Roasted cashew and marmite nut butter..

Having recently fallen in love with marmite peanut butter and used it in some recipes, I decided to see what I could create of my own version.

Please note: Making nut butters requires a sturdy food processor as it can take some time for the nuts to ‘give’ and become a paste. It’s easy for motors to get burnt out!

For this concoction, I roasted some cashew nuts myself, then kept a portion back to be able to add them later and keep some crunch in the mixture. I also needed to add some oil to loosen the mix so I used a relatively flavourless rapeseed oil.

Be warned if you do make this, it’s very tasty!!! And very easy to eat 😄😄😄😄

Ingredients

400g roasted cashew nuts

Marmite

Rapeseed oil

Method

In a blender, start blending 300g of the nuts. It will take quite a while before it starts to become a paste, 5-10 minutes. Add 2-3 teaspoons of marmite once then nuts do become a paste, the amount will depend on your tastes.

You may find that the added marmite stiffens the mixture, so this is when to drizzle in some oil to loosen it again.

Next add the remaining nuts and blend briefly to create a crunchy finish.

If you prefer a smooth paste, add all of the nuts at the beginning.

Use as you would marmite peanut butter, or any nut butter or spread.

I did the same with some roasted hazelnuts…which worked equally well!

Enjoy!

A quick and easy healthy bowl of fabulous…

Sometimes when you want a lovely tasty healthy meal but it’s the end of the week and you’re down to store cupboard options, all you need is some passata and spices to create a yummy thick kind of soup!

I emptied a carton of passata (sieved tomatoes) into a pan, added garlic powder, onion powder, roasted ground cumin, ground paprika, chilli powder and Mexican oregano, and a good glug of olive oil. I let it simmer and bubble (well covered as it spit everywhere!) for 10 minutes to develop the flavours.

I then served it up with a topping of chopped spring onions, grated cheese and toasted pumpkin seeds.

Fast, healthy and tasty! It worked perfectly 🙂

Happy weekend!

Fresh hazelnuts…

These are fresh hazelnuts, sometimes called cobnuts, and they grow on the trees all along the canal where I walk Bob, and litter the ground.

Most of them have been gnawed by wildlife, but some remain intact and yesterday I decided to pick some up..

They’re so pretty; to me they represent the countryside and regrowth and everything lovely about where I live…although right now the ground is sadly parched from the extended heat and lack of rain 😦

When cracked open carefully, they give up their milky white kernels which can be eaten raw or toasted, and added to all sorts of dishes.

My little haul

Its hard to describe the taste & texture, but they taste ‘fresh’ and young, with a crunch, but not a hard crunch like mature nuts.

I chopped some up and added them to my lunch yesterday: a whole roasted aubergine filled with a roasted pepper, mild red chilli, cherry tomato, spring onion, garlic and tabil spice sauce, and topped with tahini, roasted seeds, and the chopped fresh hazelnuts…

They made an nice addition to the dish!

If you get a chance to try some, I definitely recommend it 🙂

Wild garlic flower oat cakes…

I fancied some oat cakes recently, I have no idea why, I haven’t had an oat cake for years, but sometimes something just takes your fancy doesn’t it?

So I decided to look up some recipes and see how to make them myself. There’s many recipes if you search for them, all with their slight variations; I read a few, got the basic idea, and devised my own plan.

I have continued foraging for wild garlic this week, in particular for the flowers; the plants are now flowering like mad and I think they’re so very pretty, as well as being tasty. I’ve collected them to use raw in and over dishes, and I’ve dried some in the oven for other experiments, so when I was pondering oat cakes, wild garlic was still very much on my mind.

For the first batch I made, above and below, I added crumbled, dried wild garlic flowers to the oat dough, as well as pressing dried flowers into some of them.

In the second batch, below, I added some dried and crumbled wild garlic leaves and added some non dried flowers instead to see how they would fare..

I also made a version with added sesame and pumpkins seeds, which worked well too, just not as pretty 😉

So whether you fancy some plain or pimped, here’s the recipe I used:

Ingredients

200g oats (I’ve used thick Scottish oats)

1/2 – 1 tsp salt to taste

50ml olive/rapeseed oil

A few tablespoons of boiling water

Method

Preheat your oven to 160C fan, 180C.

Line 1 large or 2 medium baking trays with baking parchment.

Put 100g of the oats into a mixing bowl, and the other 100g into a blender and run it to make a fine oat flour.

Add the oat flour & salt to the whole oats and add any extra ingredients that you want to add: a handful of seeds, some herbs, spices, chopped nuts…the possibilities are endless.

