Category Archives: healthy

Lemon Curd

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Spring is a time for foraging farmers’ markets, whipping up wonderful treats and prancing along to picnics in the sun.  But, with summer and swimwear on the horizon, it’s also the time to unshackle the kitchen from nasty ingredients such as… and I hate to say it… butter.

So, when the gals and I got together to forage the farmers’ market and whip up wonderful treats, ahead of prancing along to our picnic in the sun – we found a recipe for lemon curd that was butter-free!  A much lighter alternative than the usual recipe… but it tasted good! I assure you!  Trust me, don’t be alarmist, it has all the good stuff – lemon and sugar and eggs!

In truth, this butter-free recipe was the sacrificial lamb, to allow us to gorge on other nasty treats like heavenly, gooey and stinky cheese, fig and nut bread and Jamón Serrano.  I like to think of this lemon curd as the carbon offset you can buy nowadays when booking flights.  Just a little something to make yourself feel better about the unintended consequences of your indulgence.

We found this treat-of-a-recipe on Food.com and we send our thanks to the contributor, Mandy, for sharing this gem.

Ingredients
1 cup fresh lemon juice (the recipe suggests you could make it on lime juice, and we added some fresh orange juice with the lemon and it was delicious)
grated zest of the lemons, oranges, or limes you use (avoid the white part, which is bitter)
1 scant cup of sugar
3 farm fresh eggs at room temperature (the bright orange colour of our curd came from the vibrant egg yolks we used)
seeds from 2 vanilla pods, or equivalent in extract or paste
sterilised jars for storage

In a small saucepan, over a medium heat, dissolve sugar into juice and add zest.
Lightly beat the eggs in a bowl. Whisking constantly, slowly pour the slightly cooled lemon/sugar syrup into the egg. Beat for 2 minutes then slowly transfer back into the slightly cooled saucepan.

Heat slowly over a low heat, stirring constantly, until it just starts to bubble at the edges and begins to thicken.  Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Transfer to a container and store in the fridge.  Alternatively, if you’re looking to prolong the curd’s life, pour warm curd into warm sterilised jars and screw down the lid immediately, allowing it to cool sealed.

To sterilise jars, place clean jars and lids into an oven set between 90-120°C until hot.  Carefully remove from the oven and fill and seal whilst hot (or the same temperature as the curd).  I prefer jars with metal lids, that are plastic coated on the inside and have a visible dent on the top which, when sealed hot, sucks inwards and when opened pops out, as this popping is a surefire way to know the contents is fresh.

I’ve since used the remaining curd to fill a sponge cake with blueberries.  I’ll have to share that recipe with you soon because it was delicious, albeit, not summer swim-suit friendly (but, I guess you can’t have everything in life).

Check out these other interesting ways to use lemon curd:

Middle Eastern Dinner Party – Part 2 – Chicken, Olive and Preserved Lemon Tagine

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Moroccan Chicken

This is another recipe I’ve gleaned from Jamie Does, Marrakesh.

It starts by infusing flavour into the chicken with a spice rub, so it’s best to start this recipe a day in advance, or early in the morning.  But once it gets going, it’s happy to blip away without much interference.  This makes it a perfect dinner party dish, because it feeds a crowd and leaves you free to set the table and make a cracking dessert.

Tagines are, obviously, meant to be made in tagines.  Whilst it might be difficult for my friends and husband to believe, there are some pieces of kitchen equipment I don’t have, and a tagine is one of them.  I used a big cast iron pot and the results could not have been any more tender or delicious.  I would love to hear if people  think tagines are really worth the investment though.  I do think they look amazing, but I’m not convinced I really need one.  And, I’m normally fairly easily convinced that I need something for the kitchen!

I was a bit concerned that the fennel bulbs would be too strong in the dish.  But they mellowed out to leave a wonderfully warm and subtle aniseed flavour.

The recipe calls for a whole chicken, of about 1.5kg, broken down.  Instead, I used a 2kg mix of marylands and supremes so that it could stretch to feed 8 with some left overs.  Marylands are a butcher’s cut comprising of the whole thigh and drumstick.  Supremes are a butcher’s cut comprising of the whole breast with the wing bone attached.  I did this because I find these cuts have much easier to navigate bones – an important consideration for a dinner party (plus I use to have a bit of a chicken bone phobia, which I’m now over, but I still prefer not to pick through my chicken in the company of others).  Having said that, don’t use boneless cuts.  You get such an amazing flavour boost from cooking meat on the bone.

Ingredients
1 whole chicken broken down into four, or equivalent in other cuts (I used a bit more to stretch to feed 8+)
olive oil
1-2 large fennel bulbs, chopped into 8 wedges each
2 onions, roughly chopped
1 bunch of coriander, stalks chopped finely, leaves reserved for garnish
4 cloves of garlic, sliced
2-3 small preserved lemons, deseeded and chopped
80g stoned black and green olives
good pinch of saffron
500ml hot chicken stock (or more if you like it really saucy, like me)
cooked couscous to serve (mixed with fresh mint, sultanas and toasted pine-nuts is great!)
yogurt and harissa to serve (optional)

For the spice rub:
1 heaped teaspoon coriander seeds, freshly ground
1 level teaspoon ground cumin
1 heaped teaspoon ground ginger
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper 

Massage your chicken pieces in the spice rub and leave covered in a bowl in the fridge for a few hours (overnight is preferable).

