Fried mozzarella and aubergine sandwiches with tomato salad

I got this recipe off Hairy Bikers (man, I love that show). It's very filling, and I assume it is quite low in calories as most of the ingredients are vegetables. I watched them make this recipe on TV and recreated it from memory. Which means I forgot half the ingredients :)

So my salad only had tomatoes, olives, gherkins, salt, and a dash of olive oil. Was still tasty though!
Surprisingly I remembered everything that went into the sandwiches, except the flour. But seeing as there's already breadcrumbs, I figured I didn't need it. I left the frying pan a bit too hot and let the sandwiches burn. Next time must remember to use lower heat as my stove is super powerful -- medium heat is enough to boil water (ie. high heat on every other stove).

We ate these for Sunday brunch and it was quite pleasant to start the day with so many vegetables :)

Pan-fried lamb with leeks and beans

I got this recipe off Hairy Bikers. Except I didn't have pork, so I used lamb. Real lamb, not hogget or mutton that pretends to be lamb, mind you. Now that I go to the Saturday markets, I've become quite the lamb snob :)
I didn't have flageolet beans either, so I used a can of "Mixed Beans". And I didn't have Calvados, so I used Apple Schnapps, and I didn't have apple juice, so I used leftover stock that I had in the fridge. Frugal!

Three leeks turned out to be a LOT of vegetables, and the lamb turned out perfect. The creamy sauce is really tasty and is a perfect fit to the leeks. I didn't have any sage leaves either, so I just went without that part of the recipe. Actually, come to think of it, I didn't have any garlic that day, haha, I did use more mustard that it said, so it was quite noticeable.

In the end, it was quite a variation from the recipe, but it was still delicious and didn't cost me a fortune having to buy things I didn't have :)

Carrot Halwa

I got this recipe off the Hairy Bikers. As I was baking for people at work (self-celebrating my three year anniversary with my current employer), I doubled all the ingredients and rolled out the halwa on a tray so it would make a slice.

This recipe is extremely expensive if you get the saffron and the vanilla pod for the cream. I did buy them and only then noticed how expensive they were. In the end, I didn't make the cream as I was taking the slice into work, so the vanilla beans are still unopened. For the price of gold, it's just as well! Ghee is also not cheap, and you don't actually have to double the ghee if you double the rest of the recipe, because it's used just in the frying of semolina. An Indian person at work said that the whole liquid off the frying is supposed to go into it, but I just poured off the fat into the sink and chucked in the fried semolina.

For the final step, I didn't serve it in glasses or with cream, but simply lay it out on a baking tray, pressed it flat, and put it in the fridge. It set nicely overnight, I then sliced it to take to work.

This is a really tasty dessert. It's not as sweet as I expected it to be (and apparently not sweet enough to be truly Indian, hehe). The cardamom makes it extremely moorish. You can also go without the saffron as it's just for the colour I think.