Sweet Potato Souffle

It was one of those mornings where you don't want to get up for an hour.

So I didn't.

This brekkie (or meal for any time, really) is perfect for one of these types of mornings, ie, when you have time for it to cook but you're not bothered to physically do much. It's really simple and you could do it with your eyes closed - which is the state you're in to start with!

I based this recipe on a brekkie I tried one day. It was meant to be 'warm sardine and sweet potato dip' but the temp was put up too high for it to just 'warm up' so it turned into a souffle! Sardines have never tasted better! But the cucumber I was meant to use as the dip-holder tasted really boring in comparison. Anyway...

Grab your prebaked sweet potato and mash it up in an ovenproof ramekin or bowl.

Whisk an egg and mix it in. If you're feelin' fancy, dust in some cinnamon too.

In the same fancy manner, smooth out the top and pop it into a preheated oven and go back to bed for half an hour after all your hard work.

I tried to make some roasted macadamias to go with it...

and ignoring the fact that it's unstable and expensive I roasted them in macadamia oil. Like goes with like, right?

But... um... I spent too long doing nothing while waiting for my souffle to cook.

I put a little maple syrup on top of the souffle when it had about 7 - 10 mins left, but it didn't make all that much difference.

Take the souffle out of the oven and go back to bed for another ten minutes. It's hot. Believe me. And it's going to stay hot for a while.

Top with whatever you fancy. I spooned on a bit of kefir and tried some of my little bombs of burnt nuttiness.

NB. I only called it a souffle because it rose. Don't assume it's puffy and airy and doesn't weigh a thing. Take a scoop and see how almost puddingy it is!

Sweet Potato Souffle

Serves 1

1 1/3 cups baked sweet potato

1 egg

cinnamon (optional)

maple syrup (optional)

something creamy like yoghurt, kefir, double cream or coconut butter (or ice cream?!), for serving

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

Mash the sweet potato in an ovenproof bowl.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg, then add to the sweet potato.

Mix until combined, and add cinnamon and/or maple syrup if using.

Place the bowl in the oven and bake for 20 - 30 mins, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Serve with creamy topping.

This might be better with coconut flour to make it less dense, and maybe some baking powder to fluff it up. And maybe some baking paper too...

And You Thought It Was Almond Flour

Breakfast was a random toss-in-the-pan that I'm going to make into a recipe.

Hint: it includes eggplant, and NO almond flour, and yet it tastes like breaded eggplant. It's gonna be awesome! Stay updated as I create low carb eggplant rounds that'll knock your socks off!

Easy Poached Eggs

After five days of charred, (natural) barbecued food, I wanted gently cooked eggs for breakfast. But boiled eggs just weren't working for me. So I poached eggs it was. On a weekday morning.

I can't say I cannot poach, because I've only really tried it once or twice. And it didn't work, so I've given up prospecting on that. Hoping for the albumen to remain in a singular state doesn't mean it will.

So I tried something new out. Using a larger surface area in water, not as much water, tension and area taken up by neighbouring eggs, and the idea of frying, I came up with this.

How to Poach Eggs when you have the Cooking Skills of an Amoeba

1. Fill a high-lipped saucepan with water a third of the way up. Bring the water to a ferocious simmer (mine didn't want to boil).
2. Crack an egg, and very slowly and carefully slide the egg into the water. You can do this by either opening the egg so that the shell is so close to the water that it might be wet, or crack the egg into a small cup and slide it in that way. Whatever you do, keep it close to the water and don't move it around once it's in there.
3. Once the first egg is in, fill the saucepan with enough eggs to cover the surface area of the top of the pan, by following the method in step 2. This will keep all the eggs together.
4. Cook on the same temperature you had it on before until the whites are cooked. I did mine too long, so my yolks were cooked too.
5. Use a flat-headed strainer-on-a-stick to pull out the eggs, and place on paper towel to drain. It would be better to do each individual egg for this, but they may have stuck together, making this an extremely difficult task to keep the yolks in tact.

This may be an easier way to poach eggs, but if you like your yolks runny and in one piece, all I have to say is: good luck!

Eggs Again

After four weeks of going egg-free, it is safe to say that not eating them didn't reduce my eczema. That can only mean one more thing... MORE EGGS FOR JORDIE! I should probably eat three eggs for brekkie every morning anyway, but now it's gonna be official. And breakfast is going to be a lot more diverse too. I won't be as weirded out by having leftovers or steak or a whopping heap of bacon for breakfast. Oh, and sardines, look out!

Egglessness

I'm sick of my eczema. It's one of the main problems I have that's gotten worse with my adoption of a paleo diet. I've had it for a couple of years now (apart from childhood), and it popped back up when I started getting super stressed about school. So my eczema is mainly due to all the stress I go through but I sometimes like to blame foods for it.

