Shoshiplatypus

A foodie WOYWW post this week! My desk has been my kitchen.

Cooking

Here are some of the things I’ve cooked this week.

I have been following Chef AJ on Youtube, the inventor of the Ultimate Weight Loss Program, who is a vegan chef who espouses the “SOS” diet – no salt, oil or sugar. We are not vegan, or even vegetarian, although we are eating considerably less meat these days than we used to. I certainly don’t go as far as Chef AJ, but as she always says, her programme is not an all-or-nothing affair. People can do as much as they want, and adopting any part of it makes your diet more healthy.

Her recipes are delicious, because she knows how to make humble vegetables extremely tasty. Her desserts are all sweetened with “the fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the whole fruit.” Having discovered this, I can now make desserts that my hubby and I can both enjoy. He was told a while back by our doctor to cut out any added sugar in his diet, if he is going to avoid going the way of many of his family members and developing type II diabetes. Since doing this, he is no longer anywhere near pre-diabetic and he says he really doesn’t miss it, but he does sometimes feel a bit deprived if he sees me tucking in to a nice sweet pudding with great enjoyment!

Chia Oat Pudding – my new go-to breakfast

Last week I discovered Chef AJ’s “Chia Oat Pudding.” I mentioned this in last week’s WOYWW post. I have just made another batch, and here are the ingredients.

This is now my go-to breakfast! I am delighted to report that my hubby doesn’t like it. All the more for me!

It is made with banana milk (a ripe banana blitzed with water) which is thickened with chia seeds, and flavoured with cinnamon and lemon juice, with some rolled oats to give it some tooth. The blueberries are stirred in and give it a gorgeous juiciness and colour. It is also supposed to have ground cardamom in it, but I haven’t got any yet – it should be arriving from Ebay in a day or two.

Another thing I am delighted about, is that I have discovered a use for over-ripe bananas – apart from putting in my hubby’s tummy!

I always buy them as under-ripe as possible, and the way I like to eat them is how they are on the left in the photo. The trouble is, they ripen so quickly, especially in the summer, and end up like the one on the right. Fortunately my hubby prefers them like this so they have never gone to waste. I’ve now discovered that the over-ripe ones are an excellent natural sweetener in recipes, and much better than unripe ones. Now I don’t mind how quickly they ripen!

Here is the Chia Oat Pudding in a Mason jar, ready to go in the fridge. The chia seeds will thicken it, and the colour will darken quite a bit as the frozen blueberries leach more juice into it.

It really is the most delicious stuff, and a fabulous way to start the day! There’s enough in the jar to last several days.

Chocolate Fudge Brownies

Last week I also discovered Chef AJ’s delicious healthy chocolate fudge brownies.

These are no-sugar, no-cook, and made of just three ingredients – nuts blitzed in the high-speed blender, dates and cocoa powder. Dates make an excellent natural sweetener too. I am planning to make some date syrup and also some date paste for cooking. These little brownies were made by pressing the mixture into one of my silicone moulds and chilled till they firmed up, and they are absolutely delicious. We had a friend for tea this week and I wanted to give her something she would enjoy, without compromising her diabetes.

Raspberry Vinegar

Last week I showed the start of my home-made raspberry vinegar. This is now bottled and ready for use. (Recycled Lidl maple syrup bottle.)

I took the photo on the kitchen counter near the window, so that the sun would shine through it and reveal its glorious ruby colour. I made enough for 1 1/2 bottles – not yet labelled. We used to buy raspberry vinegar in the supermarket years ago, but it seems to have gone out of fashion. It was great to find a recipe to make my own. This is gorgeous just drizzled onto green salad – a very simple, healthy dressing, full of summer flavour!

Vegetable stock and puree

Earlier this week I cooked up a whole pot full of vegetables in my new Ninja Foodi, using the pressure cooker facility. The veggies were pureed and frozen in ice cube trays and slightly larger silicone moulds, to be taken out as needed – these are vegetable bouillons. With the addition of some tomato powder and herbs, they are very flavoursome. The vegetable stock is also now in the freezer, some frozen in silicone moulds and some in larger containers, ready for soups, and different recipe ideas.

Vegetable pancakes

I made some of the puree into pancakes a couple of days ago. Just beating a couple of eggs into the vegetable puree makes a really good pancake batter, and they were delicious with some salad and a bit of Chef AJ’s “Yummy Sauce” which I make on a regular basis.

They are fairly fragile (like banana pancakes) so they are better made small so they don’t fall apart when you cook them.

Wholefood goodies

My latest occasional order from my favourite online wholefood shop has just arrived. I usually do a big order two or three times a year.

A lot of these ingredients are available in the supermarket, but only in over-priced small packets. I love to buy in bulk. The grains will generally keep for ages. Nuts, however, can go rancid if kept too long, but I find that if I freeze them, and then fill my small jars as required, they keep pretty well indefinitely. I’m really glad I’ve got the kitchen cupboards in Mum’s flat to store things in, because these days my pantry is full! I am trying to organise things a bit better in there, and I need to print off some new labels for my recycled coffee jars.

