Strawberry and Flaxseed Smoothie

I was at someone's house recently and noticed she had a Nutribullet which reminded me of my much cheaper jug blender which I got as a birthday present from my friend Jane when I was at university - so that was about 15 years ago and it's still going strong! I hardly ever make smoothies as I just don't have time in the mornings, and smoothies to me are really a breakfast drink. I usually end up making a cup of tea in the mornings, only having time to drink half before I have to leave to get my train, and having breakfast at my desk at work which is usually a yogurt, or cereal if I remember to put some cereal in a Tupperware container to take with me!

But I had some strawberries that needed using up, plus a couple of over-ripe bananas - we are still getting a fruit basket every week at work and whenever there are some black bananas left at the end, my boss puts them on my desk as he knows I can bake with them!

I also had some soya milk left over from when a vegan friend came to stay and thought the creamy flavour and thicker texture (as I usually buy skimmed milk which is very thin) would be lovely in a smoothie.

I also had some flaxseed in the back of a cupboard; flaxseed is incredibly good for you as it's an anti-oxidant and good for your heart, blood pressure, is a source of fibre and all sorts of other things too.

So into the blender went the soya milk, strawberries, banana and flaxseed.

I also added a squeeze of agave nectar (a vegan honey substitute) for a little sweetness. I tested it and added a little more milk to thin it down and decided I really ought to make smoothies more often!

Smoothies are a good way to use up leftover fruit which is going soft; for that reason I'm sharing this with Credit Crunch Munch, hosted by Charlene at Food Glorious Food on behalf of Camilla at Fab Food 4 All and Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

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F1 Foods: Hungary Round-Up and the next challenge: Belgium

The Grand Prix races have been a little further apart recently so it was back in July that I launched the latest challenge, to cook something related to the Hungarian host of the Formula 1 race. Perhaps not the easiest of countries to choose particularly for UK entrants, as the only Hungarian meal I had heard of before was goulash. Surprisingly, nobody entered goulash in the challenge!

 

First we had these Gerbeaud Slices from Suelle at Mainly Baking. The recipe originated from the House of Gerbeaud in Budapest; these are slices filled with walnut and apricot jam and chocolate on top and look wonderful - I can't believe I've never heard of them before!

 

 

 

Kohlrabi soup is something I've heard of but I didn't know how to make it or even really what a kohlrabi was - it seems to be somewhere between a cabbage and a turnip. This recipe from Jane at Onions and Paper looks very easy to make, and very warming for a cold winter's (or August!) day. 

 

 

  

I made Langos, which we ate on holiday in Vienna; they are popular in Austria but from what I read online, actually a Hungarian recipe. They are basically a kind of pillowy dough that is deep fried and served with sour cream and grated cheese – delicious! Quite filling but I think a small one of these would be a nice alternative side with a cooked breakfast. I think they would be quite nice served sweet with chocolate and icing sugar too!

 

 

 

 

Finally we had Szilvas Pite - not only do I not know what this is, I don't know how to pronounce it! Elizabeth at the Law Students' Cookbook has enlightened me: it's plum cake. It uses Greek yogurt and almond extract; Elizabeth said the plums sunk a little but it looks pretty good to me.

 

The next Formula 1 Grand Prix takes place in Belgium on August 21-23. I’m opening the linky now and you will have until Friday 28th to submit your entries.

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Vegan Meringue and Pavlova (yes it exists!)

Can you make vegan meringue? Yes you can! I bet you didn’t know that – and I bet you will be surprised by the secret ingredient.

I had a barbecue recently and served up this meringue and cream, and waved it under the nose of my vegan friend… not to tease her, but to tell her that I’d made it for her! The meringue doesn’t contain egg and the cream doesn’t contain cream!

I am ridiculously excited at having found out about this and have been spreading the word; each time I tell someone the main ingredient in the vegan meringue- and the fact that it looks and tastes great – they are amazed.

No, not chickpeas… but the water that is in the tin. It’s called aquafaba and you can read the fascinating story of how people have been looking for egg replacers which work in meringue. It seems to be a relatively recent discovery.

