Kimchi is SO good.  It is also SO expensive, really.

I’m into fermented foods these days, and have made my own batch or kimchi, I made some years ago with a Korean friend, and dithered a bit in finding a substitute for fish sauce, which was a key ingredient.

My recipe is simple, and as I really wanted to make it and then eat it as soon as possible I wilted the cabbage for only a few hours.  Recipes I had found involved anything from 45 minutes to 24 hours or salting the cabbage, and sometimes even longer…

Yum!

So, here’s what I used:

One smallish daikon radish, peeled, and sliced into half circles.

Three pak choi cabbages, washed and chopped in lengths of about 3-2cms.  I wanted Chinese cabbage but was not able to get one, this worked out ok, though I think pak choi is slightly bitter.

One medium onion, sliced.

These I wilted with lots of salt, in one of my biggest soup pots.  I spread a layer of chopped cabbage and sprinkled with about a teaspoon of rock salt, another layer and sprinkled with salt, and so on till the pot was full.  I did the same thing to the chopped daikon and sliced onion, I managed to fit it all in one big pot, with a plate between each different food layer, the salt needs to be washed off again, so it’s easier if they are not all mixed in at first.

While you let this sit, I waited about two hours, you will see quite a lot of water come away, you can make up the spicy paste!  Yum!

I used:
About 2/3 tablespoons of both (fresh) crushed garlic and (bought) crushed ginger and two tablespoons (bought) chili paste, this spicy goodness I combined with about 1/4 cup lemon juice and a cup of tamari sauce.  I was keen to use all fresh garlic, ginger and chili as you can taste the preservatives, but due to small people’s needs there were some time constraints, next time I’ll do fresh.

Now, maybe an hour or two has passed, but maybe even 24 hours has gone by, if you can wait that long!

It’s time to rinse off your salted ingredients, under running water rinse as carefully as you can, the veges become quite salty and wilted, so don’t rush this stage.

Then, all you do is get the pile of veges and mix in your spicy juicy paste mixture, go on, use both hands.

So yummy, you can sit down and eat a load now, you can scoop the mix into those glass jars you have boiled for the last five minutes, staying about one cm from the brim, topping up with any remaining liquid, and share it around, or keep it chilled and eat it yourself!

I made a couple to give away and placed two of the sliced half circles of daikon at the top, just before I topped up the juice and screwed on the lid.

Notes:

I found the pak choi could have had more than 2 hours with the salt, also, there was still a bit of a salty residue on the leaves, so I’d probably take more care rinsing next time too.  Two tablespoons of chili paste made the kimchi fairly mild, so up it if you like it hot.  This recipe makes quite a lot of liquid, which we like to use on rice, noodles etc. you can add less tamari if you wish.

I never liked tomato soup until I made my own, and it’s so easy!

This recipe is vegan and can be adapted to make a tomatoey base for pastas, pizzas and other soups like minestrone.

The ingredients are basic, you need olive oil, a couple of cans (maybe about 2 – 4 small cans 400gms or there abouts) or a couple of kilograms of fresh tomatoes – you’ll need to skin them (perhaps by dropping them into a large pot of rapidly boiling water to loosen the skin) a half or cup or so of tomato paste (but this works ok without it) and vegetable stock.  You can use garlic, onions and spices, I like to use garlic and some cumin.

I add red lentils to this (along with a slash of molasses and some salt) and use it as a base for pasta sauces, soups, pizzas.  If you blend it all up it’s a great tomatoey lentiley paste/sauce if you prefer a smooth texture, or have people who are scared of lentils.

Sometimes it’s more practical for me to start these meals at lunch or earlier if I’m out for the day.  I just chop all the garlic (or here I’ve left them whole as we are getting to the smaller bulbs now..) and drop them in to a pot which has some olive oil (enough to generously cover the bottom of the pot).  If you are leaving this for the day or even and hour, put a lid on it!

When the time comes to prepare you’ll swoon over the deliciousness of the garlic as the infused flavours waft out when you lift the lid…  I added my spices, about a teaspoon of each?  As much as I can grab in a few fingers, cumin seed and red mustard seed.  I like to cook the garlic slowly, so it sweats and the spices eventually start to sizzle.

