Hummus and Co.

My mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis last week, so I spent a lot of time lately researching on the internet the best foods that could help her, along with the medication she will need to start taking soon.


I found a lot of useful information and passed them on to her, and she appreciated it very much. Living away means every single event in my parents' life makes me worry tenfold, and I don't like to worry. So I thought the best thing I could do to help from here, was to gather information and then try to scare my mother enough to make her think about what she eats and drinks on a daily basis.


The mission was successful, I must say. And in fact yesterday when she came on the phone she already had at hand a notebook and a pen to take notes ;)


I gave her a recipe for hummus. It is a perfect combination for her condition, in fact both sesame seeds and chickpeas contain a lot of calcium. Plus, the raw olive oil is just as good as it can be for your body, and the lemon juice adds that bit of vitamin C to lift everyone's mood.


I have to say, when I found the recipe, it called for tahini. I didn't know what tahini was. So I searched more and found how to make that too.


Ingredients for Tahini:


2 cups of sesame seeds
1/4 cup of olive oil


I toasted the sesame seeds in a pan, stirring them occasionally and keeping the heat quite low, so I wouldn't burn anything.
Once the seeds were toasted, I placed them in the blender's jug and added the olive oil. I blended all together and place all of it in a glass jar and in the fridge. It will keep I suppose for quite a while, the olive oil will preserve it well.


Ingredients for Hummus:


2 cups of chickpeas, cooked in salt and garlic
3 teaspoons of Tahini
3 teaspoons of Lemon Juice
2 Garlic cloves
1/2 teaspoon of Cumin
2 tablespoons of Olive Oil
Salt to taste


All the ingredients are processed in the blender. Easy peasy, or, better, easy Chickpeasy :)


Reserve some of the chickpeas cooking water in case you need to thin the hummus, and enjoy!

The Crazy Cook !

It was the Easter weekend, and I went mental in the kitchen. I loved every single moment of it! Especially the one when my son, seated at the table, will say :"I like it! Mamma will you make it again?"

That is the best compliment I can receive. It makes my heart melt into butter :)

Many of the plans we had for the long weekend went out the window, as usual, and again, the good thing was being together and having fun.

During the weekend I cooked quite a lot, I really enjoyed the noises in the house, the guests coming and going, the dog waiting by the kitchen press for something to fall off my hands...

I had found during the past week, a recipe for roasted chickpeas. I really like chickpeas, they taste like childhood and they never fail to fill you up!

The recipe called for a Moroccan Spice mix, which I did not have at hand and had no intention to look for in the shops. So I just used what I had:

Ingredients:

2 cups of cooked Chickpeas (boiled with some salt and garlic)

Olive Oil

1/2 teaspoon of Curry Powder

1/2 teaspoon of Cayenne Pepper

1/2 teaspoon of Cumin Powder

1/2 teaspoon of Ginger Powder

Salt to taste

I cooked the chickpeas, after soaking them overnight, with just a bit of salt and a clove of garlic. Then I drained them and pat them dry with a kitchen towel. I placed them in a roasting dish and heated the oven to 120 degrees Celsius.

Over the chickpeas I poured a bit of olive oil to make them sticky, I sprinkled all the spices and the the salt and mixed them well, to make sure all the chickpeas were coated.

I threw the dish in the oven and let them roast for about 30 minutes, always checking they were not getting too hard.

Here are the chickpeas once out of the oven:

They were very nice, a different snack for our Easter table. Highly recommended as they keep for a few days and are so good eaten cold :)

Lemony Risotto

Yesterday my husband had an upset stomach. The poor thing!
He ate too much on Tuesday night; we were at a friend's house for an improvised dinner.
Anyway, yesterday morning he asked for risotto to heal his sick belly, and by accident, just surfing the internet, I came across a recipe for Lemon Risotto.
Now, I must say, the recipe was quite complicated, it called for eggs, butter, thyme and other things I did not have ready at home. So I modified it "on the go" while cooking it last night.
I wanted to keep it simple, extremely simple. To heal my sweetheart :)


Ingredients:


2 Lemons, their grated skin and their juice
1 Cup of Rice for each of us
Olive Oil
Salt
1 Small Onion
1.5 litre of vegetable stock


I have no pictures for this recipe, as it went so fast on the hob and on the table, I did not take any pictures.


