Mexican inspired salad!

I finally got a new camera charger in the mail today! Woohoo! I forgot how to use it. BUT it means I can now start taking pictures again, I was going a little crazy. I even have a recipe. As you may or may not know, the salads I like best include carbs and more carbs, and protein...they generally aren't greens based unless it's on the side of something.

Ingredients:

Serves 4-6

1 cup dry wheat berries, soaked overnight and then cooked (should make about 2 cups)

1 punnet cherry tomatoes, sliced in half long ways

Kernels from one cob of corn

1 cup cooked black beans

1 cup cooked pinto beans

1 spring onion, sliced thinly

As much spinach leaves as you like

Dressing -

3 tbsp red wine vinegar

2 tbsp jalapeno hot sauce (I use this stuff)

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Mix all the salad ingredients together. In another bowl whisk the dressing until combined. pour on salad, and mix that. Easy peasy! I am pretty excited about eating it for lunches this week.

Serve with some avocado to make it even more yummy.

The jalapeno sauce has coriander and mango in it - it's so so so good. And reasonbly priced (not that I can remember how much). I'm not sure how you'd substitute it, maybe a fresh chopped jalapeno, fresh mango and dried coriander...or fresh corinander but that tastes like soap. Let me know if you try it!

A little bit of a foodie update...

So I was craving dessert this week. I even bought ice cream.

I made an apple and pear tart/pie. I cooked up two medium apple and one medium pear (it was a different pear - got it from the farmer's market. Can't remember what it was called but it looked like an apple but pear shaped. It's skin was thick but cooked well) with some cinnamon, and put in my tart pan with a basic wholemeal pastry base. As you can see I went all out and made a proper lattice top! Pretty sure I did it the hard way. Is there an easy way?

It went perfectly with vanilla So Good ice cream and a bit of lindt 85% dark chocolate. I ate most of the rest cold for morning tea at work during the rest of the week.

Nadine hasn't been working much so she's been queen of the kitchen lately! This is a spinach and potato curry from appetite for reduction. Delicious. It is so fun to eat quinoa!

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Nadine has cooked a delicious looking dinner for me tonight! We are celebrating our third anniversary with Dvd's, a yummy dinner, and tomorrow we will spend the day bush walking and...car shopping. Guh!

Barley Risotto

Nadine made dinner last night - 'White Bean and Barley Risotto with Kale and Tempeh' from Vegan on the Cheap. (with button mushrooms)

This is one of the most delicious meal I've had from this book. I could eat it all day, for real. I was sad there was only 4 servings :( It was also quite expensive to make, which was annoying. Spinach/salad greens are costing a fortune at the supermarket now and it's driving me nuts. I need my green stuff! No, what I need is to get off my ass every Sunday and go to the freakin market.

Anyway, make this damn meal, it's amazing.

We used spinach instead of kale, black eye peas instead of white beans and dried basil instead of savory.

This could have been made cheaper by using frozen spinach, tofu instead of tempeh, and a cheaper brand (or bulk buy) barley. So in the end it cost around $4 per serve.

Bob loves to sleep on our rainbow doona cover :) I turned the light on and she disagreed so she hid her face!

We got a laundry hamper yesterdayand Charlee couldn't resist it!

Orzo Pilaf with Tofu Feta

Orzo Pilaf with Tofu Feta
(I used risoni pasta, a packet of frozen spinach, canned chickpeas and fresh herbs.)

I love pasta. I could eat it every day. So when I was looking for something that I hadn't already cooked 3000 times that was cheap, simple and quick to make for a mid week meal (ah, working life) this jumped out at me from guess which book? I'm almost embarassed to be using one book so much.

I plan my meals a week in advance so I don't have to think about it. Doing this also seems to cut down my grocery bill a fair bit :) I made up the Tofu Feta the day before I planned to make this to let the flavours develop overnight. Every day after it just tasted better and better :)

The only problems I had with this meal were that my stupid frozen spinach was what they call 'finely chopped' otherwise known as minced, and turned the whole thing kind of brown; and my olives tasted disgusting. I bought a different brand than I usually buy because they had a good special. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Now I have a whole jar of gross olives to finish. Damn.

Other than that it was delicious, even better as leftovers, and made 6 servings instead of 4 as said in the book, and we were eating the tofu feta for days.

Buckwheat spirals with kale and dandelion greens

At the farmers market last Sunday I also got some Kale and dandelion greens. I thought the dandelion greens were beetroot greens, but the guy told me what they were so I had to buy them anyway. He said people who like flavour use them as a bitter ingredient in salad :) I don't like salad very much so I went online to supercook.com (awesome website - you type in what you have in your pantry and it comes up with things you can make, it's a good way to stay on budget) and searched. The first thing that came up was this from the Martha Stewart website so I decided to change it (as I do) to make it vegan.

Mmm healthy. Haha no really, I really like kale. Tonight was the first time I ate it cooked - I've only had it in raw juices. It adds a nice flavour to fresh granny smith apple juice. :) Try it.

Buckwheat spirals with kale and dandelion greens

Serves 2

Ingredients

5 cloves garlic, crushed (I grate mine)

1 cup stock (I use Massel Chicken Style)

300g roughly chopped kale and dandelion greens (I had about half an half)

Handful of frozen peas

2 cubes frozen spinach (because more green is always a good thing!)

