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!

Sneak Peak: Pumpkin Surprise!!

The recipe is up!! Take a look here: Pumpkin surprise with bonus at the end!


Here's a little peak at the recipe coming up tomorrow.

It's a Pumpkin Surprise!  
 
A preview of the ingredients are cinammon, homemade apple-cranberry sauce and rice.

It's going to be a nice one people :) Hold on until tomorrow.

Waste not!
Try to utilize everything you can, don't just throw it in the trash. That's just a huge waste.
Here we saved the pumpkin seeds and we are going to dry them out and possibly roast them.
They are great as a snack.

Pumpkin seeds are an excellent source of zinc ( which can help in acne), vitamin E, manganese and countless others which help in sustaining a healthy body.
For more information on what they contain i suggest you look on this nutrition chart.

What can I do with leftovers??

 We had some bean sprouts in the fridge that were on the verge of going bad. So what did we do?  We spiced them up and ate them. Of course, sprouts are tasty when they are raw as well, but it was cold today and we wanted an extra 'zing'.

 Sprouts are excellent for you, they are a source of minerals, aminoacids, phytochemicals, proteins and vitamins such as vitamin C, A, B-complex, E, K and choline, which are all needed for us to maintain a good health.

In this case, we added some red wine in a pan along with some curry masala powder ( which in itself is a source of vitamins A, B as well as Iron amongst others) and olive oil. Heat it up and add the sprouts, leave it on until the wine evaporates.

                                        It looks like a bowl of worms but sprouts are yummy!

Remember the crock-pot lamb? This is last of it, we made enough that we kept eatting for three days. Which, if you think about it, means that it cost us about 35 dollars in total, to eat for 3 days, for 2 people. That rounds up at 6 dollars per person, per day.  Not bad at all!

Don't let it fool you, the pitta isn't a big as it looks, it wasn't a large portion of food, but it was more than enough for us.

We just used a lebanese-style pitta, put the remaining lamb and wrapped it. Really simple. We paired it up with the curried sprouts. I had them on the side, but if you want you could put it in the pitta along with the lamb. Yesterday we put the lamb along with some mustard and salad. That was really good too.                               

Tomorrow there'll be a new recipe up so keep an eye out! :)

Slow-cooked lamb with herbs

                                                                    The end result!

I love lamb. Slow-cooked lamb is one of the most delicious meats for me.
Whenever I eat lamb i consider it a treat, since lamb is so expensive, people can't really
afford to have it too often.

In this case, we are using a crock-pot, which is the best thing ever by the way, but if you
dont have one, you can use a regular pot on the stovetop or put it in clay cookware in the oven and leave it to cook for the day (yes, that's right, it takes long to make!). There are many alternatives,
use what you have.

By the way, a great place to get a slow cooker is from Amazon, for anyone who can't find one in a store close to them!


Let's get to it :)

Ingredients

Spices

• Ginger powder
• bay leaves
• rosemary

• Leg of lamb - boneless. I used an entire leg and whatever is leftover will be used to make wraps tomorrow.
• olive oil
• water
• potatoes

 For the salad

• Kale - two pieces
• 1/4 bunch spinach
• 1 onion
• 1 lemon

                                See how half my plate is full of greens? Gotta love the greens!

Instructions

This is a crock-pot recipe. Do you know what a crock pot is?
Wikipedia has the answer haha Crock-Pot
The gist is that it gives me the freedom to put food the night before, turn it on low, get to bed, wake up next morning, go out, come back and the food will be ready and waiting for me to take it out and eat.
I put the leg of lamb in it, put the ginger powder, bay leaves and rosemary. Rosemary is such a nice spice with lamb, i love it. You could also put thyme, instead of rosemary.
Cut the potatoes and spread the bay leaves in and around them.

 

                                               Here's a photo to see the food being cooked.

As you can see, my crock-pot is small. It's 2.5 Quart crockpot from Walmart.  So the next step is different for each of you. Since my pot is small, i only needed half cup of water to almost cover the food. Dont cover all of the meat because the lamb itself has some water itself that will come out while it's cooking.
All the spices you've put in before will be floating in the water and spread around.
Normally, if you leave it just with water, during the process of cooking, all the spices will float to the top and the taste will not be as strong.
What we did here is drizzle olive oil, just enought to cover the surface of the water. This makes the spices "trapped" in the water underneath, so all the taste will come out and the aroma will be heavenly.

That's it for the meat. Turn it on high until it heats up and then on low for the rest of the night. The food will be ready the next day.

