Turkey Tikka Parcels with Orange and Fennel Salad

British Turkey have challenged bloggers to invent an innovative dish using British Turkey as well as 2 non-meat ingredients which are Red Tractor approved. As regular readers will know 'The Brilliant Chef' refers to 7 year old Daniel and whenever mum's in the kitchen, disaster usually ensues! However, I hope that I have done Daniel proud this time as this dish really did turn out amazingly well.

The benefits of using British Turkey, (as well as being Food Standards Assured with the Red Tractor logo!) are that it is low in fat, can hold big bold flavours really well (hence my recipe idea to include tikka) and is a great value meat.

So without further ado, here's the recipe I created:

Ingredients for the Turkey Tikka Parcels:
1 pack turkey breast steaks (British Turkey - Red Tractor approved)
1 pack filo pastry
Tikka paste (a few spoonfuls)
Mango chutney (a few spoonfuls)
A little butter (Red Tractor)

Ingredients for the Orange and Fennel Salad:
Bag of ready-washed mixed lettuce leaves (Red Tractor)
1 Orange
1 fresh Fennel bulb
A handful of sultanas

Some Hillfarm Rapeseed Oil (Red Tractor), the juice of a lemon and a spoonful of wholegrain mustard mixed together makes the perfect dressing for the salad.

Serves 4

Method:
This is such a quick and easy meal to put together that I didn't want anyone feeling daunted by the prospect of making the parcels, so I really wanted to show that if I can do it anyone can so I have made a short video to show how to make the Tikka Turkey Parcels:

1. Cut each of the British turkey breast steaks (Red Tractor) into two or three pieces. Marinate the turkey breast steaks in a few spoonfuls of tikka paste. (If you don't have time to marinate, then lightly score the turkey breasts and rub the paste onto both sides). They can be left to marinate in the fridge from anywhere between half an hour to 24 hours.

2. In a frying pan or griddle pan, seal each piece of turkey. You won't need to add any oil into the pan as the tikka paste will prevent the turkey from sticking to the pan.

3. Cut the filo pastry sheets into smaller pieces. I cut each sheet into 4 rectangles. You will need enough of these smaller rectangles to have around 4 'layers' on each parcel.

4. Melt a little of the Red Tractor butter to brush onto each layer of the filo pastry. You really don't need too much butter - just enough to give a very light brushing to help crisp and brown the filo pastry (in fact, too much butter can prevent it from crisping up properly!) One of the benefits of turkey is that it is a really lean meat so I didn't want to add too much additional fat into this recipe.

5. Put a small spoonful of mango chutney into the centre of your first filo rectangle. Then wrap each piece of the turkey into a parcel using the filo pastry. You will need around 4 layers per piece of turkey. See my video above if you are not sure how to do this. It really is easy to do but looks really nice once done!

6. Pop the parcels into the oven at 180 degrees (for fan ovens) or 200 degrees (non-fan assisted ovens) for 20 minutes.

7. Whilst the Turkey Tikka Parcels are cooking in the oven, you should have plenty of time to put together your Orange and Fennel Salad which will perfectly complement your Turkey Tikka Parcels. Our whole family usually cannot stand fennel - but you will need to trust me on this, combined with the oranges in the salad and a drizzle of the dressing, the fennel ends up tasting great!

Simply mix together the bag of lettuce (Red Tractor), some sliced fennel - cut the bulb (not the feathery leaves) into pieces to add to your salad, the segments of an orange (no peel or pith - just the juicy segments) and a handful of sultanas.

8. Then drizzle on the dressing (made from a little rapeseed oil which shows the Red Tractor logo, a spoonful of wholegrain mustard and the juice of 1 lemon).

Then your dish is ready to impress your family and friends with! This meal turned out so well that I am planning to cook it next time we have guests over.


If I haven't managed to convince you about having fennel in your salad then you can always swap the salad for some (Red Tractor) veg instead!

This is my entry into the British Turkey Blogger Recipe Competition. This recipe was created by The Brilliant Chef's mum, Rebecca, who is not a brilliant chef but has been inspired by her little boy to 'have-a-go' in the kitchen and occasionally manages to surprise herself by coming up with something that actually tastes good and is great to make!

Disclosure: We were given £15 towards the cost of ingredients to create this meal.

Brilliant Thai Turkey Burgers by The Brilliant Chef

This is what we made one day when we needed a quick idea for dinner using ingredients we had at home. Me and my brother usually like to have burgers in a bread roll or burger bun but we didn't have any so we had to come up with another solution. Read on to find out what we did! 

Turkey is low in fat and is really good for adding flavours to so here's my recipe for brilliant thai turkey burgers.