The meringue is really easy to make – just the same as a regular meringue, though the aquafaba did seem to need a bit more whisking than egg whites, so I was very glad of my Kitchenaid stand mixer.

You need:

For the meringue:

liquid from a 400g tin of chickpeas

1 cup caster sugar

1 tbsp arrowroot powder (available in supermarkets in sachets from Dr. Oetker)

1 tsp vanilla flavouring

1 tsp white wine vinegar or cider vinegar

For the cream:

400ml tin coconut milk

Icing sugar to taste

Fresh berries to decorate (optional)

Preheat oven to 140C. Drain the liquid from the tin of chickpeas into a bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer and whisk, starting off at low speed and gradually increasing the speed to high, for several minutes until the liquid foams up and then forms soft peaks, much like whisking egg whites.

Add the sugar and arrowroot powder and mix on medium speed and then high until you have stiff glossy peaks.

Add the vanilla and vinegar and whisk briefly to combine.

Place a piece of greaseproof paper on a flat baking tray and spoon out the ‘meringue’ into a circular shape. Turn the oven down to 120C and bake for 2 – 2.5 hours. Turn the oven off and leave the meringue in the oven to fully cool overnight if you can. At the same time, place the can of coconut milk in the fridge overnight.

The next day, carefully peel the greaseproof paper off the meringue – rather than the other way around – and place on a plate to serve. Mine did break up a little unfortunately!

To make the cream, open the tin of coconut milk – the contents will have separated into a thin water-like liquid and a thick, almost solid, top layer. The tins will often separate in this way even in the cupboard and you can easily mix the two layers together to add to a curry and so on – but for this recipe, you want the solid layer. Carefully spoon it out into a bowl and add icing sugar to taste (add about 3 tbsp initially then taste it). Whisk until you have the consistency of double cream.

Spoon on top of the pavlova and top with fresh berries - I used strawberries and blueberries. And there you have it  - a vegan pavlova!

I'm sending this to Tea Time Treats as they have a theme of summer holiday baking; the strawberries and blueberries make this quite summery and this is a good dessert to have after a BBQ as you can make the meringue in advance then assemble it very quickly. The challenge is hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Jane at The Hedgecombers,

I'm also sharing it with the Vegetable Palette challenge, hosted by Shaheen at Allotment 2 Kitchen; the theme is 'more glorious reds' and she accepts fruits as well as veg.

In addition I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup hosted by Charlottes Lively Kitchen. This would be lovely if you were holding a Breast Cancer Care's Strawberry Tea fundraiser.

 

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Watermelon Smoothie Mixer Hack (and a cocktail)

I saw this on Facebook recently - someone had a brilliant trick with a whole watermelon (I don't know why these things are always called 'hacks') which enables you to turn the fruit into a refreshing drink in less than a minute - without needing to peel and cut it up and put it in a blender.

On Saturday I went to a barbecue at the home of Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker, who is a good friend of mine. She'd seen this Facebook clip as well and had tried it out, with perfect results! She had more than one watermelon so demonstrated again to a rapt audience, and allowed me to film it and put it on my blog.

All you need is a whole watermelon - putting it in a bowl to keep it steady like Ros does here is a good idea. Use a sharp knife to cut a square out of the top of the watermelon, large enough for the paddle beaters of a hand mixer. You can take one of the beaters out and just use one if you like.

Stick the mixer into the watermelon, and turn it on! Ros said you can tell when you've mixed it enough - then all you do is turn it upside down and pour out the watermelon juice!

It's brilliant and a real party trick. The juice tasted lovely, though was quite thick, so I mixed mine with lemonade and added a shot of vodka for a very refreshing cocktail.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 33

I seem to be permanently far busier these days than I ever was before, which makes meal planning even more important, but I haven't got the time to go through all my cookery books for inspiration. Instead, this is a rough plan, which I might change nearer the time when I see what fresh food is on offer in the supermarket or if I have more time to flick through a cookery book.

Monday - BBQ or houmous-topped chicken breasts

Tuesday - out with my boyfriend's dad for his birthday

Wednesday – at a BBQ event for bloggers, hope the weather is nice!

