Honey Chicken Sneak peak!

This sneak peak will go away when i post the actual recipe up!

Here's what you have to look forward to when i post the next recipe up.
It's a yummy honey chicken recipe with spicy salad, served with a slice of orange on the side.

 Looks delicious, right?

I'll be putting this up really soon, probably by tomorrow, so check back them!

Choco-Rice Pudding

Hello everyone!

Sorry about my not updating lately. I had final exams and then I started a new job; needless to say I did not have that much time in my hands to sit down and write up recipes.

But, the Christmas break has begun and I have some delicious recipes to share with you.

Here is some rice pudding made for desert. The difference from the conventional rice pudding is that this isn't made with any milk.

Instead, it's made with almond milk and coconut milk. The choice is up to you, both almond and coconut milk is really good.

Also, you can add some raw brown sugar and cocoa powder in it, making it even better!

The rice used is glutinous rice (sticky rice), which makes it more sticky and much MUCH better for making any sort of rice pudding.

Start by cooking the rice in some water, half the dosage you would usually put and when it almost absorbs all of it, add the coconut or almond milk in it.

You can add the rest of the dosage you would add as water, but in reality you can keep adding as much as you want because the rice will keep on absorbing it, be the judge, it depends how firm you want your pudding to be.

 Keep on a medium fire and occasionally stir so as to prevent the rice from sticking to the pot. Add your sugar (2 tablespoons) and cocoa powder. Also, add a teaspoon or so of cinnamon, as well as some raising and dried cranberries.

And thats all folks. It's simple, lactose-free and a delicious desert for those who want a 'healthier' desert.

More recipes coming soon!

Let me know what you think and feel free to give this a try!

Haddock delight.

 This is really simple. Using the leftovers from yesterday's pork dish (aka wine sauce and potatoes and whatever else you may have), we added 4 small haddock fillets in our crock-pot along with some vegetables and tandoori powder. Let it cook for 4-6 hours, turn it on high until it warms up and then back to low.

For the rice, we cooked it (1.5 cups) separately while we lightly fried one red pepper, one yellow pepper and about 10 thin asparagus chopped up.

After frying the vegetables for a minute or two, we mixed 2 tablespoons of soysauce and 1 tablespoon unrefined, raw brown sugar and stirred it together. Add a few tablespoons of the rice into the soy sauce mixture and continue stir-frying until it gets covered well.

Add that soy sauce/rice mixture into the rest of the rice and mix.

That's it, you're done! Take a look at more photos. I hope you enjoyed this, give it a try and let me know what you think :)

Rosemary Pork tenderloin in Crock-Pot.

 Here's a nice recipe done in the crock-pot. We got everything ready at night, turned the crock-pot on and left it for 6 hours on low. Today, we turned it on again to warm up for about 2 hours. It was delicious!



For the Marinade

• 1 clove garlic in the marinade used for the pork
• pork tenderloin - enough for 2 people
• 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1 cup red wine

Start by marinating the pork tenderloin (sliced up) in the wine, vinegar and garlic for about an hour. When marinaded, remove the marinade, lightly fry the tenderloin cuts in a pan with olive oil and add everything (including the left over marinade) to the crock-pot, set it on high until it warms up and then turn it back to low, letting it cook for the night with the rest of the ingredients.

• 4 medium-small potatoes cut up
• 1 onion in half
• rosemary
• thyme
• bay leaf- crushed and spread out
• water
• olive oil - enough to cover the surface
• 1 clove garlic in the potatoes

 Here's the result. Pair it with a homemade salad and use the sauce from the crock-pot as a dressing.  The pork tenderloin is so juicy, soft and just melts in your mouth. The taste of vinegar is not overpowering, it adds a great taste to the meat and potatoes.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Shrimp-Herring dish

I love smoked herring. It's been an accompanying piece whenever I eat beans, black-eyed peas etc. My favourite part is the egg sack/roe. But in this case the store only sells small (really small) sliced herring fillets. Since it's so salty, we put it together in a dish containing shrimp and veggies.

• 1 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 small slices of smoked herring
• Shrimp
• Frozen vegetables of your choice

We eyeballed the vegetables and shrimp. You can put however many you want that will suit your needs. In this case, it served two.

We thawed the vegetables as well as the herring and shrimp.

Place everything together in a cookware (drizzle the olive oil and soy sauce on top) and set in a preheated oven at 300 degrees F for 10 minutes. Just ten. We don't want all the nutrients to go away.

