Protein balls…

These little moreish balls of protein packed goodness were made from a collection of things from my cupboard to provide some quick nutritious snacks for my sportsmen…

I’m afraid I didn’t weigh anything but as a guide the greatest quantity was made up of oats, followed by milled flaxseeds, chopped roasted hazelnuts, roasted mixed seeds and cacao nibs, with a good portion of honey and lots of peanut butter.

I mixed it all up as thoroughly as possible in the biggest bowl I have, then place it in the fridge for an hour.

After the hour it was all firmer and starting to stick together; I rolled small handfuls of it into little balls, pushing them together as firmly as possible.

If it felt some of the mix was a bit dry, I added in some more peanut butter and kept making little rounds.

They’re so tasty, very moreish in fact! And great snacks for before or after sport. They need to stay in the fridge to hold their shape.

Throw in whatever you fancy and get rolling 🙂

Happy snacking!

Roasted butternut squash with green sauces…

The temperatures have dropped, there’s a chill in the mornings, the grass is slowly turning back to green, and I can comfortably have the oven on again…yes, autumn is arriving in the UK! Hallelujah!

I say the same thing every year about how much I love autumn, it’s my favourite season, and I celebrated its imminent arrival this year with my first tray of roasted butternut squash of the season..

Skin on, the lightest drizzle of olive oil, and a hot hot oven!

Is there truly anything much better in life!??

On this occasion I ate it piping hot with a mixture of accompaniments..

The totally green sauce is a mix of fresh spinach, mixed herbs, garlic, spring onions, olive oil, lemon juice, ground cumin, Aleppo chilli flakes, a pinch of cinnamon, salt & pepper.

The other green sauce is fresh coriander, leaves and stalks, garlic, tahini, lemon juice and mixed roasted seeds.

And all with a buttermilk and tahini sauce.

Yep! My kind of heaven!!!

Green sauces have figured a lot in my dishes recently, they’re a variation of salsa verde really, always with added spices, all very similar, but different! This one was with quinoa, baby plum tomatoes and homous. With a sprinkling of Aleppo chilli flakes and toasted sunflower seeds.

Happy Autumn northern hemisphere dwellers!

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!

Making za’atar…

Za’atar is one of the key flavours from the area of cuisine close to my heart, typical in so many Levantine dishes and homes. You can read more details about za’atar here, but in short: 

Za’atar can refer to wild thyme or dried thyme alone, or to a herb and spice mix in which thyme is king. If you read a recipe that states za’atar being required, it can easily require just thyme, but if you use the whole mix, that will work too! 

I’ve tried many many versions of za’atar, it is typically traditionally a mix of thyme, sesame seeds, sumac and salt, often including oregano and/or marjoram, sometimes including coriander seeds or cumin seeds…it’s one of those things that every home in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, all over the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, will have their own safely guarded version of making. And of course, everyone’s is the best! 

It can be used as a condiment, put on the table next to your salt and pepper, and sprinkled liberally over everything! Or mixed with olive oil to create a dip, or spread over flatbreads to make manaeesh. Or added to sandwiches of feta and salad…the possibilities are endless. 

Za’atar boasts lots of health benefits from its lovely ingredients, and is said to increase your intelligence – what’s not to like?! 

And of course, at this time of year, it could also create a homemade gift 🙂 

I haven’t liked all of the various versions I’ve tried, so it was time to make my own and I read a recipe recently including cumin seeds, and having bought fresh thyme at the market, i made it this weekend. 

So my version includes equal amounts of sesame seeds and cumin seeds, lightly toasted and cooled; a smaller amount of sumac, an even smaller amount of salt, and lots and lots of fresh thyme leave stripped from the stalks. You can chop up the leaves and blend it all in a food processor, but I roughly chopped the thyme by hand and stirred it all together. You can also use dried thyme instead of fresh. 

It smells amazing!!!! 

You can play around with quantities and what you add or don’t, it’s all about your own taste, I’m really happy with this mix and have been throwing it over everything I’ve eaten since! 

This was yesterday’s lunch, grilled aubergines with za’atar. I added the za’atar for the last couple of minutes only and kept an eye on it, otherwise it would burn. I ate these with some freshly made chunky mutabal and muhammara. 

I hope your week is going well 🙂 

Roasted hemp seed dip..

 I’ve continued playing with hemp seeds recently…for starters, I’ve been roasting them – like everything, roasting them really enhances the flavour..

As they are such tiny seeds you do have to keep a close eye on them when you roast them, they can very quickly and easily get burnt. I just spread a thin layer on my biggest oven tray and put them in an oven at 200C (180C fan). I take the tray out every few minutes and agitate the seeds, pulling them away from the edges where they get cooked the most first and giving them all a move around. I take them out of the oven for good once they have become a golden brown then leave them to cool before storing in glass jars. 

Once again I tried out a new dip with the roasted seeds as well as saving some to throw over salads and vegetable dishes. 

So this is made of..

