Chickpeas, Carrots, Courgettes and Snap Peas

I spent the last nine days in London and had the pleasure of seeing many friends for the first time in years. We don't travel through London regularly, so it has been eight years since my husband and I were there together. Most of my friends asked about this blog, since my food blogging was at its peak when we were living in London and I was cooking for them. My change in job has led me to blog very little these last few years, but I still enjoy cooking (and eating) healthy food.

While in London I bought the new Yotam Otoolenghi cookbook, Simple. I have cooked several Ottolenghi recipes before -- they were delicious and inventive, though not simple. The recipes in this new cookbook contain fewer ingredients, are more quickly produced, and are easier to make ahead. I am really excited about trying out many recipes!

I arrived home and had to rustle up some food for myself (Anthony is staying on to work in London another few days). This meal was inspired by a recipe from the new book, but the welcome-home emptiness of the fridge meant that most of the ingredients were substitutes.

Pad Thai Salad

I like Thai food because of its fresh flavours. I love the zesty lime, crisp carrots and bean sprouts, and the crunchy peanuts.

As I was making this pad Thai salad I realised that it's actually quite similar to the coleslaw with which I grew up in Canada - the base is just shredded vegetables. Then there's a sauce and some add-ins. (And almost all of my cooking has a formula not unlike this.)

As I was slicing the mint and basil for the pad Thai, my mind was constructing this table. Suddenly the superiority of pad Thai salad over coleslaw became obvious!

Carrot and Cashew Soup

I was intrigued by this soup recipe in which the cashews are blended into a carrot soup. It reminds me of things my vegan friends do. Cashews seem to do everything creamy in the vegan world. For example, my friend Michael blends it up to make cheese as the basis for cheesecake. Also, he blends up cashews with water and vanilla extract to make a cream for breakfast parfaits. Cashews can be made to make ranch dressing. So why not use cashews in soup? You don't have to be a vegan to enjoy new uses for an ingredient!

Pork Banh Mi Lettuce Cups

Anthony and I spent a weekend in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam a couple of years ago. Today's Eating with Ellie recipe is Vietnamese Pork Banh Mi sandwiches, and it brought back memories of our trip.

Seaweed, Ginger, and Carrot Salad

After a recent knee injury, I have started taking swimming lessons. Until last October, I was a keen long-distance runner. Then I had quite a bad injury that put me on crutches for eight weeks. (I wrote about my first social outing with crutches here.) I'm still not able to run, though I have managed to cycle three times in the last few months.

On my physiotherapist's advice, I needed to take up a sport that has a lower impact on my knees. I never learned to swim as a child, so I have just started a series of lessons.

Shredded Salad with Dukkah Dressing

Dukkah is an Egyptian blend of nuts, seeds, and spices. It is usually used in Egypt with a bowl of olive oil for dipping hunks of bread. The dukkah mixture is made from toasted hazelnuts and sesame seeds, and the flavouring comes from cumin and coriander, also toasted.

Cumin and coriander seeds are "more likely to be found together than apart" in Middle Eastern cooking, according to The Flavour Thesaurus by Nikki Segnit (see my review of this astoundingly useful book). The brightness of coriander seeds offsets the dustiness of the cumin. Together with the nuts and seeds, they make an interesting and versatile mixture. I haven't been to Egypt yet, so I'm happy that this dukkah let me pretend for a while.

Thai Basil and Cashew Stir-Fry

Sometimes my body just craves a big pile of vegetables. One of these days was last week during my half term holidays. After ten weeks at school my body was run down and seeking nutrients. What I needed was more sleep, less stress, and some highly healthy food.

In the past I have arrived at my half term break on the verge of illness. Many years I have made it to the Saturday after school ends and succumbed to a cold or the flu. I have laid on the couch and dribbled away my holiday.

Roasted Carrot and Garlic Dip

Carrots are my favourite vegetable and I even contemplated photographing this carrot dip with carrot sticks for dipping. Because that is indeed one of the ways I ate it! But for this photo, I made cucumber dippers. My friend Michael showed me how to cut cucumber on a steep diagonal to make perfect chip-sized dippers. I am always looking for more ways to make vegetables feel like a natural part of fun eating. Cucumber dippers and carrot dip are great examples of fun vegetables!

And so there is no need for chips and salsa at your next snack attack or movie night. If you are searching for ways to eat more vegetables, try this easy carrot dip with veggie dippers. It's also good with sweet pepper strips, celery sticks, or even rectangles of the ribs of Chinese cabbage. (I have tried this and it was superb!)

Carrot and Daikon Fritters

Daikon is also called Chinese radish. The one pictured here is medium sized; they can be as small as a carrot and as large as a baseball bat. If you see one at an Asian market or farmer's market, buy one that is shiny and medium sized or smaller.

Daikon taste a lot like red radishes. Their larger size make them ideal for cutting into batons or matchsticks or grating. (Peel them first.) They are a brilliant dipper for creamy cauliflower hummus. You can also use them as a salad ingredient, especially with a lemon- or vinegar-based dressing.

