Friday, May 15, 2015

When you are tired of London you are tired of life!

Reasons why I love living in London:

1. There are so many people that when you do outrageously embarrassing things its fairly likely you are safe from having to see the people that laughed at you again. For example when you can't find the post-office even when you know the address and have walked up and down the street many times and then have to go into a store and ask if it is hidden in anyway only to have the man tell you that no, they haven't cleverly disguised the post-office to keep it safe from foreigners you are actually standing directly across from it the sign it just above eye level.

2. The sun. One has no idea the impact that sunshine has on a person! I used to believe that the great British outdoors was the place where you get soaked eyeballs to toes as busses drive by you instead of stopping as your clearly wanted them to.  London has taught me that the wondrous British outdoors is actually a place of sunshine and busses rammed full of stinky armpits just waiting for you to get a close inspection while looking for a place to hold on before you trip over a stroller.

3. Weekends have potential, amazingly exciting potential! Each weekend we can enjoy walking through perfectly manicured gardens, shopping in the most temptingly sparkly stores or relaxing in cafes and pubs (depending on who won the coin toss) decorated with treasures from hundreds of car-boot (yard) sales.

4. Weeknights possess hidden excitement as well! I'm sure this is the same across our tea-loving country I'm just luck enough to now have a job which allows me to enjoy my evenings instead of colour coding adverbs or researching how people in the Stone Age built their houses. Either way, London has intriguing exhibitions open late enough for the briefcase-bearing office workers to attend, shops which don't close at 5 and of course far too many delicious delicacies to enjoy...all on a school night!

5. London is pretty. It is beautiful, charming and delightful. I throughly enjoy my daily walks to work, drinking in my surroundings. Okay, I don't particularly enjoy my morning trudge while frantically checking my watch every 2 seconds wondering why I needed to try and braid my hair when I was already late but the walks home are rather pleasurable indeed.
   


Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Creative cauliflower croquettes

In our Veg Box (more on this later) we were graced with one of my favourite, versatile vegetables...cauliflower! Now I have had some cauliflower successes and complete and utter fails. Once I tried to make cauliflower garlic bread which was plastered all over Pinterest. A fail. A weird, wobbly, totally not wonderful recipe fail. Pinterest can make things look oh so beautiful online but end up oh so horrendous in real life. However I pushed through and pursued....okay not really. I gave up that recipe and tried another. I'm not a fan of trying things again when they fail. Chances are if I failed the first time I'll fail the next. Why beat a dead horse??? 

Always this time I read a few cauliflower recipes and combined them into my own version of cauliflower croquettes. Yum! And not a total fail, yay! Perhaps slightly overcooked but whatever, who cares. I served them with a salad and my homemade ranch dressing







Ingredients
1 medium head of cauliflower (mine was frozen as we couldn’t cook it fast enough)
1 tablespoon Italian herbs
1 clove of garlic
3-4 green onions
pepper to flavour 
flour


Method

  1. Put the cauliflower and Italian herbs in the food processor and whiz until it resembles breadcrumbs. Because my cauliflower had been frozen and then defrosted I then used paper towel to soak up the extra moisture. Put the cauliflower into a mixing bowl. 

  2. Use the food processor to chop the garlic and onion. Add to the bowl of cauliflower and herbs. Begin to mix in flour, a little at a time, until the stickiness is almost gone and you are able to form the croquettes (aka flattened cauliflower balls). 

  3. I shaped mine into 1cm thick circles, about 3cm across, then put them on baking paper to allow for easy transfer to the fryer. I made the mistake of trying to fry them when they were still very sticky but able to stay in shape on the baking paper. They quickly made the deep fryer look as if it was a bowl of cauliflower cereal. Not good. 

  4. Fry them on a low heat to ensure the inside cooks before the outside burns. This is a lesson I clearly needed to learn the hard way. Mine were in the deep fryer for about 5 minutes at 140ÂșC. They looked rather dark on the outside but I found this was the best as the inside of the croquettes were cooked through. You could also shallow-fry, cook them in a frying pan or in the oven as well. Enjoy while nice and hot!
I hope you enjoy! 

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Can't live without my RANCH!

Growing up in North America I have a certain love for deliciously creamy salad dressings. Thousand Islands, Ranch, Caesar....yum! Used not only on salads but as a dipping sauce for almost anything, think of chicken nuggets, pizza crusts or your pinky finger. Since we have been trying to eat a more simple diet I haven’t been buying my favourite luscious dressings, not that you can find the exact thing in the UK anyways. We have a few staple dressing recipes, but as we eat salad almost daily they are getting rather boring. So I turned to Pinterest, duh, and found a lovely ranch recipe!

As always, all ingredients (okay as many as possible) were organic. I used my dressing as a dipping sauce for wedges, salad dressing and a veggie dip later in the week. 



Ranch Dressing

3/4 cup low fat mayo
3/4 cup low fat sour cream
1 tablespoon lemon juice
4 green onions
2 cloves of garlic
1 bunch of parsley (leave out the tough/thick stems)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tsp paprika
pinch salt
pinch pepper
1/4 cup milk

  1. Put the green onions, garlic, parsley and olive oil into a food processor and ‘whiz’ until you have the desired consistency. I wanted the parsley to be a bit bigger simply to look nice in the dressing!
  2. Either add the rest of the ingredients into the processor or, if yours isn’t big enough as  ours isn’t, I added it to the mixer with the whisk attachment. 
  3. Let the flavours come together for at least 10 minutes before serving. 

Note: This makes a ton. Quite obvious when looking at the quantity one would assume, but I was just excited for my favorite dip! I also found that it went a bit runny by the next day so I would suggest making it the day you are planning on serving it.