Pasta Salad with Halloumi and Mushroom

Let me mention Mark Bittman again, I might look like i am obsessed with Bittman but really i think his approach is admirable that is why in this blog i always mention his recipes and his food philosophy. Bittman says he prefer more sauce and less pasta and i would say i am at the same wagon with him. However, there is an exception on this rule, if we are talking about the quality, freshly made pasta then the equation changes. In this recipe i am making a pasta with loads of veggies and i would like to call it a salad, or a veggie dish rather than a pasta. Because essentially it is a veggie dish rather than pasta. I don't want to give the exact reipe for this since i want you to mix the ingredients on your taste.

I used pasta shells on this dish, around 250 grams. 2 big and 12 small  mushrooms, 2 courgettes, 150 grams of hallomi cheese, half a bunch of parsley and some coriander, you need to have chilies in this dish and even garlic would be very nice i didn't put any but do add them if you are willing to try it.

I chopped the mushrooms and courgettes and drizzled extra virgin olive oil seasoned with sea salt. I left them in preheated oven for about 25-30 mins at 370 F/ 180 C. Hallomi cheese i baked in oven 8-10 mins at 370 F/ 180 C but you can grill it if you like. Then i cooked the pasta shells for about 6-7 mins until al dente and mix all of the ingredients. Finally add the finely chopped parsley and coriander, you can use basil instead of coriander and you can also add some freshly grounded black pepper.  If i had chilies i would add them at this point too. Again it is up to you play with the amount of the ingredients you can use shiitake or chestnut mushrooms instead of button ones and you can add different herbs. If you want more cheese or different cheese types you can go for feta cheese. You can even change the cheese with yogurt or sour cream. I really like this light pasta salad and te best thing about this recipe is you don't fry anything once you are done with the chopping everything is pretty easy an straightforward. 

An Experiment Fails: Frozen Chocolate Covered Banana Bites

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY IT AT HOME! 

Seriously Don't! :) 

During my typical journey to school I take London overground and i can check the pictures at pinterest on this part of the journey. The other day i was roaming around pinterest  and I was also looking for some easy snack recipe ideas. Then I saw a gorgeous picture of chocolate covered frozen banana bites and clicked for the recipe. The recipe was using pure peanut butter and bitter chocolate to cover the bananas. I don't have any allergies and the picture was amazing so i thought i would give it a try. On my way to home I stopped by in the grocery store picked up the purest peanut butter i could find which was unsweetened peanut butter with palm oil and sea-salt. Oh well it is sea-salt it can not be that bad. Then i picked up bananas and 70% chocolate. When i came home i chopped the chocolate measured 1/3 cups, 1/3 cups peanut butter and microwaved those two for about a minute. I chopped the bananas and dipped them into this mixture and lied them into a baking paper covered tin. I sprinkled unsweetened coconut flakes on top and froze it overnight. According to the recipe it was suppose to taste like vanilla ice cream. Although they looked very pretty the taste was quite horrific. So if you are going to dip fruits in chocolate don't use peanut butter, if you are going to then use just 1 tbsp for 1/3 cups chocolate. I think that is enough to give flavor. The taste was quite bad but i think i have got some nice pics and a lesson out of it so it was worth to try. 

Feta Cheese and Curled Parsley Muffin

Last night after I met up with an old friend I stopped by in John Lewis, although i am not big fan of department stores and especially not a fan of chains, I love to look at the kitchen utensils at oxford street BHS, John Lewis. There are tons of beautiful utensils such as marble mortars, wood grinders, measuring cups, french presses,cutting boars all of them amazes me. So beautiful and inspiring. While i was there I saw hearth shaped silicone muffin tins probably remained from the valentines day. It was a bit expensive but i got them anyway and dreamed about making lemon and raspberry muffins. But i ended up with savory muffins, it is perfect for breakfast/brunch and most importantly they are hearth shaped. The recipe is inspired from the Cafe Fernando's ricotta basil recipe. I used feta cheese and added pumpkin seed, fresh curled parsley. It turned out pretty amazing. And I would like to give all photo credits to my housemate Rumeysa. Here is the recipe:

