Lentils stew, tasty and on a budget!

Yesterday I was busy doing my new facebook page —  https://www.facebook.com/fionabluerecipes , add me if you have an account there 🙂 — and my other half was away, so for dinner I wanted something quick, healthy and not very expensive to make. This was I came up with :

 

Ingredients :

1 can of organic lentils

1 can of tomatoes

2 organic carrots

Kale

Spinach

Onion

Garlic

Olive oil

Bacon ( always optional)

Spices : Paprika, oregano, salt, black pepper, red chilies, parsley.

Method :

Cook garlic, onion and parsley with olive oil, until soft. Add the tomatoes and let it cook for 10m, add spices and a bit of water/wine if necessary. To this add the lentils and let it cook for a further 5m. The spinach and kale need no more than a couple of minutes, so do it at the very end. If your version has bacon, I would add it with the onion.

Always remember to wash your vegetables well. A bit of vinegar when washing is said to help cleaning them.

Had the stew with a piece of rye bread that I baked in the afternoon, was really nice, filling and not too heavy. It produces an amazing gravy, which I love, so if you are like me, you are in for a treat!

Benefits of kale :  Helps with high cholesterol. It has a very high level of sulphur based compounds, which help to increase cells ability to process and break down potentially cancerous chemicals. There is a long accepted link between the consumption of cruciferous vegetables and reduced risk of cancers ( ex : kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cress, cabbage, bok choi, rocket and many more!)

So remember to top up on this every time you can 😉

Enjoy xx

Power lunch and some homemade bread!

After a crazy month at work finally have some days off.  I will be staying in London this time, just relaxing, cooking meeting friends and going to the gym. So yesterday as I was off I had the time to make something nice for lunch, really tasty and healing. I bought a book called Medicinal cookery, and I am trying to pack as much good ingredients as I can, sometimes just swapping white onion for purple makes a difference!

Ingredients :

Tomatoes

Kale

Spinach

Potatoes

Cabbage

Purple onion

Sausage (optional, without for vegan)

Spices : Turmeric, Cumin, rosemary, chili, black pepper, salt

Method :

Wash, cut and boil the potatoes.

Pan fry the sausages.

In a wok put a bit of  oil, I used carotino to try, mix all the vegetables and cook them for 10 m maximum,so it doesn’t lose all the nutrients.

Slice sausages and mix them with the potatoes and vegetables.

It’s a really nice filling meal, that gets it’s kick and flavor from the spices! Try it, I’m sure you will love it 😉

Wholemeal bread with sesame seeds crust

Ingredients :

I always use the same formula , 1kg of flour for 700ml of water, plus salt, oil and raising agent. This time I used the cake one, but you get much better results with proper yeast to bake bread imo.

I mix the ingredients,  600 g of whole meal and 400 g of white flour, salt, oil, baking powder, pumpkin seeds and poppy seeds, and combine. Add the water little by little until all is homogeneous and knead for 10 m. Let it rise for 1 hour, knead a bit more, let it rise for another hour if you have the time.

Bake for 60 m at 180 degrees in the oven bottom shelf.

This bread was made a couple of weeks ago, today I’m baking Rye bread. There is nothing like doing it yourself, it’s creative and you know exactly what goes into it! 😀

Tomorrow I’m making dinner for some friends so some more posts are coming soon!

Take care!x

( Not so) Naughty Carrot Cake!

This week I bought 3 cookbooks to get inspired, all 3 quite healthy cookbooks. And as I was looking at a carrot cake recipe I remember how much I used to love carrot cake when I was back home, in Portugal. But mind you that is not the cake that you get over here, the one that you can see all the carrot bits and has the white frosting, which I hate, It’s the smooth bright orange one! As always I didn’t follow any specific recipe, I look at 4 or 5 recipes of the same thing and combine according to my taste, and this was the result :

The ingredients :

2 cups of flour (used organic self rising white)

3/4 cup plain organic yoghurt

1/3 rapeseed oil

4 eggs

5 medium carrots

1 tablespoon of baking powder

1/2 cup of sugar (used yellow unrefined)

Honey to taste, maybe 1/2 cup

Pinch of salt

For the icing:

half a packet of Black&Green 70% chocolate

4 Table spoons of cocoa powder

1/3 cup of skimmed organic milk

1 teaspoon of butter

Peel carrots and boil until soft. Put in a blender with oil,yoghurt and blend until smooth. Add eggs and blend a bit more.

