This time of year it’s hot, I’ve eaten more rich food than usual and the shops are open sporadically. All this leads to a general feeling of not wanting to be in the kitchen too long. If I can get a meal on the table in under ten minutes it’s a winner in my eyes. I think the Thai’s must suffer this heat lethargy all year round, other than their laborious spice paste, most of their cuisine is so quick to prepare.

This beautifully simple stir fry is inspired by a recipe in David Thompson’s ‘Thai Street Food’. The list of ingredients are glaringly simple, yet the combination of flavours are much more than their individual parts. I’m not one to include a lot of pepper in my food, but this is the secret to the success of this dish. In David’s book, he suggests switching different greens and different seafood or poultry in this recipe. I had some frozen scallops in my freezer, which I quickly defrosted in the microwave, and a few bunches of asparagus to get through and that was all I needed.

Asparagus and Scallops

• 2 tsp coconut oil
• 2 bunches asparagus, woody bases trimmed and cut into 4cm length
• 350g scallops, thawed if frozen
• 2 cloves garlic, sliced/chopped (not crushed- it will burn!)
• 1 Tbsp light soy sauce (tamari for gluten free)
• 2 Tbsp chicken stock or water
• ½ tsp freshly ground pepper

1. Heat a wok until very hot. Add the coconut oil and heat until shimmering.
2. Add the asparagus and scallops and stir-fry for 3 or 4 minutes, until the scallops begin to loose their translucent quality.
3. Add the garlic and cook for a further minute.
4. Add the remaining ingredients and simmer for 2 minutes.
5. Taste and add more pepper if desired

As an extra special bonus, for all you protein junkies and/or gluten free folk, I’ve included a recipe to make your own sponge fingers. If you don’t have time, just use the store bought variety.

• 3 eggs, separated
• ¾ cup sweetener (I used ½ cup native, ¼ cup raw castor sugar)
• ¼ cup arrowroot powder or vanilla casein protein powder
• 250g light soft ricotta (I used perfect italiano light)
• 100g low-fat quark or cream cheese
• 90ml (3 shots) espresso coffee
• 60ml (¼ cup) marsala or brandy
• 3 fresh egg whites
• 40g 85% dark chocolate
• 24 italian sponge finger biscuits OR
• 2 whole eggs, separated
• 6 egg whites
• 2 tsp sweetener
• ¾ cup coconut flour
• ¾ cup vanilla casein protein powder OR ¾ cup almond meal

To make the sponge finger biscuits:
Preheat an oven to 180ºC/350ºF
Beat the egg yolks until they change colour, add the sweetener. Set aside.
In a clean bowl with a clean, dry whisk, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Fold in the egg yolk mixture and the remaining flours/protein powders. Switch to a wooden spoon and form into a dough. Divide the dough into 24 pieces and form into fingers using your hand (clean hands or gloves for hygiene, please!). Line a flat baking tray with baking paper, and place the fingers on the tray. Bake the fingers for 15–20 minutes or until golden. Allow to cool and preferably rest for at least a few hours before using.

To make the tiramisu:
Beat the egg yolks with the sweetener in a medium sized mixing bowl. Add in the ricotta and quark and stir until combined.
Place the arrowroot or casein in a small bowl. Add a quarter of the cheese mixture and blend until free of lumps. Return the thickened mixture to the larger bowl of cheese mix and stir until combined and evenly distributed. Set aside.

Prepare the coffee and combine with the marsala in a wide bottomed dish. Dunk the sponge finger biscuits in the coffee and and pack in a layer across the bottom of a large (about 30cm) square dish.

Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold through the cheese mixture until evenly combined. Pour over the coffee soaked sponge fingers. Grate the chocolate over the top. Cover and refrigerate for a few hours, preferably overnight, to allow the flavours to fully spread.

By making these biscuits I could bring the downfall of Christmas in my family. Chocolate, the downfall of Christmas? I know…. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Introducing anything new to our family’s Christmas is risky. I got weird looks with these stuffed eggs last year; but everyone loved them. This year, I mentioned to my mum I’d seen Viv’s Gianduiotti, and that I wanted to try a making chocolate Haselnussmakronen. There were serious murmurs about ruining Christmas! Chocolate, ruin christmas? Bah!

Plain hazelnut macaroons are steeped in family history. Originally Haselnussmakronen, traditional German macaroons from my grandmother’s recipe. These have always been my favourite Christmas biscuit ever since I was young. When the Christmas baking was handed down to me, I saw how easy it would be to lower the carbohydrates in these. No one even noticed.  We now have several diabetics in our Christmas party and the low-carb approach is really appreciated.