Ingredients: (yields 9 muffins)

• 2 cups self raising flour
• 1 cup milk 
• 1 cup diced feta cheese
• 1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tbsp apple cider
• 1/2 tsp salt 
• 1 tsp dried wild thyme 
• 1 egg 
• 30 grams of curled parsley (finely chopped )

1. Set the oven to 360 F/180 C and grease or line your muffin tin 
2. Toast the pumpkin seeds with salt 
3. Leave the salt at the pan and take the toasted pumpkin seed out to a bowl
4. Add the flour, baking powder, salt and wild thyme to the bowl mix it lightly
5. Crack the egg to another bowl and add the apple cider beat it with a whisk 
6. Add the milk and keep whisking
7. Add the finely chopped parsley and diced feta cheese to the liquid mixture mix it with a spoon 
8. Add the liquid mixture to dry mixture and spoon it to the muffin tins 
9. bake it for 15-30 mins mine took 20 mins

Pancake Madness Party

In the previous English Pancake post I mentioned my friend letting me know about the Shorve Tuesday and she wanted have a pancake party and we organized it through twitter! Oh how i love the power of online social media platforms. So when I came back from work to home i found out another friend of us was at home too, which was a really nice surprise. We had arguably the most amazing pancake party, and later on we realized the role of food is so important, it brings people together. Take the example of BBQ parties, why people enjoy the BBQ parties the most? Because you get to engage in activities like cooking at the outdoors, eating outside, and you might even play some games... So there is something primeval about it but it really satisfies the soul and the following day you are ready to go to work, plus you will be more efficient on what you are doing. Also cooking and eating together is so much fun, as a member of small family, I grew up with no siblings, I can not describe the joy i have when we have big eating parties. 

Last night two of my friends took these pictures Emine and Esma I would like to thank them for this beautiful pictures and also special thanks for cooking the English pancakes for us. Last night I wanted to try something different so i decided to go for North American style pancakes. However instead of using eggs i used ripe and finely mashed bananas.  The smell and taste was heavenly but we had some problems during the cooking process. I tried to cook them in high heat and messed up couple of them but then i managed to cook fairly properly couple of them. Next time i will cook them in low heat. I won't give you the recipes in this post but will sneak out some lovely food pictures. We really enjoyed our pancake party, have you ever had a pancake party before? If so what kind of pancakes/toppings did you use? Comment below or send us some pictures to publish in Your Experience section.  

English Pancakes

English Pancakes

Egg - free North American style pancakes with banana, strawberry, and cream-cookie 

ice-cream toppping

Orange and Chocolate Muffin

I promised my colleagues that I will bake for them. So i decided to bake them the lemon and popyseed muffin but then, although it would be a bit risky, I decided to try something new. I have been thinking about muffin variations and since I am a big fun of both citrus and chocolate I wanted to put together this two ingredients in muffin. I picked orange and googled for recipes on orange and choclate muffins. I will tell you how I search for recipes, I type my key words in Google image search and look at the pictures. If there is an artisan picture of the food I check the web site. So it is a trick I use to spot the artisan baking websites/recipes. However i couldn't manage to find one with loads of orange and minimum eggs, so i made up my own recipe.

Here is a bit information on the different types of muffins. Muffin originally refer to bread the muffin recipes given in this blog are usually american style muffins and they are yeast free. The English muffins are usually made with yeast and they tend to be thinner but wider usually disk shaped. The English muffins are spitted into two and served toasted they tend to resemble  light bread. The American style muffins are more like a cake and it comes in all different forms in sweet and savory.


Finally some fun-facts about muffins from wikipedia: The corn muffin is the official state muffin of Massachusetts. The blueberry muffin is the official state muffin of Minnesota. The apple muffin is the official state muffin of New York.

