Best EVER chocolate mousse

It's one of those evenings again when I just fancy something a bit naughty.  I demand pudding!  Only we don't eat 'pudding' so there isn't any,  But there is a food mixer and a whole shelf of jars full of whole foody type bits which, with a little bit of cunning, can quickly resemble any number of pudding-like delicacies.

And given I'm impatient and it's already 21.30 tonight's effort has to not need cooking or freezing or in fact anything other than tipping, whizzing and eating.

So I'm off to make a chocolate mousse.  A dairy and refined sugar free chocolate mousse with an avocado and cacao powder, obviously.

But what recipe to use?  I've read and tried several avocado 'chocolate' mousse recipes and haven't been overly impressed with any of them to be honest.  The ones with banana taste like mushed up banana.  The ones without banana taste like avocado with a bit of cocoa powder.  I want one that tastes like chocolate mousse without actually being chocolate mousse.  I refuse to believe that healthy alternative puddings have to taste healthy or alternative, I want one that tastes as gooey, silky smooth, rich and delicious as the one we're all familiar with.

So, I set about making my own recipe up and lo and behold, it works!  In fact it's SO convincing and yummy I've now eaten the whole thing!

Here's what I used:

1 avocado
5 pitted medjool dates
2 dessert spoons cacao powder
1 dessert spoon raw honey
2 caps full vanilla extract
splash water
pinch of Maldon seasalt

I bunged it all in my mini hand blender thingamy and whizzed it up until it was super smooth and silky.  Actually, it still had a few tiny lumps of date left in it which added a certain something.

Honestly, I am not lying when I say this was right up there with the best chocolate mousses of them

all.  It's so close to the original I almost feel sick and have a headache! But not quite ;)  It's rich, deeply chocolatey, gooey and creamy with a great depth of favourite, sweet but not too sweet and with a perfect texture and consistency.  It would have been even nicer with some raspberries or strawberries but I didn't have any.

Now, clearly this is not 'health' food as such, although raw cacao powder, avocados and raw honey do have some lovely health benefits. Eating 5 bowls of this twice a day is not going to help anybody's weight loss regime or whatever, but I believe in progress not perfection and if the options are shop bought chocolate mousse full of chemicals, sugar and lard, or this one made with basically fruit, then I'm choosing this one every time.

PS whilst I may have nailed my chocolate mousse recipe, I clearly have some way to go with my chocolate mousse photography skills, but can assure you it tastes a lot better than I have made it look!

Beautiful Beetroot Soup

Firstly, how pretty is this soup!? Amazing.  Now I can eat bright pink as well as wear it.

Secondly, beetroot is SOOOOOOO good for you  It's full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants and is low in fat.

And last but clearly not least, this soup is yummy. Beetroot is a bit of a love it or hate it type thing but, as I did with kale, having always assumed I hated it, I grew to love it recently. It's lovely roasted with butternut squash in a salad with feta cheese, or in a salad, or as it turns out, in a soup.

So, here's how I made this one.

I roasted about 6 beetroots for about 45 minutes and then peeled off the skins...admittedly this bit was a little fiddly.

Then I whizzed it up with about half a can of low fat coconut milk, the juice from one lemon and some salt and pepper.

Then I heated it through again with a chicken stock cube (which I would normally avoid but had nothing else stock-like around), about a dessert spoon of tomato puree and a drizzle of garlic infused olive oil.  I also added some water to thin it out a bit and make it go further at this point.

Then I added a small packet of fresh peas to complement the earthy taste to cook as the soup heated..

To serve I scattered some nice tangy feta over the top.  I think it would have been nice with some truffle oil drizzled over the top too but didn't go for that on this occasion.

And that was it!

Seriously, it is so tasty and warming but fresh and light as well.  It's rich with a little bit of a fruity tang and has such a deep flavour.  The peas help give it a bit of bite and thicken it up a little. Plus as well as tasting good it really feels like it's doing me good as it goes down too! Which is helpful as I have a stinking snotty cold so every little helps!

Yum.

Middle Eastern inspired afternoon snack smoothie

4pm is one of those in betweeny sort of times.  It's too late for lunch, not early enough for dinner, and if you eat anything too substantial it'll spoil the next meal.  That's what happens when you have brunch at midday really (which was delicious by the way, creamy spinach and leek omelette with chorizo courtesy of Fego's).

So, what to do since I also can't really be ar*ed to cook anything right now on top of all the bits and bobs of prep for the week going on in the kitchen at the mo.

The answer?  A delicious mid afternoon snack smoothie/milkshake thing.

Serves 2:

2 bananas
2 cups unsweetened almond milk (ish, clearly I didn't measure it)
dessert spoon almond butter (peanut would work as well)
3 pitted medjool dates
dessert spoon honey / maple syrup (I used manuka honey)
1/2 tspoon cinnamon
1/2 tspoon nutmeg
pinch saffron

Just whiz it all up.

I normally put cinnamon in my smoothies but decided to add the nutmeg and saffron today as I just fancied a slightly more sort of sweet, comforting, warming eastern sort of a twist.  And it worked!  I could have got away with a bit more of it as well but didn't want to use too much just in case.

I don't have a picture as we drunk it all up straight away.  It was yummy and certainly filled the in betweeny hole in our tummies without spoiling dinner a few hours away.  If you make it yourself you can see what it looked like ;)

Happy weekend x

Dilly-cious!