In a bowl mix flour, salt, baking powder,  add the wet mixture and combine.

Coat the baking tray with some kind of oil/butter and flour and pour the raw cake in.

Bake at 180 degrees for about 40m.

In bain-marie combine the icing ingredients and let them melt gently for about 10m until shiny and thick.

Take the cake out of the baking tray and spread the chocolate icing…

Enjoy! I can tell you it taste absolutely amazing, and I think it’s not so bad for you! In fact it was my dinner with a nice cup of white tea. I did a body conditioning class just before, so I deserve it 😀

Take care xx

Portuguese inspired dish!

My cooker is back to life, and so it’s my kitchen. did a beautiful broad bean and spicy chorizo stew and baked a bread, the bread post will be done tomorrow, as the dough is still rising and needs to be baked. It’s inspired on a traditional portuguese dish, and I added a few more vegetables and egg. It’s very simple, tasty and quite cheap to make. All and all takes around 30m to make.

The ingredients :

Fresh broad beans, canned broad beans (bought this ones in Paris),spicy chorizo, smoked pork sausage (this one is hungarian,bought in an eastern european shop) carrots, white onion, bay leaf, olive oil, organic eggs, frozen peas, beer, salt and pepper to taste.

Fry the onion and the bay with the olive oil, when the onion becomes soft (5m) add carrots, fresh broad beans and the meats.

Put some beer in (quite a bit) and let it stew for 15m, and after that add the canned and frozen vegetables. Let it simmer for another 10m, crack an egg on the sauce and cook it for around 3m and its ready!

And it’s done a not so heavy dinner, full of colors and flavours!

Rich Black Beans Chocolate Brownies !

Just one day off work this week means that it is being spent in the house mainly, slept until late as I needed to catch up on it, waking up at 7 all week is not that easy!

Since I found this  https://fionabluerecipes.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/healthy-baking-swaps/comment-page-1/#comment-47  that I wanted to try to make brownies with black beans, so I searched the internet, the best cook book ever, and found a recipe at the food network website. The measures are in cups, the american way, but you can find the conversion quite easily on the internet. I have one of that plastic measuring cups that have all sorts of measurements in it, so I hope it is accurate.

At this very moment I’m waiting for the brownies to cool so i can cut and plate them, hope it’s tastyyyy!

The ingredients :

3/4 cup cooked black bean

1/2 cup vegetable oil, or olive oil

2 eggs

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon instant coffee or espresso

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup mini chocolate chips, divided

1/3 cup flour (wholemeal)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar, for dusting

This is the original recipe, I swapped sugar for honey and added 2 tablespoons of matcha. I used a whole packet of dark 70% chocolate, and unfortunately I didn’t have better choco powder, just the cadbury one…

I blended everything wet together, beans with oil until smooth, after eggs, melted chocolate and cocoa powder, coffee, vanilla extract and honey. On a bowl I mixed flour, baking powder and salt and added this to the blender and pulse just until all is mixed.

I broke some pieces of chocolate and added to the mixture. Grease your baking tray and bake for 20m at 200 C or 390 F.

Enjoy and let me know if you ever baked sweets with unexpected ingredients!

They taste amazing, rich and moist!! Perfect with some green tea with mint leaves!

Take care till next time xx

So the Italian post at last!

Finally found a bit of time to update my blog, I’ve been missing it. Work is _crazy_ at the moment, really, so I just about managed to go to the gym 3 or 4 times this week, came back home and died in the sofa! But now I am determined to update it at east 3 times a week 😀

So…when I was in Italy, Rimini, I dind’t have many deserts, my weakness it’s their savoury dishes. I think I had gelato once just, sorry ice cream lovers!