The result is a delicious, saucy meal that's been enriched by the aroma provided by the herring, which is hiding underneath the vegetables and shrimp. We placed 2 herring slices on each side of the dish.

Quich and easy, delicious and healthy!

Hope you like it :)

PS: There's a lot of sauce that will be left over in your cookware. Don't let it go to waste. I put it in along with the food and took some pita bread, tore it up and let it absorb the liquid. It was so good!

Tofu Vegetable Puff Pie!

Hello!! I've been MIA for about a week, sorry about that. But now I'm back and with a delicious, different kind of pie made with Tofu. You can see the tofu above, it's marinading in half a teaspoon of masala curry powder (you can pick some up at your local Indian grocery store, or at a supermarket near you). 

It was our first try doing vegetable pie (xortopita) using tofy as our dairy alternative. It turned out really good, but already we've realized that it would've been better if we had added onion and if we had let the boiled vegetables sit for a while until some water drained away.

Here's what we used.

• 2 1-inch slices of firm tofu, marinated in half teaspoon masala curry powder.
• 1/2cup spinach 
• 1/2 cup celery
• 1/2 cup kale
• 1/2 cup leek
• salt/pepper to taste
• 1 package of butter puff pastry
• spry/shortening to oil our cookware so our pie doesn't stick

We boiled the vegetables, and let them sit for a bit. Put salt/pepper or any other seasoning of your choice. Meanwhile we set out half of the butter puff pastry on our oiled cookware and we started to preheat our oven at 350 degrees F.

 Put your vegetables in the pastry spreading them out.

Add the marinated tofu on top of them. The tofu will provide a spicyness due to it's masala curry taste. We also added the juice that you can see from the photo of the tofu being marinated.

 Start wrapping our filling with the pastry. Don't force it, we don't want it to tear up.

 Add the other half of our puff pastry packate on top, and continue wrapping it up until it's all covered up.

That's it! We placed it in our pre-heated oven at 350 degrees F for about half an hour, or until golden-brown.

It tasted great. BUT, we also thought that next time, we'll put a medium onion chopped up in our mixture. However, unlike our vegetables, we aren't going to boil it beforehand.

What do you think?

Pork in Red wine and honey-mustard sauce.

One of the best lunches I've had in some time!!

You can pair it with some bread but it's so good that I didn't want to ruin its taste with bread or anything else!

If you don't have an ingredient listed here then you can improvise with what you've got. Use what meat you have, or what wine you prefer. The spring rolls are not perfect, but we used what we had at home, i can imagine more onion would suit it, grated carrot, maybe rice inside? Next time they will be different.

But go on ahead and read the recipe! :)

Ingredients for 2 people

• 2 pork cutlets sliced up
• Olive oil for stir frying

For the Sauce

• 2 oranges
• 4 tablespoons red dry wine
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 tablespoon mustard
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon onion powder

For the fresh spring rolls

• 4 rice papers
• 1 package of bean sprouts
• parley chopped up 
• some leek
• onion
• black sesame

Peel the oranges, remove any seeds and cut them up. Put them in a blender along with all the ingredients for our sauce and blend until it's a puree.

Stir fry the pork strips for about 3 minutes with olive oil, then add the sauce and let it cook slowly for about half an hour, until it starts to thicken up. We had pork cutlets in hand, but you can just as easily pick up pork strips for stir frying at the store!

For the fresh spring rolls, we just used up what we had in the fridge. We chopped up some leek, onion, leek and parley and placed it along with black sesame and sprouts in a rice paper (you have to place it in warm water first so it becomes usable). You can eat them right away after wrapping them, or you may warm them up (just put them in the microwave for 3-5 minutes).


That's it! Hope you can try it out and let me know what you think :)

Curry Salmon with Vegetables.

Today we made delicious salmon fillets on a bed of greens, with some curry powder for the taste.
Salmon is one of the healthiest fish to eat.
When you cook it never throw away the oils left behind in your cookware before that oil is full of omega 3's!

Omega 3 helps with inflammation, reduce risk of heart disease, help with brain and memory performance, lowering cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, lupus, osteoporosis, depression, asthma... the list goes on and on! It also helps in the prevention and treatment of cancer.

The point is, the fatty acid known as omega 3 is ESSENTIAL for our health and since our own bodies cannot naturally produce it, we have to ingest it through supplements and food.