100g Roasted hemp seeds, 

2 tbsp lemon juice, 

water as needed, 

1 tsp roasted cumin, 

1 tsp ground coriander, 

2 cloves garlic, 

salt & pepper to taste,

1 bunch flat leaf parsley, chopped. 

All whizzed up in your blender. 

  
I enjoyed some of this dip with my recent mezze lunch and Selma’s cauliflower and za’atar cakes..tasty, healthy and full of goodness!! 

 
I hope you’re having a good week 😉

Mezze a la foodbod for Fiesta Friday..

 This is another of my lunches from this week..a selection of fresh tasty dishes for the eyes and the taste buds to feast on..perfect for a get together or a picnic or just a great lunch for one!!! I promise, I didn’t eat it ALL myself, not on the same day anyway..;) 

The mezze included the cauliflower, goats cheese and za’atar cakes that I posted earlier plus the following dishes..

Salad of quinoa, chopped parsley, grated raw courgette, lemon juice, olive oil, roasted cumin and dukkah

A new dip of roasted hemp seeds, lemon juice, water, roasted cumin, ground coriander, garlic, salt & pepper and parsley…more details on a future post. 

Chermoula homous with Turkish chilli flakes 

Shish taouk potatoes 

Roasted cashews & pine nuts 

 The salad was so fresh and full of goodness, and just as good the next day..

    I am bring my selection of dishes to this week’s Fiesta Friday, co hosted this week by the lovely Loretta and Jess, join in the fun…

 Have a great weekend 🙂

Hemp seed butter and hemp seed & parsley dressing..

  
Have you ever tried hemp seeds? Forget any association with the cannabis plant, these won’t affect you in any odd ways! 

I like hemp seeds (I always buy them hulled), they have a lovely nutty flavour, and adding a sprinkle to any dish adds a great extra flavour but also much needed protein for a vegetarian like me 🙂  

 
Having bought some recently I started to think about utilising them in new ways so decided to research some ideas for using them, hence making hemp seed butter. I literally threw some in my Nutribullet and whizzed them up to create a butter, akin to any nut butter basically. The Nutribullet makes light work of making any nut or seed butter and these took literally seconds to become a paste; I decided to add some coconut oil to mine for some extra goodness and flavour. 

 
The green colour really comes out when you make butter from the seeds. 

 
And so my brain continued whirring in the way it does…as tahini is just creamed sesame seeds, these creamed hemp seed could surely be used in a similar way to tahini? So I used it to make a dressing.. 

 
This is literally just some flat leaf parsley, garlic, lemon juice, water and some of the hemp seed butter. The result was really tasty! The hemp seeds respond well to being mixed with water and can be used as a non dairy addition to all sorts of things. I’ll definitely use it again in dressings and dips.  

 
It was perfect over some roasted butternut squash the next day.. 

 
  
I would definitely suggest giving some hemp seeds a go and check out the different things people have made with them online. If nothing else, just chuck some over your salad or roasted vegetables for some added goodness. 

Enjoy! 

Time for some goodness snacks (and how to make them!)..

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any of my goodness goodies, I make different ones every week, but don’t always share them – I don’t want anyone to get bored!!!

Last week I read two different recipes on two different blogs, one for making your own coconut butter, and one for making your own sunbutter…so that’s what I did, I made them, then used them in some bars.

To make coconut butter you literally just throw raw coconut into your nutribullet and whizz it until it becomes liquid. After a while it then solidifies and becomes butter. The same with the sunbutter – whizz up sunflower seeds with coconut oil (I used my newly made coconut butter), it liquefies then sets more solid.

I wanted to make some goodness bars that were nut free, so the sunbutter was perfect for binding the bars. I just threw various seeds and dried fruit into a blender and chopped it all up, mixed it with the liquid sunbutter plus some extra coconut oil, then left it to set. I made some with nuts at the same time..

I also threw together some others with a mixture of unsulphured apricots and mixed nuts, almond butter and coconut oil (more details at the end of this post)..

I have recently discovered two new fabulous products which I used in these, Pip&Nut almond butter and Lucy Bee Coconut Oil:

Both very very nice products, and I’ve tried and used many and various nut butters and coconut oils, and I can tell you that these are both rather lovely! (This is my opinion as a consumer, I have not been asked/paid to write this).

There are lots and lots more versions of my goodness snacks in my recipe index, but to give you the basics of making any of these, here is what I do..

I just chuck whatever dried fruit/nuts/seeds I have or fancy into my small bowl blender and chop them up to a fair sized crumb.
Then mix a good couple of tablespoons of nut butter of your choice and coconut oil together and melt them together in the microwave, usually takes 60-90 seconds, then stir this through the mixture, mixing well through the fruit and nuts. You basically want a good coating on everything.
I then use a silicone ice cube tray, fill each cube up and press it down with the back of a spoon, then freeze for 30 mins.
Press them out and store them in the fridge.
Et voila!

Enjoy xx