FRIDAY FEAST : TUNA BURGERS WITH SPINACH AND SESAME SEEDS

Second to be featured in the Friday Feast series are these yummy tuna burgers. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do! This recipe makes 4 burgers and takes approximately 20-30 minutes to prepare.



INGREDIENTS:

1 tin of tuna (or you can also use salmon)
1 medium potato
1 egg
4 slices of brown bread
4 tbsp wheat bran (for extra fibre!)
4 tbsp sesame seeds
Spinach (I used 4-5 cubes of frozen chopped spinach so just eyeball this!)
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
Salt and pepper to taste
1-2 tbsp oil for frying

HOW TO:

1. Tear the bread into chunks and blitz in a blender to make crumbs. Place in a bowl.


2. Grate the raw potato and spread out onto a plate. If using frozen spinach place this on the same plate too. Place in microwave for 2-3 minutes.


3. Place the tuna, sesame seeds, wheat bran, lemon juice and egg in the bowl with the breadcrumbs and mash the heck out of it.


4. Add the microwaved grated potato and spinach and stir it in well.


5. Season with salt and pepper.


6. Heat the oil in a frying pan.


7. Divide the tuna mixture into 4 and shape into burgers.


8. Shallow fry until nicely browned on both sides.

SERVING SUGGESTIONS:

• With baked potato wedges, grated raw carrots sprinkled with balsamic vinegar, and a dollop of fromage frais...


• In burger buns with lettuce, sliced onions etc...


• With a nice mixed leaf salad...


• Or anything else you fancy... ENJOY!

THE PHOTOBLOG IS UPDATED

I went for a little photo walk with my friend Øyvind last night - click through to the photoblog for more!

HOT DOGS & BLUEBERRY JAM

Since I still haven't got a clue when/if my sewing machine is returning to me, I thought I'd share a few random photos from yesterday:



We went for a walk and noticed the blueberries were beginning to ripen, so we picked a few. Not many (269 grammes to be exact) but just enough to make one jar of blueberry freezer jam when we got home. Yum! We sat down and had hot dogs for lunch before we went home. And a few of the blueberries for dessert of course!

FRIDAY FEAST : CHEATS CHAI LATTE

This post marks the first of a series of regular weekly themes I intend to introduce here on MBP. Every Friday I like to unwind after a long week at work by indulging in a culinary treat or two. And so I have decided that every Friday I am going to share a favourite recipe with you. I start it off this week with one of my fave treats - and not just on a Friday - a chai latte:



Can you believe I can't get a ready made chai latte in this town?! Neither could I when I moved back here. So there was only one thing to do - make my own. A few experiments later I decided that the easy way also happened to be (in my opinion) the best way. This isn't an exact recipe (I rarely follow recipes properly anyway, much preferring the "go with the flow" style of cooking) so you're gonna have to eyeball a bit, and adjust the amount of spices according to your own taste. But this is roughly how I do it:

I fill a large mug about 2/3 full with skimmed milk. Not only does skimmed milk have less calories (always a bonus!) but it froths better than semi-skimmed or whole milk too. Don't ask me why, it just does. I whack it in the microwave to heat it up, then use a milk frother to beat the heck out of that milk. Oooooo, we love a bit of froth don't we?

While you're nuking the milk, also boil the kettle and get your cafetiere out. Yep, multitasking at its finest here, but make sure to keep an eye on the milk or it will spill over the top in no time. In the cafetiere you put a teabag, or a teaspoon of loose leaf black tea, along with your spices: ground cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom and ginger. A good sprinkling of each. A pinch of chili powder if you want a little heat. Also add sugar if you want to sweeten your chai. Then add enough boiling water to fill the remaining 1/3 of the mug and leave to brew until really strong.

Pour the spiced tea into the frothy milk and stir lightly. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Put your feet up and enjoy!

FREE PATTERN : REVERSIBLE BABY BIB

Remember a while back I made some reversible bibs and said I might upload a pattern for you? Well here it is!



All instructions are on the pattern PDF, and this is a really straight-forward and easy item to make. Perfect for a "let me whip something up last-minute" baby gift! The little "doll" is made from the scraps from the neck hole - there are no instructions for this, because it was just a silly little idea I had at the time.