So, first thing first: softening the onion, finely chopped, in the olive oil, in a large frying pan. I put it on extremely low heat, so I had time to prepare the other ingredients.
I boiled 1.5 litres of water and poured it in a bowl where I had "pulverized" a vegetable stock cube.
I grated the lemons' skins and set aside. I juiced the lemons and set aside.


As soon as the onion is soft, but still white in color, I threw in some rock salt, half of the lemon zest and half of the lemon juice.


At this point, I put in the rice, and let it toast for about 2 minutes, stirring continuously to make sure all the grains would have a chance to come in close contact with the other ingredients.


With a ladle, I added the vegetable stock bit by bit, stirring and making sure the rice was never dry.


When the rice was almost ready, I poured in the rest of the lemon juice and lemon zest.


I let it stay on the hob for another couple of minutes and served.


My son was very impressed, my husband was very impressed. I impressed myself too! Really easy, really inexpensive and really healthy!

Another Easy Oven Baked Pasta

Saturday was a very good day. I have to say, I was busy in the garden all day, disassembling wooden pallets and reassembling them into vegetable raised beds. The result is that I planted, with the help of my son, a lot of different things, including potatoes, parsley, strawberries, peppers, spinach, aubergines...


It was a lot of fun to be outside despite the Irish clouds who never leave us alone! It was about 11.30 am when I started thinking that lunchtime was coming and I had two starving men to feed. So then, the new idea: Oven Baked Pasta and Potatoes. It sounds strange, I know, to mix those two basic starches and eat them together, but I think it is very nutritious and so, so tasty!


Ingredients:


4 small Potatoes, peeled
300 grams of Pasta (I had a few packets open, with very little left in them and they had about the same cooking time, so I could recover those!!!)
Ham or Pancetta chunks
Fresh Cream
Olive Oil
Parmesan Cheese
Salt

Peel the potatoes and cut them in pieces that are not too small. Place them in plenty of water in a fairly large pot and bring them to boil with a bit of salt. Start heating the oven at about 150 degrees Celsius.


Next, slice up your choice of ham or pancetta, or leave it out and instead use peas or mushrooms. In a frying pan, place the olive oil and the ham and let them cook for a few minutes.


In the other pot, once the water is boiling, add your pasta to the potatoes and cook until edible but not soft, drain all together and then throw potatoes and pasta in the frying pan.

Mix everything up a bit adding the fresh cream and then empty in the baking dish. Grate some Parmesan cheese on top of it and just stick it in the oven for about 20 minutes.

While the pasta was in the oven, I returned to the garden work. At 12.30 we were seated at the table and eating!

As I said above, to make this a vegetarian dish, substitute the ham with peas or mushrooms. Or both. The result is guaranteed!

Spanish Croquettes

Last night going home from work I was thinking about dinner... The pasta sauce with meatballs finished the other day so I was wondering what to put in our plates.

I remembered I had a pesto sauce jar that needed to be used and by adding some fresh cream I had the pasta dilemma sorted. However, the milk in the fridge needed to be used, but I didn't feel like making any biscuits... So then, Spanish Croquettes came to my mind. My good friend and neighbor showed me how to make them last summer, so I gave it a try.

Now, the recipe calls for:

Milk

Flour

Ham pieces

Olive Oil

Bread crumbs

A bit of Salt

Frying oil

Now, the point is to make a very thick besciamella sauce, by heating up olive oil and adding flour and milk. When the sauce is thick enough to be rolled in to small balls or "sausages", add the ham pieces and cover them with bread crumbs.

Once the rollies were done, I heated up the frying oil and fried them until they turned brownish.

Once ready I placed the croquettes on a napkin to make sure the frying oil would drain out of them.

My son appreciated the croquettes, and needless to say they were ready in less than 15 minutes :)

This recipe will work with soy milk and substituting ham with peas or corn for vegan and vegetarians.

The Mighty Pile :)

Recently I have started stockpiling. Recently means last year, when we were in Italy for our holidays. 

I was in a supermarket with my mother, shopping for something special to eat that day and I saw a very good kind of pasta on special offer. So I told my mum if we could organize for the guy who brings to us Italians in Ireland all our tomato sauce, to bring a big box of pasta as well. She said it could be done and so I bought about 30 kilos of pasta, which equals to 60 packets. The thing is, here I can only find 3 varieties of pasta, and the quality is quite low. Actually very low. Unless you are prepared to spend 2.50 € a packet, which I am not.

