Mistakes I've Made - Whipped Avocado Cream

Have you ever seen those paleo (or vegan) cream recipes that use 'whipped coconut cream' instead of dairy cream?

I wanted to try it out, so I got my last can of (what I thought was) coconut cream, put it in the fridge and got the beaters out ready to whip me up some fatty cream.

When I planned for all this, I had a wacky idea that I thought I should try, just because I already had the beaters out and dirty. I grabbed the half avocado I had and had a go at making that into whipped cream as well.

Mistakes I've Made - Mustard

So I found this recipe for a banana blossom stir fry, and at that time I'd never even heard of a banana blossom. But when I went to Tropical Fruit World, they were selling some and when I saw it, my eyes lit up like Joey's in Friends when he finds out that Monica and Chandler are going out, and I took one home excitedly, knowing exactly what to do with it.

I've always been a person of substitution in recipes. I remember one time, I was making poached pears, and I replaced everything BUT the pears. And obviously it turned out awful, and that kinda taught me to only cook a recipe if I actually have relevant ingredients.

This stir fry kinda reminded me of that.

They wanted coconut oil, I used the oil that was already in the pan from the T-bone I'd cooked to go with it.

They wanted a dry chilli and dry chilli powder, I used a fresh chilli and cayenne pepper. Which was a bad choice in itself.

They wanted jaggery powder, I initially left it out, until I tasted the chilli, to which I added coconut sugar.

They wanted tamarind paste, I used dried lime rind (to dry your own rind, just rind your citrus and lay it out to dry by itself. It has its own oils to keep it moist in that sort of way, and you can use it like fresh rind. It helps when you don't want to go out of your way to get a lemon JUST (italics) for the rind.

They wanted fresh coconut, I used desiccated, even though I had semi fresh stuff (my coco snow would've worked well in it).

They wanted mustard seeds, I used wholegrain mustard. Which, I found out, is a big no-no.

Mistakes I've Made - Activated Almonds

Yesterday I mentioned that I made my own almond meal using my 'failed' almonds. How do you just fail a nut?

As I've mentioned in a previous post, you have to soak nuts for them to not stuff up your insides, so when I came back from Costco with a big bag of almonds the other day, I decided to try to soak them all at once and dehydrate them so that I can just eat them without worrying about soaking overnight.

The bag was emptied into a big bowl, the almonds were blanketed with water, and a splash of apple cider vinegar was stirred in. Ok, maybe a big splash of vinegar. I didn't really know how much to add so I just kinda poured it in.

And they sat in the cupboard with a tea towel lid overnight.

In the morning I rinsed them and preheated the oven to I think it was 150 degrees to start with. Once the almonds were patted dry with paper towels, I lined a few cookie trays with baking paper and spread out my now-expanded almonds between them because there were that many of them. I popped the trays in the oven like so and checked them every half hour. I advise you not to check this often; it makes you feel like your nuts have taken a lifetime and nothing has happened since you last visited.

Mistakes I've Made - Baked Eggs

This morning I had a bit of time so I decided to make myself baked eggs for breakfast. Bad idea. Well, not really. I definitely learnt from it. It was kinda funny how I stuffed up because, in a way, I planned for it to happen this way.

My baked eggs went as followed:

I fried up my sliced mushrooms and greens (some grown up bok choi and a bit of spinach) the night before...

but I only half cooked the greens because I knew that they would get even more cooked in the oven in the morning, so the white bits of the bok choi was still quite crunchy. And I popped it all into a medium sized ramekin.