Download the PDF pattern here.

Print at 100% on an A4 size sheet of paper. As always, please remember MBP patterns are free for personal use only - contact me for licencing details if you want to use it to make items for sale. I always appreciate a link back to this post if you make one, and I'd love to see your versions! Have fun!

GREEN FINGERS? HARDLY...

...but I am quite proud that most of the plants on my balcony have survived so far.



I wouldn't exactly say they're thriving, but they are still alive, and blooming. Not bad for me, let me tell you. I didn't inherit even one green finger from my mum unfortunately. I am one of those people who want to have green fingers, but who instead seem to have the unique gift of being able to kill the most hardy of plants. So just the sheer fact these are still alive is pretty much a miracle. Yep, definitely an achievement - especially the Nasturtiums as I planted them from seed with my own two hands!

So, since my sewing machine is still broken and I have no sewing projects to show you, I thought I'd show off my flowers and at the same time tell you about this really fun application that my sister told me about: Poladroid. You might have come across it before? It's pretty addictive and loads of fun.

You know how they stopped making Polaroid film? Well now you can turn all your digital photos into "Poladroids". The application looks like a Polaroid camera, and sits on your desktop. You simply drag and drop your image file onto the "camera", and out pops a "Poladroid". Just like with the good old Polaroids you have to wait for them to "develop", and you can speed the process up by "shaking" them. The new images are saved as JPEGs in a folder that you specify.



Oh and just to add to the fun quirkyness of this application... after every 10th image you make it tells you that you are "out of film", and you have to close it down and launch it again to continue...

Have fun making Poladroids! I'd love to see what yours come out like, so post me a link to yours in the comments!

I'LL BE MAKING A REGULAR GUEST APPEARANCE

A while back Olan, founder of Ofifteen, emailed me to ask me if I would consider becoming a DIY contributor, coming up with creative and fun DIY projects and tips/ideas in a weekly column.



"Ofifteen is an online lifestyle magazine that covers features such as home tours, interviews, videos, trendcasts, fashion and a whole lot more that is updated throughout the week. Our goal is to inspire individuals through a variety of topics that are beyond the subject of home and garden. We are an online only magazine and are quite content with that idea as we are obtainable to readers from all over the world."

Initially I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to come up with something worthy of posting every week, or that I wouldn't be able to find the time inbetween full time work and single mummyhood - and when Olan emailed me again this week, I must admit that those thoughts popped up again. But then I decided to take the plunge, and I have accepted her invitation. I am very excited, as this will be my first guest blogger appearance - please wish me luck!

SEXY OR WHAT?!

You know if anything was gonna cheer me up after my sewing machine packed in... it was the arrival of this beauty yesterday:



My brand spanking new MacBook Pro in all its sexy aluminium unibody and glass screen slickness finally arrived safely yesterday, after being held hostage by the evil people at the detention centre Post Office overnight. Oh I have waited ages for one of these babies...

Me being a graphic designer I guess it comes as no big surprise that I do ♥ Apple products. Opening the box yesterday it struck me how Apple's attention to design and details really shines through right down to the packaging. (The only thing I can't say this about is the mighty mouse. Yes it looks nice, but it is a PITA, the trackball constantly clogs up and is neigh on impossible to clean. Apple people, can you please fix this?!)

So yes, this should keep me nicely occupied while I wait for my sewing machine to be repaired or replaced!

So what about the sewing machine you ask... Well you're not gonna believe this. I rang up one of the two sewing machine stockists in town:

"No, sorry... we have stopped doing repairs" Bummer.

So I phone the other people:

"Oh, no we don't service that brand" Bummer x 2.

They were eventually persuaded to at least have a look at it for me though, so after opening it up and having a peek inside it myself yesterday (it looked scary, so I promptly assembled it again after removing loads of lint, some pins and a drinking straw - how the heck did that get there?!) I took it in today. It might be time to look at a new machine anyway, if there is nowhere locally to service my old one. Next time it will be a Bernina or a Husqvarna, so at least I know I can have it fixed locally if something does go wrong!