🏷️ eating in

And you thought it was impossible to capture the essence of summer in a salad dressing, didn't you? Well... you were mistaken.

The inspired spirit of summer salad dressing:
-- Extra virgin olive oil
-- Granny Smith Apples
-- Super ripe heirloom tomatoes

-- Garlic (smashed with the apples, oil and tomatoes in a mortar and pestle)
-- Ripe oranges
-- Jalapeños
-- Green onions
-- Salt
-- Black pepper.

Blend all of this together in a blender and voila, you have spirit of summer in the blender jar. I recommend tossing kale, red-onions, roasted almonds and strawberries with this dressing for a super-awesome summer salad. :-)

I have a new breakfast favourite and recipe was a complete accident.

I had chopped granny smith apples and carrots for a salad yesterday but in a moment of distraction, I tossed them in when I was sautéing green onions and garlic today.

When I realized that it was not zucchini but granny smiths, I stopped sautéing. The onions were still translucent and not browned. I added cooked french lentils and kidney beans, brought it to a boil and purééd it all. Garnished it with powdered coriander, cumin and fresh coriander leaves and thinned it out with water and freshly-squeezed lemon juice.

And that's what I am having for breakfast - spiced and steamy lentil smoothie with carrots, apples and onions. It's delicious! :-)

My Sunday was super fancy and delicious because I baked this:







Yes!! I can't believe it either. It is the MOST delicious and fancy looking thing I have ever baked. Thank you, Maura. m/ You rock! m/

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PS: More about the bread workshop later... (and possibly more photos, depending on whether I get them.)

PPS: Maura posted about the workshop on the fancy and delicious bakery blog:

I know this is a very unscientific way of going about things, but I am just very curious about what all of you eat. Take this poll if you dare:

Dairy:

1. How many gallons of milk do you drink per week? What kind?

2. How frequently do you eat any kind of cheese in a week?

3. How much half/half or creamer do you drink in a week?

Staples:

4. How much rice do you consume in a week?

5. How many loaves of bread do you eat in a week?

6. How many times do you eat any pasta in a week?

Meat:

7. How many times a week do you eat meat of any kind (including fish)?

8. How many times a week do you eat eggs?

The best cup of coffee:



- Brew Trader Joe's house blend in any coffee machine
- Add fat-free/1% milk in blender
- Add a heaped tablespoon of mascarpone to blender
- Blend and blend till foamy
- Heat 1/2 mug blended milk in microwave for a minute
- Fill rest of the mug with brewed coffee
- Stir vigorously
- Enjoy with homemade speculoos!

Breakfast is a triumph today. I think I have finally perfected the art of making delicious Nutella the way I like it - without the ridiculous amounts of canola from Canada, semi-hydrogenated creepoid compounds or truckloads of sugar. As a bonus, it is mind-blowingly tasty! In four short steps, you can brute force your mornings from the nadir of suckiness to a zenith of awesome!

1. Toast a handful of hazelnuts till they are a toasty earthy brown. I guess you could roast them in the oven if you don't want to stand around stirring them. But I do like to stand around in my kitchen a LOT. I think it's the chessboard floor. There is something hypnotic about chessboards. It's like I am being checkmated by the stove but I make counter-moves and show it some aggression. Anyway, I prefer hands-on active approaches that make some noise early on weekend mornings (the better to annoy that perennially whiny hag next door who seems to think I am responsible for ALL the noise everyone else in the building makes and additionally, complains about it when I am not even in town).

Maybe it's time to get some speakers (that Chuck Norris would be proud of) and give her a flavour of what it might be like if I were in the serious business of making some REAL noise. So, how many hazelnuts, you ask? The average Nutella box proclaims that it has 50 hazelnuts to a jar. Yeah, if you didn't know any better 50 is a big number. But without the canola, sugar and dodgy hydrogenates, it makes up a paltry amount, so be generous. You could toast 50 hazelnuts and it will make nutella that lasts half a week.

2. Add the toasted hazelnuts to the blender, start blending till everything is a fine powder and sticks to the blades. That's hazelnut butter coming out.

3. Add chocolate soymilk (I used Sunrich, because I am in love with the brand) - just enough to cover the hazelnuts in the blender. Blend some more.

