Veggie Pizza

Kale Cabbage pizza.

Normally when people give me pizza its cheese and tomato. Boring-I'm vegetarian  I still have taste buds! Occasionally I get vegetable, with maybe some murdered onions on. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, I know people find it difficult to feed me! Now I'm lactose intolerant I tend to bring my own pizza to outings anyway. This recipe is something I've been wanting to try for a while, but kept forgetting when we had kale at home (which isn't often-no one else really likes or appreciate its healthfulness . No of course, there is no kale around  so I settled on cabbage instead. I used sweetheart cabbage which was, surprisingly, lovely and sweet! Whatever you use, slicing it finely and frying are diffinalty what make this great.
Even my mum said "If I saw cabbage pizza in a recipe book, I'd never try it-but it's actually rather nice. Leeks would be good too". I nearly fainted!! It was pretty yummy though. I forgot to take a picture of the whole pizza, but heres the left overs I had with beans for lunch.

I used a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall  recipe from 'Veg every day' which is a brilliant book I got for my birthday.
But basically here is the recipe:

Cabbage Pizza   serves 2-3 people

Ingredients
1 pizza base (make your own dough-its so fab!)
1 tbsp oil
1 medium onion
1/2 cabbage
30g cheese

1. Peheat the oven to 200C
2. Roll out dough, as thinly as you like.
3. Chop up an onion and thinly Slice cabbage. 
4. In a pan heat up the oil and the fry onion until golden.
5. add the cabbage to onions, cook for arround 5 mins-until soft.
6. Top pizza with the veg mixture, sprinkle over some cheese if you like.
7. Bake in the oven for 15-20 mins.

Pea, mint and goats cheese omelette

Pea, mint and goats cheese omelette

This was a simple Saturday lunch, with a peas for protein and they are so lovely and sweet it really helps to balance out the slightly sour goats cheese. Its really a wonderful mixture. This can be eaten straight away, or sliced up and put in a lunch box.

Recipe

• 3 cherry tomatoes
• 80g frozen peas
• 1-2 eggs
• ½ tbsp. olive oil
• 1/2 tsp dried mint
• 20g goats cheese (crumbled or grated)

Method

1. Heat up the frozen peas in the frying pan, whilst they are cooking, chop the tomatoes.
2. Once the peas start to thaw, add the tomatoes and cook for around 2 mins.
3. Mix the eggs and oil, then pour into the pan.
4. Sprinkle over the goats cheese.
5. Cook for 3-4 mins until the egg starts to set, then finish off under a grill to set the top (or if your brave-flip it!)

Celery Salad with Jamaican Beans

Celery Salad with Jamaican Beans

Staying with my grandparents food wise is exactly how I expected it to be. So far dinner had been veggie sausages and scrabbled egg on toast and then quorn bolanase…Veggiefree meals. So I’m making lunches as vegetable packed as possible. This isn’t easy considering all I have are bags of beans, lentils some celery and spinach.   I’m finding it a bit stressful, making my lunches like this is helping-but then my grandma keeps trying to be helpful and make my lunches-cheese on toast is not what I want, but today that’s what I had to have. Great. And dinner will be vegetable less too. It makes me not want to eat.  To top it all off she said ‘are you stuffing your face again?’ when I had a snack of orange and rice pudding. I know she was joking, but I threw it away and its made me over think again. Really finding it hard right now.

This lunch is the left overs of my celery and some black beans I boiled up.Not everyone likes celery, raw and stringy I can kinda see why. This is a really different way of having celery- the spices make this lovely and frying gets rid of some of the water, but keeps the celery crunchy. The beans add protein and are always good.

Celery Salad
1/2 tbsp olive oil
2 sticks of celery
1/2 bell pepper
1/4 tsp ground black pepper

Method

1. Heat up the oil in a pan, whilst chopping the celery and pepper.
2. Add the veg to the pan and heat through. The celery wont exactly go crispy, but frying evaporates some of the water off.
3. Add the ground pepper and stir for around 5 mins.
4. Put into a bowl, and keep the frying pan

Black beans

1/2 can (120g) black beans or dried beans

1/2 tsp Jamaican jerk spice (or 1/4 tsp each chili powder, cinnamon and thyme).

Method

1. Boil up the dried beans, boil for 10 mins then simmer for 30-40 mins.
2. Drain the boiled beans or the can.
3. Add the beans and spices to the pan, stir through to coat the beans.
4. Top the celery mixture with the beans

Not the greenest day!

Butternut, Sage and goats cheese sandwich
Today is Friday  but I'm not in school! We where supposed to have mock exams, but as we've only learnt half of our topics, most of my teachers decided not to give us one. So I've had a 'day off' catching up on notes, sorting out books and tidying up! I've just got to make dinner, sort my Grandmas computer out and do some revision... Of course I have done some nice things too, I had a lie in until 7:45, went running, make some peanut butter dough biscuits (ate them all...) and whilst typing this I've watched F.r.i.e.n.d.s. Still why not treat myself on this day off..Butternut squash is my favouirte food! Its awesome in soup, salad, curry, everything! (Haven't tried it in porridge yet though). Roasting it makes it go really sweet and pumpkin like. This sandwich is actually inspired by some soup I had the other day-Butter nut squash and sage. By adding dried sage to the oil, the squash really takes on the flavour.

Ingredients
1/4 cup butternut squash (or pumpkin) (double for 2 slices worth)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dried sage
1-2 slices bread
Some goats cheese grated

Method

1. Heat the Oven up to 180C
2. Chop the squash into small pieces (the smaller they are, the faster it cooks)
3. Mix the squash, oil and sage, so the squash is well coated
4. Roast in the oven for 30ish mins. Longer if you use more squash, or large pieces.
5. Remove the squash (if soft and goldeny).Toast the bread.
6. Top the bread with the squash and cheese.
7. Grill for 2ish mins, until cheese melts
8. Enjoy!!

As well as this I had a veggies sausage sandwich, onion bhaji and an orange. So really there really wasn't a green thing in site (unless specks of sage count??)! I'll make up for it at dinner tonight!

Butter Bean and Swede salad

Bean and Swede salad

Happy Mothers day to all mothers in the UK!! and A lovely day to everyone else elsewhere too.

This is my Friday lunch. Fridays tend to be one of two things; a bit of a left overs mix, or Dahl day!  Only I couldn't be bothered to boil up any lentils and had no left over beans. I’d left it too late to do more beans (they have to soak for 8 hours and that takes forward planning).  So I splashed out and used canned. And not just any canned beans-butter beans! They were so lovely I ate the other half of the can that night… good job they are healthy! (I make my lunch the night before-mornings never have enough time in them). Not many people like swede but its so sweet and cheap! Mine had been in the fridge too long and was looking a little sad. But dicing and frying the swede but frying brought it back to an edible state. I think that when fried it tastes rather like pumpkin! (and unlike pumpkin, cheap and in season here).

I paired with some chopped pepper and mixed nuts as a snack.

Recipe:

·         100g swede

·         ½ tsp chilli powder

·         ½ tbsp olive oil

·         ½ can butter beans (or boil up 1/3 cup dried)

·         Couple of handful salad leaves

Method

1. Dice the swede into small pieces so it will cook nicely, heat up the oil in a frying pan.
2. Add the swede and chili powder and fry the swede until golden brown and smelling lovely. Then remove from heat.
3. Drain the butter beans and add to the cooling swede (the heat will remove the excess water which can make your salad limp).
4. Wash the salad and put in to bowl/container then top with the bean/swede mix once it has cooled.