Here is the new member of our muffin family:

Ingredients: (yields 16-20 muffins)

• 4 cups of flour
• 2 eggs 
• 1/2 cups orange zest
• 1/4 cups orange juice
• 3/4 cups +1 tbsp soft brown sugar
• 1/4 cups granulated white sugar
• 1 cup +1/3 cups chocolate (i used 100 grams dark chocolate (70%) and 100 grams orange flavored chocolate) 
• 1+1/2 cups Greek yogurt 
• 4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cups light olive oil 
• 1/2 cups coconut oil

Recipe:

1. Grade the skins of 6 small oranges finely (1/2 cups)
2. Chop the chocolates in small cubic pieces
3. Grease or line your muffin tin and set the oven to 180 C/ 375 F 
4. Crack the eggs in a bowl and beat heavily then add the orange zest keep beating add the brown sugar and keep beating then add the granulated sugar and whisk heavily (at this point you can use an electric  mixer that would make things a lot easier and quick)
5. Add the yogurt and keep whisking then add the oil to the liquid mixture. 
6. In another bowl mix the dry ingredients flour, chocolate, baking powder mix lightly.
7. Add the liquid mixture to the dry mixture mix lightly until the flour disappears.  
8. Spoon the mixture into the muffin tin and bake 15-30 mins depending on your oven. 

English Pancakes for Pancake Day

This morning my friend tweeted me about the pancake day and i wasn't aware of it until she explained what pancake day is. So to the best of my knowledge, today is the Shrove Tuesday, also called in French Mardi Gras meaning fat Tuesday. According to Catholic belief (or tradition i am not very knowledgeable in this matter) tomorrow is the first day of Lent, where forty days of cleaning begins. I assume it is the month of fasting, restraining from some things so the eve of lent is somewhat the last chance for some to eat flour, sugar, eggs, and butter since those foods are restricted during Lent. 

In this post we are going to present English Pancakes which differ from North American ones and looks more like the French crepes. The North American ones are puffier and this is done by using baking powder/soda and just like in muffins lightly mixing the liquid and dry ingredients until the flour disappears. English Pancakes  are thin and before it is cooked the mixture is very well mixed and more liquid. 

I have one problem with pancakes/crepes the fact that they smell like eggs, otherwise they are fun and easy to make  and the toppings are to die for. Therefore, I always try to prevent this egg smell i try to use best quality eggs, and i always add citrus zest to to the eggs and beat it heavily. If you have any other recommendations for preventing the egg smell on pancakes/cakes please comment below, i would love your suggestions:) 

Today i was talking about the pancake day with my British colleague and it turns out it is popular here in UK to have them with lemon and sugar topping where as in North America Maple syrup is more popular. Personally I try to be more creative about it, i tried nutella, lemon curd, cheese,  and several different types of jams before. It is up to you savory or sweet be creative with the topping. 

Ingredients: 

• 2 cups milk/yogurt
• Zest of 2 lemons 
• 2 cups of flour 
• 1/2 tbs salt
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 eggs

1. Zest 2 lemons in a bowl and add the eggs keep beating
2. Add the butter and milk
3. Combine the salt and flour in another bowl and  add the liquid mixture while whisking at this point you might want to use an electric mixer since you don't want and lumps in your mixture, then put the mixture to the fridge and eave it there for 1-2 hours. 
4. Heat the non-stick pan and start pouring liquid in thin layers and  flip it one the other side is cooked. 
5. Then use your favorite toppings and enjoy your pancakes/crepes.  

