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!