Bookmarked! Guacamole with baked (in bacon!) tortilla chips

Bookmarked! 
Only three posts in on my 'bookmarked' series and I'm already cheating a little bit. Yes this recipe was bookmarked but really, only to remind me to hurry up and make some guacamole!
I really love The Food Lab, found on food website/leviathan seriouseats.com. It take two of my favourite things, namely food and scientific method and combines them. I imagine most people would learn a few new techniques from reading through, even if you think you've got your recipe sorted. I'll probably be posting more off The Food Lab, as my method for frying steak, making chicken tikka masala and more all borrow heavily from those pages. 

In this case the way I make guacamole was only slightly modified. Apparently the best way to get a good mix of chunky and smooth in your avocado it to use a whisk (who knew?) but as I already had my trusty but bloody heavy pestle and mortar out for the other bits and my washing up bowl is a pit of despair which I prefer to visit as little as possible I smashed it up in there too. Mostly what I got from the post was the importance of pounding your add-ins with salt before mixing in the avocado for all of the flavour!

Bookmarked!- Breakfast Risotto

Bookmarked! No, not risotto for breakfast. Even I'm far from that bonkers and I'm certainly not the sort of person who is up, ready and raring to fry, add wine and stir, stir, stir before work. This is a risotto inspired by breakfast. Or more accurately, inspired by this bacon, egg and leek risotto made by Smitten Kitchen.

Bookmarked! - Tuscan fries for the fryer-phobic

 

Bookmarked! From BBC Food by Nigella Lawson, these are the Tuscan Fries from her latest Italian food series. The idea is hob-top skinny fries, started in cold oil, with garlic and herbs thrown into the boiling oil for that extra thrill of white hot fat spatter. 

I bookmarked this recipe because it looks like a fryer-phobic friendly gateway project. I blooming love fried food but had never before taken the greasy plunge into making it at home. And the sort of oven chips I can buy in supermarkets I can walk to (so not the big ones) are just nasty.

What I changed: I scaled the quantities down to suit a two person portion. Then I ate it all myself. I have no shame. I also used a fresh basil and dried thyme mix and less garlic than vampire-slayer Lawson. And my frying method was definitely the wimp's way out, using a saucepan and small batches instead of the recommended heavy frying pan. I think it worked very nicely though so I'm sharing it here. 

Bookmarked!

If you read food blogs (and why else would you be here, welcome as you are), then you probably also have a bookmarks folder bursting at the seams with delicious, beautifully photographed and ambitious recipes of other people's creation. Hopefully you're a little more successful than me at transforming your bookmarks from pixels to plate- I think that out of my nearly 200 bookmarks I've probably actually made somewhere more in the region of two. Just an order of magnitude of 100 off then. Clearly, my bookmark folder is just a very pretty way of using up hard disc space. 
So, in an effort to challenge myself and revisit pages that I want to emulate (or at least did at the time, on a quick relook the sight of cuppa cuppa cuppa cake* just brings a slack jawed sense of 'why, dear god, why?'). 
So I bring you "Bookmarked!" Over the next few weeks/months/until I get bored and frustrated, I will attempt to bring you my version of a page I have bookmarked sometime in my browsing past. 

*You'll have to Google it, I'm afraid. I fear the Pioneer Woman's propaganda machine too much to actually link to it 

The Rules: 

1. Pages must have been bookmarked already- no adding new bookmarks because someone posts egg on toast and I'm too lazy to cook anything fancier
2. Recipes can be changed, but must still be recognisable as the original. I'm not going to plough on with a Maldon sea salt-containing-chocolate-anything. I probably meant to sub out the fancy ingredient when I bookmarked it and so that's what I'll do now. 
3. I'm (probably) not going to have any bookmarks for boiled carrots and I might go mad if I try and make a whole meal out of interesting and save-able components. So generally speaking, I'll freestyle the side dishes.

Coming up in a matter of minutes- my first "Bookmarked!"- Nigella Lawson's Tuscan Fries x