4. Add toasted thick and hearty steelcut oatmeal. Add a good sprinkle of flax seeds. Blend. Blend. Blend. Till it gets really creamy. Add chocolate milk at intervals till you reach the consistency of that artificial sham of a Nutella they sell here. My Oster blender does this job in around 10-15 minutes. Other blenders could be more efficient or could just break-down and die. You never know till you push their limits. So I suggest you give your blender its Nutella ultimatum today. Everyone knows that you should never wait till the kitchen apocalypse hits this planet. Every small appliance will grow extra appendages to hit you with.

That's it. Slice granny smiths (yes, other apples are just inferior. Admit it.) Spread the awesomeness of delicious Nutella on the slices and breakfast like a German!

I think this is the tastiest cabbage stir fry I have EVER had in my life. It's also probably the easiest and the quickest to make. I made it from scratch in around 20 minutes - the time it takes to steam the lentils and bulghur.



Before I forget, the exact recipe:

1. Steam brown lentils and bulghur in the rice cooker: 1:1
2. While they are steaming, add a generous amount of olive oil to the fry pan, add a pinch of cumin seeds, finely chopped garlic, green thai chillies and dried red chillies (crumbled into the oil).
3. Saute till garlic turns almost light brown. Scrape everything to a side.
4. Add chopped zucchini, sprinkle salt on it. Stir-fry for 2 min. Scrape to the side. Mix with garlic et. al.
5. Add chopped carrots, pour minimal amount of soy sauce over it. Stir fry for 2 min. Mix with everything else.
6. Add green chopped cabbage. Toss and saute with everything else. Add a little more soy sauce.
7. Add the steamed bulghur and lentils. Stir and toss till evenly mixed.
8. Turn off heat while cabbage is still crunchy.

ENJOY!

I am a tea fanatic.


And I don't even write about it so much. How did they know?!

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Caught @ladycroft's wordle - @ladycroft #50987 and I think it did a pretty good job there. :-)

I made bread today for the first time in my life. And it is probably the best bread I have ever had. I can't believe this - it is seriously blowing my mind.



The recipe is extremely simple and it's shocking just how wonderful it tastes with butter. And of course, no recipe is worth following so I went ahead and completely messed it up with abandon.



I don't have any measuring cups or implements or scales. Worse, I don't really have a concept of what a cup is, so I did a very rough volumetric-ratio-eyeballing (which actually means, I just dumped in whatever seemed okay). @heidi, you can sigh now. ;-)

That's not all. I didn't let it rise for 20 hours because I was impatient, threw in an obscene amount of walnuts and dates, and then added a whole chopped jalapeno because I didn't want it to be sweet. Then I thought, what the heck, why not be crazier and added a whole fistful of flaxseed and a tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil just because it happened to be near the flaxseed.



Even with this terrible approach to baking, I got splendid results. And of course, I went the extra health freak mile and used 100% high-fibre hard winter spelt flour and no bread flour. I have heard of recipes being described as "forgiving" but this one HAS TO BE the SUPER-GIGANTOID-GODMUM of ALL the forgiving recipes in the history of cooking on this planet.



Go ahead, mess it up. You will get edible results. :)

I finally caved in and bought a carton of Amish Organic Country Farms 1% Milk (well, mainly because they were out of the fat-free milk gallon). I really had high expectations from this milk - seeing as how it is organic and all. I could not have been more unrealistic about my expectations.

This milk tastes like it came directly from the cow or buffalo or whatever bovine they were milking. I know some of you are smirking and saying. "It's milk. What else did you expect?".

Let me tell you, I did not expect the farmyard cow/bovine smell. It completely throws my milk drinking experience. It taints my coffee and makes tea unbearable with its heavy heavy cow-ish/bovine odour. My tongue is now coated with the same odour and I can feel it slowly creeping up my sinuses. Ugh. Ugh. UGH.

I am DONE with this Organic Amish milk business. I am going back to fat-free mass-produced possibly hormone tainted neutral-smelling milk. I think I will deal with the devil and trade a little undue cell proliferation for the urge to throw up everytime I drink my favourite black tea with milk.

Maybe boiling will do away with the smell? What do you think?