Easy Veggie Sushi Rolls

There are many kinds of sushi out there but in this post we are going to be covering rolled sushi so called makizushi. According to some sources sushi means seasoned rice, this makes the rice one of the most important ingredient in sushi. This means you need to know how to cook and season the rice , it is not rocket science but as easy as it seems cooking rice is one of the hardest thing to do in the kitchen. I think for any type of rice you are making you need to know the secret ingredient or that secret step, which is going to get you the perfect rice. However if you are aiming to make sashimi, it doesn't have rice in it so it is another story. The other important criterion is fresh ingredients, obviously. To me the garnish is important as well i would like my sushi to be served with loads of wasabi,  soy-sauce, and ginger pickles. Another important thing which effects the taste and smell of the sushi is the nori, I think the nori should be toasted otherwise the sushi smells a bit weird which is not good. So don't forget to toast your nori before starting rolling up your sushi. 

I have made this rolls a while ago so i won't give the exact recipe over here but i can give you another link which will take you to design*sponge where i have got this recipe in the first place.  It explains pretty well how to roll the sushi and exact amount of ingredients is given as well. So click here if you want to take a look into the original recipe. The original recipe uses sliced carrots but i grated my carrots because i wanted consistency in the texture since avocado and cucumber are not as crunch as carrots are. 

For those of you who are living in London i am sure you can find the required ingredients from anywhere but if you dont want to look around i have bought nori, soy sauce, wasabi powder, pickled gingers, and sushi rice from church street whole foods market. I bought the sushi rolling mat from well street Tesco and it was only 1 pound but saved my life you are going to need it badly when you are rolling. 

Finally i want to share an inspiring video from guardian on sushi making. The way they obtain the wasabi is so impressive, enjoy:) 

Banana and Coffee Flavored Whole Wheat Muffins

Most of the blogs i have visited doesn't have a multiple versions of one dish, so i want this blog have variety of options on muffins. I personally find easy to make muffins and in my opinion muffins are delicious treats. I would like the visitor have variety of options in this blog so it will save them searching on the internet or the cookbooks for recipes. I am planning to add sweet and savory muffin recipes to the blog and hopefully we will have a database of muffin recipes in a month or so.

The other day i was going through the recipes at the Minimalist column in NYT. If you read my previous posts you would guess i am a big fan of this column and i usually try the recipes given in minimalist column. I like how the videos are simple and short and i also like the way it has been presented by Mr. Bittman; I mean he is so natural and he is not trying to sell the recipe. When i was roaming around the videos i found the whole wheat muffin recipe and i decided to try it. It turned beteer than i thought here is the recipe:

Ingredients (yields 8 muffins)

• 2 1/2 cups & 4 tbsp whole wheat self raising flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup soft brown sugar
• 1 cup mashed banana
• 3 tbsp very strong coffee
• 1/2 cup greek yogurt

1. Grease your muffin tin and set the oven 180 C/ 375 F
2. Beat the egg in a bowl then add the brown and white sugar keep beating.
3. Add the mashed bananas & yogurt to the mixture.
4. Slowly add strong coffee to your mixture.
5. Melt the coconut butter in microwave or in a sauce pan and while mixing slowly add it to your the liquid mixture
6. In another bowl mix the dry ingredients whole wheat flour, salt, and baking powder.
7. Slowly add the liquid mixture to dry ingredients and dont mix it heavily. mix it with the help of a spoon until the dry ingredients disappear.
8. Split the mixture to the muffin tin and put it in to the preheated oven mine baked in 15 mins but it depends on your oven.

Wheat Salad with Feta Cheese and Basil

Bulghur is a widely used grain made from drum wheat. I will explain how bulghur have been made traditionally and still in the small villages farmers use the same technique to make bulgur from their home grown corps. First they boil the drum wheat and sun-dry it. Then the drum wheat can be broken into pieces with a very primitive machine featuring a heavy cylinder shaped stone rolling over the wheat. Or more labor intensive way could be using an old style mortar the wheat can be broken into pieces by using little water and repetitively crushing it in the mortar. The grade of the bulghur depends on how long you beat or rolled over the wheat. This process is now industrialised but still small farmers use the old fashion way of producing bulghur.

