Wholemeal Banana and Raspberry Muffins

I love banana muffins. It's really the only kind of banana I like, but the same old plain banana muffins get boring after a while.

Wholemeal Banana and Raspberry Muffins (cane sugar free, fat free)

Makes 12 regular muffins

Ingredients

2 cups plain wholemeal flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1 tbsp whole flaxseeds, ground mixed with 3 tbsp water

3/4 cup soy milk

1 tsp apple cider vinegar

1 tsp vanilla essence

1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce

1/2 cup mashed ripe banana (2 small)

1 cup frozen unsweetened raspberries

Method

Lightly grease a muffin pan with margarine or oil. These muffins will probabaly stick to paper liners, and my muffin pan isn't non stick, though if yours is in theory you won't need to grease.

Preheat oven to 200 degrees C.

In a small bowl or jug mix together the soy milk and cider vinegar and set aside to curdle.

In a large bowl sift or stir together the flour and baking powder.

In another small bowl mash the banana and stir in the vanilla, flax egg, curdled milk and applesauce.

Gently fold the milk mixture into the flour and stir in the raspberries. Divide evenly among muffin holes and bake for 15-20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean :)

These were just sweet enough for me. We are trying to cut out sugar, but if you want a little extra sweetness in your muffins you could add 1/4 - 1/2 cup of sugar. I have to remind myself that just because they are healthy it doesn't mean I can eat them all at once haha. I have a million frozen bananas so I could just make some more..

I was going to post the rye banana muffins I made but I can't find the recipe I wrote down! So I posted these instead.

Also, I finally figured out how to add a tab across the top of my blog page! So now there is an about me section. I figured people read this now so why not. I'm thinking of adding a recipe page too. One day :)

Date day!

Today Nadine and I had the day off together (yay!) so we decided to have a date day rather than just sit around watching telly which is what we usually end up doing.

First there was breakfast. I made buckwheat pancakes again, but we had no maple syrup so we squeezed a lemon over the top and melted a little bit of margarine on them. Delicious. I also used straight buckwheat flour, not half and half. Didn't make a difference at all, I thought they might be a little dry but nope. Perfect. I topped them with some fried sliced banana.

Nadine drinking yummy cocktail

I got to choose the restaurant, so I picked Ginga Japanese restaurant because we haven't been there for ages. We started off with a cocktail - sake, gin, ginger ale, lemon and pickled ginger slices. Mmm. The sugar in it kind of gave us a headache though, haha. That's the problem with giving things up! 

Nadine ordered the bento. Clockwise from left: PLain rice with black sesame, vege tempura (eggplant, sweet potato, carrot, zucchini and capsicum) steamed vege and tofu, inari zushi and an egg sushi, Ignore that we didn't eat it haha.

We of course has edamame on the side. Can't go to a Japanese restaurant without edamame!

I had this massive bowl of veges in broth with some bean thread noodles, rice, miso soup and pickled things. Yuuuum.

The glands in my throat have been acting up over the last few days (tmi? Ha) so I ended the lovely day with a green juice :) Silver beet, carrot, orange, ginger. Hopefully it all goes away because I can't afford any days off work!

While we were in the city we walked past a little cafe that said they had vegan sweet options on a sign outside so after lunch we went and had a delicious piece of (sugary!) cake. It was chocolate with mint icing. And we found beetroot in it. It was pretty good. I forgot to take a picture though :)

Valentine's day dinner

We aren't really big on the whole goopy lovey dovey crap associated with Valentine's Day, so we usually cook up a particularly special meal and dessert. Sometime we go out or buy presents but we are very broke this month :) Also this year Nadine had a nasty cold so there was no wine :( very sad. But the food was so so so delicious!

Nadine made dinner, a recipe she found in Tal Ronnen's 'The Concious Cook' (Old Bay Tofu Cakes with Pan Roasted Summer Vegetables, Horseradish cream, Apples and Beets) Jeez this guy has long meal titles. However long it takes you to read the title, it was fantastic. We thought the cakes wouldn't work because they were so mushy but they did, we just had to be extra careful, which is fine. I used the 'Horseradish cream' as a salad dressing on today's lunch at work. Yum. It's definately a comfort meal, for some reason it reminded me of when we got to eat fish fingers as kids.

