Rich and Creamy Eggnog

Even living in Singapore, when December starts, I am ready for the comforting winter items of my childhood. Eggnog tops the list. (Further down the list are hot chocolate, warm apple cider, stews, and pumpkin dishes.)

Eggnog is not common in Singapore, though, so I have to make my own. And so I chose this eggnog recipe, from Mark's Daily Apple. It has less sugar (and hence tastes less sweet) than any commercial version. This means I can drink more of it - and with abandon - yippee! December beverages are sorted and lots of eggnog lattes are coming my way.

Pumpkin Pasta with Walnuts and Lemon

This unusual dish caught my eye because of the combination of ingredients I wouldn't have thought went together: walnuts, pumpkin, cream, sage, and citrus zest. I can perhaps imagine putting three of these things together (pumpkin, cream, and sage, maybe; or walnuts, pumpkin, and sage) but all of them at once sounded delicious.

Combinations like this characterise Yottam Ottolenghi's recipes for me. They are unexpected puzzle pieces that you suddenly know will fit together perfectly into an incredible dish.

Zucchini Noodles with Rocket, Lemon, and Capers

People are always asking me how I eat so many vegetables. Today I am going to share with you one of my tricks. I adapted this pasta recipe from a published Donna Hay recipe. Regular readers already know one trick that I used: I replaced the spaghetti with zucchini (courgette) noodles. But today I want to talk about another trick.

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.

Breakfast Parfait with Grain-Free Muesli

Let’s talk about your first name. Do you like it? Have you ever fantasized about changing it? My parents have often told me that they couldn't agree on my first name. My mother wanted to call me Juliana and my dad wanted Elizabeth. In the end they called me Sarah.

Sometimes I have imagined myself with Juliana or Elizabeth as my name. I think as Juliana I might be more of a romantic--it has a fairy tale ring to it. Elizabeth, meanwhile, sounds regal. I think it might fit with my slightly stoic personality. I would never have been a Lizzie, though, that seems too casual for my sincere side.

Easy Grain-Free Blueberry Muffins

I have noticed that the food I make myself just seems to taste better. I know this is a very selfish thing to say. In fact, this kind of selfishness is quite common. We humans overvalue the things we make for ourselves. For example, that Ikea furniture that we put together. It's not the greatest furniture ever but assembling it adds to its value for us.

I was reading about this in Dan Ariely's book The Upside of Irrationality. "Pride of creation and ownership runs deep in human beings." Ariely says that creating food is a good example of this. Even semi-homemade items taste better to us: steps such as adding some herbs to a bottled pasta sauce, mixing curry paste with chicken pieces, or adding eggs to a cake mix. These at-home adjustments give us a feeling of agency over our food, and hence the food tastes better to us.

But often homemade really does taste better, right? It's not just psychology that fresh from the oven muffins taste better than store bought. Adding fresh chopped parsley to a bottled sauce does, indeed, make it taste more fresh. (Although there is a line beyond which I don't think this is true; adding eggs to a cake mix may not actually taste better than a not-at-all homemade factory cake.)

Pumpkin and Sage Pasta

I was at the Singapore National Museum last week and I saw these watches on display. They are designed by Hanson Ho and Matteo Colella. The placard said that the watches explore "the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative aspects of time." The hour, minute, and second hands are all the same length. This "allows for both the absolute and arbitrary reading of time, catering to the needs of the various contexts and situations."

Ask Sarah: Nine Grain-Free Quiche Crusts

Ask Sarah is an occasional series answering readers' questions. This time it's actually a question from my sister-in-law! It's a question I have been pondering for some time, so I've shared it here as well.

Anna asked: "Hello lovely! I'm looking at quiche pie crust recipes so that I can make and freeze quiche now for Christmas. I know that you are restricting your wheat-flour intake, and I'm wondering if you've found a savoury pie crust recipe that I might use. ;) Let your Pinterest finger wander!"

