This week, we cooked from Jamie’s American with Jamie Oliver. This is one of the most recent Jamie Oliver books we’ve bought. We’ve been huge fans of his over the years, as I’ve written about quite often in this blog. One of my best friends has said numerous times that he believes this is Jamie’s best book. Last year, we went to the US as a family, so we figured we’d look for recipes from where we had visited on that holiday. The book is organised by geography in America, so that worked perfectly. We started in New York with “A Killer Mac ‘N’ Cheese”. We thought this was a good mac and cheese. We loved the breadcrumbs and garlic topping, and the bay leaves came through in the sauce beautifully. The fresh Tomatoes helped lighten the dish up and were a great addition. Even though it was a vegetarian dish, it felt fabulously moorish. We Used Bob low-fat cheese for the cheddar, which helped lighten the load a little for what is a pretty carb and cheese heavy dish.

Next was Veal Parmigiana, which my daughter described as a little like a meat pizza. The sauce was like a pizza sauce with melted mozzarella on the breaded pork escalopes. This was a fab supper dish for us all, not difficult and super tasty – definitely one we’ll go back to. While that was cooking, I had a go at Chilli Cheese Cornbread. It was denser than I’d have liked, but the flavours were great – the green chilli was really fresh, and, all in all, was a pretty damn good cornbread.

Next up was “Jewish Penicillin” – a fabulous chicken soup with Matzo balls. Our go-to chicken soup is a Marcus Wareing veloute, but this is a close second. It’s a lovely broth with Matzo balls, a bit like dumplings if you’ve never had them.

The week ended with Cajun blackened fish steaks, which we did with Salmon and served with chips on our Friday night. This was super easy, under the grill and was a great little dish – it’s already on the menu for next week!