I made dessert :) As soon as I saw the recipe on PPK (Berry Creme Tart with Cocoa Olive Oil Crust) I knew I had to make it. I made it up on Sunday afternoon when Nadine wasn't home and hid it in the fridge. We had one each for dessert then cut the other one in half and ate it with work lunches the next day :) Amazingly good. Make them :) The filling is especially good on it's own. I had to eat the leftover filling in the morning for breakfast so Nadine wouldn't see it and eat it and the delicous surprise would be ruined! Tragic. It's like the best pudding you've ever had.

So even though Nadine was blowing snot out of her nose all night and I had to get up at 5:30am the next morning to go work, it was a very nice relaxing Valentine's day for us :)

Happy 2011 :)

We don't like to venture into the city on New Year's Eve. It's a frightening place, so we opted to stay home inside :) We made it into a date night (which seems to be becoming a tradition) so I cooked a simple 3 course meal and we bought some pink bubbly to drink in our fancy glasses :) It was nice.

I had been up since 4:30am because I had to start work early (and finish early because the boss wanted to get ready to party haha) so I was exhausted by 9:30pm. So we crashed and went to sleep. However, technically we were awake to ring in the new year because the fireworks from the city woke us up! We could see them from our front stairs, but there's one stupid tree that's in the way so we couldn't :( Oh well.

We started off with a little bowl of cleansing cucumber and ginger soup, recipe from Boy George's Karma Cookbook. It was surprisingly delicious! Not very flavourful, but it wasn't intended to be a main dish. Put a bit of chilli in this and it'd be perfect if you have a cold! (The ingredients are: cucumber, leek, lots of ginger, shiitake mushrooms, kombu seaweed, water, tofu and parsley for decoration.)

The main was the best. The recipe is from Robin Robertson's Vegan on the Cheap. Fusilli with Potatoes, Green Beans and Lemon Basil Creme. The creamy sauce was made from cashews, soy milk and lemon juice, basically. It's a pity I can't post the recipe. Maybe just buy the book, it's brilliant.

Now this is truly a crap picture. We have more for dessert tonight so I'll try to take a better photo! Ijust threw this together off the top of my head. I'll call it...Summer Fruit Freeform Tart with Balsamic Reduction. Yum.

Summer Fruit Freeform Tart with Balsamic Reduction

Ingredients
1 sheet square vegan puff pastry (I use Borg's)
*1 small nectarine, thinly sliced
*1 small peach, thinly sliced
*1 apricot, thinly sliced
*4 mulberries cut into thirds
Vegan margarine, for brushing on pastry before cooking

Half a cup of regular balsamic vinegar

Method
While letting the pastry defrost on the bench, pour the half cup of balsamic vinegar into a small saucepan. Turn element to it's lowest heat, and let vinegar reduce until thick. (Mine actually reduced all the way down to barely 2 tablespoons. It was very rich and sweet!) Set aside when it's done. I don't know how long it will take, just keep an eye on it.

When pastry is defrosted, cut across and down to make 4 squares.

Arrage slices of fruit in a fan (like in the photo) and top with the little bits of mulberry.

Smoosh sides of the squares of pastry up to surround the fruit so it won't go everywhere. Brush with melted margarine and put on a baking tray lined with baking paper. (I even buttered my paper because I was paranoid it would stick. It shouldn't.)

Turn oven to 200 degrees C. Cook pastries for about 25 minutes (I checked mine after 15, then every five minutes after that).

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream and drizzle with the balsamic reduction!

* Any fruit would work, really. Apples and strawberries? Banana and blueberries? Yum. Use whatever is in season and slice it thinly so it cooks in the oven :)

My mulberries were labelled as blackberries in the shops. They aren't :S Perhaps they are some sort of cross? Whatever they are, they were on special for $4.80 or something at Woolworths so I couldn't resist. Frozen berries would work perfectly as well.