Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies

Am on a cookie binge these days. These are SO GOOD. I love the rich flavour of sesame in basically anything - so why not cookies!

And the addition of tahini makes a regular chocolate chip cookie into a buttery, savoury, beautifully rich cookie.

And these cookies are really easy to make. I love cookie recipes where you chill the dough overnight, because when you're ready to bake them the next day, it's about 30 minutes from rolling the cookies to eating the (warm) cookies. DREAMY!

Middle East Feast!

Guess who just got back from Beirut? This moi!

Lebanon is gorgeous, and I literally didn't have a bad meal there. This is a feast I made a few months back, before I'd gone. So because all I want to eat now is Lebanese food, I thought I'd post this while I'm whipping up some slightly more authentic recipes of deliciousness for you all.

Sometimes I just get in the mood to adapt/bastardise some cuisines into a feast of a dinner. This dinner requires a little preparation but is actually quite quick and easy to put together. We have an amazing Lebanese restaurant nearby and every time we go, I have a crisis about what to order. Because I want it all. So, when I fancied that kind of dinner, I MADE IT ALL.

I don’t think any of this is particularly authentic, because I’ve tweaked it to my tastes, adding sesame to the falafel, and turmeric to the tahini sauce etc, but it's really quite delicious. 

Sauce!

You could add in some more chicken, slice up extra pita bread, throw in some hummus and make this a finger food buffet feast for a party! But it makes a really delicious indulgent feasting dinner for two as well.

Halva Tahini Brownies

I might have mentioned  before (a million times) that I like Greek food. And when we went to Greece this summer, I had a great time browsing the little supermarket for random ingredients. I ate a lot of honey and sesame bars because they have a million different types there.

I also went to the supermarket specifically looking for halva - it’s like a crumbly nougat made with sesame seeds/tahini. I love the flavour of sesame and I’ve used tahini to great effect before in brownies. 

Halva was an obvious choice for a brownie topping – sweet but not overpoweringly so, with a beautiful nutty undertone and a mildly sticky texture when cooked. You can get halva in the UK but the only ones I could find were in a speciality food stop, therefore expensive. Obviously heading to Greece to get some was the next step.

Chicken and Falafel Salad - Or: My First Salad

I'm going to take the blog in a slightly different direction for this one, because.. THIS IS MY 200th POST!

And for that, I’m going to let you all into a secret.

I’ve never made a salad before.

Because I had always held the belief that..

And to be honest, this is definitely true..

I was never particularly bothered about it, apart from having a sneaking suspicion that I am missing out on something which could be quite delicious. I had never really considered salad a dinner. It was what you'd eat when you were punishing yourself for whatever reason. It was about tolerable on the side of something actually delicious, or on top of a burger. 

I resolved to make a foray into salads after eating a particularly delicious one while on holiday in Lisbon. It had crisp lettuce, delicately spiced chicken, a host of veggies and a balsamic dressing. I was smitten.

I decided that I’d give salads a go myself, seeing as we are coming into salad and beer-garden season (HAH! It's been snowing recently..). But to keep it safe, I wanted to stick to flavours and textures which were familiar to me, so I thought I’d try an Eastern-inspired chicken salad with some sesame baked falafel on the side. It's simple, but tasty. And I'm using it as a springboard for more elaborate salads in the future!

And while simple, it's goooood. The parts themselves are delicious together or separately. Those falafel would be really delicious in a hummus pitta. The chicken would be equally delicious over couscous with roasted vegetables. Go wild!

Cream Cheese Brownies

The blog has been a bit too savoury lately (ie: two savoury posts in a row!)

So I thought I should rectify that with another type of brownie (I'm a tiny bit obsessed with brownies..).

I have been meaning to get more use out of the revelation of sesame-cheesecake mixture that I made for the sesame yoyos. And I really love brownies, but a few years ago when I attempted to make cream cheese brownies the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster. Like, "throwing the batch out" disastrous.

Nevertheless, these things are sent to try us! And if I never kept cracking on at recipes which had previously been fraught with difficulty, then this blog would be pretty empty. Trial and error, practice and tasting, that’ll get you where you need to go. Never give up!

And I’m glad I kept going, because I’ve cracked it! These are some of the nicest, nuttiest, creamiest brownies I’ve ever made! Please make them, you won’t regret it. Brownies, brownies, brownies!

Chocolate and Sesame Yoyos

I love nutty, seedy flavours in sweet as well as savoury cooking. There is nothing more delicious to me than a cookie filled with hazelnuts, or a cheeky walnut in cake, and of course, pistachios in the mighty baklava.

I also have a massive vat of tahini paste that I am keen to use whenever I can.

I also love discovering new flavour combinations. 

So when this recipe fell into my lap, I was immediately enamoured! These are light little biscuits, studded through with sesame seeds, and stuck to eachother with the most scrummy sesame-cheesecake filling. This has opened up a huge new range of recipes to me, it makes me immediately want to make a chocolate-sesame cheesecake. The chocolate and sesame complement each other beautifully, and the creamy sesame filling is completely delightful.