Yellow Courgette Spaghetti and Is Raw Food That Good for Everyone?

Take one courgette....

 

Make it into spaghetti with a julienne peeler....

Add runner bean and tomato salad....

Grate some Gran Padano on top (god I love this cheese)...

Et voila, a nearly raw dish!

When I was reading about different people's recipes involving courgette spaghetti, I was surprised that no one cooked it. I mean obviously the raw foodies weren't going to, but...no one? And they were all saying how it was JUST LIKE NOODLES, just as good if not better! YAY!

Well, I didn't personally agree. It felt healthy, and crunchy crispy vegetabley, but not that satisfying. And most importantly, it wasn't bendy enough to twizzle around a fork in a satisfying way!

So I remade this recipe, or one similar, but a cooked version:

I fried up an onion.
I added some runner beans and cooked them for a couple of minutes.
I added some fresh tomatoes from the greenhouse. Big ugly ones.
I let this accept the fact it was going to soon be a pasta sauce (only about 5-7 minutes).
I made another courgette into spaghetti with my julienne peeler.
I added the spaghetti on top of the sauce, put a lid on and let it steam for a few minutes.
I then mixed it up a bit, topped it with some medallions of mozzarella and grilled it.

It was divine. Although not as photogenic. I felt full, and like I'd gained some energy.

I'm coming to a place of reevaluation. Recently I've been getting into raw and unprocessed foods, and getting very excited about them, and reading up on the wonderful natural benefits foods contain. I've been having Earthsprout's Greenylicious Smoothie for breakfast, tasty salads for lunch and eating Sarah B's Life Changing Loaf of Bread in my lunches. I've been cutting out white flour and sugar as much as I can and trying to eat nuts and pulses instead of meat.

And I've lost weight. Which I know a lot of people would be happy with but I'm pretty skinny and I didn't want to and it doesn't look good. The thing about eating like this is that it reduces my appetite, but also doesn't make me feel particularly satisfied (but the thoughts of all the vitamins, minerals, omega 3s etc are very satisfying!). And it's made me remember what I knew before I got so into it - that different diets are right for different bodies.

Some people look voluptuous and healthy on a vegan diet. Some people look gaunt and awful on a vegan diet and their bodies could use some animal protein. Some people feel much better on raw food. I think I need a decent amount of cooked food and I need good amounts of CAARBS! With a decent helping of some sort of protein and fat to keep my blood sugar on an even keel. The way I feel after a big load of (gluten free) spaghetti with lentil Bolognese is amazing! I have so much energy and my brain works faster. They have the opposite effect on lots of people - a friend of mine says lots of them make him feel sleepy and lethargic.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not giving up on raw food and soaking nuts and making smoothies - I've just accepted that it can't be the only stuff I eat.

...Although I suppose if in decades to come I need to shed some pounds, I'll know what to do!

Blackcurrant Frangipane Tart

 
My mum is amazing! I came home to this - blackcurrant frangipane tart. She even did gluten free pastry.

It looks pretty and summery and it tastes like pure comfort food.

 
Recipe:

• Pastry - see Coconut Cream Pie recipe 
• 125g blackcurrants, washed, topped and tailed
•  1 egg
• 1 egg white
•  170g sugar
• 100g ground almonds
• 70g butter, room temperature
• A pinch of salt
• 170ml milk

1. Oven to 190°C. Butter a 24cm (9½in) round ovenproof dish.

2. Make the pastry case.

3. Blind bake it.

4. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy

5. Add the almonds, egg and egg white and mix

6. Stick mixture into the pastry case

7. Scatter blackcurrants on top

8. Bake for 40 minutes until golden and firm.

It is divine with some sort of creamy yoghurt, Rachel's Gooseberry Yoghurt was perfect.

Yes that is another home-grown runner bean salad...

Runner Bean Salad

I picked my first little bunch of beans today!

 

And I knew just the sort of thing I wanted to do with them....and it turned out really tasty, so here's the recipe.

Ingredients (serves two):

Pesto ingredients:
handful of fresh basil
half a handful of pine nuts
half a clove of garlic
teensy bit of fresh chilli
olive oil
sea salt
wholegrain mustard (optional)

Main stuff:
some runner beans
some uber-tasty little tomatoes
leaves if you want them: lettuce, rocket, etc
half a handful of pine nuts

 
First, make the pesto: I used a pestle and mortar because it was far too small a quantity to put in the blender.
1. chop up the basil leaves finely
2. chop up the garlic and the little bit of chilli finely
3. mash up the pine nuts with a bit of olive oil...

