fresh veggie delivery

Tags

beets, cooking, food, food delievery, Green Earth Organics, health, healthy, healthy eating, organic food, organic vegetables, potatoes, vegetables

Recently I decided to try out something new and ordered vegetables online. The whole thing started when Green Earth Organics popped up in a conversation I was part of on a facebook networking page and because I liked what they said I decided to check out their website.

I loved the idea of a box of seasonal, organically grown vegetables delivered straight to my door and their prices were reasonable too. The boxes on offer come in different sizes and different contents: large ones for families, ones picked for juicers, one with purely Irish produce,  and one filled with favourites. They even have bags of fruit and an array of other healthy products.

Since I live on my own I opted for a small box for the test run and this morning a white van pulled up outside my door delivering a box filled with freshly picked vegetables:leeks, beets, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, onions and parsnips. Green Earth Organics even added a handwritten note and recipe to help inspire their customers what to cook.

Now I can’t wait to cook the vegetables and find out if they taste as good as they look. So tonight I’ll be enjoying some fresh beetroot and I see some yummy vegetable soup over the weekend.

I can’t believe how excited I am about this but I have to say I am impressed how easy and efficient my online vegetable shopping experience has been. So I’ll possibly be seeing more of the friendly carrot Green Earth Organics has on their logo as I think I may become a regular customer: fresh vegetables delivered directly to my door is just to good to pass up on.

a box filled with healthy vegetables

pea soup comfort

Tags

autumn, comfort food, cooking, food, healthy, home made, pea soup, recipe, soup, stew, vegtable

There is nothing better than a hot plate of soup when it’s cold and wet outside, and when the soup is thick and stewy it is just pure bliss.

Since I live on my own I often just buy a tub of fresh soup as I don’t want to be eating the same dish all week long. While they mostly are yummy and filled with vegetablely goodness they do tend to be more on the slurpy side, lacking that little bit of bite and substance.

So yesterday I took the wooden spoon into my own hands and stirred up a batch of pea soup, one of my favourites. Since I didn’t have a recipe, and I was too lazy to google it I decided to make it up as I went along and was delighted with the result.

I chopped up some onions, added a handful of cubed bacon and braised them in the pot. Once they had simmered nicely and the onions where clear I took the mixture out of the pot and put it to the side. Then it was time for the peas.

I bought a large glass of fresh peas in my local shop, added some broth, a bit of salt, a tad of pepper, some garlic and a good handful of a soup mix (lentils, split peas and barley) and let it cook.

While the soup was bubbling away I chopped up two carrots. After about ten minutes my hand blender blended everything together while still having a stewy consistency. Finally I added the onions, the bacon and the carrots and let the soup simmer away for a little while (until the carrots were soft).

Once all was done I poured myself a large bowl of soup and enjoyed every comforting spoonful and I am delighted that I made enough to enjoy more of the scrumptious soup today.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dinnertime

Tags

community garden, cooking, Dinnertime, food, mudisland, onions, Weekly Photo Challenge, Weekly Photo Challenge: Dinnertime

I have a thing for onions – and I do believe that most dishes are better with them in it. The best onions I have eaten in recent years are the ones we harvested in the community garden Mudisland. They were  a little bit sweet and just full of flavour. Sadly it’s still a long way off until we can harvest this years onions – but at least it’s something I can look forward to!

creating kale chips

Tags

baking, carb-free, cheat, cooking, eating, food, healthy eating, kale, kale chips, vitamins

Even the busiest person has to eat and since eating alone can been alone can be a little lonely I decided to invite my wonderful artist friend Dragana over for dinner last night.

A roast chicken and some salad was the obvious choice for me. After all, while the chicken happily cooks in the oven you can do other things, only a bit of basting now and then. As a salad lover (and knowing that Dragana always loves my homemade dressing) chopping up, dicing and mixing whatever salady stuff I find in my fridge into a concoction of healthyness is something I do most nights anyway.

However my guest has decided to go carb-free for a while, so any rice, pasta, potato or even carrot side serving was out. Not wanting to give up on something a little crispy I decided to make some kale chips, something I haven’t done in a while but always find yummy.

An additional bonus – kale is one of those super foods that is high in vitamin K, A & C followed by lots of manganese, fiber, calcium and a whole slue of other healthy qualities. And while of course it’s always best to steam vegetables, drizzling them with oil, salt and spices and letting them bake in the oven isn’t a bad option either.

So, if you want to try it yourself, just make sure you tear up the kale leaves into manageable sizes (cooks more evenly), get rid of any big stems (they end up tasting like sticks) and wash them. Once dry (I lie them out on a towel and dab to make sure all the water is gone), sprinkle with oil and spice (I put oil, about a tablespoon full, into my hand and massage the oil into the leaves, I do the same with the spices), put into the oven for about 10 at 150 degrees, toss once, back in for another 5-10 minutes.

The results are crispy, not burnt and really yummy!

before the oven

yummy crispiness after the oven

pancakes for breakfast

Tags

breakfast, breakfast food, cooking, food, pancakes, photos, quote

When I woke up this morning and ambled down to the kitchen I realised that I had forgotten to buy bread yesterday. As I stood staring into my empty breadbasket I decided that I wasn’t in the mood for muesli or porridge and baking bread would just take to long for my grumbling tummy. So pancakes it would be!

Whipping up eggs, milk and flour into a creamy batter and melting some butter in a pan only takes minutes and as the pancake turned golden brown I cut up some last strawberries, added a few blueberries and sprinkled them with a hint of sugar.