So the stockpiling habit began. Once the pasta boxes arrived, I placed them all in a space under the stairs, close enough to the kitchen, on a small bookshelf. When I looked at all that food I felt a kind of security. It definitely makes me feel safe to have enough food to feed my family for at least 2 months! The pasta sits alongside my parents' homemade tomato sauce. More recently I have added to this, and increased the pile with olive and vegetable oil, vinegar, sugar, some pesto jars, vegetable stock cubes, salt, wine bottles, flour, pickles and sottoli, yeast, bicarbonate of soda, soda for washing, soap bars, toothpaste, evaporated milk, dried legumes such as beans, lentils and chickpeas, corn starch, potatoes and other things that now I cannot think of.

I find this habit to be a very good one. At least, it works for us as a family. Our trips to the supermarket have been drastically reduced. We go shopping once a week now, and we only buy bread, fruit and vegetables and yogurts for my son. On average, this shopping cost about 20 €. Once in the supermarket, I usually buy products to go in the stockpile. It is important for me to have always the same amount of items in the pile. They are rotated and obviously, the ones just bought go at the back of the shelf.

In the kitchen drawer I only keep the products I am currently using.

Last weekend I cleaned this particular drawer. It is my kitchen drawer, where I keep all the things I need in order to cook. I found 3 bicarbonate of soda packets open, so I decided to put all of the bicarbonate in one single jar, to protect it from humidity and have it all in one place. I also changed the paper that lies underneath the bottles and jars. I got rid of empty packages and I can now see what I have, what I need, what I need to buy and what needs to be refilled from the stockpile.

I also have the habit of washing and keeping glass jars when empty. I love them. Particularly because they come in handy all the time, believe me. I also buy bigger glass jars to keep things tidy.

I come from a culture of reusing, recycling and preserving. Every year in August, for example, I helped my parents make the tomato sauce. The bottles used for this operation usually come from the local bar, empty "Peroni" beer bottles that would be otherwise thrown away. The bottles are washed, filled with the precious sauce, sealed with new caps and placed on their shelf. Once a bottle is empty, my mother would thoroughly wash it, and place it on another shelf to be used next year. This means that we have glass bottles older than 30 years. Older than me. It is a virtuous cycle that gives a simple bottle a huge importance and a very long life. I have also always seen my mother use the freezer as a "treasure chest". Out of the freezer come all kind of things, such as legumes, vegetables, fruit and meat. This means there is always something to cook during the winter months, even if she doesn't go shopping for weeks in a row.

I am trying hard to apply all the teachings of my parents into the life I have now, working full time, living in a terraced house with an eclosed garden at the back. It is hard, but it seems to be working quite well. I try to take one step at a time, like a child discovers walking. When I thought I had no space for a stockpile, I managed to de-clutter the small space under the stairs, and that worked. When I thought I could never grow anything to put on the table, I found that growing in pots can be an option. When I thought I had very little time to cook, I learned to cook extra portions and freeze the extras. When I thought my son would need nappies for a while, before he was born I bought reusable nappies for a fraction of the price I would have spent on disposable nappies and without creating the huge amount of garbage the disposable would have. When I thought of all the chemical crap that comes in our washing powder and that inevitably ends up on our skin, I searched for a simple way to make washing powder.

I believe all of us can find ways in the everyday life to create virtuous habits. I believe that by showing and not telling our children what to do in order to save some money, avoid to create garbage or cook a simple meal, we can really make a difference in our life and theirs.

I needed to take control of our lives and our expenses, especially since we decided to buy our house, and I found that taking control of what we eat is the first step. The journey is still long, I have skills to learn and skills to rediscover. I have a lot of things to work on, and I will definitely do so, one at a time.

Easy Pasta Salad

The "nice season" is almost upon us, and our neighbors yesterday had the great idea of a barbecue to take full advantage of the sunny day. There is no summer in Ireland, only sunny days here and there, so when, by coincidence, the sun is out and the temperature is not too low, we all run to our gardens and start the barbecues!

When my neighbor called me yesterday, I said: "Wonderful! I'll bring salad!!!"

Then I realized, I had no salad in the fridge... Wooops :)

So I looked around the kitchen and saw I had bought some cherry tomatoes some days ago, and I had peppers in the vegetables bowl and I also had my brand new basil plant. Fantastic!

