Sunday Baking

 

Another thing you can do on a Sunday is some baking! I had my birthday a few weeks ago and Emma decided to bake some of these beautiful cupcakes for me to take into work! We’ve been getting really incredible Strawberries from a friend grown on a small farm and these were absolutely perfect.

The ingredients for 16 cupcakes are:

• 500g of strawberries, about 2 punnets.
• 220g of flour
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• 1 cup of caster sugar
• 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• Half a cup of canola oil

Save the really small strawberries for putting on top of the icing, you need 1 for each cupcake! Cut off the tops from the remaining strawberries, and mash them using a potato masher. Add in the oil, apple cider vinegar and vanilla essence and give it a quick stir. Mix up the sugar, flour and baking soda and make a well, pour in the wet ingredients and gently add them together. Take a heaped teaspoon of the mixture and put it into a cupcake paper in your baking tray. Put these into the oven for half an hour at 180 degrees. While these bake prepare the icing! For the icing you need to get your mixer and mix up: 112g of non-dairy margarine 2 cups of icing sugar 1.5 teaspoons of vanilla essence 2 tablespoons of soy milk Stir this up for about 4-5 minutes, adding the sugar to the margarine first and then the vanilla and soy milk last. Make sure its smooth and once the cupcakes have cooled down start covering the cupcakes, distribute fairly between them and finally put a single strawberry on it! Beautiful, and we made just one for ourselves to try and are having trouble not eating the rest!

Big Breakfast Fry Up

A traditional breakfast fry up can be great weekend comfort food and is great as a lazy brunch when you’ve slept in a bit as well! For this one we used:

• Organic Rye Bread (toasted with some Nutelex added)
• Redwood Organic Rashers
• 400g Mushroom
• Juice of half a lemon
• Handful of Italian Parsley (chopped)
• Redwood Organic Gyros Style Sausages
• Frozen Hash browns
• 3-4 cloves of garlic
• Melrose Organic Mayonnaise
• German Style Mustard

While the hash browns cook for 20 minutes in the oven, get the sliced mushrooms fried up with the garlic. When these loose their juice and some of this evaporates, add the juice of half a squeezed lemon and a handful of Italian parsley chopped finely! Chuck these on the plate or on top of the toasted bread and get the sausages going. These should take no longer than 2-3 minutes else they’ll be too tough, and once they’re on the plate give the same treatment to the rashers. By now the hash browns should almost be ready so quickly mix up half and half of a German style mustard with some mayonnaise to make a nice accompaniment to everything!
That’s all there is to it, fairly simple and traditional with a lot of opportunities to add your other favourites such as tomatoes or wilted spinach if you have the time to expand it!

Simple Chinese Feast

The great thing about these recipes is that they are quick and easy to cook with little preparation and cooking time! So you can make a couple in the time it might take you to make one usual dish in some circumstances! They also go really well together, so we make a few and eat them over a couple of nights together!

 

The first dish in our Asian feast is Stir-Fried Rice Noodles.

The ingredients for this dish are:

• 500g of Fresh Rice Noodles
• 3 tablespoons of Light Soy Sauce
• 1 teaspoon of brown sugar
• 1 cup of bean sprouts
• 1 teaspoon of sesame oil
• a sprinkling of dried chili flakes

Get the wok going and cook the sugar and soy sauce for ten seconds, then add the noodles and stir fry for 1 minute. Then stir in the bean sprouts and the remaining ingredients. Done! This is a perfect accompaniment to any dish and the fresh rice noodles are fantastic.

 

The second dish is Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Garlic.

The ingredients for this dish are:

• 1 bunch of choy sum
• 3 bunches of bok choy
• 1 teaspoon of sea salt (or less if you don’t like it too salty)
• 5 cloves crushed garlic
• 2 tablespoons of water
• half a teaspoon of sesame oil
• 2 tablespoons dry sherry (or shao hsing wine if you can get it)

Once you’ve heated some oil in the wok (preferably peanut), add the salt and garlic and stir fry for ten seconds adding in the bok choy and choy sum and stir fry for 1 minute. Add the dry sherry, stir fry for another 30 seconds, add the water and stir fry until the leaves are tender. Stir in the sesame oil and its ready to eat! A very earthy greens accompaniment to any dish.

 

The two stand out dishes of this feast are the potatoes and the pumpkin!

The ingredients for the potatoes are:

• 500g baby new potatoes (which have been boiled until soft)
• 5cm piece of ginger
• 2 tablespoons of brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons of shao hsing wine (or dry sherry)
• 1 tablespoon of light soy sauce

Heat some peanut oil in the wok, add the potatoes and stir fry them for a minute or until they are browned all over! Don’t panic if they break up a bit but try not to mash too much. Add the ginger and stir fry for 30 seconds, then add the sugar, wine and soy sauce and stir fry it for another minute or until its caramelised. Yum!

 

Last but by no means least, our favourite dish out of the lot is the Stir Fried Pumpkin with Black Beans! You will need to get some salted black beans, which can be bought at China Town, we use the fermented salted black beans.

The ingredients for this dish are:

• 500g of pumpkin
• 5cm piece of ginger (chopped)
• quarter of a cup of dry sherry (or shao hsing wine)
• 2 teaspoons of brown sugar
• quarter cup of water
• 1 tablespoon of brown rice vinegar
• 1 tablespoon of light soy
• 1 teaspoon of sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon of salted black beans

 

You need to cut the pumpkin into small stir fry pieces. Heat some oil in a wok and add the pumpkin and ginger and stir fry this until its lighty browned. Then add black beans and stir fry for one minute before adding the dry sherry and sugar and stir frying for another minute. Then add the water and stir fry for 2 minutes. Finally add the vinegar, light soy and sesame oil and stir fry for the final 2 minutes or until the pumpkin is cooked to the consistency you like. Serve immediately!

As mentioned previously the great thing about these recipes is that they are quick in preparation and cooking time! They don’t use a lot of ingredients and most of them are fairly simple! So this makes a great humble feast for when you can’t be bothered spending long hours in the kitchen!

Bean Nachos

 

Bean Nachos are a fantastic filling meal that’s very satisfying and this is a fantastic vegan way of making them! Sometimes you just want to eat something that looks unhealthy! You don’t want to give the impression that being vegan means eating lettuce leaves, or exotic tofu from a small Asian shop in China Town.

This is a meal of corn chips, avocado salsa, spiced beans and soy cheese all washed down with a beer. Not for the overly health conscious, although its not really that fatty! First you tip hot water over your tomatoes in order to peal them, you could probably use tinned tomatoes but you’d be denying yourself some beautiful fresh flavour if you resorted to the contained cousin. Beautiful fresh tomatoes give this meal a fresh refreshing taste too!

Once the tomatoes are peeled and chopped (you can just scoop out the flesh if you want to, but that sounds like a lot of work for this quick messy meal); you move onto the beans by cooking some onion, chilli, oregano, crushed cumin then add your chopped tomatoes and a tiny bit of tomato paste, a good dry white wine and let it bubble away until the liquid reduces.

Then add some tinned red kidney beans (you could buy dried and soak them in the fridge overnight, but to be honest the canned organic ones are so cheap and this would defeat the purpose of a quick easy meal). Once the beans are heated through, the assembly begins! Throw some corn chips onto a bowl or serving plates, cover them with a layer of spicy beans, and grate over half a block of Cheezly Mozzarella over it. Put it under the grill until the cheese is melty!

But you can’t have nachos without guacamole and while there are many versions of guacamole, a quick simple one is crushed avocado, lime and some sweet chilli sauce. Great stuff with a great beer for a Saturday night when all you want to do is eat junk and watch good movies!