I looked up dietary options for 'fixing' eczema that go with paleo-ness, and I've found a few options, but I decided to go with an egg allergy first. Eggs are my hero. They're my staple breakfast, and they're probably the only things I make sure I get good quality of. I go nuts for them. But last October, when I started eating more eggs (and more carrots), I noticed that my skin was getting more orange, so I thought it was the eggs (but I cut out carrots for a bit and I'm much better now).

I don't know why the hell I decided to cut out eggs on EASTER. I was just sick of my eczema so much (it had gotten worse with my four or so assessments in the same week) that I decided that a month to cut out something. So I cut out eggs, because it was a single food, even though it's one of the only foods I couldn't imagine giving up.

It's been 2 weeks - actually, nearly 3 - since I stopped eating them, and unless it's a die off reaction, my body needs eggs. But let's just see how I go.

Next Thursday I'm driving out to the country to get some free range eggs to celebrate :) I don't think I'll be able to go egg free for much longer.

Double Kale Omelette Roll and Colcannon

I promised you two tied-together kale recipes yesterday. And here they are!

Last night I made myself a scrappy colcannon with stuff we had in the fridge. And we had a lot of kale. So a lot of kale went in. We didn't have potato though so I don't know if it's still colcannon... Colcannon is the traditional Irish recipe I was talking about yesterday. It's simply mashed potato with either cabbage or kale, with a dab of butter and maybe some scallions and parsley/chives. I may or may not have looked up the proper traditional herbs before I made it so mine turned out quite differently. And because I felt slightly deprived without potatos, I added the traditional dollop of butter (more than what's in the photo, shhh!). I'll just give you a run down of my super-specially-lazy and not-so-traditional colcannon.

Mid-mash

Could this Still be Called Colcannon

Serves as many as you want

Pumpkin

Kale (equal amount as pumpkin, size wise)

Butter

Dump the pumpkin and kale (kale on top) into a pot and fill up with water until it reaches the top of the pumpkin.

Cover the pot and bring it to the boil, then change the heat settings to however your situation is going. Want that Irish goodness right now? Keep it at full boil. Chicken wings still have twenty minutes to cook (my situation tonight)? Turn that knob down as low as possible. Turn it off even, if it mushes up before you want it.

Once the pumpkin is all ready to mash, drain the whole lot.

Then add the butter. As much as you like. Really. Butter is good for you!

And get a fork and mash it all up. Mashing stuff is always quite fun, especially when you've got curly green bits there too.

Of course you could theoretically make this with any root veggie you like. It still wouldn't be a traditional colcannon. But it still makes for a delicious, healthy, kaley dish.

Onto breakfast!

I had a heap of leftover colcannon (from planning) so I designed a really kaley breakfast for myself. It's an omelette with kale cooked in the eggy bit, and then the colcannon stuff is spread onto the omelette, which is then rolled up. Sounds too good to be true? It's not. Just check out these pictures.

The process is pretty simple. Like I touched on before, you get your omelette going in a rectangular pan, and your mash heating up in another.

Look at all that kaley goodness!

Then, once you flip your omelette and cook it like normal, whack it on a plate or something and smear all the mash over more than 3/4 of the rectangle like so:

Just leave a little on the end, because you gotta leave space on the end of stuff when you roll stuff up.

And now you roll that stuff up.

Serve it with a bit of lemon, and take a photo before your first slice. Because that 'slice' won't end up as pretty as you might think. Instead of getting something perfect like this:

...you end up with a squished:

Yeah, not so pretty as before. But it still tastes good!

Double Kale Omelette Roll

Serves 1 pretty hungry person

2 eggs

4 - 5 kale leaves

3 tbsp water

coconut oil or butter

3/4 cup leftover colcannon

more water

Chop up the kale leaves pretty small but still kinda roughly.

Whisk the eggs and the water until combined, and add about 2/3 of the leaves (or 3 kale leaves) to the eggs and mix it all up.

Heat up the colcannon in a small saucepan, add the leftover kale and add enough water for the raw kale to steam and for the pumpkin to not stick to the saucepan. Keep stirring it so it doesn't burn or do anything nasty.

Heat the coconut oil/butter in a rectangular frypan (round would work too, but it wouldn't look as awesome) and pour in the omelette mixture. Cook like a normal omelette.

Once the omelette is cooked, lay it down and spread the kale-added colcannon on the omelette thickly, leaving space at one end.

Roll the omelette up from the colcannony side.

Serve with lots of lemon juice.

By the way, the reason I add lemon to my kale or spinach stuff is because lemons have a lot of citric acid, which reverse the stuff that oxalic acid (in kale and spinach) does in your kidneys. The leaves are cooked, so that removes some of it too. Also, the non-heme iron in leafy greens can't be absorbed without vitamin c, so lemons (and the pumpkin in that colcannon) give you that vitamin c to get more iron than without. Oh, and I just think it tastes good. Think of gozleme. You have that with lemon, so why not something else?

