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.

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.

How to Cook (and Enjoy) Broccoli Stems

Broccoli is my husband's favourite vegetable and we eat it incessantly. But I can't stand the little dark, curly leaves. And I think the stems taste like ick.

Thankfully a recipe from Ellie Krieger's cookbook Weeknight Wonders has come to my rescue. I have learned how to cook broccoli stems so that they are delicious. Yippee!

There are just two tricks:
1. cut away all but the sweet, inner portion of the stem, and
2. make sure the stems get the most heat while cooking.

Loaded Hummus Plate

It was my pick at Eating with Ellie this week and I selected a recipe from Ellie Krieger's cookbook for this loaded hummus plate. A good homemade hummus should be in every cook's repertoire; it's a revelation compared to supermarket hummus. Here's a classic hummus recipe of mine. I also like cauliflower hummus!

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!

Herb Salad with Goat's Cheese

I am terrible at using up the herbs that I buy in little plastic packets. And I am annoyed at myself for this. Often I will buy a pack of mint or parsley or coriander to use with a specific meal. Then I put the remaining herbs away thinking they will be just the things to sprinkle over a meal in a day or two. But then I forget. Later I realise I have a pack of leaves where half of them are already past using and the rest should maybe--no, definitely--be used right now.

Courgette, Corn, and Tomato Sautee

Fresh corn looses its sweet flavour soon after harvesting. I read (in The Vegetable Bible) that corn is past its best only a few hours after it is picked. I guess this explains why frozen corn often tastes so good. It is frozen immediately after harvest, thus preserving both nutrition and taste.

Cauliflower Gratin

Roasted cauliflower is just so deep, delicious, and nutty. If you grew up with wet, limp, boiled cualiflower, then roasting cauliflower will feel like a whole new vegetable. And to make it even more revelatory, add some caramelised onion, cream, and Gruyere cheese for a gorgeous cauliflower gratin.

This is a recipe from a magazine which said to mix store-bought caramelised onion relish with cauliflower florets, then top it with a mixture of cream and cheese. Since I couldn't find any store-bought relish, so I just made some caramelised onions the day before I wanted to make the gratin.

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.

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.)

Chez Panisse's Baked Goat's Cheese Saald

During our honeymoon we had one memorable meal. We were young and poor at the time, so we planned to have one fancy meal out during our week in Quebec City. We went to a restaurant called Toast near our auberge (inn). It was the most expensive meal either of us had eaten up to that point in life. (I seem to recall that it cost about $100. This was ten years ago, by the way.)

We still talk about some parts of that meal. We remember Anthony ordering a salad that came presented in a massive bowl that tilted the spinach leaves towards him. There was a piece of baguette balanced on the leaves, covered with two pieces of oozing, baked goat's cheese.

Cherry Tomatoes with Asian Greens and Garlic

I was having the kind of work day which I wished would end. I love my job is so many ways--I'm a teacher and I love my students and my subject. But I really don't like marking student notebooks. It's an essential part of my job and so I do it a lot. But I was having the kind of day in which success at marking had to be be achieved by comfort eating chocolate at the same time. Ugh.

By the time a class set of books were marked, I think I had eaten four mini bars of mint chocolate and three mini packs of M&Ms. My stomach felt awful but I was so relieved to be finished. I packed up and left from a twelve hour day. Dinner could be simple, since my husband was not going to be present. In the end, all I wanted to eat was a bowl of vegetables. Do you have days like this?

Daikon "Risotto" with Spinach, Feta, and Pine Nuts

I have so many ideas to share about how to eat more vegetables! Recently I have been replacing different parts of our meals with vegetables. Last week and this week I made vegetable "risotto". Last week I made turnip rice for a red wine risotto and this week I am sharing a recipe for daikon rice. Daikon is a little like radishes in taste and like a rolling pin in size. It is quite crunchy when raw and cooks up quickly. This risotto made an excellent weeknight meal.

Born Round by Frank Bruni [book review] & Italian Creamed Onions

I just finished reading Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite by Frank Bruni, a memoir by the former New York Times restaurant critic. It was very engaging to read about his American-Italian childhood. I was enraptured by the stories of the feasts his grandmother, aunts, and mother created for family events. Having a huge bounty of food was a sign of love in his family. Special occasions always merited a massive spread of food for the whole extended family. His grandmother even had two kitchens in her house, one in the basement for creating the plethora of dishes, and one upstairs for guests to marvel at how she cooked it all without leaving the kitchen in a disastrous mess. One of the dishes I made after reading about it was creamed onions.

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!)

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)