As I munched on my breakfast I could help but let out a sigh of joy, there is truly something very satisfying about pancakes – yummy comfort food in a flip of a pan.

There is hardship in everything, except eating pancakes

Baptist preacher Charles H. Spurgeon

Christmas jam

Tags

Carrageen Moss, christmas, Christmas jam, cooking, food, home made, jam, making jam, photography, photos, plum jam

Maybe a few months too early, but yesterday my home smelt of Christmas. Cinnamon and other spices mixed in with red wine and plums wafted around the house as I finally got around to cooking jam.

I didn’t have quite enough jam-sugar so I experimented. Through online research I  found out that the main ingredients that makes jam, well, ‘jammy’, is pectin and since plums are high in pectin (like apples, citrus rinds and cranberries) I decided that plain sugar would suffice. Being in  the experimenting mood I even added some Carrageen or Irish Moss (a tasteless but really healthy seaweed) into the mix. Not just based on any old whim, but based on the fact that it is know for its gelling properties – an added benefit is that it is known for its anti-viral properties and that it is believed to be an aphrodisiac can’t be a bad thing either!

The plums I had bought at the fruit & veg market were still a little bit hard, so I cut them up, pitted them and let them sit over night in sugar. When I went to make the jam and lifted the lid a wonderful fruity smell seduced my nose with its sweet plumy goodness.

A short while later, as I stood in the kitchen, while adding some red wine and spices and pureeing the fruit, I was enveloped by the scent of Christmas. And I have to admit it took some will power to not just put on ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ and give in to the feeling of Christmas.

Now I have thirteen glasses, of all different shapes and sizes, filled with a dark ruby red jam that will hopefully tastes as good as it smells – my morning toast will just have to surrender to some testing!

trip to the fruit-market

Tags

cooking, crafts, Dublin, fruit, fruit and veg, jam, knitting

Today, my Swiss neigbour/friend and I decided that we would go down to Dublin’s fruit & veg market and get some yummy produce to make jam from.

We left this morning, perhaps a little late (my neighbour that they open at 5am and I though she knew something I don’t) but we were still in time to get a tray of plums, some blueberries, lemons and beans.

So, while my friend gets first pick of the crop I have been trying to find some good recipes online. And since my funds will be very low this year (my masters will be taking all of my euros) I have been thinking of turning the wholesale fruit into edible Christmas gifts.

Now my evening is planned and I am excited to get cooking. But for now I will tackle my to-do list and hurry the day along. And who knows, maybe it’s even time to pull out my knitting needles too – after all the temperatures are low and it feels like the perfect time to start creating socks.

 

 

baking coconut macaroons

Tags

baking, coconut, coconut macaroons, cooking, food, macaroons, sweets

I woke up this morning with the unusual urge to bake some macaroons – no reason why and I haven’t a clue where the idea came from. Over breakfast I pondered my sweet desire and decided to give in to it.

With the radio entertaining me with some old hits I whipped the egg-white into frenzy and sieved the powder-sugar in, a hint of lemon and lots of coconut later I was left with a sugary, white batter – like a cloud in a bowl.

As I spooned little fluffy pillows onto the  baking tray I decided to pop to a friend for a cup of tea and share my morning munchies. And the rest – well I will offer them to the lovely mechanic around the corner – my boot won’t unlock so maybe we can exchange some goodies!

a little darker then I like – but yummy none the less

 

dead toaster revived

Tags

blew a fuse, breakfast, cooking, food, photography, soup, toast, toaster

It finally happened, I have been expecting, anticipating it for months now, my toaster died this morning. It did so in quite a dramatic fashion. The toast popped and all lights went out, leaving my kettle half boiled and me a  little stunned.

I flicked the switch on my fuse-box and all electrical goods beeped, peeped and bleeped back to life and I put the kettle back to boil. As I munched my toast my mind wandered and I forgot what had happened not 20 minutes earlier and put a new slice into the slots and, no surprise, the same thing happened again. the toaster popped out the lightly baked bread and blew the fuse again.

I resigned to the fact that the toaster had lived out it’s useful life, after about eight years of toasting and popping not a bad investment. Too busy to do anything much about it I left the dead toaster where it lives on the kitchen counter, to be disposed of at a later time

But then the strangest thing happened.

When I came back from lecturing I reheated the leak and carrot soup I had made last night and without thinking popped the last slice of toast into the toaster to dip and thunk. I made my tea, waited for the pop and buttered the toast, when suddenly I remembered the fiasco this morning. Somehow my toaster has revived itself and will live to pop for another day.

revived toaster

 

porridge and tea

Tags

breakfast, Comedian Steven Wright, cooking, food, health, healthy options, porridge, quotes, tea

We all know that “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” or so they say. I have no idea if that is true or not but I do know that the word break-fast literally means to interrupt those hours of non-eating.

The benefit of that is that this kick-starts your metabolism which in turn raves-up your engine, so to speak,  burning calories and setting the pace for the rest of the day. Of course this does depend on what you have for breakfast, a sugary donuts or a muesli bar isn’t really going to work, but wholegrain toast, sugar-free muesli and porridge, fruit are just a few options that do.

I like a little bit of variety in the mornings but I do tend to tend to stick to muesli or porridge. And especially now, with the weather being so wet and miserable outside, a hot bowl of porridge with some cranberries and cinnamon and a steaming cup of tea always seems to warm my spirits and my tummy at the same time.

 

I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time‘. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

Comedian Steven Wright