A Little Luxury For Me

Food

Tesco Cheese For Entertaining Range Review

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We were recently given the chance to try out Tesco’s Cheese For Entertaining Range.  This selection features ready to eat or ready to cook products that are perfect if you are hosting a dinner party or have friends for lunch and don’t want to be slaving away in the kitchen.

Tesco Cheese For Entertaining RangeWe tried the Goat’s Cheese and Bacon Parcels.  The goat’s cheese discs come wrapped in ultra thin smoked bacon and need pan frying (no need for oil) for a few minutes before serving.  They are very tasty with strong flavours that balance each other perfectly.  They’d make a lovely starter or light lunch served with a green salad and some good bread.

mature cheddar soufflesNext up were the Mature Cheddar Souffles.  They come in individual glass dishes.  Despite the hearty mature cheddar flavour, the souffle is really very light.  They are so easy to cook too.  You just need to bring them to room temperature and then cook in a preheated oven.

The third dish we tested was the Mexican Style Monterey Jack Cheese.  This is good and spicy (it uses a traditional Mexican blend of spices plus hot chillies) so making it perfect for tortilla wrap filling. This would be good for sharing or as a snack.

The only down side I encountered was that the Tesco Cheese for Entertaining range wasn’t available in my local (quite large) store, but I was able to get it from a Tesco Extra shop.

Fresh Bread

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fresh breadFresh bread is an everyday little luxury for me. The smell of baking bread is just divine and if it didn’t make me feel so hungry, I almost feel I could live on that alone. My fresh bread almost always comes from my breadmaker. I set it so it comes in time to present me with a fresh loaf first thing. I find this helps with the gorgeous scent of fresh bread making me hungry, because it’s breakfast time anyway when I get up so I don’t feel hungry for long. There’s something magical about getting up and smelling fresh bread which has been made for you while you slept.

freshly sliced breadAnother thing that I find amazing about making my own fresh bread is that something so tasty can be created from so few ingredients. My normal white loaf, that I make most often, only contains 4 ingredients: water, flour, salt and yeast. They don’t look very promising when you put them into the bread bucket (the bit that the dough goes into that acts as mixing bowl and baking pan), but alchemy is at work to turn these humble ingredients into culinary gold.

My recipe for a simple white loaf requires the following ingredients:

  • 350ml/ 12 fl oz water
  • 500g/ 1lb 2oz strong white bread flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon yeast (the dried, suitable for breadmaker sort)

Put the ingredients into the bread bucket in the order they are listed.  Choose the basic white bread setting for your breadmaker with a bread size of 1.5lb.  Then 3 hours later you’ll have your bread.  Bare in mind that it is difficult to slice when warm, so allow for some cooling time.  I like eating it best when there is still a touch of residual warmth left from the cooking process, but it’s cooled enough to slice fairly easily.  It doesn’t keep for too long, so eat on day 1 or 2 as fresh.  After two days toast it.  The toast it makes is like nectar too.

 

Hotel Chocolat Easter Egg Giveaway

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Hotel Chocolat Easter EggHotel Chocolat recently got in touch and offered readers of A Little Luxury For Me the chance to win a Hotel Chocolat Easter egg.  They are giving this Zebra Beastie Egg as a prize in our giveaway. The Zebra Beastie Egg is an hollow-cast milk chocolate egg with 6 praline and caramel-filled mini eggs. The Beastie Egg is printed with an all-natural, cocoa butter zebra transfer.  Doesn’t that sound good?

To enter leave me a comment telling me who you would give the Easter egg to or maybe you are planning to keep it yourself.  For extra entries you can share the competition on the various social media networks.  For each one that you do share on, please leave a separate comment and details of what you have done so I can check (I’ll need a username or a link to do this).

Competition Terms and Conditions

1. No bulk, third party or automated entries.
2. Entrants must be UK residents aged 18 years or older.
3. The winners will be chosen by a random draw.
4. The winner will be notified by email and will have one week in which to claim their prize. Should they fail to respond within this time, an alternative winner will be selected.
5. Competition closes at midnight on 25/3/2013.

This competition has now closed and the winner is Claire Nelson.