Ah, Pinterest! It is so addictive. But actually a great way to save and organise great ideas. "Creative vegetables" is my favourite board to pin. Recently I have started whole separate boards for kitchen design and for home office ideas. Do you use Pinterest?

creative vegetables | healthy sweet stuff | food photo inspiration

And quiche! How wonderful that we can look forward to some at Christmas. Since going grain-free I have seen numerous good ideas for quiche that avoid wheat flour crusts. (Some are bizarre.) Which of these would you eat?

Caramelised Cherry Tomatoes

Caramelised cherry tomatoes, otherwise known as my new easiest side dish. I have started a new job and I am working much longer hours than before. I have to admit that I gave up on cooking for a while. I bought fast food from the train station and enlisted the nearby delivery restaurants to keep us fed for a month. But too much food cooked outside my own kitchen starts to taste strange after a while. Enter: this laughably easy dish.

I bought some white fish to pan fry since that's a fast main dish. Then I added this Donna Hay recipe for caramelised cherry tomatoes. The idea is really that you pan fry some chicken or fish and remove it. Then deglaze the pan for two minutes with balsamic vinegar and halved cherry tomatoes. Then serve. That is all! Cooking the tomatoes add only two minutes to the overall time of making dinner. I served it on some courgette noodles (they were raw, and the balsamic juices warmed them a bit). That's the kind of fast food I need right now.

Weekend Links #37

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

food reading links:
--A long article I have been reading about fueling a marathon while eating paleo (from Ben Greenfield Fitness). And here's another take from Mark's Daily Apple.
--While we're on the topic of sports nutrition, I was reading about a couple who are rowing from California to Hawaii without sugar or "junk carbohydrates" (from Diet Doctor).
--A great post from A Veggie Venture that answers the question, "What is a tomatillo?" plus everything you need to know about them.
--Just before our three weeks away from home I was freezing everything left in the fridge and discovered you can even freeze quiche and tortilla chips (from The Kitchn).

recipe links:
--Macaroni and cheese made with Guinness, heavy cream, lots of cheese, and some crunchy barley (from Mutineer Magazine). What a combination!
--Ginger and chocolate ice cream (from Blogging Over Thyme). I love everything ginger, and pairing it with dark chocolate is perfect.
--I was investigating grain-free Yorkshire pudding recently and found a recipe (from The Saffron Girl) that looks like it is worth trying.
--The flaxseed crust on these mini quiches is a useful recipe to have on standby (from The Kitchn). Plus, mini quiches are good for breakfasts.

Banana Nut Porridge (grain-free)

I love sweet breakfast foods like pancakes, muffins, and porridge with fruit. But I am trying to eat less sugar and I have been mostly grain-free for about a year. As a result, I now have a good arsenal of low sugar (or sugar-free) and grain-free breakfast recipes. They still satisfy my sweetish tooth and give me the fat and protein I need at breakfast.

Here are some of my sweet breakfast ideas:

• this banana nut porridge (pictured above, recipe below) has a whole egg whisked in the near the end of cooking, plus it is grain-free and has no sugar added
• these banana coconut flour pancakes, the recipe for which is given as a formula based on how many ripe bananas you have on hand
• these pumpkin and cranberry muffins, which are made with fresh or frozen cranberries and coconut flour, with pumpkin puree for moisture
• this apple and cinnamon mini cake, which is made in the microwave and takes about five minutes including the preparation
• this mango, banana, and coconut loaf, which introduced me to the idea of sugar-free eating (not grain-free)

Grain-Free Banana Pancakes

People are always asking me how I eat without grains. I have stopped eating any wheat, rice, oats or other grains. It was an experiment last year that really paid off in terms of my digestive health and energy levels. I'm not intolerant to any of these items, but I have come to believe that my body (and most others) are not designed to handle grains.

I get asked especially about breakfast. Breakfast food is full of grains: cereal, toast, pancakes, waffles, and muffins. Lots of times I avoid grains at breakfast by avoiding these foods. Instead I eat a lot of eggs and vegetables. Scrambled eggs with some green beans on the side. A salad with a hard boiled egg. Two fried eggs plus the leftover broccoli from last night.

But I also make grain-free versions of all our favourite breakfast items.

