recipe

cucumber and cashew noodle bowl

~ aplotzi ~ 1 Comment

I love cooking with cucumber. It’s really delicious cooked and I often put it in a stir fry julienned or just chopped into stick shapes and add it to the pan with all the other ingredients. Cooked cucumber has a subtle, delicate taste which works really well with Asian recipes. I have also added crunchy cashews and a bit of coconut so it has my favourite combo of sweet and savoury with smooth and crunchy and is nice and healthy but super tasty. Perfect for a vegetarian or vegan dinner.

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the perfect roasted fries

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It’s the simple things that are the best and I love fries as much as the next person. No carb free living for me, and I don’t care if I have a muffin top, life’s too short to be eating just ‘clean food’. Food should be delicious, beautiful and sensual and a bit of what you fancy. I eat mostly healthy food which is unprocessed with lots of vegetables, fish and of course cake. I don’t have a microwave and am still mistaken for someone at least fifteen years younger so I must be doing something right.

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sticky jamaica ginger cake

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Jamaica ginger cake is very nostalgic for me as it was a very occasional treat when I was growing up and I loved everything about it. I loved that it was a dark, dense, slightly sticky on the outside sponge cake made with lots of black treacle and fragrant with spices. They still make it today but I wanted to do a dairy free version that could also be vegan so I have created this recipe around the original recipe but omitted the butter and milk. It has a great texture as well as a great taste, and you don’t miss the dairy at all. The cake gets nicer over the next few days after baking and gets slightly sticky on the outside as the flavours mature. I tested it out on my friend’s teenage kids and they really loved it even though they had never had Jamaican ginger cake before. It’s dairy free heaven… but shhh, you don’t have to tell anyone it is because they won’t notice!

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vegetarian laksa bowl

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This laksa is my version of the delicious  coconutty creamy sweet and sour Thai broth. Although more of a meal. It’s got soft boiled eggs and roasted tomatoes with spinach and leeks. It works because they are all flavours that work well together. It’s perfect for a midweek supper or on a date night. Once you have made the laksa paste you can keep it for a long time in the  freezer for future use. The laksa jars in the supermarket aren’t as good and fresh tasting, but they are fine if you can’t be bothered to make it.

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mashed peas on toast with parmesan

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I love peas and always have, and will always be excited if I know they are on the menu, and I try and find any excuse to put them in a recipe. I have wanted to make mashed peas on toast for ages, and now I have knocked one up for the blog. It’s a delicious mix of crunchy bread with the delicate pea mash and the flavours of the Parmesan and balsamic vinegar. Bloody delish and great as a canapé or starter or as a snack.

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sweet and sour okra

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This okra recipe is taken from my first ever Madhur Jaffrey cookbook my then boyfriend was given by someone he worked with because he loved curries and he loved cooking. We often used to argue about who cooked the dinner because we both loved to cook so much. Which led me to realise that theres’s room for only one domestic goddess in a relationship. The book has inspired me ever since then although I change the recipes to contain much less oil, and I use coconut oil instead of ghee. It is one of the most delicious ways to eat okra because it’s full of flavours which are sweet and fragrant and it has the gentle perfume of cumin and coriander. I also replace the sugar in her recipes with maple syrup, but you can use sugar if you prefer. I often serve it with other Indian dishes like dhal or just with plain basmati rice and an Indian pickle. One of reasons Indian food lends itself to vegetarian and vegan cooking so well is because it’s very, very tasty and has great textures and colours. I usually cook Indian food if I’m having my friends over for a vegetarian feast as I know everyone loves it.

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date paste

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I have been wanting to use dates to sweeten cakes and other foods for a long time. Sugar is something I try and cut out as much as possible and I tend to use maple syrup instead, except in cake baking as it’s a bit more complicated as the ingredients are integral to the recipe working. So I have been reading up about the best way to use dates as a sweetener and it seems that making your own date paste is deffo the best way to incorporate them into a recipe. So far I have also read that if a recipe uses a cup of sugar, you can then add two cups of date paste but you have to bear in mind there’s more water content in the date paste and it’s not as sweet as sugar. It also keeps in the fridge for up to two weeks and let’s not forget that dates are one of the major ingredients in sticky toffee pudding. So what could go wrong flavour wise…? I will try it out in my recipes, and am really interested which flavour cakes and even biscuits it will work with…plus it will sweeten things like oatmeal for breakfast.

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lentil and feta salad

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This salad is just an assembly job and only takes a few minutes to make. It originally comes from a low carb cook book I covet called Easy Low Carb and the recipes are complied by different authors. I think it’s out of print now, but it’s full of recipes to inspire anyone who wants to cook low carb or low G.I. but wants to keep it interesting and delicious. I have tweaked this recipe a bit to suit my tastes. I replaced the vinegar with lemon juice and added a tad of sweetness and lemon zest because lemon zest from organic unwaxed lemons is a really healthy addition to your food as well as super tasty. This salad is perfect with fish or meat or with other salads or just as a snack.

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truffle fries with fried eggs

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Sometimes it’s the simplest things that are the best things and like most people I have loved egg and chips ever since my foodie sister took me to a greasy spoon when we were teenagers. At home we were used to eating European food and this was the best kind of British food and a revelation on every level, and something my mum would never have cooked us, so it felt rather exotic. It’s still up there in my memory as one of the best meals I ever had in a restaurant. However, I thought I’d ramp up the flavours a notch and create a newer version using olive oil, truffle oil, parsley and Burford eggs. You can use coconut oil, and there is a taste free version now in health food stores. I’m just eating this now having photographed it for this post, and all I’m thinking is it’s so delicious I can’t wait for Ralph to try it, and it is a perfect date night dinner.

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vegan chocolate fudge cake

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Really easy to make chocolate cake, it’s all done in a food processor. It’s deep dark and super chocolatey for a real dairy-free egg-free chocolate fix. I promise you can’t taste the beetroot, but it’s the beetroot that makes it fudgey. I made this cake for a friend who hasn’t eaten cake for years because she can’t eat eggs and she really loved it and ate nearly all of it! In the picture I’ve made two cakes (double everything) and sandwiched them together with the icing, then iced it all and decorated it with freeze frozen raspberries. It’s very rich and chocolatey so it’s lovely served with more berries and of course, vanilla ice cream. By the way…if I’m feeling lazy I use the Betty Crocker chocolate fudge frosting from a supermarket (which is vegan) instead of making the frosting. And sometimes I cut it half and sandwich a bit of good quality cherry jam in the middle, which keeps it super moist.

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