So here is what wikipedia says about the nutrition facts of 1 cup bulghur;

• Energy: 2003 kJ (479 kcal)
• Dietary fiber: 25.6 g
• Protein: 17.21 g
• Carbohydrate: 69 g whereof 0.8 g sugars
• Fat: 1.86 g whereof 0.2 g saturated fat
• Potassium: 574 mg
• Iron: 3.44 mg

• Glycemic Index: 46

In Turkey we have two different grades of bulghur. The one with smaller size called 'ince bulgur' it doesn't need to be properly cooked and it has been used with many different dishes. The regular sized bulghur have been used in pilav which is rice made with bulghur instead of rice (i dont know if it makes any sense but a well made bulghur pilav is very tasty). The regular sized bulghur has also been used in cold soups, even in stuffed vegetables or stuffed grape leaves. We currently have excessive amount of bulghur at home and we never really use it. So i decided to search for a nice recipe to make use of bulghur and found the bulghur salad with herbs recipe from BBC's recipes. Here is how i did it,

Ingredients:

• 1 Cup Bulghur Wheat
• 2 Cups Water
• 2 Branches Fresh Rosemary
• 4 Branches Fresh Basil
• 9 branches Fresh Mint
• 300 gr Cherry-tomatoes
• 200 gr Feta Cheese
• 1/2 Tsp Salt
• 2 Tbsp Olive Oil

1. Put the bulghur wheat, rosemarries, salt, and water in one pot and bring the stove to boil.
2. Wash and towel dry the basil and mint then finely chop the two herbs.
3. Dice the feta cheese
4. When the bulghur is drained the whole water in the pot fish out the rosemary.
5. Combine the herbs, cherry tomatoes, feta chesee, bulghur, and olive oil in a bowl.
6. When serving you can use some reserved feta and basil to make it look pretty.

Glazed Vegetables

Glazed vegetables are my favorite simple food, i love them so much and most of the time consume it as a main course. First I boil them then i glaze them with olive oil and put them in to the oven for 5-10 minutes (don't put the soft vegetables like broccoli, spinach etc. into the oven just drizzle some extra-virgin olive oil and serve). Dead simple, very tasty. You can either eat it with the main course or you can eat them by themselves. Highly recommended!

You dont really process the vegetables, so it boils down to the dipping sauce. You can use whatever suits your taste as a dipping sauce. Here is what i use,

1 Cup Greek Yogurt
1 Tbsp Red Pepper
1 Tbsp Zahter (A Palestinian Spice )
Salt for taste.

Sometimes Breakfast: YooBerries

Sometimes a breakfast can be as simple as strawberries and yogurt. In this modern world most of us trying to be fit and fast. But most of the time the cereal breakfast is just daunting and again in the weekdays we don't really have time for a tasty start to the day. It takes 1 minute to put cereal in a bowl and pour the milk in it, and it takes 1.5 minutes to put strawberries and honey to the bowl and process it with the hand blender, put the yogurt on top. Here you go the perfect breakfast you add some healthy cereal or muesli on top if you like which will up to 2 minutes but i promise it would be much tastier than regular cereal breakfast. I used Greek yogurt in this recipe you can either buy one or make your own Greek yogurt as thick as you would like. Mark Bittman beautifully explains (in the video below) how we make Greek yogurt in my family. Actually, our Greek yogurt is called "suzme yogurt", the literal meaning is drained yogurt. In Turkey "suzme yogurt" is very popular and it is rather sour, salty. It makes really good the Turkish yogurt drink so called "ayran". I will put up some delicious ayran recipes soon although most of the foreigners doesnt really enjoy the traditional one which i looveee. Anyways back to the breakfast: you can make your own greek yogurt without using salt and you can use it in this recipe. In that way, at least you can make sure that haven't use excessive amount of thickeners.

Ingredients (makes 1 portion):

1/3 cups of fresh strawberries

1 cup of greek yogurt

2 tbsp honey

1. Put the strawberries in a bowl and add 2 tbsp honey and roughly chop it with a hand blender.

2. Add the yogurt and mix with the spoon.

3. top it with 1 or 2 strawberries.