To placate everyone, and satisfy my curiosity, I prepared both. If the family don’t get into them, the woman I bought the hazelnuts from will happily take them off my hands. I hope that these make your Christmas extra special.

xo

Gianduja and Haselnuss Macaroons for Christmas

To make 15 of each

• 300g (18oz) hazelnuts, plus 30 extra
• 150g 85% dark chocolate or cocoa farm sugar free chocolate
• ½  teaspoon vanilla extract
• a pinch
•  salt
• a pinches cinnamon
• 1 cup granular sweetener, or 200g castor sugar
• 4 fresh egg whites, at room temperature

1. Place your oven racks near the centre of the oven, allowing for a little room for the air to flow. Preheat an oven to 120ºC/250ºF. Line two baking trays with baking paper.
2. Place the hazelnuts, reserving the 30 extra, in a food processor and grind until they are a fine powder. Set aside in a large mixing bowl. Break the chocolate into squares and place in the food processor,  process until fine crumbs are formed.  Place in a second mixing bowl.
3. Add the vanilla, salt and cinnamon to the ground nuts, and mix until combined. Place a third of the nut mixture (about 100g) in the chocolate bowl. Divide the sweetener equally amongst each bowl, half a cup in each. Stir both bowls to combine the mixtures.
4. In a large clean, dry mixing bowl, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Fold half the egg whites through the non-chocolate mixture until evenly blended through to form a sticky, slightly crumbly dough. Repeat with the chocolate hazelnut mixture.
5. Using your clean hands (for extra hygiene wear gloves), form each mixture into balls the size of walnuts and place on the prepared trays. Gently press a hazelnut into the top of each one.
6. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Turn the oven off and leave the door ajar for a further 20 minutes before cooling on a wire rack or elevating the trays on bowls to allow air to flow under them.

Substitutes and Alterations:

• If you don’t have a food processor, purchase ready ground hazelnut meal from the supermarket and grate the chocolate with a cheese grater.
• Raw castor sugar, natvia or spenda would all make suitable sweeteners in this recipe

This time last year I shared with your my family’s Christmas Cinnamon Stars

I’ve been playing around with a few little ideas for Christmas and asked what everyone was after over on my Facebook page. Shortbread was one suggestion. These aren’t quite shortbread but they fill the house with the sweet smell of baking, all the same. Even better, because they don’t contain any butter, they’ll keep for much longer, making them the perfect sugar-free gift to tuck inside a Christmas card.

 Cashew Finger Cookies

•  90g (¾ cup) cashews
• 2 egg whites, from fresh eggs
• ¼ tsp cream of tartare
• ⅓ cup sweetener (I used Natvia, you could use raw castor sugar, Splenda. Xylitol doesn’t work in my experience)

1.  Preheat an oven to 120ºC/250ºF. Line a large, flat baking tray with baking paper.
2.  Place the cashews in a food processor or blender and grind to a powder. Set aside.
3. Place the egg whites and cream of tartare in a clean dry bowl. Whisk to form stiff peaks. Fold in the sweetener and the ground cashews.
4. Fit a 5mm nozzle to a piping bag. Fill with mixture. Pipe the mixture in 4cm/1.5in lengths onto the baking tray. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes. Remove once golden.
5.  When you remove the the cookies from the oven, they will still be soft. Don’t fret! Let them sit for about 20 minutes and they’ll be beautifully crispy.

I’ve had chia seeds in my pantry for about a year now. Occasionally i will sprinkle them on oats or into baked goods, but it wasn’t until recently I discovered their amazing gelling properties. Chia pudding is hardly a secret in the raw/vegan community, but for me it’s been an exciting new discovery.

I’ve been eating chia pudding for breakfast the last few weeks with either almond milk or coconut milk and mangoes. This is all part of pretending I’m on a tropical holiday somewhere. While making my breakfast the other day, I was on the phone to my friend/client/massage therapist, Carly, and the conversation landed on Chocolate. Don’t all good conversations at 7.30am? By the time we hung up, my chia had gelled and I had the idea that chocolate was a perfectly normal (and antioxidant rich) breakfast food.

Once I had chocolate and mango all ready to go, I couldn’t leave chilli out. Vivienne might not have forgiven me. She’s promised me that they’re a perfect combination. And they were. The chia gel was smooth and cooling along with the mango, the coconut milk sweet, the cacoa powder earthy and a little bitter. The bitterness going perfectly with the occasional zing of chilli. It all summed up my tropical island fantasy breakfast perfectly.
2 Tbsp chia seeds
1/2 cup water
1 1/2 tsp cocoa powder
2 Tbs coconut milk
1 ts sweetener (I used natvia)
a sprinkle of chilli flakes (if you’re brave)
1 mango, diced

Mix the everything except the mango in a bowl. Leave to sit for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally while you drink your morning cuppa. Top with the mango and eat.

Preparation and Storage: This whole recipe can be prepared up to 3 days in advance and kept refrigerated in an air tight jar.

