Mazi Mas

Mazi Mas is Greek for 'eat with us' and believe me, you should!

Ovalhouse is currently playing host to a brilliant new innovative pop up restaurant Mazi Mas. The restaurant supports immigrant women who struggle to find work or are not supported in the search for work. Click here to read their story. 

These women bring their culture and culinary skills together to bring us boring Brits a fiesta of flavours every day of the week. Every day a different chef, from a different country takes over the kitchen to introduce us to their home country's pallet. Click here to read each chef's story.

Roberta Siao from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil happened to be the chef last night when I visited this wonderful idea of a restaurant. We chose the cheese bread pictured above as it had the chef's name by it so we were sure it had to be something special - it was so delicious. 

It is a compliment, I hope, to Roberta that as soon as the Moqueca - fish (or pumpkin for the veggies) in a coconut milk, peppers, lime and coriander - came to the table, all thoughts of cameras disappeared as the aroma wafted up our noses and it was only once I was taking my last bite that I remembered I hadn't taken a photo! 

All in all it was a fabulous meal and I know I will be back to sample some of the other chef's work.The company brings you food from Brazil, Iran, Ethiopia, Turkey, Senegal and Peru. If you like your food authentic, this is the place to go! 

Mac Burger

I took a short trip up to Birmingham last week to surprise my lovely old housemate for her birthday. So the night before I went to the Bristol Pear with some friends where we plotted how to surprise the birthday girl over some delicious burgers. I went for a mac 'n' cheese burger which was fantastic. However, as you can imagine, there is a lot of oil and frying involved in such a feast so I decided to recreate it the slimming world way. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately if you see it that way) there is no picture of the final result because they all got eaten before I could get any photos. 

Serves 5:

What I used: 

• You already have the mac 'n' cheese  to make the mac 'n' cheese patties.
• 1kg of extra lean (5%) beef mince
• 1 onion
• salt & pepper
• nutmeg
• Provence herbs
• 5-10 wholemeal burger buns (depending on how hungry you are)
• 1/2 iceberg lettuce
• 4 tomatoes
• 4 gherkins  

What I did:

• Follow the mac 'n' cheese recipe to make the patties
• Fill a muffin tin up with the mac 'n' cheese and put in the over for 20 minutes
• Leave to cool

• Cut the onion as small as you can
• Empty the mince into a large bowl
• Mix the onion, salt, pepper and herbs into the meat and season to taste
• Mould the mince into burgers using your hands (use the muffin tin for rough size guide)
• Fry the burgers on a med-high heat until fully cooked

• Cut the vegetables into slices and put them on a plate
• Toast the wholemeal buns 
• Serve everything separately and allow diners to build their burgers
  
  
  
  
  
  Like I said, it went down so well that there was no time to take pictures. We put various condiments on the table and then we figured that it was easier to put the mac burger under the beef burger (but that was just because our burgers were a bit thick). We layered up the veg, I made some homemade chips and dinner was served.