Thursday - fish for me, chicken kiev for him

Friday - curry

Saturday lunch- grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches (a half sandwich with salad for me!)

Dinner – BBQ?

Sunday lunch- beans on toast type of thing

Dinner - roast poussin for me, roast chicken breast for him

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Family Photo Letter Collage

It was a year ago this month that my boyfriend and I bought and moved into our lovely house. We spent a couple of months working all-out on the redecoration, taking 2 weeks off work and then using every available weekend to paint, oversee new flooring, assemble furniture and so on. We took a breather as it was coming up to Christmas, and then… never really started again. Most of the house is finished – we just need to paint the bathrooms – but some of the finishing touches haven’t been done. To me, that’s things like putting up coat hooks and mirrors – but there are also a few decorative touches left to think about.

Ages ago I bought some cardboard letters spelling the word ‘home’ and some others spelling out 'Love' from Hobbycraft, and put them away until I could decorate them to display in our new home.

I hadn’t really thought about how I would decorate them, other than with patterned paper or fabric. Then Snapfish, the digital photo printing people, came along with an offer of a voucher towards products from their site – as long as I could craft with them.

That’s not as easy as it first sounds – they have loads of gifts and ready-made products on their site that you can personalise with photos, like photobooks, canvas wall art, mugs, calendars, jigsaws and so on. Most of those wouldn’t give me much to play with in terms of crafting. Their main offering of course is getting your photos printed so I decided to take that as a starting point for my crafting.

I remembered the cardboard letters and hit upon the idea of making them into a photo collage. After all, it is family and friends that make a house a home. This is also a good way to display a lot of photos if you don’t want to have a frame on every windowsill or shelf!

The letters I had were quite small – only about 10cm high – but luckily Snapfish has a product that is just right for this. If you’ve never bought a collage print before I highly recommend it. You can select up to 20 photos, and a print size of 6x4, 7x5 or 10x8 and it will arrange the photos in a collage – making some of them bigger and some of them smaller. If you don’t like the arrangement, you can shuffle and do it again. The largest size is only £1.09 and looks really nice in a frame – I did one of these with photos from a USA holiday I took a couple of years ago, and I also gave one to my parents with photos from a day we spent at Chelsea flower show a couple of years ago. The smaller photos are only 12p for 6x4 or 22p for 7x5.

You can cut these up to make wallet-sized photos or in this case I cut them up to glue onto my cardboard letters.

The 'love' letters came in a cute little box but the 'home' letters were from a different range (they may not even have been Hobbycraft actually) and weren't in a box, and I couldn't find the letter 'e'! Rather than turn my craft cupboard upside down I decided just to use the word 'love'.

This was much faster to make than you might think - I actually did it on the kitchen counter while I was cooking dinner! I simply cut up the collage print, selecting pictures that would fit on each part of each letter and glued them on. I covered the edges with offcuts of photos as you won't really see these, but I didn't want to leave them blank. I didn't bother covering the backs of the letters though.

It looked even better than I was expecting and fit perfectly into one of the cubes of this Ikea shelving unit that we have in the living room. The letters really stand out against the black wood and this now has pride of place in the living room.

Thanks to Snapfish for a voucher code for their site.

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Non-alcoholic Drinks for Barbecue

When I’ve had friends over for barbecues recently the most popular drinks have been non-alcoholic ones. I put that down to a myriad of reasons: when it’s really hot, people want to quench their thirst with something they can drink quickly without getting tipsy right away; some people are driving; some people are tee-total (yes really!) and one is pregnant. Also, the drinks I made look and taste great!

 

I already posted the recipe for this non-alcoholic mojito; here are two other ideas.

 

Strawberry Iced Tea

 

I had some strawberry-flavour tea bags and made them up with a little sweetener (Splenda), waited until it had cooled and added more water, some ice cubes and some fresh strawberries.

 

Ginger and Cranberry Fizz

 

This one is also very easy to make and tastes lovely. I had a bottle of ginger beer left over that someone bought to a previous barbecue, and as I don’t like ginger beer I wasn’t suer what to do with it. I also had a carton of cranberry juice in the fridge so I mixed the two together in roughly equal quantities and added some fresh mint leaves. Delicious!

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