Simple Mango Smoothie

For the last two months or so, I’ve been starting to enjoy having smoothies with my breakfasts occasionally. They’re a quick combination of yummy fruit, lots of protein, nuts and even more nuts in the milk. I might also like them because of the fact that we have glasses that make them look kinda cafe-style. I have a few little mini stories about my two-month progression of smoothie-making and I thought that I could just collect them all and include them all here. So excuse the random jumping around here.

My favourite smoothie fruit is mango. I tried a banana smoothie once, but it was too.. gaggy for me. I think I’ll have more bananas in their whole form before I move onto having bananas in any mashed, mushed or squishy form. I’ve also tried pumpkin and that would have to be my second favourite. And orange just doesn’t work at all; it’s all watery and stuff and that doesn’t go well with the powder. I don’t think I’ve experimented with any other fruits... Does anyone have any ideas for other fruits/vegetables I could try?

It’s a little against my ideals, but I got myself a big bucket of protein powder a while ago and I’ve been popping a tablespoon of it into my smoothies. When I first got it, I couldn’t find a scoop so I assumed it didn’t have one, but I eventually dug down to it and when I found it, it was GIGANTIC! It would have to be at least two tablespoons! How does someone fit all that powder into a smoothie that is supposed to be runny and slurpable? That wasn’t going to happen. Also, the powder I’ve got is unflavoured so it’s not the most... amazing taste in the world. But after having a tablespoon of it nearly daily, I’ve gotten used to it and sometimes I kinda crave a smoothie just for the (overwhelming) taste of the powder. It’s kinda weird. I guess it’s like how I initially detested tahini and now I love it.

I entered a healthy chicken nugget competition some time ago and surprisingly I came a runner up! :D I was so excited that the people who were running it actually tried to make my funny nuggets that I think I was more excited about that than my actual prizes. One of prizes I got was a sample of super greens and reds so I tried it in my smoothie this morning instead of my protein powder and it smelled a bit spirulina-y before I tipped the little sachet in but it tasted great! Well, it didn’t exactly taste like anything; for once, I could taste the mango instead of any powder. It was a nice change from the protein powder, with all the organic vegetables, fruits and superfoods. I can’t say that I can feel any more energy or more vitalised or anything but it's got to be good for you.

I think it’s been two weeks now that I’ve improved the whole smoothie-making experience for myself. I used to own (actually, we still have it) a little tiny blender with a teeny baby 250ml cup thing to put the content in, and while I can actually control how much fruit I need to make a smoothie the right size (or else I’d make a batch for a small community), the stuff at the top wouldn’t be as blended as the stuff at the bottom so I came to liking the idea of a chunky smoothie. A couple of weeks ago, like I said, I upped the ante and I got a big 1.5L blender. I could not be more excited; I could finally have smooth smoothies! So of course now my smoothies are far too big to fit into one glass.

I think that covers all my little stories for now! I don’t even know how I have such a variety of things to talk about when it comes to smoothies, because I barely stray from this super-short ingredient list and I’ve barely had my share of smoothie time. So here’s the recipe to the one-and-only simple smoothie!

Simple Mango Smoothie

Serves 1

flesh from 1 big mango cheek plus all you can get off the stone

1 tbsp nut butter (I have almond, walnut or peanut butter)

1 tbsp protein powder

non-dairy milk (I use almond milk)

a couple of soaked almonds (optional)

Pop the first four ingredients in the blender in the order provided (I find it easiest this way, so that the nut butter or the powder doesn’t get caught up in the blade and do funny things) and when pouring the milk in, pour in about enough to cover three quarters of the content in there or enough to make it runny instead of a puree kind of thing. Pour into a pretty glass and sometimes I like to drop in a few soaked almonds :)

Sources:

http://www.ezyprotein.com.au/

http://naturalnewagemum.com/2012/11/22/kates-almond-crusted-chicken-nuggets-winner-of-the-great-homemade-chicken-nugget-competition/

https://nutraorganics.com.au/our-products/super-greens--reds

First Post

Hey everyone, and welcome to my first post! I think I'm going to jump straight into it and give you a nice simple recipe for my first post.

Summer's here!
I can feel it; the days are getting longer, and the layers are getting fewer. Aaaand it's the holidays at the moment, so I've been enjoying the sunny weather. I've been longing for this season since it ended in February. And now it's actually come! It felt like it never would!

Yesterday I made myself a nice icy treat to celebrate for the inevitable return of the Australian hot weather. We had loads of fruit in the fridge, and what better way to prepare it lazily than to freeze it up and blend it with some coconut water?