carrot deliciousness

Somehow, I ended up with 3 x 1 kilo bags of carrots in my fridge. As I have a pet hate for wasting food, I found some interesting carrot recipes on the net and my favourite food blogs.

Carrot cake oatmeal
What? Carrots for breakfast? Well why not? Carrots are as sweet as fruit and fruit is often consumed at breakfast so I figured it could be used as a substitute in my breakfast. Plus, I liked the idea of having carrot cake for breakfast. I used a recipe from Oh She Glows, a healthy vegan blog.

I don't have an amazing abundance of stuff in my pantry, so I used the following ingredients listed in the recipe:

*1 heaped cup of finely grated carrots

*1 cup oat milk plus extra where necessary

*1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp ground ginger, 1/8 tsp nutmeg

*1/2 cup oats

*A bite size chunk of banana

*Toppings: raisins, pumpkin seeds, coconut shavings and yoghurt

The method is a one pot simplicity. I soaked all ingredients except the toppings in a bowl overnight as this would speed up the cooking process the next day. The next morning, I put these ingredients in a pot, boiled and simmered away as I would when cooking normal porridge. After around 10 minutes, everything melted together. Excited...

You can add sweeteners to the oatmeal, but I thought it was sweet enough as the carrots and banana were a natural sweetener. Yoghurt added extra creaminess and the pumpkin seeds/coconut gave the meal a crunch. As the oatmeal on its own looks like a mysterious orange glob, the toppings make the porridge look more palatable.

Carrot hummus
I forgot where I got the recipe for carrot hummus, but the end result was pretty delicious. It was the standard hummus recipe with a can of chickpeas, tahini, garlic and lemon juice... plus two slightly boiled carrots and a bit of fresh minced ginger. These are my work snacks for the week :)

scrambled tofu

Just some pics of one of my favourite meals to have - scrambled tofu. I use either medium or extra firm tofu and add turmeric and tamari sauce which gives the tofu an egg-like appearance. Toppings include mushrooms, fresh herbs (e.g. chives), onions, tomatoes, spinach, zucchini and basically anything in my fridge! I eat this as breakfast with a slice of toast, for lunch/dinner or as a healthy snack.

I feel pretty lazy at the moment and want some warm comforting food such as scrambled tofu. I went to Sydney for the weekend and it was good to get a change of scenery. However, with my back pain and other things, I over exerted myself so I don't feel like I got much of a weekend. Socialising and being in my home town wasn't as satisfying as I had wished. Oh well. I'm going to try to do something for myself this weekend. Maybe I'll start a creative project. Maybe I'll write about my project on this blog :).

tofu pancakes

I took a much-needed day off work to relax, rest and recuperate. Somehow, I spent 6 out of 8 hours of the day cooking. I'm not sure if it was exactly relaxing and I felt slightly hopeless for using up my day on chore-like activities. I probably need more hobbies other than cooking or those that revolve around food. Oh well. Let me embrace it for a moment.

I've read many recipes that include silken tofu in pancakes. Many of these recipes are vegan and tofu is used as an egg/protein substitute and can lighten up the texture of the pancake. However, I wondered whether tofu can be used to complement conventional pancakes that use eggs. Are eggs really necessary in pancakes/tofu pancakes? I tried making both.

My recipe consisted of gluten free self raising flour, oat milk, silken tofu and 1/2 egg for one pancake. I used egg in the batter and pancake shown on the left whereas the batter/pancake on the right has no egg.

Both pancakes are a similar colour to their batter - the egg added a yellow tinge to the left pancake whereas the pancake on the right remained a beige tofu colour. Both pancakes cooked decently. As you can see, the pancake with only tofu broke a bit, but this isn't significant.

I was experimenting with pancake batters so I thought I'd take it a step further and try out different pancake toppings. I microwaved frozen raspberries and added fig jam to it to remove the berries' occasional sourness. I also used rice malt syrup.

The tofu pancake with egg was light and fluffy. The taste of the tofu was noticeable so I probably wouldn't recommend it to tofu haters.

The pancake without egg was a bit more mushy and had the texture of firm porridge. It was less like cake and more like a moist pudding. I still enjoyed it but if you try this, don't expect it to taste like the conventional flour, egg, milk, butter pancake.

I would definitely cook tofu pancakes again. They were also pretty light on the stomach. I prefer the one with egg as I anticipate a cakey texture when I eat pancakes. If I cooked the one without eggs again, I'd cook it for a bit longer on a lower heat. Also, tofu pancakes would probably be fluffier and rise more with wheat flour, rather than gluten free flour.

zucchini dill and feta pie

I've got a love/hate relationship with cheese. When I was young, my family was infamous among my friends for our cheesy remake of McCain's frozen pizza. My family would often have McCain's Hawaiian pizza for afternoon tea or when friends came over. At the request of my brothers and I, my mum would pile an extra ton of shredded cheese on the pizza, bake it and serve it with corn.

