Summer strawberry and avocado salad

The Culinary Consultant is out and about for the weekend, and I am enjoying the rare treat of having the house all by myself. Which is great, except in the night when there are lots of weird noises and the house seems strangely big. Which is silly but I heard some noises from the neighbour's driveway last night, but it sounded like they were in our driveway, so I had to get up and close the window to feel safe. Of course closing the window would protect me from anything bad happening. And I get to watch as many romcoms as I like. Not a single movie with any shooting or violence. I'm burning through Netflix. Note to self though, I should probably learn to use the Xbox so I could watch my movies on the TV instead of the computer. Oh well, first world problems, eh?

One major benefit of being home alone is I can make all the salads I want. Today I made a summery strawberry and avocado salad for lunch. I have been going through punnets of strawberries as if there is no tomorrow. For dinner I have an idea for something vegetarian, which you will hear all about if it turns out reasonable. And tomorrow there will be another lunch salad! I probably should not mention the half tub of Ben & Jerry's I had for dessert after lunch...

Strawberry and avocado salad (for 1):
a handful of mixed greens (I like to include spinach)
cucumber
1/2 avocado
4-5 strawberries
1 tbsp finely crumbled feta
2-3 tbsp balsamic vinegar

The howto:
Prepare the balsamic reduction. In a small saucepan, bring the balsamic vinegar to a medium heat making sure it doesn't boil, and keep on the hob until reduced to about half of the original volume and slightly syrup-y. While the balsamic is reducing, slice the cucumber and cut the strawberries into quarters. Place the ingredients on a plate, and drizzle with the balsamic reduction. Enjoy with a slice of fresh bread.

The verdict:
This is such a quick and easy lunch, and it's ridiculously delicious. It only takes a few minutes to throw together so it's perfect to maximise your time out in the wonderful summer sun. The salty feta, soft avocado and sweet strawberries just go so well together. And the balsamic reduction is perfection! 

King prawn and avocado starter with a slight twist

This starter has a bit of a story behind it. It was really born as a result of several coincidences. Me and the Culinary Consultant were going to roast a whole chicken as our after workout meal the other day. However, we were going to take a quick nap after the gym, but ended up napping for almost two hours. And in his typical style, the Culinary Consultant had picked the biggest chicken he could find, and we realised cooking time for the chicken would be three hours. Really hungry after the gym (and extended nap) we realised we need a starter to keep us alive until the giant chicken was cooked. Luckily, the Culinary Consultant had some king prawns in the freezer, and was planning to serve them with a mayo based sauce. He asked if I wanted something else from the grocery store as he had to get some mayo and I thought some avocados would be nice with the prawns. He came back not only with mayo and avocados, but also a mango. I rarely use fruit when I'm cooking, but whenever I do, I absolutely adore the result. I have done a really good mango and avocado salsa, but this time I thought how about doing a fruity salsa type of thingy but using mayo instead. We had both been working out for two hours, so I thought the most important thing in this case was not how healthy the food would be, just how good it would taste. 

This is a really quick and easy starter. If you like the traditional prawn and avocado combination, I'm pretty sure you will like this too. You can also modify the proportion of onion to mango to tomato to get a salsa to your specific liking.

Super non-healthy mayo salsa (malsa? sal-yo?) with garlic prawns (serves 2):
For the salsa:
1/4 of a big red onion (or about 1/2 of a small one, or any amount to taste)
1/3 of a ripe mango
1 large ripe tomato on the vine
1/4-1/2 clove of garlic
2-3 tbsp mayo (I used full fat for maximum flavour, but you can obviously use your favourite)
1/2 tsp ground black pepper

For the prawns:
2 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, sliced thinly
250 g king prawns

You will also need 1 ripe avocado for serving

The howto:
Finely chop the garlic, onion, mango and tomato. Mix in a bowl with the mayo and black pepper. In a skillet, heat up the oil with the garlic. Add the prawns and cook until cooked through (or if you are using cooked prawns, only give them a few seconds on both sides to heat them up). Divide the avocado onto two plates, add prawns and salsa. 

The verdict:
For something that was whipped together from random ingredients, this turned out amazingly good. I wanted to eat the sauce straight out of the bowl with a spoon. Obviously, I was ravenously hungry as well, so maybe I have to make this another time to see if it was just the hunger or not. But I think it wasn't just the hunger, it was truly good. Trust me, you have to try this! I love the combination of mango and red onion, and the mango goes incredibly well with the garlic-y prawns. I think you could stretch this to serve as a starter to three or four people as well, if they haven't just come back from the gym, and if it will be immediately followed by a main.

Card of the day:
This time my card is a get well card for my sister. You might remember that it's not very long since my last get well card for her. I told her that I appreciate her hard work to make sure I have reasons to make cards, but I would love to do something else than a get well card. The owl is from a stamp set called Fox and Friends from Stampin Up. I have wanted this stamp set ever since I saw these awesome cards, and since, the stamp set has popped up here and there. Since then I have found entire Pinterest boards dedicated to the stampset (just type fox and friends in the search box, and click boards if you want to see some amazing cards). Anyhows, my point was that I really wanted the stamp set, but you can't really buy it anywhere anymore. I found someone selling it on Ebay, but ended up paying quite a lot of money for it. Not that it's not worth every penny, but seems like some of the stamp sets really increase in value after they are retired. So now I just have to make as much use of it as I can to make the purchase worth it. And it is just so darn cute!! 