I haven't written a blog post on here for so long but I have been SO busy in the kitchen. We've been eating so amazingly well recently it's left me no time to write about it at the same time. 

But since tonight's dinner was so quick, easy and yummy I decided to just jump right in and quickly write it up. 

I wanted something light but satisfying, comforting and creamy with enough protein without using meat since I seem to have gone off it again. 

Anyway I grabbed the following:

1 full handful fresh dill

1 garlic clove

Half a lemon

Half a tub of Greek yogurt

1 courgette

1/2 cucumber

Tin butter beans 

Generous pinch seasalt

Few flakes Parmesan 

Drizzle olive oil

First I whizzed up the dill, garlic and yogurt in a hand blender. 

Then I spiralised the courgette and cucumber on the fat noodle blade - without one you could just use a peeler to slice off thin strips. 

Warm the veggie noodles in some olive oil in a sauté pan before adding the drained butter beans and a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt. Warm it all through then squeeze in the lemon juice, stir through the dill yogurt mix and the Parmesan.  

And eat! 

I served it with some cracked black pepper and a toasted whole grain pitta bread and a little bit of feta over the top as I had some left in the fridge. 

It was absolutely delicious. Really fresh from the dill, tangy from the lemon but creamy from the yogurt and Parmesan. The beans made it nice and satisfying and the spiralised veggies meant it felt like eating pasta but without the pasta!

So nice.  Enjoy!

I love my spiraliser!

I have wanted a spiraliser for EVER!

So I finally put it on my Christmas list and hurray! I am now the proud owner of a mean vegetable turning and slicing machine.

So I made these. It was very exciting and from now on everything we eat will be twirly whirly and crimped. Huzzah.

Fridge food

Sometimes the most random collection of bits and bobs from the fridge make the most yumptious (yes, I made up a word with as much gay abandon as I make up food. So sue me) meal.

Tonight's fridge searching conjured up this delicious plateful:

Aesthetics are not its strong point here, obvs, but it rates very highly on easy-peasiness, scrumminess, healthiness and therefore all round happiness.

I should probably explain what it all is:

Bits of ripped up chicken - we ALWAYS have a roast chicken about the place, we roast one every weekend, we're so rock and roast.

Some left over brown rice.

Some left over lentils from a Merchant Gourmand ready to eat packet just heated up

Some feta cheese

Half an avocado (always on hand here)

A rather random pile of chopped up courgette and potato with mint and apple sauce from a recipe I tried to follow that went very wrong but whose leftovers led to 3 really nice meals - this one included.  You can read about the intended recipe and subsequent inventions here.

Some random dill floating around the top sprinkled on top.

The unattractive beige mungey plop on the top is a tahini dressing made with tahini, olive oil and lemon juice.  There's also a smattering of tamari sauce going on in there too.

All in all it was extremely satisfying, very tasty and wholly wholesome.  It is quite carb heavy but we had been to the gym so no big bother there, and it's mostly slow release carbs.

Anyway, the point is, you don't always need to know what you're doing, or have a recipe, or some extravagantly laid out plan to get a decent meal on the plate.  Just root around and chuck some things at a plate and hey presto!

Idiocy and Invention

It could be said that the world's best inventions have not sprung into the world already fully formed and perfectly functioning.  Instead they tend to evolve through a process of failure and learning.

Or in other words, I tried to make something the other day that went spectacularly wrong, but I worked out why and made something even better out of the remnants. Go me!

I had seen Ella Woodward's courgette fritters on my Deliciously Ella app (sorry, can't find the recipe online to link to) and really wanted to give it a go.

You're supposed to grate a load of courgette and potato but in my infinite wisdom I decided that was too much work and too boring so I shredded them in a mini blender instead.

You're also supposed to squeeze out the liquid which was impossible and hurt my wrists (what a woofter).

Then you add mint and apple sauce.

Then I cursed and moaned because my mixture was rubbish and wouldn't stick together at all and all just fell apart in the frying pan.

Then I remembered a crucial piece of information that had been hiding in my brain and that I could have done with several moments earlier - blending stuff releases WAY more water than grating.  Oops.  Mega fail indeed.  Not only were my bits too small so there was nothing for it all to grab onto and bind itself around to make fritter shapes, it was all far too watery thanks to my stupid blending and my limp wrists.

Hey ho, lesson learned, dinner ruined.

NOT.  I chucked a whole load of it in a pan, patted it down and then cracked an egg on top to make a rather yummy fresh, minty courgette frittata thing.

WINNER!

There was still a load of mucked up courgettey mixture left so I put it in a tupperware and lo and behold another piece of info from the deep dark depths of my brain sprung forth...kitchen roll!  I placed a few sheets on top of the mixture before sealing the lid and popping in the fridge.

Next day, much of the liquid had now been absorbed by the paper towels so I mixed a load of it up with a packet of turkey mince, some dill and some worcestershire sauce, formed the (now sticking together) mixture into patties and fried/steamed them up into super delicious, light turkey burgers.  BOOM!

Another win.  I served them with the first thing ever made in my new spiraliser, courgette sort of sproingy things and cucumber noodles coated in herby oil I made by blitzing dill, mint, parsley, olive oil, lemon juice and seasalt in a blender.  Super yum!

The rest I just made into a sort of hash to go with a random plate of loveliness a day later.

So, thank you Ella for the inspiration.  I'm still not convinced the original recipe would ever have worked but I bow to your superior knowledge and experience.  When I can be bothered, I shall try again.  Properly this time!