What better way to have some omega 3's than salmon?

Go on ahead and read the recipe!

Ingredients for 2 portions

• 1 lemon
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 cup water
• 1 teaspoon curry powder
• 2 salmon fillets
• 1 red bell pepper
• 3 large celery stalks
• 6 asparagus
• 1 whole leek

Instructions

Start by preheating your oven at 350 degrees Farenheit.

Chop up you celery and leek (the leaves too!)  and place them in your cookware, place the asparagus (whole) in it as well.
Place your salmon fillets in .

Juice the lemon, and pour the juice along with pulp on top of your greens and salmon.

Put the water, olive oil, curry powder in and stir it all together in a separate bowl. When thouroughly mixed, pour it all over the salmon and greens.

Place in the pre-heated oven for 30 minutes or until cooked.

You can test if your salmon is ready by sticking a fork/knife in the flesh and if it flakes, it's done.

Take it out and place it in a plate, along with all the juices left at the bottom of your cookware, and cut up a red bell pepper, serving it together with the salmon.

Done!

Hope you like this one. It tasted divine!

I leave you with some more photos of the dish. Have a great day :)

See all the juice at the bottom of the plate? You can soak you salmon in them, it's great!

Haddock Patties with lemon

Today we are making Haddock Patties. I'll start off with a photo of the final product.
Like what you see?

It's garnished with apple-cranberry sauce on top, with veggies all around it.

This is quite different from any of the recent recipes I've put up but it is really tasty. I usually am not a big fan of haddock. I don't like how it tastes and I absolutely do NOT like fish and chips. In this case, the bland taste of the haddock is overpowered by the lemony taste and the mustard we put it. It turned out really good.

Ingredients for 2 patties

• juice from one lemon
• 4 small Haddock fillets
• 1 tablespoon black sesame
• 3 tablespoons apple-cranberry sauce
• 1 tablespoon mustard
• 3 tablespoons glutinous rice-flour - will be used as a thickening agent
• 2 servings of frozen vegetables of your choice - thawed

 Instructions
Place the haddock fillets in a pot with the lemon juice. Put it over a medium heat and cook it for 30 minutes.

After it's cooked, mash it up, making sure the haddock absorbs and mixes with the lemon. Add the mustard, black sesame, apple sauce (counter-balancing the lemon) and rice flour and continue mashing it up.

When it's mixed together to your liking, give your mixture shape, by forming it into a patty

.

Here's our patty, garnished with apple-cranberry sauce on top.

Add your thawed vegetables (warm them up first! I warmed them up for 10 minutes) in your plate and you're ready!

Hope you like it and enjoy it guys.

Thanks for reading!

Delicious Vegetable Pie

So... the title of the blog entry is "Vegetable Pie"...Hm...what could we be using this time??

I'll give you a look first at the final product.

This is what i had for lunch today, vegetable pie with tofu! :)

 Like what you see?? The crust was so light and flaky, it was heaven. The question is, what did we use?

Kale, Spinach, Leek and Celery

Yup, we had some kale that was near the end of its life, so we made a large pie with it as well as the other veggies we had in the fridge.

Here's what we did.

Ingredients

• a whole bunch of kale
• a few stalks of celery
• spinach - about 2 handfuls
• Leek - chopped up, quantity is up to you
• half a halloumi cheese (in this case) - you many also use feta or any cheese of your choice
• salt for taste
• margarine/butter for coating the cookware
• butter puff pastry leaves - about 15 or more of them. 
• onion - quantity is up to you

Instructions

Start by pre-heating the oven at 350 degrees Farenheit.

Wash and chop the vegetables up. Chop up the onion. Grate or slice the cheese and mix it up if you wish. We layered the cheese on top of the vegetables instead. I find it preferable for my taste buds to suddenly get a nice chunk of halloumi rather than get a small constant dose of it throughout the pie. Mix the vegetables and onion up, add some salt to taste.

Lay out the butter puff pastry leaves. The main difference between phyllo and butter puff pastries is in their name, "butter"; it makes it easier for me to work with since they are already buttered up. I bought one package of them and all of it was used to make this flaky pie.

Layer the halloumi and vegetable mix. Close up the pastry leaves into a shape you desire and place the pie in a margarine-coated cookware so it doesnt stick.