I stamped the owl onto Hobbycraft ivory card (160 gsm) using Tim Holtz distress inks (Broken China, Peeled Paint, Worn Lipstick, Dusty Concord and Fired Brick). I used the Hobbycraft Single Clear Tree stamp in the bottom left hand corner, stamped with Tim Holtz distress ink Walnut Stain. I used the same ink to stamp the sentiment, for which I used the Hobbycraft Clear Stamps Typewriter alphabet in walnut stain, and stamped a bit of the tree at the edge of the sentiment. I inked the edges of both the sentiment and the background with Walnut Stain and Vintage photo distress inks. I matted both the sentiment and background onto a green paper from the Dovecraft Back to Basics III set and adhered it all onto kraft cardstock from Craft UK Limited.

Friday quickie aka the avocado that never was

Today, after work, I was supposed to clean my apartment. Vacuum, do the dishes, scrub the ladies room. I was going to do laundry and then read a few papers and edit the book chapter I'm writing so that I could finally send it off to my boss (it's only four days late so far...). And above all, I was supposed to eat healthily. I have been trying to be good all week, but on Tuesday I baked chocolate-courgette bread (which I will post about soon), and yesterday I got a lovely lovely parcel from back home with all sorts of goodies I couldn't keep my hands off. Particularly, I got rye bread, which I have been eating for two days now (with butter, of course!) and Dominos. Dominos are the best biscuits ever! They are like Oreos, but much better. And this year there is a new Domino, the Domino Super, which has more of the white creamy dreamy filling than the traditional one. So of course I asked my mum to ship some over ASAP. And they were pretty much gone at the speed of light.


Anyways, when I got home from work (after biking 10 miles, and doing my weekly grocery shopping and cycling home from the store in the pouring rain for 15 minutes) I ate a Domino, two tablespoons of jam straight out of the jar, dates and a piece of banana cake. Dates are evil! Almost as addictive as raisins. I don't know what evil came over me today at the grocery store to make me buy some. I know I can't keep my fingers off them. Sigh. Oh well, after this, surely I cleaned and ate healthily? Oh, are you kidding me. I did pop a sweet potato into the oven, but they take like... forever... to cook. So meanwhile I just whipped up a batch of creamy lemon bars (which I will blog about next, I promise). Not that I made them for me, I'm seeing a friend tomorrow who likes all things lemony. And surely I won't touch them tonight. Of course not! Well I do have to taste a little bit. But not because I would want to, but just to make sure they are good enough to give to someone else. That might or might not require me to sample half of the batch. But it's important to get samples from all over the baking tin, so that I can be assured the pieces from the middle are as good as the ones on the sides. Anyone know where the closest carboholics anonymous meeting is? And do they serve coffee and doughnuts there? Which reminds me, I really want a doughnut pan, there are so many lovely recipes for baked doughnuts on Pinterest, it's driving me doughnuts!

Ok, so that was today's random ramblings over and done with. So, onto todays quickie. It's just something my twisted mind thought up because I had some left over sweet potatoes that needed to be used, as well as an over-ripe avocado. So I thought a nice oven baked sweet potato with tuna-avocado salad can never go wrong. And because I recently made a lovely soup with roasted cauliflower and roasted garlic (once again something for a future post), I thought while I have the oven all fired up, why not roast an onion in there as well to throw in the tuna salad. Of course the avocado turned out to be so over ripe it wasn't edible anymore (which is so annoying as they are crazy expensive). But this crazy concoction still turned out pretty amazing. And it's quick to whip together, the only thing that takes time is to bake the sweet potato. But you can use the time wisely, like I did  by baking something. Or maybe even clean if you are a better person than me. 


Baked sweet potato with tuna and roasted onion salad (serves 2):
2 sweet potatoes
1 onion
1 tin of tuna
2 hard boiled eggs
1/2 sweet pepper
2 spring onions
(1 avocado)
black pepper
cayenne pepper
salt
dried coriander (or whatever other herbs you like, dill would probably be great too)
fresh basil leaves or some other herb
(possibly some olive oil if you are not using tuna in oil and not adding the avocado)


The howto:
Wrap the sweet potatoes and onion in foil individually, and bake in 175 degrees for an hour. Meanwhile boil the eggs. When sweet potatoes and onion is baked, unwrap the onion, but keep the sweet potatoes wrapped to keep them warm. Make the salad in a food processor. Start by adding the onion, eggs, sweet pepper, spring onions and spices, and grind until smooth. Add tuna and quickly pulse. If you happen to have an avocado which is still the proper avocado colour and does not collapse into itself when you touch it, add it to the salad, and pulse quickly, just enough for everything to be mixed. Serve immediately.


