to-day basis its not my cup of tea.  But when certain recipes crop up I add them to a list of things to try out (although most of them never get crossed off the list).  But when I came across a Peanut Butter Brownie Pumpkin recipe I just had to do it!!

As it reached Halloween and I had some time off I decided to take the plunge and do it.  I found this recipe from Wifessionals which is a blog I have been really enjoying recently and you must check her out!

So this is what Kaitlyn from Wifessionals pumpkins looked like:

Image from http://wifessionals.blogspot.co.uk

How amazing and yummy do they look!? Now here is my attempt:

My attempt! The best of the bunch

Ha ha! They look totally different! To be fair, the problem I found was the bag of Orange flavour buttons that I used for the coating (Kaitlyn used Wiltons Candy Melts in orange flavour) wasn't big enough, the coating worked well for a few of the pumpkins and had I bought 3 bags of buttons then I think they'd have all been coated a bit more and I could have used some for decoration. 

My attempt - it was all going well before the coating!

My attempt - I was so close!

Oh well, at least I tried and I'm glad I did! I don't think I will be quitting my day job to do this full time, but hey were still so scrummy!

I took them with me to the party and let Andy (the Boyf) and his flatmate scoff them down! They enjoyed them, so it was all worth it.

Dani xxx