Tofu 'ricotta' (I made one recipe worth of the one in Skinny Bitch in the Kitch but you can use whatever one you like)

Pasta for 2

Method

1. Bring garlic and stock to a boil. Turn heat down and simmer for a little while.

2. Add all the green and cook until it's all wilted down. I can't remember how long it took - kale takes longer so you can put them in separately if you like.

3. Cook the pasta.

4. Meanwhile add tofu ricotta in little bits (couple of tablespoons at a time) until it looks like what you like. I added about 6 tablespoons worth. It won't go creamy though. (Unless maybe if you use silken tofu to make the ricotta...I used extra hard 'I'm a brick' tofu which didn't exactly have the consistency I wanted...)

5. Stir cooked pasta into sauce and serve at once :)

It doesn't look very nice in the picture but it was! We've been eating loads of beans and lentils lately so I thought it'd be a nice lighter change.

I chose buckwheat noodles because I was curious about what they were like. They were pretty good - a little grainy in texture though, but fine.

We washed it down with a hot cocoa made with almond and soy milk :)

Quick, cheap and easy dinner

Quick spaghetti, peas and spinach - Serves 2

1 cup frozen green peas
About 2 cups baby spinach
1/4 red onion
5 cloves garlic (or to taste)
1 tsp hot chilli sauce (or 1 fresh chilli)
Sprinkling of thyme
Rice bran oil/olive brine/water/whatever you like to fry things in

Spaghetti for 2

While Spaghetti is boiling, fry up onion and garlic. Once it's softened a little add in the peas, chilli sauce, and spinach. Cook on low until pasta is ready.

Serve up and eat!

This is good when in a hurry - say if you have a lot of studying to do and can't waste time cooking up gourmet meals. Though usually when I have an assignment to do I find the hardest, most time consuming recipe to cook. Ha.

Pumpkin and Spinach Ravioli with tomato sauce

So yesterday I got in the mood to spend hours slaving over hand made pasta (ie: I was procrastinating hardcore). This is another dish that seems to dominate the vegetarian option(s) on restaurant menus. However for some reason it's generally served with a thick heavy cream sauce PLUS truckloads of cheese grated on top and I could never finish the whole thing without feeling as big as a house.

Pumpkin and Spinach Ravioli
Serves 5

For the pasta:
I used Bryanna Clark Grogans homemade pasta recipe. I made one batch. (I couldn't find the actual recipe - printed it yonks ago)

For the stuffing:
About 1/4 medium sized organic pumpkin
1 packet frozen spinach (125g)

Defrost spinach. Steam pumpkin. Squeeze some of the water out of the spinach (I used this as the water in the pasta) and drain pumpkin. Mash together and set aside.

For the sauce:
About 1kg fresh tomatoes
Whole garlic, chopped
Chilli
Mixed herbs to taste
Splash of red wine

I've started to make my own 'tin' tomatoes to save on packaging. I also know it's just tomatoes - no salt, sugar, acid anything. Just tomatoes. I chop them all up and simmer them down for an hour or so, let cool, and freeze.

Just fry the garlic and chilli then mix everything else in. Leave it to simmer for a good while - at least half an hour but longer is better.

My mum got me a pasta roller and ravioli mold (mould?) for christmas last year so it made it reallllllyy easy to make. That's why they're all exactly the same size, etc. I just made up each batch of ravioli and put them on a floured baking tray to go into the freezer. They keep for a few months in an airtight container, but they never actually last that long in my house. It's a really great meal to have on hand for when there's no time to make dinner. They take minutes to cook, and I've usually got tomato sauce in the freezer too. If not it's not hard to make. They are also good to feed omnivorous friends and family.

I think 12 ravioli is adequate for one person. Mine measure 1.5 inches across.

This is the best ravioli I've made so far :) We think it's because I took my sweet time making them (I had no one coming for dinner, no time limits or anything. If you make them for company, maybe make it the day before or something.) Though my kitchen bench is tiny and I had barely enough room to move, it's still a quite relaxing experience making them. You can fly off with the fairies if you feel like it :)

Kofta curry

I am slowly working through my mound of potatoes. I happened across this recipe for potato and spinach kofta balls and thought they sounded delicious (on FatFreeVegan Kitchen) but thought we really haven't been eating much rice lately so I made an Indian Kofta Curry sauce to pour over the balls instead of the yoghurt sauce as described in the recipe. Kofta curry is one of our favourites to order when we are at Indian or Himalayan restaurants :)

So I made the potato spinach kofta, and let it cook while I had the rice on and started the following sauce:

Ingredients:

2 onions, sliced
2 garlic cloves, chopped or crushed
1 tbsp ginger, chopped or grated
1 tsp ground tumeric
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp chilli powder
400g can of crushed tomatoes

Method:

Fry onions, garlic and ginger in a little bit of oil or water until soft. Add tumeric, garam masala and chilli powder. Stir and cook for a minute - don't burn! Add in the can of tomatoes and a little bit of water to make it go further. Simmer on very low heat until everything else is ready :)

Serve on top of potato spinach balls on top of brown rice.

The balls worked perfectly, the texture was just right - crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The sauce was quite spicy (use less chilli powder to change that) but definately edible, it certainly cleared out our sinuses though.

This recipe is definately a keeper :)