Drizzle over the oil.

Add 2-3 tablespoons of hot water and start to mix it all into a dough, add extra water as necessary to bring it into a usable dough.

Generously flour your work surface and roll the dough out to about 3mm thick.

*This is the point at which I pressed the flowers into the oat cakes.

Cut out the oat cakes with cookie cutters, I used 6cm and 8cm diameter ones.

Use a palette knife or fish slice to lift the cut rounds onto the parchment paper.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, turning once halfway through.

*The time required to bake them may change depending on how much water you’ve added and what additional ingredients you’ve included.

Assess the oat cakes yourself to ensure they are as cooked and crunchy as you want them to be.

Allow them to cool to harden further.

Enjoy them on their own or adorned with whatever topping you like.

Store them in an airtight container. Mine softened after a couple of days but they were still good and the wild garlic flavour worked well.

My weekend brunch.

I hope you have fun with some oats cakes!

A very useful masala curry paste…

I’ve made this curry paste several times recently, it adds great flavour to any dish, plus it’s packed full of goodness and immunity boosting ingredients for this time of year.

I’ve used it to make masala sauces, added it to soups, and vegetable curries…

I’ve baked eggs into the sauce…

And I’ve made chicken curries for my boys with it.

I highly recommend making a huge amount of it and use it lavishly!

I have used lots of spices from the lovely Spice Kitchen UK and you’ll find the full recipe on their blog…I hope you like it!

Toasted rice green tea…

I drink a lot of green tea, and I’ve tried many many types and flavours, and my favourite is definitely ‘genmaicha’, a Japanese green tea with ‘genmai’ or roasted rice. The smell when you make the tea is gorgeous, and the rice adds a wonderful flavour to it. Some makes call it popcorn green tea because of how good it smells, a bit like popcorn.

As happens, a lot, I wondered about roasting the rice myself and making my own version of the tea so that I can control the amount of rice and the flavour – added to which, genmaicha tea is never the cheapest green tea to buy so why not attempt my own??

I had some roasted leaf green tea in my cupboard and thought that the toasted rice would be a nice addition to it, so I set about the Internet to see if anyone else had made their own too. I found one site with some useful information and I made my own assessment of what they’d done and made my own plan…

In a perfect world you’d use proper Japanese rice, but failing that, I used what I had: weirdly, I used Spanish paella rice. The rice is white and plump and looks a bit like a Japanese rice so why not?

I soaked the rice in lots of water for 24 hours then drained and dried it.

I then toasted it in a wide non stick pan over a medium to high heat for about 20 mins, moving it constantly. As it started to brown, I kept a really keen eye on it and didn’t leave it alone at all to ensure none of it burnt.

I then poured it into a large piece of grease proof paper to cool before testing it in my tea.

And hey presto! It works!!! It tastes great! It’s so cool!

So, if you’ve never tried it before, how about making your own genmaicha?

I’m taking my tea along to this week’s Fiesta Friday, co hosted this week by Diann and Antonia, and hope that everyone enjoys a refreshing cup of my homemade genmaicha…

UPDATE: I have now also soaked and toasted brown basmati rice which I added to loose sencha green tea – this works REALLY well. The rice smells so good and adds great flavour, and some even pop in the pan. And the sencha is a lovely smooth refreshing green tea…

Making your own apple cider vinegar…

When I started making fruit yeast water bread from apples, I didn’t realise that I was taking the first steps towards making apple cider vinegar, as fermenting apples in water is pretty much all it takes to make your own ACV.

I’ve now made several batches of my own, using 3 different methods, and I can state from my experience that the simplest is the best. Like with all these things, if you search methods and recipes, you will find endless options, some more convoluted than others, some requiring daily stirring, some requiring the addition of uncooked chickpeas and bulgur wheat, and all extolling the virtues of creating a ‘mother’.

This quote is from Wellness Mama: “Apple cider vinegar with the mother is simply unrefined, unpasteurized and unfiltered ACV. The “mother” is a colony of beneficial bacteria, similar to a Kombucha SCOBY, that helps create vinegar through a secondary fermentation process.”

The mother is what makes apple cider vinegar a bit cloudy or murky looking, and what gives it it’s goodness. Not every attempt at making vinegar generates a mother, and the vinegar is still good without it. Creating a mother is the pinnacle in making apple cider vinegar, and what we must all wish to manage, but you haven’t failed if you don’t achieve it. Just making your own vinegar is good fun, and it tastes really good. Mine haven’t been as sharp as mass produced vinegar, they’ve been much more subtle and much more obviously made of apples.