Simply Cooked's Best of 2013

Most Popular Posts

My most visited posts this year were all posts written before this year. I'm a little surprised that the top five are not more recent ones. But there are some classically helpful posts in this list, and that is what visitors to Simply Cooked are looking for (and finding!).

How to Cook Perfect Quail's Eggs

The largest amount of searchers come to Simply Cooked looking for instructions on how to hard boil perfect quail's eggs. This post was visited more than 90,000 times in 2013, which is more than double the visits for any other post.

Light Box for Food Photography: Step-by-Step



The post giving instructions for how to build a light box was written in 2010, and was my first widely popular post. It was also a turning point for my photography since with better lighting I was able to take much, much better pictures. If you don't yet have a light box, make one soon.

Brussels Sprouts with Lemon and Almonds

I found some beautiful Brussels sprouts at a grocery store near me. What a treat in Singapore - they are definitely not local food. These few sprouts cost me S$6.24, which is approximately GBP 3.25 or US$5. I made sure to enjoy every bite! I made them into my lunch: brussels sprouts with lemon, garlic, and almonds from Donna Hay's website.

Since coming to Singapore I bought my first Donna Hay cookbook! I've long admired Hay's simple food and absolutely beautiful styling. Below is the sort of image for which she is famous - this is from a recipe on her website for bacon and roasted tomato omelette. I love this photo because it is a very straightforward picture, not fussy, but nicely composed and inviting. Hay is also famous for this pale blue colour, just click through her website to see how prevalent it is. I am sometimes a bit in awe of blue in food photos; it's not at all common and hard to get right. All my photos with blue backgrounds look a bit sickly.

Simple But Impressive Stuffed Peppers

I used to believe that stuffing a pepper (or mushroom, or squash) was a waste of time. And pretentious. Why bother with something that takes extra time and looks so ridiculous? Yet recently I have changed my tune.

I have come to believe that stuffing a pepper makes an easy meal look more impressive than it is. It's so easy to do. First, turn the oven on and cut some peppers in half. Put them into the roasting dish and into the oven while it heats. Meanwhile, scramble fry some meat and vegetables. Then pour the mixture into the hot peppers; top with cheese. Return the peppers to the oven to melt the cheese and voila! Impressive dinner!

Pumpkin and Cranberry Muffins (Grain-Free)

What I love about cranberries is the way they make my mouth pucker. My teeth pop them open and the acidic juice quirts out. Just thinking about eating one of these muffins is making my saliva start to run. Does that happen to you when you think about eating sour foods?

Riced Cauliflower

This recipe is affectionately known as "cauli rice" in my house. It's a rice substitute that I eat all the time, most recently with beef chilli and chicken curry.

Cauli rice is very mild and neutral tasting - just like rice. It is just finely chopped cauliflower, pan-fried in butter until translucent or a little charred. It's a very simple backdrop to a spicier main dish.

Apple and Cinnamon Mini Cake

Of course I collect the "MoneyBack" points that my local grocery store offers, since I visit the shop every day or two. Do you collect points? But what do you do with all those points? Well, I was just ridiculously excited when I saw that MoneyBack was doing a Le Creuset promotion. I redeemed all the points I had for two small stoneware bowls and two mini casserole dishes. I didn't really need any new kitchen items, but they were just so beautiful!

Pumpkin Custard

This delicious gluten-free and grain-free dessert is so simple. It's basically a healthy, whole food pumpkin pie without a crust. It's a one-bowl procedure to whisk together the ingredients and then the custard bakes away quietly for almost an hour. It emerges from the oven with wafts of cinnamon and warm pumpkin. It's great alone or topped with coconut cream or a sprinkle of spices.

Coconut and Nut Snack Bowl

This simple snack bowl has got me through many sugar cravings. I have found that cinnamon and coconut are both tastes that I find sweet, even when there is no sweetener involved. This lovely little bowl contains almond butter, coconut oil, flaked coconut, and some walnuts, all sprinkled with cinnamon.

It was Sarah Wilson who first put me onto cinnamon and coconut. The added cup of chai tea makes it even better. I have been eating variations of this snack in the afternoons and also as a "dessert"; my main sugar cravings are mid-afternoon and late evening after dinner.