Now I’ve got some nice big bags of dates and almonds, I can make some date syrup and paste, and also start making some almond milk in my high-speed blender.

New blender attachment

Making the brownies, the worst part was chopping the dates. They are extremely sticky, and even with the shorter goblet on my high-speed blender, they were very difficult to get out. This week, I got myself the blender kit for my Veggie Bullet, and this should make things a bit easier. It’s the same as a Nutribullet, but it is a different size, designed to go on this machine as an attachment. I got my Veggie Bullet several years ago for rapid shredding and slicing if I’ve got a lot to do. To alternate between shredding and slicing, you simply flip the disc over. This machine is super-fast and a whole cabbage can be shredded in seconds! You just have to remember to put a large bowl under the spout. I forgot once. Ooops. Cabbage shooting out all over the place! It also has a spiraliser attachment, which I often use to make things like courgette spaghetti. There are other discs available too, such as angel-hair and ribbon slicers but I haven’t got those.

I haven’t tried the new blender kit yet, but I think it will be very convenient, and much easier to empty and clean.

Recipe Organisation – App Review

The other exciting development this week is that I have found a great app to organise my recipes. It’s called Paprika Recipe Manager 3. I got the app for my iPad, and also the full programme for the laptop, and you can set it up to sync between your devices. Here’s a screenshot of the home page on my laptop.

On the left you can see the customisable categories list. I’ve already added quite a few folders and sub-folders (e.g. “Sourdough” is a subfolder of “Bread”). On the far left are other options – you can use this to manage your stocks in the pantry and create shopping lists, and you can make meal planners and menus. There’s a built-in timer, and when you enter any timings in a recipe (e.g. “bake for 45 minutes at x deg. C”), the time will be clickable, and you can set the timer as you put the dish in the oven. You can put the source of each recipe with a hyperlink which will take you to the original website. As you can see, I haven’t put many recipes in yet, and not all have photos. I’ve created a useful “To Try” category where I can put any recipes of interest, and can find them easily and try them out before filing them elsewhere.

You can put a recipe in multiple categories. For example, Chef AJ’s Chia Oat Pudding is in the Breakfast, Chef AJ and Desserts categories. I discovered that if you have saved a recipe in multiple categories, if you subsequently edit the recipe, it is automatically edited in all destinations. Being able to edit the recipes is very useful. I usually end up changing something on a recipe – using a preferred ingredient, for example. Each recipe also has a section entitled “Notes” for any other information you might want to add.

The “Browser” button takes you to the Paprika site where you can search for online recipes. It gives you lots of popular recipe sites or you can do your own basic search. “Cloud Sync” backs everything up and syncs between your devices, and also in “Browser” are all the instruction manuals, etc. etc.

This is going to be an absolutely brilliant app for me. My recipes have got completely out of hand. I’ve been cooking for over 50 years and have so many! I’ve got all my recipe books, collected over the years, and I certainly won’t be getting rid of those. I may eventually copy my favourite ones from them into Paprika. Then I’ve got my A5 ring binder of recipes that I’ve printed out. This has got quite big, and it’s a pain because I have to keep printing stuff out in order to keep it anything near up to date. It has tabbed dividers to help me navigate but it’s so full that it takes far too long to find things. There are numerous scraps of paper tucked into it with scribbled down recipes waiting to be typed. I have also got all the typed ones saved in folders on my hard drive, along with some not yet typed out. Lastly, I have numerous recipes saved on Pinterest and Youtube. The hard part is remembering where individual recipes actually are, and I’ve been known to Google a recipe rather than trying to find it in my chaotic “system” because it’s quicker!!

I shall gradually update all this muddle into Paprika, and in the meantime, any new recipes will go straight in.

Another brilliant feature of the app on the iPad is that it automatically disables the tablet’s sleep mode. The recipe stays open no matter what, so you aren’t having to faff around restarting the iPad when your hands are covered with dough…

Someone’s really thought about all this!

Other creative stuff

I haven’t had time or energy after all that lot to be in the studio. Apart from the desk which is empty, the place is a tip, and I need about a week to sort it out. I am in the process of going through my stuff and weeding some of it out, so that I can pass it on to a good home. There are definitely projects in the pipeline (apart from my ever-growing list of UFOs) and I am keen to get back in there and get creating again. No further progress on the slippers this week, but I’ve ordered some more curved needles just in case anything happens to the only one I’ve got!

No kitty photos this week, I’m afraid. They’ve been doing their usual thing, and delighting everyone who has seen them. I also have no further news on the health front – still waiting for CT scan appointment. I am trying out a new brand of stoma bag, having been sent some samples, and so far so good – I think I may change brands! I never thought I would, but the new ones have some great features.

Have a great week, everybody.