 
4. Mash the whole lot together with some sea salt...

 
5. Chop the beans up a bit and blanch them in boiling water for 4 minutes - you want them to still have a crunch.

6. Strain and let cool for 5 - 10 minutes. Meanwhile dry fry the pine nuts to very very lightly toast them.

7. Mix some or all of the pesto into the beans, and mix the halved tomatoes in too.

8. Leaves, beans and tomatoes, pine nuts. Easy.

Almond Chicken Curry

The internet is the best thing that ever happened to me in the way of learning to cook. Don't get me wrong - I think with absolutely everything becoming digital, we can become disconnected from grounding, earthy things - we don't even need to speak or even message someone to find out what they're doing, let alone go and visit and hug them, we already know it all from their facebook feed. When was the last time you had a spare 15 minutes with nothing useful to do - did you ponder about life and death or draw something, or did you check your emails?

 

But I think cooking is a creative, come down to earth thing, and there's nothing that has helped me develop my passion and breadth of experience anywhere near as much as the internet. Have you noticed old people call it the 'world wide web?' If you call it this, you are old, and it's time to play on your eccentricities.

 

The thing is, the other day I knew exactly what I wanted to eat: chicken curry, with some sort of thick, a bit creamy, almonds-blended-up-into-a-paste, a bit cinnamony, not necessarily terribly spicy, sauce. Don't know where the craving came from, haven't eaten anything like that for ages, and only when someone wimpy orders something like it in a group takeaway. So, I knew what I desired, and I was very much up for spending an hour or two creating it. But if the 'web' wasn't in existence, how would I make it? I could ring round my neighbours and see if they'd got a curry cookbook. I could take one out from the library? But the thing with cravings is, you have to seize the moment, because if you hang about too long, it goes away, but if you catch it and feed it what it wants, nothing has ever ever tasted so good.

 

 

 

The other thing about getting recipes from the internet is, you can look at as many different people's takes on the same sort of dish, and decide what's essential, what's not, and what you might do differently. YEARS worth of cookery book learning, condensed into one or two meals.

 

I found a few recipes for the almond chicken curry I wanted, but this one was just perfect. It's from eCurry: http://www.ecurry.com/blog/indian/curries/gravies/murgh-badami-curried-chicken-in-almond-sauce/ 

 

I chucked in some prunes that needed using up, they were great. I've made this dish three times now, I absolutely love it.

My Favourite Salad

My lettuces were ready for eating (i.e. about to get out of control, we're not talking baby leaf) today, so it was definitely salad for dinner. This is my favourite salad, which I'll be honest, takes a long time if you make a decent amount of it because of all the sweating and roasting of vegetables, but you could whip it up in 40 minutes if you made a small, unsweated batch.

 

 



 

Ingredients:

 

1 aubergine

2 red peppers

1 courgette

some sort of earnest lentil

feta cheese

fresh mint

red onion

fresh salad leaves

tomatoes (if you like)

 

1. Sweat the aubergine and courgette by chopping them into chunks, sticking them in a colander and pouring tons of salt on them, and leaving them in the sink for 30 minutes.

 

 

2. Meanwhile, roast the red pepper chunks in a bit of olive oil at 200C if you're limited with oven space. Should take about 30 minutes.

 

3. Rinse the salt off the other veggies, and pat and squeeze them dry with embarrassing amounts of paper towel. Roast them for 30 minutes as above.

 

4. Meanwhile, cook your lentils. I use green speckly ones and they usually take about 35 minutes. Apparently you shouldn't boil them like hell, just simmer.

 

5. Leave the lentils to cool or even run some cold water through them if you're eating soon.

 

6. Chop up some feta, some red onion and some mint and bung everything together.

 

7. Eat with lots of fresh leaves. I chopped up some tomatoes and spread a bit of my homemade (with hazelnuts this time!) pesto on them as they were a bit boring.

I usually put the lentilly salad on the bed of leaves but my bowl overflowed...

Elderflower Champagne

It's that lovely time of year again, the elder trees are all suddenly going for it, blooming away. I am taking advantage of this. Off I went to collect the elderflowers in my new basket. The recipe says 25 heads of elderflower, which sounds like loads, but it only takes about 5 minutes to collect.