Over a medium-high heat, fry your chicken pieces in some olive oil (skin side down first) for about 5 minutes a side until golden brown.  Remove chicken from the pot temporarily.

Fry off your onions, fennel wedges, coriander stalks and garlic for a couple of minutes.  Then mix in the preserved lemons, olives and saffron.  Add the chicken back to the pot and evenly distribute the ingredients before adding your hot stock.

Cover the pot (or tagine) and simmer on a low heat for 1.5 hours, or until the meat starts to fall away from the bone.  Mine ticked away happily for about 2 hours (without the lid for last 1/2 hour to thicken the sauce up).

Give the mix a bit of a gentle stir half way through and add more liquid if it looks dry.  Taste, and season with salt and pepper if required.

Serve on a bed of couscous, topped with reserved coriander leaves and be ready to soak up the complements from your guests.  This fancy stew (well, really, that’s what it is), elicited ohhs and ahhhs as I presented it to the table, but (most importantly) it tasted good! 

You’ll see in the photo above that I served this with a super quick and easy side salad of grated carrot, ginger, mint, parsley and coriander with a pistachio oil and orange juice dressing.  A great, refreshing accompaniment.

 

Gluten-Free and Sugar-Free Chocolate Cupcakes

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Healthy cupcakes.  Seriously.  These cupcakes are gluten-free and sugar-free… but it tasted soooo good! 

I was originally espoused to the idea that these were dairy-free too.  I may have just chosen to believe that butter isn’t really dairy.  If you are following a strict dairy-free diet, I’d suggest trying to make the cupcakes with olive oil and the frosting with coconut oil or a dairy-free margarine.

Ordinarily, I’m a little put off by recipes which call for you to whip egg whites for addition to batter, because my mixer only has one bowl.  It’s a right pain to have to stop, transfer the mixture into another bowl, then wash up so I have a clean bowl to start whipping my egg whites.  But this recipe doesn’t require a mixer to mix the mixture (try saying that 10 times fast!).  You can mix the mixture in the saucepan you start out with meaning the dish dilemma doesn’t present itself.

If I didn’t know better, I would honestly think these were just run-of-the-mill delicious chocolate cupcakes.  I’m stoked to have found a healthy alternative (even if I did use a bit of butter).

Ingredients – for the cupcakes
1/4 cup (60g) butter (see possible dairy-free alternatives above)
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups xylitol  (or, if you’re not bothered by it being sugar-free, 1 cup caster sugar)
1 1/4 cup quinoa flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, separated
seeds from 1 vanilla bean
1/4 cup soy yogurt (or sour-cream or regular yogurt)

Ingredients – for the frosting
1/4 cup (60g) softened butter (see possible dairy-free alternatives above)
60g melted dairy-free, sugar-free chocolate (I use Plamil Foods and find it’s the closest thing to the real deal about)
3 tablespoons xylitol
1-2 tablespoon cocoa powder
seeds from 1 vanilla bean

For the cupcakes:  Preheat your oven to 190°C (170°C fan forced).  Bring water and butter to the boil in a medium sized saucepan.  Once the butter has melted, remove saucepan from the heat and whisk in sifted cocoa powder.  Then sift in xylitol, quinoa flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.  This mixture shouldn’t be hot any more.  But do make sure.  Then add the egg yolks, vanilla and soy yogurt and beat by hand until smooth.

Meanwhile, whip egg whites until soft peaks before gently folding this through the cupcake mixture.

Spoon about a 1/4 cup of mixture into each cupcake liner (held in muffin tins is best to keep their shape).  I found there was exactly enough mixture to make 12 cupcakes - awfully convenient.  Bake for 14 minutes.  Leave on a wire rack to cool before frosting.

For the frosting: whip softened butter and xylitol until butter become pale and fluffy.  Add remaining ingredients and continue to whip until all well incorporated and fluffy.  Using a piping bag with a large star nozzle, pipe frosting onto cool cupcakes.  You may find it easier if you pop the piping bag full of mixture in the fridge for just a couple of minutes (no longer) to firm up before piping.

NOTE: Xylitol and quinoa flour (pronounced keen-wah) should be available at your local health food shop.  In baking, quinoa flour is best toasted in an oven at about 100°C for 2 hours before letting it cool and repackaging it for future use.  This seems to mellow the grassy flavour quite a bit.  Also, if you’re not going to use your quinoa flour soon, best to leave it in the freezer, as it’s more likely to quickly spoil than regular flour.

Just a bit cheesy – Smokey Macadamia Nut Dip

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You may have read that I’m on a bit of a crazy freak-food diet – no dairy, no gluten, and no sugar, but with a side of extra walking.  Two weeks down, two to go!

