My favourite foodie viewing

One of the things I've really missed since coming home for Summer is cooking for myself, although I can cook for myself here at home of course, it's not the same when you're not in 'your' kitchen and you don't purchase the food yourself. But I've been looking at lots of new recipes to try when I get back, I like watching cooking videos on YouTube a lot, but it takes a bit of leg work to find a really great channel with high quality filming and obtainable ingredients in the UK.

My absolute favourite of the moment has been the Taste made channel which I will link here
They post new videos Sunday to Friday with a different show and presenter for each day of the week. My favourite day is Tuesdays for the Raw.Vegan. Not gross
The presenter is Laura Miller, and to be honest I firstly just love her, she has this wonderful rich voice that just soothes the soul! She's also entertaining and easy to watch. I've been addicted to every video she's done on the channel, which isn't many since it's a new channel and I've probably watched them all twice. For most (maybe all?) recipes you need a food processor which is a tool that we don't have, but today is my mums birthday (happy brithday mummy) and she wants to get one with some vouchers that she got for Lakeland, so now I'm dreaming of making tomato tarts and chocolate truffles.

I'll a couple of my favorites here:

Let me know if you watch any cooking channels and what your favourite ones are!

Raw Vegan Red Pepper Soup recipe

Is this just a fad?
Yes.
I'm trying a raw vegan diet for 7 days only. I love bacon, I love bread and I love nutella too much for this to be a lifestyle change. I'm told this could help clear up my skin, or if not it could at least make me feel better, more energy etc etc
A week may not be enough for it to kick in, or I may end up extending it if I really enjoy it, but I doubt it!
Here was my dinner tonight, it was really delicious and soo much easier than actual cooking - certainly a perk of going 'raw' the food gets to your plate within 5 minutes.
This is the red pepper soup recipe that is 100% from www.therawtarian.com
Head over to there for the full recipe, but this is how it went down for me...

I took a 1/3 cup of plain cashew nuts and soaked them in water for an hour so that my little smoothie blender would blend it up easier.

Then I took a red pepper and washed it, then I cut up 3/4 of it roughly, and 1/4 of it finely.

I threw the 3/4 roughly cut into the blender, along with all the drained cashew nuts and 1/2 mug water.

I added a pinch of dried mixed herbs just to give it a little kick (not in the original recipe)

I blended it up for about 2 minutes, until it's almost completely smooth, there shouldn't be any little grittiness of nuts

 I scattered the 1/4 of finely chopped peppers in the bowl of soup, this recipe makes enough for one person.

It tastes really good, I can't believe how creamy it is, all because of the nuts. Also, the red pepper makes it really naturally sweet too. But I do recommend adding the herbs for an extra something.

Then for dessert, it just so happened that the supermarket were selling 300g grams of raspberries for £1 because they went out of date today, so I snapped those up and ate the whole bowl! Raspberries are my favourite!

The strangest dinner ever...

All I had in my cupboards here at university was the ingredients to make bolognase (no spaghetti) and since I was hungry enough I decided to just make it and deal with whatever fell out the pan onto my plate.
Then I cam up with the ingenious (or not so) idea to have toast with it!
Like toast bolognase or bolognase on toast!
It was all working out so well in my head and this is how it came out!

Maybe not so great after all, actually it was rather strange. I think I much prefer with spaghetti.

My dessert on the other hand was a delicious success!
I had a banana, chopped it up and mixed it with a Soya vanilla yoghurt.
It tasted like the kind of thing I would eat as a small child but it was sooo good!

I'm glad that you can see my place mat was a textbook, but clearly I should give up this university nonsense and go to culinary school instead or something!

Dumpling Delight!

Dumplings are a huge indulgent food that my nan makes, I love love love them, being away from home and all I decided to recreate that comfort food and it was a surprising success and super duper easy
The recipe itself is called a lamb cobbler, but essentially it's a case of making a spaghetti bolognase sauce, if you don't know where to start with that my recipe here will help you out
http://alexiaesque.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/got-15-minutes.html

Then, take a mug of self raising flower and half a mug of water and add the water slowly to the flour until its a kind of gloopy but wet texture, but dry enough to hold it's own shape.

Spread the bolognase type mixture into a baking dish and pull off lumps of dough and roll into balls, this recipe makes about 6 dumplings in total. Lightly coat the dumplings with egg, or much less waste use milk so that they go a pretty golden colour, and put them in the oven at 200 degrees celicus for 25 mins- 30 mins
and then you get lovely fluffy dumplings!

I'm pretty certain this is the simplest way to make dumplings, if you want to get fancy you can add herbs and spice and all things nice!

Got 15 minutes?

This is how to make some finger-licking (although you don't eat this with your fingers) spaghetti bolognase, this is how it goes down...

-Heat some oil (I prefer rape seed) in a large saucepan and fry 1 onion and 2 garlic cloves for a minute.

Add half a packet of mince meat (250g) or a vegetarian meat substitute and cook it up until it's not a gross pink colour anymore

Then mix in a tin of chopped tomatoes (400g) and 5 mushrooms sliced up- Stir it all up and bring it to the boil so it's bubbling then just keep it on a low heat for ten minutes

While that's heating, boil a pan of water for your pasta and once it's boiling drop the pasta in

Add some herbs if you want to the bolognase and skip out the salt, just add pepper.

Drain the pasta and put it on the plate, add the bolognase and serve!

This makes enough for about 2 people, or you can keep half and save it to eat for lunch the next day
Hooray for cheap student cooking!

Cooking up a storm

Want something super quick and easy to eat that tastes good and is good?

Well look no further than Chef Alexia to help you out on a Thursday night.
You will need:

5 or 6 of those little mushrooms

Half a mug of peas

A small onion

Any type of pasta, spaghetti or gnocci

A can of tuna (optional)

Pesto sauce (optional)

-Boil a pan of water and cook your pasta or gnocci, while that's cooking chop up your onion and mushrooms into little pieces.

-Drop the onion into a hot pan for a little bit (use rape seed oil, it's even better than olive oil for you!) then add mushrooms and peas or any other veg you want to throw in.

-Once it's all cooked in the pan, drain the pasta from the pot, then throw everything back into the pot and mix it around, add your tuna and pesto sauce at this point too and mix mix mix

Done!

Voila!

Bon Apetit!