Yesterday morning was one of experimentation in my kitchen: I just love playing and creating a mess when I’m on my own, literally turning my kitchen into a bomb site, which then all magically disappears before anyone gets home! The boys were at football, I had things to make for a friend coming to lunch today, and things I wanted to try out….including Jess’s sweet potato spoon bread.
It’s basically a kind of soufflé/bake really and Jess’s looked so tasty that I had saved it. Mashed roasted sweet potato is mixed with a milk and polenta mixture, egg yolks and then whisked egg whites, before baking.
I made a few changes to the recipe for my tastes and choices, including halving everything as I was only making it for me; I replaced the butter with coconut oil; I used almond milk; I left out the sugar; and used gluten free baking powder. This rendered the dish gluten free, sugar free and dairy free and still VERY tasty!!!!
All I can say is: yum yum yum!! It took all my strength not to eat it straight from the oven and allow it to cool! The smell and taste was lovely. And remained so today when I reheated it 🙂
At the same time I decided to test out something else, something pretty amazing that I keep seeing…look at this:
A bowl of whisked egg whites, yes?
No.
This, is whisked chickpea juice, which whisks up and becomes exactly the same as eggs whites! Which can be used exactly the same as egg whites!!! And it’s just the juice that you usually pour away when you drain a tin of chickpeas!!!!! AMAZING!!!!!
This is particularly amazing for vegans, and I am not vegan, I do eat eggs and dairy, but having seen Laura’s post and her amazing vegan meringues and then Kellie’s mousse on Instagram, I just had to give this a go. The juice from one tin whisks up to fill a big bowl, it really grows in volume, it takes a while to stiffen but once it does, you literally can’t tell the difference between it and real egg whites. The flavours of the chickpeas isn’t particularly strong and you can easily cover it with why we you add to it anyway. I added tahini out of interest and created a tahini mousse, but you can use it with any standard mousse recipe, or make meringues like Laura did. I basically just folded tahini into the whisked up juice and left it to set it small bowls.
What a cool thing, hey? Who even ever thought of trying it??
As you may imagine, it’s a rich flavour, you can’t eat much of it, and very very filling, but it is absolutely a light mousse and was very tasty with a slice of sweet potato bake. I ate this on its own, as above, as a snack, and the next day alongside lunch of roasted cauliflower and chickpeas; sweetness comes from the sweet potato, but really it remains a savoury dish, the tahini balancing out the sweetness. You could turn either into whatever course you wanted to though really..I don’t like sweet things remember, so I will always convert something to a savoury version.
So, those are just two of the many things that came out of my kitchen fun yesterday, there’s more to come very soon..:)
I hope you had a great weekend and a great week ahead xx see you on Wednesday for a super colourful guest post for this week’s ‘What would you feed me?’
foodbod 