To be honest, I can’t say that I’ve dropped a heap of weight in the last two weeks, nor have I started to feel miraculously good.  But, I am stubborn and will finish my commitment to 4 weeks.  Who knows, a motherland of healthy-eating-endorphins could rain down towards the end.  And if nothing else, it’s good for a clean out of my body and mind.

One of the more measurable benefits of this diet, however, is that I’m starting to experiment more with unusual ingredients and recipes that previously I would have overlooked.  Pre-diet Heike would have seen a recipe for Raw Vegan Nacho Cheeze (yes, with Z), and looked the other way.  Freak-food diet Heike, however, saw this recipe and got a bit excited about the thought of something dairy-free tasting remotely like cheese.  Turns out, I’m totally addicted to cheese.  To anyone who knows me, this might not be a revelation.  But I was astonished at my dependence.

Now, don’t freak out.  I’m not going to abandon dairy longer term.  So, you will soon see a return of recipes involving cheese on this blog.  Recipes such as my Roasted Tomato Bruschetta with Goat’s Cheese.  I can’t wait until I can eat that one again!

I digress.  When I saw Wayfaring Chocolate’s recipe for Raw Vegan Nacho Cheeze, and saw how simple it was to knock up, I raced to the kitchen to give it a go.  What did I have to lose?  I had all the ingredients in the pantry and, heck, it might just end the rebellion of my cheese cravings.

Ingredients
2 cups (240g) macadamia nuts
1/4 cup (60mls, approx 1 small lemon) lemon juice
1 tablespoon (15ml) coconut aminos (or soy sauce, or tamari)
1 tablespoon (15ml) ground turmeric
2 tablespoons (30ml) smokey hot paprika (or cayenne, if you prefer more of a kick)
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup of water (or more depending how saucy you like it)

Stick everything except the water in the food processor and hit wiz (or waz-it-up, as Jamie Oliver seems to always say).  Slowly add the water until you hit your desired texture.

Serve with rice crackers and celery and anything else you fancy.

Verdict:  Did it taste like cheese?  Well, for someone who’s not eating cheese at the moment – yeah – it kinda did.  For anyone who does eat glorious cheese though, maybe… not so much.  But, I would still recommend it as a great dip to serve with Crudites.  Not really cheese… but it tasted good!

I’ve just whipped up a batch of chocolate fudge cupcakes (made of quinoa flour and using xylitol instead of sugar).  They look great, but after I’ve run the most important test, the taste test, I’ll see if they are worth sharing with you!

If you liked the look of this recipe, check out these other blog posts featuring macadamia nuts, which I think look great too: 

Pumpkin Soup with Savoury Pumpkin Scones

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Today, was Pumpkin Day!  A small nearby village, called Collector, hosts an annual Pumpkin Festival and it’s a right hoot.  The festival has pumpkin rolling competitions and prizes for best scarecrow, to name but two of the fabulous things which happen at the Pumpkin Festival.

Needless to say, I bought up big on big pumpkins.  I know – big pumpkins is a relative term.  Compared to the size of pumpkin I normally buy, these were massive.  Compared to the pumpkin which won the heaviest pumpkin ribbon – these are tiny!

collector pumpkin festival

After much consideration, I decided to make a pumpkin soup and some savoury pumpkin scones for dinner.  Both were delicious and because they both freeze well, will make great lunches in the week.

Ingredients – Soup
1 large pumpkin, deseeded and cut into chunks
1 tablespoon sumac
olive oil
1 litre vegetable stock
400ml coconut milk
1 large red onion, diced
2 teaspoons hot smoked paprika
thumb sized piece of ginger, grated
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 a nutmeg, grated
coriander, roots and stalks finely chopped, leaves whole
salt & pepper
yoghurt (or sour cream) to serve

Preheat oven to 200°C (fan forced).  Coat the pumpkin in olive oil and sprinkle sumac, salt & pepper over.  Roast in the oven for 30-40 minutes.

Meanwhile, gently sweat down the onions in the olive oil and add the coriander roots and stalks, paprika, ginger, garlic, cinnamon and nutmeg.

When your pumpkin is soft after roasting, remove from oven and let cool slightly.  Then, carefully peal away the pumpkin skin and add the flesh to your onions.  Add the vegetable stock and stir.  Let the stock some to the simmer and simmer for 10 minutes.  Then, take a stick blender and blend the pumpkin.  Finally, add the coconut milk to warm through.  Serve soup with a dollop of yoghurt or sour cream and top with coriander leaves.

Ingredients – Scones
500g pumpkin, peeled and chopped
3 1/2 cups self-raising flour
salt & pepper
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup shaved parmesan
1/2 cup grated tasty cheese
3 slices of prosciutto, sliced

Recipe inspired by Donna Hay

Preheat oven to 180°C (fan forced).  Roast pumpkin for 30-40 minutes.  Place pumpkin flesh in a large bowl with the flour, salt and pepper and mash until smooth.  I used disposable latex gloves to mix this.

Make a well in the centre and gradually add the milk, mixing until combined.  Press out onto a baking tray, lined with baking paper, to form a 20cm x 30cm rectangle.  Top with the parmesan, cheddar and prosciutto.  Score into 12 squares and place on a baking tray. Bake for 20 minutes.