Place it in the oven for about 30 minutes or until flaky and golden-brown in color.

That's it!

Our Vegetable Pie is ready to be consumed. It's so good, I really recommend trying it out.
It doesnt matter what vegetables you have handy, it doesnt have to be anything specific, any green and leafy vegetable works (lettuce, cabbage, kale, spinach, you name it!).

Bonus!

In order to get our share of protein during our lunch, we cut up some tofu in 1cm-thick slices and put Masala curry powder on it, then lightly fried it, until it was crispy on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside. Tofu doesn't absorb much besides salt (so be careful when you marinade it in soy sauce), so the outside of our tofu is slightly spicy while the inside is pretty bland. Yummy!

 

A Pumpkin Pie with a twist

This is another recipe that we made from yesterday's leftover food.
In this case, we made our own style pumkin pie.


Take a look.

How we made it is really simple! We took the leftovers from yesterday's meal and simply added a handful of raisins, mixing it all together. You can't get much simpler than that!

Then, we took some butter puff pastry and put the stuffing on it, closing it around the edges and creating the rounded shape you see above.

Put it in the oven at 350 degrees Farenheit for about 30 minutes or until the color turns golden-brown. Since the inside is already cooked you only need to have the pastry cook.

If you need a reminder how to prepare the filling, here's a link: Pumpkin surprise

I leave you with some more photos of our delicious lunch!
Enjoy :)

I believe it could so easily be spruced up and become part of a christmas dish. Pumpkin is synonymous with winter, christmas, thanksgiving etc. that people tend to associate it right away.

If you have any suggestions or try it out yourselves, let me know! 

Pumpkin Suprise!!

 
Aren't pumpkins great?
There are so many varieties of them and all of them are delicious.
In this case we used a kambocha squash. When we bought it we left it sitting outside next to other pumpkins in order to mature a little and get sweeter.

There are so many ways to cook pumpkins and since this squash was in such a nice shape, we decided to cut the top open and stuff it with goodies.

Remember the sneak peak last night? Pumpkin surprise

Well, the result is here:

It was sooo good!

How did  I do it you say?

Read on!

Ingredients - can serve up to 5 people with 1 medium squash

• 1 Kambocha squash
• rice of your choice - 2 cups
• quinoa - half a cup
• asparagus chopped up - your choice how many
• 1 onion
• 1 orange's zest
• apple-cranberry sauce -(homemade) - can use apple sauce instead or substitute of your choice
• margarine
• cinammon
• water
• salt to taste

 Clean the flesh from the cut pumkin and set it around your main dish.

Instructions
Start with cutting the pumpkin top open and cleaning the seeds inside. You can save the seeds and dry roast them for a snack later or if you so wish. You can also save them and use them to plant some pumpkins in your yard!
Pre-heat the oven at 400 degrees Farenheit (200 degrees Celcius).
Prepare you cookware, use margarine so it doesnt stick and come apart. I also put margarine on the pumkin slices and the main dish itself so sweeten it up.
Start cooking your rice, leave it on for 10 minutes so that it will be half cooked before adding it to the pumpking.
Add asparagus, quinoa and the rice as a filling in the pumpkin. Add the cinammon in and around the pumpkin as you can see above.
Add the apple-cranberry sauce on top of it all, as well as the onion (i spread it around the pumpkin after i took the photo you can see above) and orange zest.

Pour some water in the dish so that it can be used to cook the rice and pumpkin.

Put it in the oven for 45 minutes until the color is a nice golden one. Done!

Optional:
Put it in the over and after about 20 minutes take it out, mix the stuffing together some more (making sure the apple sauce is thouroughly mixed in), then take the softened up pumkin lying around and make a 'cover' for our squash. It will create a semi-crispy outside that is nice and leave the inside soft and moist. Put it back in for another 25 minutes until cooked.

Bonus!!

 Lactose-free/ Gluten-free rice pudding!!

Ingredients

• rice of your choice (though preferably sticky rice)
• Coconut milk
• cinammon for taste
• rosewater
• some sugar
• rice flour for thickening up

Make it as you would normal rice pudding, adding coconut milk instead of milk when cooking the rice. Add cinammon and instead of egg, add the rice flour to thicken it up and at the end when it's off the heat, add the rosewater (so it doesn't evaporate).

This turned out so good, you can eat it while it's hot, or cool it in the fridge, it's really up to you!!

Hope you enjoy it!