Detox green juice smoothie

Sometimes I don't fancy a smoothie for breakfast, but do fancy the nice healthy kick a smoothie gives me.

Today not only was a smoothie not on the cards but a hot cross bun was! But I wasn't happy about just having a hot cross bun which has pretty much no goodness in it whatsoever. That doesn't sit well with me. So, I decided to make a light, refreshing zingy green juicy smoothie to give me a full on health power punch before the less wholesome hot cross bun. 

I say juice smoothie because I used ingredients I would normally use for a green juice but rather than put them through the juice extractor, I put them in the blender. That way I get all the goodness, fibre and all, rather than just the juice. 

I used cold green tea rather than almond or any other milk to keep it light and fresh, and also added some coconut water to loosen it a bit.

Ingredients:

Cold green tea, probably about 2 cups (I just poured it in). We get  2 litre bottles of Ohi Ocha Ryokucha Japanese green tea off Amazon but you could just make some green tea with a tea bag and leave it to go cold!
2 big generous handfuls spinach
1 apple cored and sliced. I used pink lady as they're my favourite
A decent thumb sized chunk of ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
About half a cup of coconut water. I use Vita Coco which you can get in most supermarkets.

The actual liquid and amounts thereof you can play with until you're happy with it.

Whizz the spinach and liquid up first to make sure it's all properly blended otherwise you end up with chunks of spinach in it still.  Then add the apple and whizz that, then the ginger.  I added the coconut water as it was blending at this point as I noticed it was a bit thicker than I wanted it.

Fresh, light, zingy, healthy and yummy.  It needs a quick stir every now and again if you don't drink it all immediately as the liquid separates.  There were also a few little ginger fibres every now and again but not enough to put me off making it again.  Hopefully it will help sort out my snuffles too as I've rather had enough of feeling snotty this week now thank you!

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!