So I put on some water to cook 1/2 a kilo of pasta and sliced up the cherry tomatoes, the peppers and the basil. I added table salt, olive oil and some mayonnaise and left it all to stand while the water heated up to the boiling point.

I cooked the pasta just to the right point, which is a minute before it is ready to eat, drained it and put it back in its pot. Then I covered the drained pasta with cold water to stop the cooking process. That needs to be done every time you intend to make pasta salad, because otherwise the warm pasta will continue to "cook" even after it is drained.

I drained the pasta once again after about 2 minutes and mixed it with the salad mix.

Ready!

And today I have a yummy lunch at work which does not need to be microwaved :)

The ingredients are:

Pasta

Olive Oil

Cherry Tomatoes

Mayonnaise

Peppers

Fresh Basil Leaves

 

Ham and Peppers Risotto

Last night I needed to pop in the shop for a few minutes just to get fruit and yogurt for my son's lunchbox. I ended up with 9 peppers because they were on offer. Once home I decided to try a risotto and this came out:

Ingredients:

1 yellow pepper

10 ham cubes (I used Parma ham)

Olive Oil

1 cup of Arborio rice per person

1 cup of water per person

Parmesan cheese

First of all, as usual with risotto, I made the "base" by quickly frying the pepper cut in small pieces and the ham with a small onion chopped up. Once they started frying, I added a cup of water per person and salt. Do not overdo the salt because ham is salty already, so go easy at first and then taste it after a while to see if there is need for more.

This is the base ready. In a large pan, I placed another small onion, chopped, and let it get soft with some olive oil. I added the rice and toasted it for a few minutes, stirring it continuously.

After toasting the rice, I added the liquid part of the base and let the rice cook for the time needed. Once the rice is cooked, I added on the top the pepper and ham pieces and let the rice cook a bit more with some grated Parmesan cheese.

And this is the rice once in the plate :)

Obviously, without the ham, it's a good recipe for a vegan risotto.

Yum yum..

Peas and Beans!

This morning, before coming into work, I have collected my peas and beans pots tray from a dear friend. She took care of them while we were away and I have to say, what a nice surprise! In just over 2 weeks, 38 pots have a plant in them. Tonight it's planting time! I can't wait!

My son and his friends in school have also started a vegetable garden with the help of one of the teachers. When he told me he was so happy, his eyes were shining!

Tonight, if the weather stays good, I will be building a small container in the garden, close to the back wall. It is a good sunny spot and I can attach a wire net to the wall where the peas and beans can be tied to, making sure all their potential develops.

We'll see!

Still Alive!

Aaaahhhh... We are back from a two weeks holiday spent fighting sicknesses and bugs of all kinds. We have survived!!! That is good. I cannot wait to try and make a speed-of-light Paella, as close as possible to the delicious one we ate in Barcelona.

I might give it a try tonight.

During the holidays, I have convinced my friend first, and my mother later, to give Home Made Washing Powder a try. Other friends I met laughed at my face. Not a bother at all. In my own house I do what I like and I do not intend to justify it in any way. I like it, it's perfectly legal, I do it. Simple, no?

The funny thing is, I was not even trying to convince them that making your own laundry powder is good, they just brought it up and laughed at me. Fine.

We've been to Barcelona and then to central Italy, to visit our families. I can tell now for sure that Spanish use the same ingredients Italians use in their cooking; they just combine them differently and that gave me many ideas to put into practice. I also feel the desperate need to grow nyora peppers, to make Romesco Sauce. We'll see where this goes :)

I have purchased three dried nyora peppers from a shop in Barcelona. If I'm lucky, some seeds will come out of the packet...

We had a good time despite the chickenpox, the fever, the cough and colds and I realized once again how strong we can be as a family, just the three of us. I just kept my parents amused for a few days, while laughing about our "bad luck holiday" :)

A quick update on my Apple Vinegar. I filtered it the day we left, just before loading the bags in the car. It smells delicious; I am a vinegar lover and I cannot wait to try it in a nice salad. We'll see.

I believe my mother will soon be making Pineapple Vinegar. She was very happy when I gave her the recipe, she is a woman who's curious of trying new things. And me too.

My sister was amazed at the idea of using the whole pineapple: the juicy inside to eat and cook, the core and peels for the vinegar making, and the top to grow a new pineapple plant. She's a very curious girl as well. I can see her growing into the woman she will be one day, and it is a beautiful sight.