I cook with wine. Sometimes I even add it to the food.

No matter what the holiday, I always use it as the perfect excuse to spend more time in the kitchen and make more of an effort with meals. After work it’s all too easy to reach for a takeaway or grab a pizza because after being confined to a desk for most of the day, who wants to spend hours on end prepping dinner?!

I dug out a recipe I'd been dying to try for ages. A Spanish style stew - chorizo, chickpeas, spinach, red wine and tomatoes – topped with a piece of fish

Waiting for food to cook is a thirsty affair:

Instead of buying a baguette, I made my own bread from scratch. Stuffed with numerous sun-dried tomatoes and black olives, the dough barely held together. There may have been some swearing at this point...

Thankfully it didn’t fall apart in the oven, and the end result was pretty damn tasty:

Bitten by the bread bug, the next day I made bread rolls stuffed with chorizo. 

Think of them as like a pizza stuffed crust... but in miniature form

I gave slutty brownies a go

For those of you who are in the dark about slutty brownies, these are brownies AND cookie dough combined into what I can only call a MIRACLE. Best served warm for a gooey centre. You can use basic brownie and cookie recipes for this. Or you can be lazy like me and buy a mix... thanks Asda!

The chicken stuffed with parsley garlic butter and black olives was a fiddly affair. It was meant to be like a swiss roll but the chicken I bought was bordering on morbidly obese and was too fat to roll out. Even after I beat the hell of it with a rolling pin, it remained stubborn. Instead I improvised and made chicken parcels:

The end result was delicious:

And I like to think some of it looked like a swiss roll (ish)

Stay tuned for more recipes and more food based content!

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