The verdict:
The whole idea with the tuna salad was supposed to be the avocado, as I thought it would bring a nice creaminess without having to add mayo. However, now I will never know. Well at least not until I make it again. Because I certainly will. Just the baked onion and eggs did add quite a bit of creaminess, and I think next time if I add the avocado, I will only use one egg. I could also imagine replacing tuna with chicken would work quite well. Maybe add some curry in that case to the spices. Not too shabby considering that all ingredients are pretty much things I always keep stocked at home anyways. I think my traditional Friday night lentil soup has got some serious competition. 

Pay it forward

Maybe you remember the movie Pay it forward, starring Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment and Helen Hunt. Spacey plays a social studies teacher who gives the pupils in his classa humble little project to change the world. Osment plays a boy who launches a good-will movement, with the idea that you should help three people with something really big without asking anything in return apart from them helping out three other people. The idea is of course, if everyone does a favour for three others, by the laws of exponential growth, soon the movement would affect a huge masses of people. 

So why am I going on about a sappy feel-good movie? Well, first of all, Kevin Spacey is really great in it. But to get to the point, I recently bought three of Jamie Olivers books: Jamie at Home, Jamie's Great Britain and Ministry of Food. I love them all (of course, it's Jamie, who wouldn't love his quirky, fun and unbelievably delicious recipes), but I particularly like the introduction to Ministry of Food. Jamie talks about how we are living in the middle of a horrible epidemic of bad health with the rise of obesity. The problem is that people perceive themselves to be too busy to cook proper, healthy food, and instead live on takeouts and preprocessed food which is lacking in nutrients and full of empty calories. His plan is similar to that in Pay it forward, and he calls it (very cleverly) pass it on. The idea is that you learn a few good recipes, such as those in Ministry of Food and then teach them to at least two people, again creating an exponentially growing tree of people teaching each other good recipes and basic cooking techniques.

I know it sounds idealistic and silly, but the truth seems to be that many people today really don't know how to cook. That is a harsh contrast to others, who are passionate about food, cooking it, planning it, sourcing the freshest and most ethically produced ingredients. And it is important to show those who aren't passionate about cooking at least how easy it can be. Cooking healthy and delicious food doesn't have to be hard or time consuming.

Of course you can now see where I'm going with this. I made something from Ministry of Food for dinner today, and I'm hoping someone else will enjoy the recipe, and they will in turn teach it (or at least pass on the link) to someone else. This recipe only takes a few minutes to cook (12 minutes according to Jamie's recipe) and can be done by anyone who can use a knife to cut an avocado and know how to heat a frying pan.

Jamie's Prawns and avocado with an old-school Marie Rose Sauce (serves 2):

1 or 2 ripe avocados

1 or 2 punnets of cress

plain flour

220 king prawns, peeled and ready to eat (I used raw prawns, that just adds a few minutes to the cooking time)

olive oil (I used coconut oil for frying the prawns as I think it gives such a lovely flavour that goes well with prawns)

2 cloves of garlic

1 heaped teaspoon of paprika

extra virgin olive oil

Marie Rose sauce:

4 tbsp mayonnaise (I made my own, and will post the recipe soon)

1 dessertspoon tomato ketchup

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tsp whisky

1 lemon

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

The howto:

To make the sauce, mix all the ingredients. Only use the juice from half of the lemon, then taste, season with salt and pepper and add more lemon juice if you think the sauce needs it. Otherwise cut the remaining half of the lemon into wedges for serving.

Halve the avocado, remove the stone and peel off skin. Place on plate together with cress and drizzle sauce over.

Put flour on a plate and toss prawns until they are coated with flour. Heat olive oil (or coconut oil) in a pan, bash and break up your garlic with your hand and add these to the pan (still with their peel on by the way) and immediately toss in the prawns. Season with salt, pepper and a good dash of paprika. Cook for a few minutes until crisp and golden (or until done if using raw prawns), divide onto plates and serve immediately with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.

Using my own mayo, I got a calorie count of about 600 kcal per serving (38g total fat, 15.4g carbs, 22.3g protein). Of course that will vary depending on what mayo you use and how much you drizzle olive oil onto your plate, as usual I suggest you do your own calorie calculations if you count your calories. 

The verdict:

As usual, Jamie has put together a pukka mix of flavours (yes, I know, very subtle, but when it comes to Jamie's food, I'm running out of adjectives...). When I made the sauce, I wasn't sure about it, I thought it had a bit too much Worcestershire sauce and was a bit too sharp, but mixed with the creaminess of the avocado and prawns, and the peppery cress, the flavours just came together perfectly. The whisky gives it a nice smoky and distinct flavour, I would never have thought of adding whisky to a sauce for prawns, but then again I'm no genius like Jamie. And the dish even looks perfect with the green of the avocado and cress against the red of the paprika on the prawns and the pinkish sauce. The only downside is that this is no light meal, with the avocado, olive oil and mayo it ends up having quite a bit of calories. Of course, the fats in the avocado and olive oil are good fats. I made my own mayo from extra virgin rapeseed oil (a longer rant about my love for rapeseed oil when I get around to posting the recipe for mayo) so that should be packed with those good omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids (and yes I know there are plenty of people out there with a negative attitude to rapeseed oil, but there are plenty of alternatives if you happen to be one of them).