Substitutes and Alternatives: For a smoother texture place the chia seeds in a food processor or coffee grinder before mixing. To boost the protein content I sometimes sprinkle hulled hemp seeds on top of mine.

Traditionally carrot salad is popular in many cultures, the most well know are those from the middle-east. However, this salad is a spin-off from an Asian noodle salad I used to cook back in my vegetarian days.  As it is, it’s raw/vegan, but you could add egg noodles, rice noodles or even low carb konnyaku noodles to this if you want to make it a bigger meal. I’m keeping a big tub of it in the fridge and using it in wraps or just grabbing it for a quick snack. The herbs may get a little soggy but I’ll allow that because as the bright flavours of the dressing soaks through the crunchy carrot the flavours just become better and better.

Carrot Salad with Sesame, Soy and Lime Dressing

• 4-5 carrots, grated (to make 2 cups)
• 1 large (170g) red capsicum, shredded
• 200g (2 cups) snow peas, shredded
• 1 big handful mint, shredded
• ½ bunch coriander leaves

Dressing

• 4 tsp sesame oil
• 2 Tbsp sweet chilli sauce (sugar-free optional)
• 2 Tbsp dark soy sauce (or Braggs Aminos/Tamari for soy/wheat-free)
• 1 Tbsp kecap manis
• 2 Tbsp lime juice
• 1 tsp sesame seeds

1. Combine the salad ingredients in a large bowl.
2. In a small bowl combine the dressing.
3. Toss the dressing through the salad.

Makes 4 large serves.

Nutrition per serve (using sugar-free sweet chilli):
114 Calories
5.4g Fat, 0.9g Saturated, 0mg Cholesterol
2.9g Protein
10.7g Carbohydrates, 4.5g Fibre
914.2mg Sodium

Food shared with good friends always seems to taste better.  Just over a year ago I was in London sharing this bread with my dear friend Carolyn. We’d jumped on the tube and trekked across town to the Islington Farmers Market not knowing quite what we’d find when we came across Flour Power City. Their selection of sourdough bread caught our eye. We’ve both had our moments of obsession with trying to grow our own sour dough starters and resolved that it’s something best left to experts. Carolyn picked the Dark Rye Bread with Caraway and Raisins. I was sceptical, I’m not a fan of sweet and savoury combined. I don’t like fruit with my cheese or pineapple on my pizza. So, would this work?

At breakfast the next morning all expectations were surpassed. The sharpness of the 100% rye flour combined with caraway, fennel and the sweetness of raisins, honey a molasses. It was rich, just sweet enough and densely filling. A single thick wedge was enough to keep me full for most of my morning rambling around Hyde Park.

A year later and the molasses jar has been creeping to the front of my pantry. A tiny drizzle in my morning quinoa adding an extra dimension. Somewhere a food memory was triggered. I wonder if I could make a rye bread with a hint of molasses in it?

I found these instructions on making a rye sourdough starter. They seemed much easier than past efforts for wheat sourdough. This gave me a lead time of 3 or so days to figure out the next step. Tabs started to  span across the top of my browser as I compared notes from different baking website. It was clear I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The Fresh Loaf was a huge help. Especially this recipe on 100% sourdough ratios.

This loaf was made in my oval Le Crueset pan

The terminology of bread baking and all of the technical bits and bobs are still lost on me. And I’m sure I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I am really enjoying this bread. Plus, I’m no longer convinced bread making is for ‘someone else’.

You will need:
a little less than 1kg rye flour
a little less than 1 Litre filtered water
½ cup raisins
14g salt
2 tsp fennel seeds
1 Tbsp caraway seeds
1 Tbsp molasses
1 tsp honey

(Thursday) Morning- Day 1
Place 50g of flour and 50g of filtered water in a large, clean, glass jar. Stir with a chopstick until combined. Cover with a lid and place somewhere warmish (25ºC or so), such as a window sill.

(Thursday) Evening- Day 1
Add another 50g of flour and 50g of water to the jar. Stir, cover, put back on the window sill.

(Friday) Morning- Day 2
Small air bubble should be starting to form today.
Stir in another 50g of flour and 50g of filtered water. Use a whiteboard marker to mark where the slop fills the jar to. Cover and leave in your warm place.

(Friday) Evening- Day 2
Your started should have risen a bit and have bigger bubbles.
50g of water, 50g of flour, stir. Mark jar with marker. Rest.

(Saturday) Morning- Day 3
Hopefully your starter will have nearly doubled in size overnight. Their should be nice big air bubbles in the mixture at around 5mm in size.
If it’s not ready yet, repeat the ‘feeding’ process for another day.