Recipe for 10 litres:

·       6.7 litres hot water

·       1.170kg sugar

·       Juice and zest of 7 lemons (I just peeled the rind off them, we'll see if it works)

·       3 tbsp white wine vinegar

·       25 heads of elderflower

1. Put the hot water and sugar into a large container (a spotlessly clean bucket is good) and stir until the sugar dissolves, then top up with cold water so you have 6 litres of liquid in total.

2. Add the lemon juice and zest, the vinegar and the flower heads and stir gently.

 

3. Cover with clean muslin and leave to ferment in a cool, airy place for a couple of days. Take a look at the brew at this point, and if it’s not becoming a little foamy and obviously beginning to ferment, add a pinch of yeast.

4. Leave the mixture to ferment, again covered with muslin, for a further four days. Strain the liquid through a sieve lined with muslin and decant into sterilised strong glass bottles with champagne stoppers (available from home-brewing suppliers) or Grolsch-style stoppers, or sterilized screw-top plastic bottles (a good deal of pressure can build up inside as the fermenting brew produces carbon dioxide, so strong bottles and seals are essential).

5. Seal and leave to ferment in the bottles for at least a week before serving, chilled. The champagne should keep in the bottles for several months. Store in a cool, dry place

Coconut Cream Pie

I made my first ever coconut cream pie! Pete, Mum and I were dreaming about them so much I had to make one for us to eat.

 

Gluten-free, naturally. It was great! I have no pictures of the inside as it got eaten so quickly, but basically it's a pastry base, sweet coconut goo middle, and squidgey airy meringue on top. I read recipes for ones with whipped cream on top and I thought that sounded like the meringue version's rubbish cousin, but mine was so ridiculously sweet I can see why that would work.
 
Here's the recipe:
 
Turn the oven to 180C. Grease a 9 inch pastry tin.
 
GLUTEN FREE PASTRY:

• 225g/2 cups gluten free plain flour
• pinch salt
• 110g/ 1/2 cup cold unsalted butter, cubed
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 egg

Rub the butter into the flour and salt until it looks like breadcrumbs.
 
Mix in the sugar, then the egg. Try and make a ball of dough with it. Add a tablespoon of water if it won't stick together. And as many as you need until it does. You don't want it too sticky though. You just want it to come together.
 
Roll it out on some foil. Gluten free pastry should be seen and not heard so you want it quite thin - 4-5mm.
 
Line your tin. You can't do it all in one unless you're a superhuman. I consider myself to have done well if I've managed to get a piece to cover most of the botton of the tin and construct the sides on seperately.
 
Blind bake for 15-20 minutes, or until it's looking dry and before it gets brown.

COCONUT GOO FILLING:

• 2 1/4 cups cream
• 3/4 cup sugar, plus 1/4 cup for the egg whites
• 3 eggs, separated
• 1/4 cup cornflour
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 cups dessicated coconut

1a. Put the coconut onto a baking tray and bake it in the oven for a few minutes, until it goes brown. This toasting gives it a better flavour.

1.  Put the cream and 3/4 cup sugar in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Meanwhile mix up the egg yolks in a jug.

2. Pour the hot cream into the the egg yolks, slowly at first, stirring lots. If you stick it all in at once you'll get blobs of cooked egg. Leave a residue of cream in the saucepan.

3. Put the cornflour into the cream dregs in the saucepan and stir into a paste. Stir lumps out. Add the cream and egg mixture back into it, a teeny bit at a time, stirring to combine. When you've added enough that it's turning back into a liquid, add the rest of the cream and stir in.

4. Bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer. Cook it like this, stirring constantly, until it thickens, 4-6 minutes.

5. Take off the heat and stir in the toasted coconut and vanilla extract. Pour into your precooked pastry case and leave to cool completely.

MERINGUE TOPPING:

6. Oven to 150C. Whip up the egg whites with the remaining sugar to form stiff peaks. Spread over the pie, right to the edges, and bake until it's going lightly brown on the top, about 30 -40 minutes. You can bake it at a higher temperature for less time. The aga's on low at the moment so I just stuck it in there.

It's so sweet you need to drink a gallon of water after a slice and you feel a bit funny. I have plans for the next one - I think I'll make it as above, but whip up some double cream and somehow inject it under the surface of the meringue....like people inject jam into doughnuts.