My teenage years marked the beginning of a very long phase of not liking cheese for its high fat density. I enjoyed the taste of most cheeses but disliked how it was often used to complement large dishes where the cheese becomes barely noticeable. It adds fat to the dish but not much taste.

Then when I went to university, I studied exchange in England. With their supermarket aisles of specialist cheese and a French housemate who constantly snacked on cheese, I started to eat cheese again, like a child rediscovering ice cream. I realised what type of cheese I liked and how I could use it more efficiently in dishes.

I don't often eat feta cheese as I find it extremely salty. However, it's amazing in Belinda Jeffery's recipe for zucchinni, dill and feta pie. Actually, the whole recipe is amazing. I cooked this around 2 years ago:

I remember it being very tasty yet not overwhelming. There wasn't too much cheese in it but it was still moist after a few days. It was perfect winter home food and had a fluffy and heart-warming (awww) texture.

chirashizushi (sushi bowl)

When I see my mum in Sydney or if she visits me in Canberra, she often provides me with an abundance of food, ranging from home made minced beef, to abalone soup and fish/corn stirfry. Last year she gave me a couple of packets of Japanese style eel, something that I love eating in restaurants... but haven't figured out how to cook.

I've also been trying to overcome my fear of eating carb-dominated food at any meal except breakfast. When I say carbs, I mean brown rice, wholemeal pasta and bread rather than the carbs you find in fruit/veges. However, I realised that I need carbs for longer term energy (2-4 hours) rather than relying on the sugar boost that fruit will give me. I stomached the courage to remake chirashizushi, which is sushi in a bowl. I tried it once in a Sydney restaurant and loved it. I made this before but burnt the eel by overcooking it in the microwave. Silly me.

My nutritionist recently advised me that if I continue to maintain my underweight BMI, it is likely my bones will crush and I will have huge skeletal surgeries when I'm an old shruken lady... okay not exactly, but being underweight is a huge risk factor in having low bone density and all sorts of issues in the long term. So this is the first meal I've cooked in ages that has rice.

The base of the dish should include sushi-style rice (rice cooled with sushi vinegar). At the last minute, I realised that I didn't have sushi vinegar so tried to substitute it with rice wine and white vinegar... haha and it was nothing like sushi rice.

I topped the rice with blanched carrots, snow peas, green beans and chinese cabbage. I also added shitaake mushrooms marinated in soy sauce and mirin. I made a Japanese style omelette - this consisted of egg, soy sauce, mirin, sugar and salt and I tried rolling in the way Japanese restaurants do. (visible in the second picture). This time I didn't burn the eel (yay). I added some wasabi for a kick and sesame seeds. 

The second time I prepared this, I also add bits of seaweed. More of a sushi experience! 

guilty eating

One evening, Dan and I spontaneously attempted to make 'chocolate banana ice cream'. We had to freeze the bananas then blend it with a little cocoa and milk until it's the consistency of soft serve. However, we were pretty impatient and didn't wait til the banana was completely frozen... So we ended up with a cocoa banana mousse. It was a bit sickly to eat on it's own so I put it on top of a gingernut biscuit.

The quality of this photo isn't the best. It's difficult to differentiate between the light brown colour of the biscuit and the dark brown creation in the background and there's too much white balance in the background. The pictures and content in my blog aren't perfect either.

I'm quite self-critical in areas of my life, especially with what I eat. Society doesn't really set achievable standards either. In particular, females always chuck around invisible standards of the 'perfect diet'. For example, I could be out with a group of friends having lunch at a cafe. We all order salads but one girl orders chips and gravy. She sees that her choice isn't as 'healthy' as everyone else so makes excuses for herself such as 'Oh I'm just being a phat bat today' or 'I should really eat better like you all'... there's like an invisible standard that salads are the norm and chips are a 'guilty' treat. Should the girl have to feel 'guilty' about it and compare herself to others? I understand that it's not nutritionally healthy to eat chips all the time, but it's about the feeling associated with eating chips. Guilt and like you've done something wrong.

These social dynamics appear in heaps of situations. People (females) at work snack on chocolate and often saying 'oh I'm being bad today'. Screw that. Treats should be a considered a normal part of a healthy diet - it shouldn't be considered a 'bad' thing.

Although I criticise these social norms, I'm definitely not above them when I choose what to eat. I rarely choose to eat chips/gravy or chocolate. But if I do and express how guilty I feel, people around me would say 'oh it's okay, you eat healthy normally and you are skinny so it's okay'... People don't really know what it takes for me to stay skinny. To me, this implies it's okay to eat junk food because I try so so hard to stay skinny by eating small amounts, restricting my diet and exercising when it's thundering.

