Following our recent Bloggers Night In, I’d come home with some goodies to try out in the kitchen. We’ve been eating in with The Spice Tailor, Tilda and Soreen this last week.

I love curries and Monkey has been eating them since his weaning days.  I hadn’t heard of The Spice Tailor before so was looking forward to trying the Rustic Rogan Josh set I received. The set comes with spices, a base sauce and the main Rogan Josh sauce.  I had some chicken left over from our roast dinner last week so decided to use that to make the curry for a quick dinner.

The instructions were very easy to follow and we were soon ready to eat. We’d been given a selection of Rice from Tilda, and I decided to use the White & Brown Basmati rice to go with our curry.

We both thoroughly enjoyed this meal, in fact I think it was Monkey’s favourite curry of all time – he devoured it.  For me, I would have liked more sauce, but that’s a personal taste thing, it was fab, very flavoursome.  The rice didn’t clump together and was moist, but well cooked through – great for a meal on the run.  I’ll be adding both items to my shopping list in future.

I needed a pudding one evening last week and I was trying to decide what to make, it was one of those freezing cold days, so I wanted something to really warm me up! I got inspiration from an unlikely source.

Yes, from Soreen!  I love malt loaf, and have been a Soreen addict since childhood.  But I’ve only ever thought of eating it sliced with lashings of butter on top. Well, in my Soreen goodie bag was a little recipe book.  I flicked through it and came across a recipe for Manchester Bread & Butter Pudding – pudding was sorted!

I used the Soreen Fruity Five fruit loaf in the following recipe – it was really very good and we all enjoyed it.

150g Soreen malt or fruit loaf – slice and butter on one side
150g slightly stale sliced bread – butter on one side
50g soft unsalted butter (additional for greasing)
juice and zest of one small orange
3 tbsp sultanas
300ml milk
300ml double cream
1 vanilla pod, split
3 large eggs, beaten
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
3 tbsp caster sugar

Preheat oven to 150 deg C / Gas Mark 2

Grease baking dish (make sure it’s deep enough for 2 layers of pudding.
Simmer milk for 10 minutes, add in the vanilla pod, nutmeg, orange juice and zest.
Beat the eggs well with the double cream. Strain the milk and then whisk into the egg mixture.
Layer the dish with the slices of Soreen and drop some sultanas on top.  Then put a layer of bread slices on top, pour over the custard and sprinkle over the remaining sultanas.
Bake in the oven for 20 minutes.
Sprinkle over the caster sugar and bake for a further 15-20 minutes.
Eat!

Yum!

I have to thank The Spice Tailor, Tilda and Soreen for their lovely products.  We’ve really enjoyed trying new things.