Every batch I’ve made has tasted different, with varying levels acidity, and all different colours. It’s not the easiest stuff to photograph, but this should show what I mean…

These are all apple cider vinegars. The photos below show them in the process of fermenting, you can see how the colour changes. The honey coloured liquid, in the middle above, started off as the cloudy yellow jars on the far right photo below..

So, where to begin to make apple cider vinegar…

You need a clean jar/vessel, water, apples and honey, and some cheesecloth.

*I’ve used organic apples and non organic, and both have worked.

*I’ve used water boiled and cooled, and water from the tap, and both have worked, but our water has very little chlorine in it. If yours has more chlorine, or you’re not sure, then use boiled and cooled water.

*I’ve used standard runny honey and a milder set honey, and both have worked.

Choose your biggest jar or jug to make the most out of your efforts (hence me using two below)

Wash your apples and roughly chop them into chunks, removing the stalk, but keeping the peel and core and seeds.

PLEASE NOTE: you can just use apple peels and cores if you’ve got them leftover from a recipe. It’s a great way to use peelings!

Fill your vessel 2 thirds with apples, top up with water and add a tablespoon of honey. A rule of thumb is to add a tablespoon of honey per litre of water.

Use a clean jar or bowl as a weight to keep the apples under water (between explained in the photos below), cover with cheesecloth/muslin to keep any fruit flies out, and let vapours escape.

Make a note of the date, place the vessel in a dark cupboard and forget about it for 3 weeks…well, not completely. Check it every so often to ensure that there is no mould or fruit flies, and that the fruit remains under water.

*If mould appears it will be green; I had little green fluffy balls appear on a batch when I experimented with pears, and again when I tried using a pomegranate. If mould appears I’m afraid all is lost and you need to discard everything and start again.

*Initially you will see bubbles as the fruit ferments. That’s good. They will eventually settle down.

*It will smell amazing!

After 3 weeks, drain your liquid through clean cheesecloth/muslin and collect it in another clean jar and add another tablespoon of honey.

Discard the apples.

*If you have made vinegar previously and have some left, or you have kept some of your own vinegar mother, you can add a bit of that too.

Cover the jar once again with cheesecloth/muslin, and put it back in the cupboard, and leave it for another 3 weeks.

*If you see white flecks like I have, it’s fine, these could be yeast, or even a growing mother.

*If you see a white thin jelly like layer forming, that is a mother. Don’t disturb it, just let it happen.

After another 3 weeks, give it all a stir and give it a taste. If you like it, start using it, if you want more acidity, or deeper flavour, let it ferment for longer. Store with a lid firmly in place.

Then start playing, like I have…this week I have started an attempt at sweet potato vinegar…

In December, I started a batch of orange vinegar, just oranges, water & honey…and it smelled AMAZING all over Christmas, perfect timing!

This is what’s left from this jar about once it was drained…and it still smells amazing!

I am loving all of my various vinegars, after so much love, and time, I almost don’t want to use them, but that is why I made them after all…:)

I hope this is all helpful and interesting and you feel inspired! Please do let me know if you have feedback or questions.

I am taking my vinegar along to this week’s Fiesta Friday, I hope you can join the co hosts this week, Lily and Judi, and be inspired by everyone’s dishes..

My idea of ‘fast food’…

I don’t eat what is typically called ‘fast food’. I don’t buy or eat any ready made foods, I make everything I eat. I therefore make sure that my fridge contains things that I’ve made, various dishes, sauces, dips, prepared vegetables, cooked grains, at all times, so that I always have choices of my own food readily available. On the very rare occasion that I haven’t got anything immediately and readily available, and I’m hungry and want something NOW, I reach for the eggs…

Eggs cooked in a tomato sauce is my ‘fast food’.

I’ve always got eggs, and I’ve always got a jar of passata (sieved tomatoes), so that becomes my starting point, and then I add whatever takes my fancy from my fridge or kitchen cupboards. This can include any leftover vegetables, as below, any veg that needs using up (like the spinach included above), herbs, spices, chilli sauces, whatever takes my fancy…

And then I make holes in the mix and crack eggs into them and cook them through.

I usually then also add grated or chunks of cheese (as you can see on all three concoctions), sometimes I sprinkle over seeds or nuts, and very quickly, and simply, I’ve got a filling, tasty, healthy, colourful meal….

This can also be a perfect way to top up on protein for a vegetarian like me, particularly after exercise.