Salad
The salad is really simple. It was prepared 5 minutes before we ate. I washed 2 kale branches (?) and a handful of spinach and chopped them up. Chop up one medium onion and take the fresh juice of one lemon and pour it in the salad.
As a dressing  i just used the lemon juice and a couple spoonfuls of the oil from the crock-pot with cooked lamb (the oil retained the aroma of lamb and the herbs).

The end result is a delicious blend of herbs and spices, with the distinct taste of lamb. It's a healthy meal with the proper amouth of starch, protein and vegetables.

Let me know what you think of it and if you have any suggestions comment below! :)

Spicy Meat-alternative lunch.

Food is food. The combinations are endless as long as you let your fantasy roam.
But, in order to stay healthy, you have to ensure that you always have your serving of protein, greens and carbs.
A good guide is this :

vegetables 50%
protein 30%
starch 20%

To make it a little easier, just make sure the protein you are eating is as thick and wide as the palm of your hand. It's different for each individual. Opt for rice and potatoes for starch, instead of pasta. In my diet I've substituted pasta with rice noodles/egg noodles or rice.

In this case meat-alternatives made of tofu are being used as the source for protein.

You'll notice that in most recipes I will be listing frozen vegetables.
The reason is simple.:

• Frozen vegetables as cheaper than fresh ones. 
• They are washed at the collection site right before freezing (with water cleaner than tap water in your home).
• they are more fresh than "fresh" vegetables since they are frozen right after collecting them
•  therefore their nutrients are unaltered while for "fresh" vegetables a lot of nutrients are lost in transit.
• they last a loooong time in the freezer.

this is the final product:

Ingredients

• firm tofu - half the size of your palm, as thick as your palm.
• half a tofurky spicy italian sausage - google "tofurky" it's a company name
• frozen vegetables of your choice - thawed
• one portion rice vermicelli noodles
• masala curry powder for marinating the tofu in
• a smidge of oregano
• soy sauce to taste

Start by spreading some masala curry powder on your tofu and let it sit for about 5-10 minutes. 

In the meantime start making the rice vermicelli noodles in a pot, add some soy sauce in the water.

when they are ready, take it off the stove and drop in your vegetables. They will be warmed up but 

not boiled.

Take your tofu sausage and your masala curry tofu and lightly fry it in a heated pan with olive oil for 2-3 minutes on each side, depending how strong your heat is. It should get crispy on the outside while staying nice and soft on the inside. Sprinkle some oregano over it for the aroma - but careful, don't want to put too much since oregano is bitter!

And that's it!

The spicyness of the sausage is balanced by the vegetables and the noodles. Adjust it to your tastes.

Recipes should be your starting guideline. If you have any ideas then let me know! 

It's a delicious meal for cold days :)

Food for an upset stomach.

So i wasn't feeling too good the other day. I had an upset stomach and was feeling pretty weak.
You know the feeling when you're hungry but not hungry at the same time? Yea, I had that.

I found this lunch really helped my upset tummy.  It was light enough that it didn't make me feel
stuffed, but it was also filling and helped me feel better.

--- Apple contains pectin, which helps you with an upset stomach and can prevent diarrhea ---


Delicious shrimp with vermicelli noodles, apple, and vegetables. 

What you'll need for a single portion:

• kale chopped up - about a handful
• frozen vegetables of your choice thawed - half a handful ( in my case it was peppers with beans)
• shrimp - a handful
• one portion of rice vermicelli noodles (you can find them separated into portions in the store)
• one medium/small apple sliced
• soy sauce - to taste

Pretty simply, huh?

This is all about how YOU like your food. Be creative, dont be restricted to what a recipe tells you to do.

Mix things up, add spices if you want; in my case, it was kept simple because of my upset stomach. 

The shrimp was precooked so all to be done was to reheat it in a pot, while you are making the rice vermicelli noodles in another pot at the same time (rice vermicelli noodles cook really fast). When the shrimp is done, remove it from the pot and add the thawed frozen vegetables and the chopped up kale to be warmed up a little but not heated up too much or boiled!  

Serve it in a plate, add the sliced apple on top with some soy sauce, I liked the soy sauce on the apple, it added an extra zing to it.

That's it.

It's a fast meal, perfect for that day where you aren't feeling too good and it's really healthy!

Enjoy! 

Please help me out by spreading this around to anyone who might find it useful :)
Until i start getting enough traffic on this blog i'm going to be posting the same things to my other blog.