I'm trying to be more aware of what feeds (pun not intended) my self-critical nature so some day I can eat chips/gravy/chocolate/junk food without feeling an intense amount of guilt.

morrnnniingg

Far out. It's 8am and I'm already exhausted. I've taken rec leave from work today to attend a few appointments so hopefully I'll squeeze in some time to relax. I don't want to waste my time by meaninglessly staring at Facebook, but watch movies, write in my journal, read etc.

To start off the day, I've made a vegan avocado cocoa spread for my toast. The spread is pretty delicious and is like a healthy version of nutella. I got my mini food processor and whizzed some avocado, cocoa, rice malt syrup, vanilla essence, oat milk to thin the spread and some hazelnuts to give it that Nutella taste that I love. The spread was a bit chunky, but I think it adds character to the spread.

And here I am, sitting next to my warm radiator, blanketed by my night robe. Amazing.

hot cross buns, hot cross buns

I know its months past Easter but I still want to post up pictures of my favourite hot cross buns from Easter.

I've been living with my current housemates for about one and a half years now. During that time, my male housemate frequently mentions that he gets a free batch of hot cross buns from the Silo Bakery every year as his parents know the owners. For those not familiar with Canberra, the Silo Bakery is quite well known in town for its bread and pastries. Its situated among the popular cafe scene of Kingston.

I'm a bit skeptical of 'popular' eateries. Is it popular because it has a 'unique' brand but the food is actually the same as everything else offered in the area? Is it popular just because its sophisticated for Canberra but in the grand scheme of things (aka v.s. other cities) its actually bland? Is the eatery trying too hard to be cool that it becomes contrived?

I woke up on the Thursday before the Easter weekend and it was a major struggle to get out of bed. I was pleasantly surprised by a package waiting on the kitchen bench - free hot cross buns! They looked kinda rustic.

The hot cross buns were actually really good. There weren't too many sultanas and there was a good balance of spices. The top of the bun was glossed with a nice marinade. And the buns were satisfying - none of the 'just spiced fruit bread' bullshit.

That day, I also tried Woolie's 'sticky date and caramel' hot cross buns for the first time. I was intrigued by the concept but the buns were pretty ugh - bland fruit buns with overpowering hits of tough caramel. 

I remember I ate 2 hot cross buns that day, not doing any exercise and feeling bloated and guilty. I'm probably too hard on myself - I guess I don't eat fruit buns all year round.

black sesame rice paper

I was browsing the Asian grocery stall at the Mawson shops and came across a suspicious looking product. They were like Vietnamese rice paper rolls with black sesame seeds. I'm a huge fan of Asian black sesame dishes so I thought I'd give this a try. Each pack was around $3 and came with 3 sheets - half the quantity of packets of normal rice paper rolls. I prepared them like rice paper rolls by dipping the sheet in very hot water and rolling them up. I was quite intrigued by the texture:

Each sheet was quite thick, became a bit slimy and was very hard to roll up. They were also quite tough and chewy to eat. I soaked the sheets for a bit longer, but even after 10 minutes, they were unpalatable. Makes an interesting looking dish though! Like ants or sea animals swimming?

After some googling, I realised the rice paper was meant to be warmed up in the microwave or in oil, allowing the rice paper to fluff up like a prawn cracker. Whoops and cool! I served them like sang choy bow, using the rice paper as a bowl for marinated veges. Fun and crunchy!

brb, i'm just going to warm up an apple in the microwave

I usually snack on apples at work but since the winter cold has hit Canberra, I haven't really been tempted to bite into the cold crunchiness of apples. Instead of wasting the lot of apples I bought for that week, I needed to adapt... how could I prepare them another way? I realised that work has cooking appliances that actually apply heat to food - amazing! This included microwaves, sandwich presses, toasters and ovens. During a mid week hump hour (1-3pm ish after lunch when my energy usually crashes), I prepared an apple in a microwave safe dish. I cored it, stuffed it with frozen raspberries, popped it in the microwave for around 4 minutes and voila! The raspberries melted creating a moat of juice around the apple that helped stew it. The inside of the microwave was pretty colourful afterwards - it looked like something from the planet Mars decided to have a mental breakdown and splatter everywhere. Nevertheless, with a dollop of natural yoghurt, the baked apple was delicious and homey.

And I tried again another day by chopping up the apples and with mixed spices. The cut up pieces of apple reduced the cooking time by half.

And the name of this blog entry comes from a conversation I had with a colleague, who recently inspired me to get back into food blogging! It helps to be open and honest with the right people.