Like Gado Gado, this is another Indonesian street food recipe. It is a delicious mix of sweet and sour with a bit of crunch mixed with the creamy egg. Who’d have thought lime would go with a fried egg? Well it really does. You can soft poach the eggs if you prefer… It’s perfect Asian comfort food and its low budget and pretty healthy too. I love anything with a fried egg!
This version of Pad Thai is a delicious warm noodley stir fry salad. Perfect on a summer evening. You can add cooked prawns or chicken to this recipe, if you want to, it’s totally versatile, but stands alone as an outstanding vegan recipe. I love that it’s a tangy mixture of flavours and it’s a variety of textures. It was a great hit at dinner with my vegetarian boy pals (it can be made with white noodles too).
Guac is the perfect tasty health food and this recipe is bursting with vitamins. Everyone has their version of it and this is my version , it is silky smooth, except for the chopped red onion and tomatoes on top. It’s got all the authentic Mexican flavours of lime, chilli, oregano and cumin and it has a bit of a kick. You can put in half the chilli if you prefer it milder. I have eaten this ever since I went on the Fit for Life diet years ago. I’d have it on toasted rye bread with butter, but now I’d just make it with bread brushed with olive oil, roasted and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. It’s a lovely combo of crunchy, creamy and spicy and it’s super delicious. Perfect for lunch as it takes minutes to make.
I love this bowl of coconutty deliciousness. Laksa is a comforting Thai coconut broth with vegetables and noodles. It’s spicy, creamy and noodley. I find a lot of vegan recipes are trying to emulate meat dishes, which is not great because vegan ingredients can be fantastic and with imagination don’t need to pretend they are something they are not. There are a lot of sumptuous vegan dishes that don’t shout deprivation of any kind. Hopefully you will try my vegan recipes and agree that they are just as good as any recipe using animal products, I try to make them look delicious too, and full of colour and not just a load of beige-ness.
This recipe is my take on a Laksa I hope you like it. It’s healthy and delicious.
I had a salad similar to this with my friend Amanda this week in a restaurant. We really liked it and thought it was a great idea, but thought the dressing needed a bit more oomph. Roasted fennel is a fantastic ingredient in a salad, it loses its liquoricey flavour and has a delicious delicate flavour and texture. I’ve also added a few extra ingredients to make it more tasty. This recipe has all the right components for our tastes plus there’s the crunchy and creamy thing going on which we love.
Recipe
Serves 2.
Ingredients:
2 fennel bulbs sliced fairly thinly
100g Feta
A lemon cut into wedges
Some baby salad leaves
A sprinkling of Sumac
A handful of pistachios
2 tablespoons of pomegranate seeds
3 tablespoons olive oil plus a bit more for roasting the fennel
2 teaspoons lime juice
2 tablespoons of pomegranate molasses
Salt and pepper to taste
This salad is lower carb, and for me it has the right combination of textures and flavours, because it tastes fresh and delicious. It has the creaminess of the coconutty and peanutty sauce mixed with the crunchiness of the cucumber and the sweet and sour flavours from the limes, maple syrup, Sriracha and coconut cream dressing. This is a vegan recipe at its penultimate best and is fab served with fish like my (Asian sea bass) but you can serve it with chicken or steak and if you aren’t low carbing it, serve with Thai sticky rice. Yum.
Recipe
Serves 4.
Ingredients:
1 large cucumber
A sprig of fresh coriander finely chopped
A handful of chopped roasted peanuts
2 salad onions finely sliced
1/2 teaspoon sesame seeds (I use black sesame seeds)
The dressing
3 tablespoons of smooth peanut butter
1/2 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon of coconut cream
1 lime juiced
2 tablespoons of water
1/2 teaspoon of Sriracha (chilli sauce)
1 tablespoon of soya sauce
1 tablespoon of maple syrup
Hurrah…it’s pear season. I think pears are fairly underrated, partly because they sit rock hard in fruit bowls and no one knows if and when they will ripen, and when they do ripen they start to become over ripe really quickly. Well now here’s an answer, so they don’t go to waste, I use them raw while they are still hard in salads or I roast them with vanilla, spices and honey and serve them as a dessert.
Most people opt for apples over pears but I kind of prefer pears. Like my pear salad, I sometimes like to use them as I would a vegetable and pay homage to the humble pear.
You can use soft or hard pears for this salad, either will do. Apart from tasting delicious, it also looks beautiful with the colour of the red cabbage.
I wanted to create a recipe that uses hard pears for salads as they are perfect in the same way as carrots and celeriac are. So I created this healthy, tasty salad and tested it on friends at dinner and they really loved it and wanted the recipe, and they are still talking about how delicious it is. The dressing is an unusual combination of flavours, like mustard and lime juice, but trust me, it works. You can use ripe pears if your pears are ripe, it’s still delicious, and it’s also amazing with shavings of pecorino. Pecorino and lime, who’d have thought? Perfect, too, if you want to try new flavours salad-wise.
Recipe
Serves 2.
Ingredients:
1 teaspoon Poppy seeds
3 firm pears cored and very thinly sliced (I leave the skin on but its up to you) they can be sliced lengthways or in discs
A round radicchio roughly shredded or chopped chicory
A sprig of parsley finely chopped
A sprig of chives finely chopped
1 teaspoon of maple syrup
¼ teaspoon of English mustard
1 lime, zest and juice
2 tablespoons of olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Don’t you love a snack? I love them and I’d be happy to live on them for the rest of my life. These are a lower carb version of a Gado Gado salad, but in a small snack form. So if you are on a lower carb regime they are perfect. Great as a canapé or starter, or just in front of Netflix with your favourite box set. They are crunchy, creamy and sweet and sour, which is, if you read this blog, my favourite combo… blinking delish.
Serves 3-4.
Ingredients:
12 Quails eggs (£2.60 doz from Sainsbury’s) or 4 normal size eggs
1 red pepper very finely chopped
1 head of chicory or a lettuce
1 small cucumber, julienned(I use a julienne peeler)
A handful of crispy onions (supermarket)
A small sprig of fresh coriander
The sauce:
1 clove of chopped garlic
3 tablespoons of maple syrup
5 tablespoons of peanut butter
Juice of 2 limes
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon of soya sauce
1 tablespoon of tamarind paste
Chilli sauce to taste (optional)
This delicate pale green sorbet has all the freshness of cantaloupe with its soft melony perfume. It is so summery and delicious that Leon and Ralph (godson and godfather) think it’s amazing and tastes like the best melon snow. You can replace the vodka or gin with apple juice if you prefer it alcohol free.
Makes 1/2 litre approximately.
Ingredients:
3 cups of ripe cantaloupe or any melon scooped out of the skin, deseeded and chopped into chunks
1/2 cup of sugar or maple syrup
Juice of half a lime
2 tablespoons of vodka or gin which gives it a lovely flavour