In a large mixing bowl combine
150g of your starter
525g of water.
Mix until the starter has mostly dissolved. Then add
625g rye flour.
Mix using wet hands and a wet spoon until combined. Cover and rest for about an hour.
Place the raisins in a large bowl and cover with boiling water to soak.
Add in the salt, spices, molasses and honey and mix again with a wet spoon and wet hands.
Place in a greased ovenproof saucepan. Cover and allow to rise for 2-4 hours, or until nearly double in size.
Adjust your oven racks so there is at least 40cm height on the middle shelf. Heat your oven to 200ºC.
Your bread will still need plenty of room in the saucepan, if it doesn’t have nearly double the height still left in the pan, remove the lid and use a second saucepan or bent foil tray as the cover for the pan. Having this height will allow steam from your dough to get trapped and help with the moistness of the bread.
Place the saucepan(s) in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.
Remove the lid, reduce the heat to 180ºC and bake for another 75 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and rest for about 15 minutes. The bread should come away from the edges of the pan and be easy to tip out.
Rest on a wire cooling rack until cool.

For the first day, or two, the bread will be quite cake-like and soft. A good rye bread should be left un-cut for at least 24 hours. However, you’re a stronger willed person than me if you can resist that long. Over the next few days the bread will develop a sourer taste and a firmer texture even if you have cut it.

Leftover Starter
You will have a bit of sour dough starter leftover. Feed it another 50g of flour and 50g of water and after 8hr pop it in the fridge. The (Friday) night before baking day take it out from the fridge, feed it again with 50g of water, 50g of starter and you’re ready to begin (Saturday) baking day the next morning.

A note on saucepans- The first time I made this I used my large, oval cast iron Le Crueset pan and didn’t need a second saucepan. The bread came out not as tall and more oval shaped. The second time I made this I used 2 20cm Circulon saucepans stacked on top of each other. The bread was the height of a regular loaf and would have been better for toasting, if I hadn’t decided to eat it ‘naked and raw’.

And finally, mangoes were under $2 each at my rather pricey fruit and vegetable shop. I could hardly contain my excitement. The plan was to have them for breakfast with some homemade yoghurt and oats. However, I got chatting to Viviane from ‘Chocolate, Chilli, Mango on Facebook and was persuaded to do some baking.

I don’t bake very often. I’m not a sweet tooth, but Viviane’s recipe for Flourless Mango Cake‘ caught my eye because of it’s lack of processed ingredients. Her recipe called for coconut sugar and coconut oil, However, my curiosity about coconut flour has been brewing and this was all I needed to have a play.

Maybe you’ve strayed into the wonderful world of sugar and process carbs and need a way back. After my weekend away in Melbourne, I sure did. All the delicious treats of St Kilda and surrounds have recharged my body and inspired me to get back into the kitchen and keep food fun, fresh and fast.

When it came time to get into a clean breakfast I had to get creative, I didn’t want to be lured back to by the sugar-faeries. Pancakes always seem a bit more special to me after a week of porridge, but I didn’t want the same old, same old. Good thing too as I was out of cinnamon and my vanilla essense was still packed from the trip. So, when  I opened my baking draw in my pantry, searching for inspiration, the coconut essence jumped out and grabbed my imagination. Combined with the nutty taste of the quinoa flour and a few oats added for extra chewiness I was excited.

There are many protein-rich pancake recipes out there and depending on the day i make mine with different ratios of liquids to solids, depending on whether i want crepes or cute fluffy pikelettes. When the mixture hit the pan and the tiny little bubble started to form, I new I’d be satisfied. Up the puffed, golden and luxurious a perfect reward after a cold winter’s morning walk.

So, today I thought I’d make up it with two recipes. Technically one-and-a-half recipes as they both come from the same idea. Baked pureed cauliflower.

If you don’t already know my obsession with all things cauliflower puree, you’d better start at the beginning with the original cauliflower pancake recipe.

About to run off to the Get the Edge Workshops, a few weeks ago in Melbourne, I needed something I could eat with my fingers. Something sweet would be bonus. With not much in my house I become my most inventive and was curious to find out what would happen if I took the original cauliflower pancake recipe and made it into bars.
Due to the extra volume of cauliflower, instead of firm chewy protein bars I wound up with a light, fluffy, sweet baked custard texture. This had turned out MUCH better than I’d expected. So good, I’ve eaten it every day since for the last 2 weeks.

Chocolate mousse cake just before baking... fingers crossed

Today I was about to whip up another batch with the plan of making it in bulk, when it occurred to me that maybe a I could make a chocolate mousse cake. Yum! Fluffy, soft, chocolatey. The only improvement I would make is to use a double chocolate protein powder. However, if you’re like me and only have vanilla, you’ll get a perfectly acceptable result.

Baked Vanilla Custard

Nutrition:
195 Calories
28.3g Protein
8.1g Carbohydrates, 6.8g Fibre
3.7g Fat