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.

Evening to morning quinoa

I've written about quinoa before and how much I love it.  If you haven't tried it, do.  It works like a sort of couscous/rice type thing but is actually a high protein grain and is more closely related to spinach and beetroot than any actual cereal.  It's nutritionally better for you than other cereals and grains too being high in amino acids.  It's now very readily accessible in pretty much all supermarkets too.

Anyway, I decided to make a quinoa, kale, avocado and chicken salad for dinner last night by lightly wilting some kale leaves in coconut oil, chopping up an avocado and tearing some chicken off a ready roasted one we made earlier in the week, and mixing it all into about a cup of freshly made quinoa (see my earlier Quinoa Queen post about how to cook it nicely).  For a dressing I put 1 tspn miso paste, a few drizzles of tamari sauce (a wheat free soy sauce type thing, also readily available), a small drizzle of olive oil, a splash of water and the juice of 2 lemon wedges in a jar and shook it all up.  I drizzled that and mixed it all up together, served and sprinkled on a few parmesan shavings and walnuts.  That was it! It made 2 portions.

But, I'd purposefully made too much quinoa in the first place which mean that I had more than enough for my breakfast this morning too.

That might sound odd, but quinoa makes a lovely porridge type dish.

All I did for breakfast was add 1/2 cup of the cooked quinoa to a pan with about 1/2 cup coconut milk - not the canned type, the stuff in cartons as a milk alternative.  You can use almond milk or anything really but I fancied coconut today.  Then basically just heat it up for a bit.  The milk won't all get absorbed but it will gradually turn a bit creamier.  Towards the end of the cooking time I also added the juice of half a lime (don't forget to roll the lime on the counter top first to make it easier to get the juice out) to complement the coconut. And that's it!


You can top with what you like but I used a few different berries, 1/2 a magnesium rich, seratonin inducing banana, a drizzle of pure maple syrup, a spoonful of greek yogurt and a few walnuts for extra crunch and added omega 3, ALA and any number of other wonderful walnutty healthy benefits.

It tastes like a cross between rice pudding and porridge with a bit more bite and is lovely and sweet and creamy but without being heavy or stodgy.

So, there we go, quinoa 2 ways from dinner to breakfast.  Now, what's for lunch...

Blackberry cake of extreme yumminess

We've gone all a bit hedgerow happy recently. Alex has been busy making sloe gin and today we added a modest but plump and juicy blackberry harvest to our supplies.

I decided, in part inspired by the great British bake off no doubt, I'd like to make these blackberries into a cake of some description. A sugarless, eggless, flourless cake to be precise. A sugarless, eggless, flourless cake that tasted of coconut and almonds to be even more precise.

No pressure then! Piece of cake - well, hopefully. 

So I searched on the interweb for AGES and found nothing I liked. So, I gave up and decided to make it up myself. 

Anybody who knows baking knows this is not a wise plan. Baking is a very precise, scientific thing requiring just the right ratios of this that and the other. 

Anybody who knows gluten free, vegan, sugar free baking knows the above applies, and some. 

Anybody who knows me and my style of cooking will be expecting the worst here - I don't like measuring and fiddling about. I like chucking things in and seeing what happens. 

So I had found a recipe after all - a recipe for disaster!

HOWEVER what I managed to create was one of the most delishscrumpdyplumptious things ever EVER.

I'd love to tell you the recipe or how I did it, but I didn't write it down!

It went a bit like this:

Combine 1 cup spelt flour, 2tbs flaxseed, 1tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, cinnamon. Then I chucked 'some' ground almonds, coconut flour and dessicated coconut at it too. 

In another bowl mush up a banana, add 1 cup coconut milk, 1 cup ( ish ) apple purée and some pure maple syrup. Melt some coconut oil and add that in along with some vanilla extract and almond essence. Bung in the blackberries. 

Stir the whole lot together and chuck more wet stuff at it if it looks like it needs it. 

Told you my version was very scientific!

I baked it in a loaf tin at 180 for 35mins but it was still a bit wobblesome so I ended up cooking it for another 15 mins odd. Then left it to cool for 10mins before taking it out and stuffing it in mouth as it was SO nice. 

 Gooey, moist, sweet and fruity. Delicious on its own or with Greek yogurt. Yum yum yum and no sugar or lardy nasties in sight. 

I am really rather proud of this but expect I shall never be able to recreate it again! If anyone else manages it do let me know. :). 

A date with dates

WOW!

There are no words to describe how absolutely delicious the smoothie I just made was.

I was lying in bed perusing my pinterest board trying to decide what to have for breakfast.  Give the smoothies a rest and just have berries and greek yogurt?  Try the fruit salad with avocado that a good friend recommended to me yesterday on the back of my avocado post? Some variety of clever gluten/egg/etc free pancake?  Something to do with the coyo (yogurt made with coconut milk) that Alex bought me home yesterday (SO excited to try that), a wholemeal bagel with peanut butter (may have overindulged a tad last night, not sure the berries are quite going to cut it!)...

Then I remembered a whole heap of recipes I've seen using dates recently and that I had bought some the day before to experiment with a few, so I ended up settling on this recipe for a banana, date and almond shake on DeliciouslyElla.

Woah Wah Wee Wah!

Translated as gosh, that really was incredibly yummy.

You can follow the link above for the actual recipe.

As per usual, I didn't really bother with the whole recipe, measuring thing.  I had a brief glance at the ingredients then just sort of went from there.  I had actually run out of almond milk so I substituted with coconut milk...not the stuff in a tin, you can buy it in cartons like almond milk, soya etc as a dairy alternative.  Alpro have just started doing one available in supermarkets but there are several other brands such as Koko.  I bought some maca powder yesterday having never tried it before so seeing the recipe suggested adding some for added energy, and feeling in need of any help I can get in that area thanks to a busy week, not sleeping so well and mild over indulgence last night, I went for it.

When I first made it using the ingredients suggested, I found it quite runny (I may have used too much milk given I couldn't be bothered to get the measuring cup out to do it accurately!), so I added half a trusty avocado which not only added a few more super nutrients, but also made it super thick and creamy.

Good enough for an early morning, unwashed, no make-up selfie!

I have to tell you, it was so so delicious.  If, like me and my brother, you used to (pah, who am I kidding? Still do!) like licking the bowl/spoon when mum made cakes, then you will LOVE this.  I'm not joking, it tasted exactly like that gorgeous indulgent cake mix taste.  It didn't last very long in my glass!

The only thing is, I'm not as convinced health wise about this one.  I know the ingredients are all very good for you and are full of lots of lovely healthful benefits but I'm a little bit funny about any kind of dried fruit because of the high sugar content, so coupled with the sugar from the banana and the fat from both the nut butter and avocado (which admittedly I added myself), it certainly doesn't pack as much of a healthful punch as the green smoothies I normally drink.  To be honest I don't really mind the fat bit, but I'm not so keen on eating so much sugar first thing in the morning.

So, I think this one will be for occasional guilt free indulgence as opposed to an every day staple.

I already know that next time I have a craving for some kind of oreo milkshake or some such other naughty concoction, I will be getting out the blender and making this instead...I might even experiment with adding some cacao next for a chocolatey kick...