If you already make similar dishes, or fancy giving one a go, just grab some passata or tinned tomatoes and start building a sauce; look around your kitchen and take inspiration from what your fridge or cupboards have to offer, and add some texture and flavour and substance; then once you’re happy with it, make wells in the mixture and break eggs into them and cook.

Then, do as I do, and eat it straight from the pan! Perfect!!! That’s your meal right there – fast and fabulous 🙂

Falafels cooked in a aebelskiver/poffertjes pan..

I’ve made falafels many times before, always oven baked because I could just never bring myself to fry them! I’ve also seen posts from people using a poffertjes pan to cook falafels, and other patties and Indian cutlets, and decided it was time for me to finally treat myself to one.

For me, I remember this type of pan from my childhood for making mini Dutch pancakes ‘poffertjes’, but to you it may be an aebelskiver pan, used for making similar Danish goodies. It makes total sense to use them for cooking falafels or patties on a hob/stove with minimal oil. You can see below the tiny drops of oil in each hollow which proved to be a perfect amount…

I used it for the first time today for falafels and I will definitely use it again for these and other concoctions. 

The recipe I’m sharing below is a pretty standard falafel recipe, it is simple to play with it and create your own versions however. Today I threw together chickpeas, spring onions, garlic, dried herbs, spices, chickpea flour and lemon juice and it worked a treat! I got in there with my hands and started making little balls of mix which I flattened slightly in preparation to cook them. 

I have to tell you – I didn’t weigh or measure anything and I produced the perfect number of patties for the pan by pure luck….or sheer fluke!!!

Ingredients

250g dried chickpeas, placed in a large bowl of water and soaked overnight
1 medium red onion, peeled and roughly chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 bunch flat leaf parsley
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 cayenne pepper (optional)
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt to taste
Flour of your choice as needed – I used chickpea flour, but it can be any flour 
Some people also add half a teaspoon of baking powder, I didn’t this time

Method

Wash and drain the chickpeas
Put everything EXCEPT the flour in a blender and chop to a chunky crumb, then put it all into a large bowl
Add enough flour to bring the mixture together in your hands, then create small balls of the mix and flatten them slightly to make the falafel shape 
Put your poffertjes pan over a low/medium heat and place a small amount of oil in each dip and allow it to heat up briefly
Place a falafel in each dip and cook for about 15 minutes depending on the size and the heat your using, I kept checking mine and moving the pan around as it doesn’t sit evenly over the gas on the hob/stove 

I served mine on freshly made homous as is traditional, I highly recommend it! 

I’m taking my falafels to this week’s Fiesta Friday, co hosted this week by the lovely Jhuls and Antonia…

Moroccan spiced carrots, chickpeas and spelt…

It’s no secret that I love autumn, I love everything about it: the cooler temperatures, the beautiful colours, the changing leaves, the abundance of root vegetables…I didn’t mean to make something that almost epitomises autumn in a bowl, but that’s how it ended up! Maybe it’s just in my soul?!

In the beginning it was going to be a soup, but I can’t always bring myself to blend up the vegetables, they look too good whole, so this morphed into something else, not really a stew because it’s not very liquid, maybe a warm salad, or just as the title of the post says: ‘Moroccan spiced carrots, chickpeas and spelt’. I just kept adding things until I thought it was perfect!

I didn’t measure anything but I do remember how I made it so hopefully I can still share the process and it might be interesting…

In a large saucepan I heated some coconut oil, and added some chopped red onions over a medium heat; after several minutes and once the onions looked liked they were starting to brown, I added chopped garlic, cooked for a minute, then added liberal amounts of a Moroccan spice mix that I made previously. 

Again I cooked this for no more than a minute then added water to stop the spices from burning. I then added a great pile of peeled and chopped carrots, topped up the water until it covered them, added salt and pepper, then brought it to the boil. As the carrots cooked, I added some spelt, then later some chickpeas and chunks of butternut squash that I’d already roasted, chopped coriander (leaves and stalks) and finally some dried barberries for the colour and little surprise shots of their tart sweetness. 

And pretty much left it to bubble away until the carrots were cooked, but not mushy, and the spelt was cooked, adding water when necessary. 

Eating some with some tahini, as I did when it was just made above, you can still see the lovely colours of the individual ingredients. 

By the next day, the flavour had developed even more but the colours had all merged together and become one autumnal palette..

It’s the kind of dish that just gets better and better, and one I’ll be making again and again, and no doubt evolving as I do!

Happy Autumn everyone 🙂