About Me

Welcome to my food blog - My name is Megan and I am a major food lover, a cookbook obsessive but also a home cook.  Food makes me so happy! And I want to share this happiness with everyone.  I want to record my favourite recipes from cooking shows, websites and my beloved cookbooks and the idea is to buy the food locally and make something yummy, simple but special - if I can make it, so can you! While I have always had a keen interest in cooking and baking, I have received zero training so I’m very much a home cook but I hope to get in contact with local bakers and chefs to showcase what the North West of Northern Ireland has to offer.  Yes, there are great things happening in Belfast but don't forget about us up here!!! 

I am fortunate to live on the edge of the beautiful wild Sperrins outside a small village called Feeny.  I love living here - the air is clean and fresh, I have family all around and it’s a beautiful place to live.

I lived in Belfast for 6 years as I studied for an Undergrad and PhD in Linguistics. While my culinary journey was not an inspiring one in my undergraduate years (Chicken Fajitas anyone?), I became spoilt by the variety of brunch destinations, coffee shops and markets that I had in such close proximity throughout those years. Having lived in Feeny for over a year now, it is the access to all those lovely food places that a foodie like me has missed the most!  However, with every downside comes an opportunity and while I mainly bought cookbooks to admire and dream about, now I am making a conscious effort to use them and to try and make all the yummy food that I have missed so dearly in my own kitchen with ingredients that I can buy locally.  Some of these work out, others do not (my burritos were NOT good - Boojum is safe for now) but I'd like to share with you all of these successes and maybe some failures because we are all human!

Feel free to get in touch with me and give me some feedback or ideas.  You can also connect with me on social media.  I really can’t wait to hear from you and will try my best to reply within a couple of days.  

Blueberry and Cinnamon Scones

While I am a major foodie (like the kind of person who daydreams about dinner at breakfast), I am also quite health conscious.  I love fruit and vegetables and trying to make yummy food that is also quite clean and lean.  This is not one of those recipes.  Whilst a member of Million Dollar Fitness, Derry (amazing!), Dee asked the question ‘If you had to name your child after your favourite food, what would it be?’ and at the time I couldn’t think.  Chocolate? Yea, I like chocolate but not enough to name a child after it. Crisps? No. Cookies? Close.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Then when on a particularly strong clean eating streak it came to me. 

I would have to name my child SCONE.  The second child would then have to be pancake.

I love all bread but scones and pancakes really have my heart.  With this in mind, the first recipe for my blog had to be one of the two.  This particular recipe comes from Avoca’s Café Cookbook 2.

In this cookbook, Avoca suggest using any berries but my love for blueberries is endless so it was only going one way for me.

Ingredients

450g flour, plus more for dusting

50g Caster Sugar

1 heaped teaspoon baking powder

quarter teaspoon cinnamon

pinch of salt

110g butter, cubed

1 egg

200ml milk

blueberries

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 200C / gas mark 6.  In a bowl, mix all the dry ingredients.  

With your fingertips, rub the butter into the dry ingredients until you have a mixture that resembles dry breadcrumbs.  Add the egg, blueberries and the milk - just enough milk to moisten the mixture and bring it together.  You want the mix to be quite dry.

Mix well until you have a soft doughy texture that's not too moist.

Gather your mixture together into a ball and roll it onto a lightly floured surface.  

Lightly roll the dough to a depth of 1.5cm for small scones or 3cm for large scones and cut out using a 3-5cm or a 7cm cutter.

Ok, at this step I ran into a little bit go bother as the only cutters I had were heart-shaped - not ideal.  So I had to do a mad search of the kitchen to find something to cut out my lovely scones.  My niece's water beaker was the only substitute I could find.  This just meant that I had to keep a closer eye on them as they baked.  The guidelines here are from the Avoca book.

Place scones onto a baking tray and bake in the pre-heated oven for 10 - 12mins for the smaller scones or 18 - 20mins for larger scones or until cooked.

These were so quick and easy to put together and I felt like a bit of a legend having these ready for breakfast on a Sunday morning - Conor was impressed too!