Ready for Easter?

Hot cross porridge


One of the things that annoys me about blogs sometimes, is that a perfect recipe/idea comes up-but its too late. Take a lovely advent calander someone put online on the 5th December. they must have made it a week before and I could have used their ideas!! By no means am I saying this recipe is perfect, but its pretty yummy and the spices and rasins do make this taste rather hotcross bun like. These pictures show my beutiful arrangement of the fruit and nuts to look like a cross. Of course this isnt nessaccary, and once I added the milk it was ruinined :( but at least my pictures prove I tried. I think this would be a perfect good friday or easter breakfast. I have to say, my personal plans for easter morning invole chocolate!

Ingreadents
1/2 cup oats
1 cup milk
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp raisins*golden if you have them!
1 tbsp sultanas
1 tbsp currents
small handful chopped nuts/seeds

Method

1. Mix the milk, spice and oats in a bowl.
2. top with the nuts and fruit-cross pattern optional.
3. Microwave for 2-3 mins
4. Sprinkle with a little more spice and enjoy!

To anyone in the UK..how are you holding up in the cold?! Where is our spring?

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

Strawberry syrup Porridge

Coconut porridge with hot strawberry sauce

My favorite thing to do with strawberries, is heat them up into a hot sauce, and pour onto yogurt. But since finding out I’m lactose intolerant and allergic to soy  there isn't really a yogurt I can eat right now. So I made a plain (but lovely) oat mix, with coconut and cashews and topped with my hot strawberry sauce. Quite nearly as lovely as with yogurt..

 Recipe

• 1 Handful of strawberries
• ½ cup oats
• ½ cup milk
• 1 tbsp dessicated coconut
• 1 palm full of cashew nuts

Method

1. Chop the strawberries into very small chunks, put in a small cup or bowl
2. Chop the cashew nuts finely
3. Mix the nuts, coconut, oats and milk
4. Put the strawberry mixture and porridge in the microwave for 2 mins.
5. Remove oats and microwave the strawberries for another 30 secs
6. Pour sauce on top of oats
7. Enjoy!



I decided to splash out and have strawberries while I can. My parents leave for a 3 week holiday tomorrow and despite being nearly 18 I have to stay with my grandparents. I don't really mind, i get on very well with them and it means I can look after my grandma. It just through up a few issues for me.
Number one is food. I think over the last month or even two months, I haven't worried about food at all. The odd wobble  (sugar encrusted dried  pineapple...my brain starts to scream "so much sugar, unnatural, colourings, CALORIES" and I just ate it anyway! I felt pretty proud for over coming that. I don't want to go backwards because I know I will have lots of ready made frozen stuff there. (My grandparents do not understand vegetarianism) I think it'll be OK though, as I cant cope with being hungry any more, and I'll just have healthy lunches-but I'm not looking forward to it. They defiantly wont be buying any strawberries, so I had them today, whilst I can still just ask my mum to buy stuff for me!
Number two on a similar point is, I wont have my scales, so for three weeks how will I check I'm not loosing weight? this I know is silly, but its taken me months to put on.
Number three is sleep. Last time I stayed down there, I didn't sleep more than 4 hours per night...and its 3 weeks.
I think that's enough of me admitting my life and silly problems to the world!

Apple and toasted seeds

Apple and toasted seeds
Yesterday was been such a lazy day for me! I spent the morning in my Pajamas, just making my lunch for today somehow took me 2 hours!! I have never bothered to toast seeds before. So when prepping my porridge last night, to combat my lazyness I tried it. I will do it again and again! It's really worth toasting them just for the smell. It really does bring out the flavor as well though, in particular sesame seeds which can be a little tasteless otherwise.
Sweet apple and a few raisins cut through the seeds bitter toastynes and make a nice balanced bowl.

Ingreadents

• 2 tbsp sunflower seeds
• 1 tbsp sesame seeds
• 1 apple
• 1 tbsp raisins
• 1/2 cup oats
• 1 cup milk

Method

1. Heat up a small frying pan (no need for oil!)
2. When hot add the seeds and stir, keep an eye on them as they go from plain to toasty very quickly!
3. Chop up the apple, mix in a bowl with raisins and oats.
4. Pour over the milk.
5. Top with seeds, mix or leave as a topping.
6. Microwave for 2-3 mins
7. Enjoy!

Thinking about it, I wasnt that lazy, I did go for a run, make my lunch for today; did 45 mins of revision; Make my mum some roasted butternut squash/sage toastys and wrote up 3 blog posts... Maybe I'll say nice and relaxed day instead?!

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!

Apple and dried fruit with a twist

Apple, current, raisins and sultanas

Today was a little different. This is a mixture of currents, raisins and sultanas. I normally don't bother with all these (I just chuck in a few raisins) but today was special. Why special? Not really sure! I just felt like splashing out. Its amazing how different they all taste, although all sweet, I think sultanas are the sweetest and currents are lovely and chewy. I just left the apple sliced, rather then chopping/dicing. This was great on top, the slices just softened slightly and heating them really made them sweet.

Recipe

• 1/2 cup oats
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 apple
• 1 tbsp each currents, raisins and sultanas

Method

1. Mix the oats and milk and mix in the dried fruit
2. Slice the apple and put on top of oats
3. Microwave on high for 2-3 mins
4. Enjoy!

Mango and dried fruit morning starter

Mango and dried fruit porridge
 Just looking at this makes me hungry! I started off with a mango, but it was so sadly bruised I didn't feel there was enough for one portion. So I added some lovely dried fruit. Chewy natural dried apricot, dried cherries and the 'super food' gogi berries.
I drizzled with coconut milk to make this a fabulous start to the day.

Recipe

• 1/4 mango
• 1/2 cup oats
• 1/2 cup milk
• Mixed dried fruit (cherries, gogi berries, apricot).
• 2 tbsp coconut milk

Method

1. Chop the mango.
2. Mix the mango, milk and oats.
3. Microwave for 2-3 mins
4. Top with dried fruit, and drizzle with coconut milk
5. Enjoy!

Unfortunately this was the only really good thing today, as my dad was taken into hospital after having chest pains on the weekend. Hopefully all will be OK.