Ingredients: 

500g pack of minced turkey

1 red onion

A slice of bread ( to make breadcrumbs with)

A tablespoonful of Thai spice paste

Juice of 1 lime

A little Fresh coriander

Rapeseed oil 

To serve with:

Lettuce 

A sprig of fresh coriander to garnish

Radish, tomato and spring onion garnish

Bread

Method:

1. Finely chop the onion and the coriander (we use the chopping attachment of our hand blender to get it really fine) and add to the turkey.

2. Add the juice of one lime and a tablespoon of Thai spice paste. You can add as much or as little as you like. We added a tablespoon because that was all we had left and it was not too spicy so we all could eat it - even my little sister. She loved it!

3. Chop up the bread into breadcrumbs. Again we did this using the chopper attachment. Add this to the turkey.

4. Mix all these ingredients in with the turkey mince and shape into burgers. You can find a top tip for stopping the mince sticking to your fingers in my video on my mini meatballs recipe here.

5. Then fry in a little rapeseed oil turning over once to ensure both sides are cooked.

6. Instead of baps, we made the bread into circles like this:

If you prepare the bread first, then you can use the spare bits to make your bread crumbs with. Otherwise put them in a bag in the freezer to make into breadcrumbs next time you need some.

Then we served the burgers in the bread circles with some lettuce, a little bit of fresh coriander and a little garnish of chopped tomato, radish and spring onion. 

Moshi Monsters Eye Pie Vanilla Cake Kit

My mum doesn't usually let us buy things like cake kits because she says it is just as easy to make the cakes ourselves. But this time it was different. This time it was a Green's Moshi Monsters Cake Kit. And it was a bargain price of only £1. So she said YES!

And if you don't already know how much me and my brother LOVE Moshi Monsters, then you can find out on our family blog at The Beesley Buzz.

You get the 'eye' pictures in the kit (on edible paper), the cake mix and white chocolate buttons to melt and cover the eyeballs with.

You need to add an egg, a bit of milk, some margarine and a bit of water.

The instructions were on the back of the packet and it was really quite easy to make.

The only disaster we had was mum dropping the sponge mix out of the oven and ruining it! It didn't matter that the sponge got all broken up as you need to do that in the recipe anyway - but the glass bowl she cooked it in had smashed a bit so we couldn't risk eating it if it had bits of glass in. So she quickly had to make some more herself and then baked it in the microwave so it only took 4 minutes and we had some replacement vanilla sponge - hurrah!

For coating the eye-balls in white chocolate, the instructions say to roll each ball in the chocolate to coat it, but we just drizzled the chocolate over it and that was easier for us.

The other really cool thing is that you get a sheet of moshi stickers in the pack and a moshi activity sheet which kept me and my brother busy for ages.

Can't live without Flatbread recipe!

Easy to make flatbreads

One of the farms near us had their Open Farm Sunday just a few weeks ago and they had lots of things to learn about and lots of things to try. I helped to milk cows, learnt about pollination and bees and even got to do some cookery.

We made some flatbreads and they were so easy to do. They gave me a copy of the recipe and the very next day we made some more at home.

Since then we cook these really often because they are so simple to make and they taste so great.

If you roll them out really thin, then they are like wraps and you can put all sorts of fillings inside, roll them up and eat them.

This recipe is enough to make 6 flatbreads. But be warned - they taste so good that you'll need to make more so we have been doubling and even quadroupling the recipe to make more.

Ingredients:
60ml handhot water (boil some water and then add a little cold water)
1 tsp honey
1 tsp yeast (1 sachet of easy-blend dried yeast seems to be the perfect amount)

50g white bread flour
50g plain white flour
pinch salt

Variations:
You can add some dried or fresh herbs or spices, or 2 tsp cinnamon sugar to the flour before mixing the dough.

Method:
1. dissolve 1 tsp honey into 60ml hand-hot water. Then stir in the yeast.
2. Weigh the flours and put into a mixing bowl. Add a pinch of salt.
3. Pour the yeast and water mix into the bowl of flour and mix to form a dough.
4. Knead the dough for around 5 minutes. Tear it into 6 equal sized pieces.
5. Lightly flour the worktop and a rolling pin and roll each piece of dough into a very thin flatbread.
6. Heat a heavy-based pan (we used a griddle pan and a frying pan and they turned out fine) and cook the flatbreads, one at a time, for about a minute on each side.

What I found amazing was that the dough is not a sticky dough so you can roll the flatbreads really thin without it getting stuck everywhere. Also they cook so quickly and don't need any oil at all. Just be careful using a hot pan and it gets very very hot!

I have called it 'Can't live without flatbread recipe' because now we have tried it, we can't live without it and keep making them every few days.

Recipe courtesy of Commonwork.