Lemon and Popyseed Muffins

Lemon is my favorite ingredient, and poppy seed is a plant my farmer grandparents have had been growing for years now. In my family traditionally we use the poppy seed for breads and lemon for salad except my mother she prefers lemon by itself like, she can have lemon as if she is having an orange. So those two popular items have been brought together by the Americans (I guess). The other day my friends wanted to get together for brunch and we decided to host it in our house. Since i have been obsessed with muffins these days, i decided to bake muffins with my two favorite ingredients. Then i set down on my beautiful mac and googled for the recipes. Although there is tons of lemon poppy seed recipes at the web it is not easy to find a good one. After some research and clicking on too many websites, i found a good one from your home based mom and i have as usual twisted the recipe a bit.

Muffin Ingredients (makes 8 muffins):

• 1 egg
• 1 cup greek yogurt
• 1/2 cups coconut oil (you can use butter)
• 1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 1/4 cups brown sugar
• 6 lemon zest (Attention please this recipe is extremely lemony if you want it to be less lemon flavored use less lemons)
• 1 and 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tbsp baking powder
• 3 tbsp poppy seed
• 1/2 tsp salt

Icing:

• 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 tbps and 1/2 tsp lemon juice

Steps:

1. Grate the zest of the 6 lemons
2. Combine the zest with 1/2 cups granulated sugar in a mortar, pestle the lemon and sugar by pressing and turning the stick in a drilling motion . (This will allow the essential oils extracted from the zest and integrate with sugar)
3. Add the brown sugar keep pestling.
4. Add the egg mix until you get a creamy texture. (at this point you can use an electric mixer we used a fork and man power since i had friends who wanted to participate making and baking process:))
5. Melt the coconut butter at the microwave or in a saucepan and let it cool then add it to the mixture slowly with a spoon while mixing.
6. Add the yogurt and keep mixing until you get a homogeneous mixture.
7. In a separate bowl mix the dry ingrediens flour, poppy seed, salt, baking powder.
8. Add the liquid to the dry ingredients mix until the flour disappears. (This part is important you do not want to over mix it you want sort of fully mixture rather then creamy one for muffins.)
9. Paper line of grease the muffin tray and spoon the mixture to the tray.
10. Pre-heat the oven 360F/180C and let the muffins bake for 15-20 mins with the help of toothpick check the muffins.
11. Mix the icing ingredients and pour the icing on top of the muffins.

Enjoy....

Potato Salad with Celery and Fennel

Back in Christmas time me and my lovely fiance, who was in town for 3 weeks only, visited the fish house at Brough Market. He had the famous fish and chips and i had a sea bass with veggies. I had fennel in the veggies and it was assorted with the olive oil. I previously tried using fennel in the salad etc... Although I have been a big fan of distinctive tastes such as rocket, celery, ginger; fennel never really worked out for me. But that fennel at the fish restaurant was absolutely my taste. So last weekend when i went for grocery shopping, I bought some veggies including fennel. And the other day I made an incredible salad and used the boiled fennel. Also I have to tell you i tried the boiled fennel just with extra-virgin olive oil which was absolutely heavenly. I think it goes very well with the fish, you won't be disappointed i promise.

One thing you need to be careful about is not over boil the fennel. You don't want it to loose it's texture, you want it to be a bit crunchy but still boiled.

Salad Ingredients:

• 1 fennel bulb
• 400 grams baby potatoes
• 3 celery leaves
• 2 artichokes (you can take this out if you don't like artichoke)
• 1/3 bunch dill
• 1 red chili
• 2 short spring onions (or chives for taste)

Dressing:

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 lemon juice

Boil 1 liter water with 1 tbsp of salt, slice the fennel and soak them to the boiling water for 3-5 minutes. Drain the fennel with the help of a large spoon set them aside. Using the same boiling water put the baby potatoes with skins on and cleaned artichoke inside the boiling water. Let them boil until tender. Drain and slice the baby potatoes (if they are big) with skin on and dice the artichoke. Chop the celery leaves, and dill roughly.