The first 2 are from my previous holiday to Italy

Squid ink Risotto,  I love it so much!!

Fish antipasto, if you like fish, this is heaven!

Pasta with clams, one of my favorite pasta dishes, and as you can see I LOVE seafood 🙂

This is another antipasto, it has 3 different cheeses, meats and some fried bread, yummiiiii

And that with pizza with rosemary, sea salt and olive oil

Seafood risotto and pasta with tomato sauce and seafood!

 

Most of this food came from D. parentsrestaurant  in Rimini, the food is amazing so if you do go there please give it a try, you will not regret, the name is B&B and it’s located in Viserbella. 😀

Just a picture of the scenery

Italian food is one of my favorite cuisines, lots of fresh, organic  ingredients, handled in a very simple way, it’s right up my street!

Tomorrow I will make black beans brownies, so please keep an eye for updates.

What are your favorite cuisines?

Thank you for checking the blog out;)

Fish,seaweed salad and an awesome snack!

This snack/dessert was an idea of a colleague of mine, she gave me some at work and today I decided to make it for dessert as we had a very light dinner. It’s simple, easy and totally yummy!! Just open up some dried figs and stick a piece of very dark chocolate and an almond…Really it is amazing, even D. that doesn’t like figs very much liked it. And Because I bought some dates today, I added some to the plate, I love them, but careful it has a high G.I.

After coming back from holidays I realized that I put on some more weight, 3kg since I stopped smoking, which was more than 4 months ago! yay for me 😉 So I decided to go to the gym a bit more,as I was a bit lazy in june, and not having carbs at dinner time.This week I did 5 hours of gym ( 2 hours of Boxfit, 1hour of circuits, 1hour of Bums tums and tighs and 1hour aerobics,my 1st,loved it!) and I will try to keep it up, I will let you know if I will be able to shift that weight or not ( for the people that don’t know me, I am tiny so 3kg is quite a bit!)

Our dinner was really tasty. I used the microwave for 3m to steam the fish in lemon juice and did a seaweed salad. Usually I don’t use the microwave to cook, BUT my oven/cooker kind of exploded today and I’m waiting for someone to come and fix it, so I had to find a plan B 😀

 

If you don’t have carbs at night, what do you have? Hope I will have my oven working soon so I can keep posting!

Have a lovely weekend, in London is supposed to be 30 degrees, so tomorrow it’s picnic day in the park 😀

The italian post will come but didn’t have much time lately to through all the pictures, sorry! x

Strawberry muffin,but a healthier one!

Long time no see! Tonight I am just going to share a quick recipe for strawberry muffins! They are little and a bit healthier than the “normal” ones 😀

It’s really quick to make and it’s going to be a fab snack in the afternoon with my coffee!

Ingredients :

110g of plain flour ( I used self raising,maybe it’s better plain), for a wholesome muffin swap for wholemeal flour ( I didn’t have any)

50ml of rapeseed oil

4 tsp of plain yoghurt

( the original recipe called for 110g of butter, swapped by the yoghurt and the oil)

2 organic eggs

half a tsp of baking powder

125g of berries

I used 30g of sugar plus quite a bit of honey ( to taste)

Poppy seeds

Mix together the oil, yoghurt,sugar, honey and eggs for 2 minutes. Add the flour, baking powder, poppy seeds and keep mixing at the end join the berries and use the spoon to mix in and not the electric mixer. 😉

Spoon it into beautiful colourful cupcake cases and bake at 190 degrees for around 20m depending on the oven.

Serve with fresh fruit and enjoy!

Perfect for anytime of the day 🙂

Tuck in!! YUM

As you know I was on holidays that’s why I haven’t been posting so much, but I took many pictures in the meantime! My next post is going to be holidays food, plus a few updates on some diet changes! Keep in touch and let me know which one is your favorite muffin recipe!x