Chilli Chicken Wraps

I always enjoy the recipes from our Wednesdays with Donna Hay blogging group. Memorably, we have made feta and eggplant meatballs (the best meal I have ever cooked) and spinach with sesame dressing (the recipe with the fastest cooking time on this blog). This week's recipe is from a book I don't own: Off the Shelf by Donna Hay. My fellow blogging friends kindly offered to send me details, but I decided to take a gamble this week and make it up!

Quick Carrot Pickles

Oh, the Olympics! I love them. Summer Olympics are great, but I like the winter games best. I'm Canadian! We've got five channels of Olympics and I'm flicking between them with glee. I want to watch hockey, speed skating, figured skating. curling, snowboarding, biathlon, moguls; oh, all of it!

Tonight I'm watching curling. You know, there is so much strategy and skill involved. The players have microphones so you can hear them discussing their strategies--sometimes that is the best part. It's amazing that they can throw those heavy rocks down the ice sheet with such precision.

Weekend Links #33

Weekend Links is a way of sharing all the engrossing things I see around the internet. I publish Weekend Links approximately every two weeks. As usual, I welcome your ideas and feedback.

food reading links:
--Looking back on Elizabeth David's legacy (from the Observer Food Monthly). She has been described as the UK's "first lady of food" thanks to her 1950s cookbooks lauding fresh, mediterranean ingredients.
--Eating healthfully is easier when you have a bigger reason to do it than for yourself. Enter a Christian reason to serve God with your diet (from The Atlantic). The article also compares the church to Weight Watchers.
--The comments in this short article from The Kitchn elaborate on what "clean as you go" really means for a messy cook.

image source: My New Roots

A Three-Star Lunch at Caprice

My husband and I went for the set lunch at Caprice this weekend. It's a three Michelin-starred restaurant in the Four Seasons hotel in Hong Kong. The view looks out over Hong Kong harbour.

We had three courses with a glass of wine. Allow me to describe each in a bit of detail.

Starter: chilled tomato consomme with mozzarella and tomato cocktail

Pork and Shiitake Mushrooms in Lettuce Cups

Using my hands to eat seems to make the meal more fun. Don't you think? There is something about picking up the food that makes it so much more enjoyable. Except perhaps on a date, when I inevitably spill sauce down my wrists and into my sleeves. Or at a fancy restaurant when my sharp elbows pointing out at the neighbouring table make me feel conspicuously out of place. But at home I can eat with my fingers and let the sauce drip where it may.

Roasted Aubergine Dip

I am a veg-aholic. You may already know that I am in love with vegetables. That's why I started this blog. I think more people should become crazy veg-lovers! My main goal with this blog is to inspire other people to love vegetables - because I think they can be really versatile and delicious.

A lot of the people I meet have had bad experiences with vegetables. For example, have you tasted overcooked, mushy carrots with your school dinners? Or foul smelling boiled cauliflower, blanketed in bland sauce? There are some atrocious vegetable dishes out there!

Carrot Salad with Spiced Bacon Topping

Here's the easy kind of food I like to make and eat. This is just some chopped vegetables and a bacon topping. But it tastes special because the bacon is fried with garlic and a few aromatic spices in butter.

Carrots and courgettes (zucchini) are such simple and cheap vegetables, but I really love finding ways to make them seem new again. I chopped them into tiny pieces in my food processor, and made this little bacon topping to go with them. There's just enough butter to coat the vegetables very lightly; you may like a bit more butter or olive oil. I ate the whole lot for lunch one afternoon.

Thanks for Visiting!

Hello, friends! This is just a short, personal note to say thanks for visiting Simply Cooked, or liking us on Facebook. In the last four months the blog has had over 10,000 page views each month! This is a huge milestone for me and I'm so excited. Plus, there are more than 300 people subscribed to the blog by email or RSS feed.


My next goal is to increase the interactivity on the Simply Cooked Facebook page. I think it could be a great place to share easy, tasty recipe ideas. Anyone can post there, so I hope you will. Next time you find something interesting around the web, please share it with the Simply Cooked community by posting it there. Or share your kitchen ideas.

How to Write Recipes to Make Cooking Easier - Carrot and Apple Muffins

I was making carrot and apple muffins for my colleagues. Every muffin recipe uses two bowls and the recipe is always much the same. Wet ingredients go in one bowl, dry in another. They are combined with a few strokes, then the batter is dropped into the muffin tins and baked. Muffins are designed to be easy; hence the reason I make them so frequently. But the recipe I was (roughly) following for the muffins was making the process harder.

Weekend Links #25

Weekend Links is a way of sharing all the engrossing things I see around the internet. I publish Weekend Links approximately every two weeks. As usual, I welcome your ideas and feedback.

food reading links:
--The University of California at Berkely has been running a course this semester called Edible Education. All the lectures have been videoed and are available online for free. Listen to lectures by Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, and others.
--A review of the film Toast, about food writer Nigel Slater's childhood (from Lettuce Eat Kale). I am very much looking forward to seeing this.
--Ten tips to manage mindless eating (from Casual Kitchen). What strategies do you have (or need)?

Chickpea and Carrot Salad with Japanese-Inspired Carrot Dressing

When I go food shopping I try to always pick up something new (to me). Otherwise it can be much too boring to go shop for food time after time. I recently came home with a little bottle of shichimi togarashi, a Japanese spice blend made with seaweed.