Squeze the lemon and olive oil in a separate bowl mix them until you obtain a green- yellow looking mixture add sea salt if necessary. Pour the dressing in to the salad and mix it. Then spread finely chopped red chili on top.

A failure: healthy muffins

I think a real blogger should not just post the successful recipes and also the failures so if you ever come across to something similar you should maybe consider improving the dish. I am obsessed with muffins and baking these days. i have tried the raspberry lemon muffin recipe from Cafe Fernando with blueberries couple of times and i loved it but i was striving for a healthy muffin. And there is a daily blog that i check almost everyday called simply breakfast. I decided to try the recipe for healthy breakfast muffins since it had loads of coconut in it. So i was excited to try the recipe and went down to the shop after work and had an accident during shopping with the olive oil ended up ruining my ugg boots :( Now that i think about it, it was a sign for me to not to bake these very healthy muffins. So here is the recipe,

• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 2/3 cup desiccated coconut
• 1/4 cup ground Almond
• 3 eggs
• 1 banana
• 1 Tbsp greek yogurt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 10-15 frozen blueberries

Combine everything and put them in muffin tin and pre-heated oven 350F until it is golden.

The original recipe has 2 Tbsp jam in it. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be sweet but honestly i though you would get a good flavor because of the massive amount of coconut. Also one more irritating think about this muffin is the presence of eggs is so dominant. I am not an egg lover so it was pretty hard for me to consume even half of it. When we were discussing with my friend we thought you might be able to get something out of it if you consume it like pancakes with maple syrup. If you like eggs and coconut it might be a good choice for you but not my taste...

Cocunut Tofu Curry

After a long and exhausting day i get to try a coconut recipe.

This recipe is adapted from The Minimalist from Nytimes. http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/the-minimalist-curried-tofu-with-soy-sauce/
It turned out really good, i twisted the recipe a bit here is my version of it.

• 1 large Spanish onion
• 1 pack of soft organic tofu
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 2 tbsp of soya sauce
• 15-20 pine kernels
• 1/2 tbs cumin
• 1/2 tbs ground sweet red pepper
• a pinch of salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil

I have followed the instructions given in the Mark Bitman's recipe. Diced the onions and fry it until it is soft and brown. Add the cumin and let the cumin toast.add tyhe pine kernels keep stirring and add the coconut milk (The Coconut milk was solidified when i opened it i was surprised cause i have never worked with coconut milk before but it turns out it might happen when it is cold around and considering the Siberian freeze in UK... Anyhow don't panic when your milk is solidified or separated mine turned out fine when it was heated.) The coconut milk has a heavenly smell when it is heated. Then I added the tofu and soy sauce salt and pepper for taste. It is very easy to cook and very tasty as well. Highly recommended:)

Winter Salad

I have started this blog long while ago but haven't posted much. I think the blog will turn out to be a food blog maybe you can also see some posts on science. I am not blogging on my work though since we are suppose to publish, although i would love to blog on the life of a grad student it is not very exciting. I think it has been summarised on one of the episodes in Simpsons by this statement "There is nothing wrong with them, they just made a wrong life choice." Anyhow, so i guess food is an important part of my life and i am very happy to read, write, try, eat, and talk about food. So without any further due here it comes the winter salad recipe;

4 medium sized carrots,
10 grams of root ginger,
3 celery leafs,
1/3 bunch dill,
1 medium sized lemon,
Extra virgin olive oil,
Sea salt,

Peel the skin of the carrots grate the carrots, roughly chop the celeries and dill, in a separate bowl mix the sea salt, lemon, and olive oil do not peel the ginger and grate in to the mixure for dressing. Mix the salad with dressing. Enjoy the salad:)