All the while get some water boiling for your stock, if that’s how yours comes, I use a powdered stock and tend to add it to taste, maybe about 4 cups goes into this soup.  Pour in to the garlic and spices your tomato paste, stir it through, add your canned or fresh, skinned and chopped tomato mix, I like to heat it through and reduce it a bit.

But you don’t have to, you can just put it all into the big pot with your stock, warm it through, cook for a few minutes, gently stirring while you find some pretty bowls to serve it in, and pull out the fresh baked bread…

Taste it and maybe season with a little salt, sprinkle on some fresh parsley or other fresh herbs, maybe some cracked pepper…

And enjoy!

Oh and this freezes really well, so fill your freezer and forget about the tinned stuff!

I had a go at my first raw vegan cheezecake yesterday, it was easy, but taxed my puny stick blender somewhat.

I’ve been keen to make one for ages, and needed to have all the ingredients together at one time, good coconut oil was proving tricky to find (the not too pricey organic kind..) and well, if we have massive amounts of delicious raw cashews at hand we eat them in nearly everything!  Not to mention dates!

So, you want to know how it’s made?  It’s like this, blend until fairly smooth (my blender could only manage smooth to chunky, which was fine with me) for the crust,

1 1/2 cups of almonds

Small pinch of salt

1 cup of dates (or honey, but this would be WAY too sweet I think and not vegan?  Depends on who you ask.)

Press into a tin or dish, I used a spring form tin, refridgerate for about an hour.

For the Cheese:

3 cups of cashews (pre soak in a bowl of water for about an hour)

1 cup of lemon juice, and a good bit of zest, I used four lemons for this

1 cup honey or about 3/4 cup agave syrup or sugar

1 cup of coconut oil (warmed until liquid, you can do this in a cup in a pot of hot water)

1 teaspoon or so of vanilla

To make the cheese, blend the cashews, lemon, honey, coconut oil and vanilla. Blend until smooth and adjust to taste., and pour the cheese mixture onto the crust.  We added frozen blueberries as these are a treat for Luna at the moment, I just sprinkled them mostly in the center and pressed them gently into the cheese.

I put the cake in the freezer for a couple of hours then transferred it to the fridge.  Let sit at room temperature for 30 mins or so before serving.

I found it really very sweet, so would use less sweetener, honey, sugar, agave, whatever you prefer.

Enjoy!

This is one of my best and simplest soups…  it’s really just about the mushrooms and all that garlic!  (Really big mushrooms).

You want some too?   Grab about three good sized large flat mushrooms, like the size of your hand large if you can find them fresh, a head of garlic (if you’re not so big on garlic, just a few less, maybe four cloves?), olive oil and vege stock.

I pour a generous splash of olive oil in my pot, (use less if you’re no so keen on slightly oily soups – it gets that green sheen on top…) and grate my garlic in, you can chop it or crush it.  These days I start making dinner at lunch and so I leave this to sit and infuse while I read to and sleep the kids.

Meantime, chop the mushrooms finely.  If you’ve also done the oily garlic infusion, doesn’t it smell divine?  Slowly, like on the lowest temp setting, cook the garlic, stirring gently, this takes a while, then..

Toss in the chopped ‘shrooms, again cook on low for ages, until they reach a really wilted state…  and smell really good.

Then I add my stock, I like this organic one, and it takes about 4 cups, see?

Use extra hot water if needed, and do add stock to taste.  Cook slowly, I just let it simmer, then dish up!  Soo good.

Make sure you’ve made some good bread to go with it!

Would you like some?  We get loads of limes whenever we see Rob’s parents, so what to do with them??  I love limes, and lime cordial is soo good.

You can make a cordial with lemons too, or tangelos?  Probably anything like these.

So here’s the recipe, it really is simple, and it was given to me by Rob’s aunt.

Wash your fruit, get a big pot with about 4 cups of water boiling.

When I make this with lemons I use 3 cups of sugar, with limes, I use about 4 cups of sugar.

Also with lemons, I might use about 6, and limes, well, about 10 or 12?  The ones we get from Rob’s parent’s orchard are really good, super juicy and a good size.

While your water boils and the sugar dissolves, halve and juice your fruit, you need to drop the squeezed halves into the water sugar mix, reservingthe juice.

This needs to boil for about 10 minutes, I’ve boiled it longer and it’s also fine.

Strain into another big jug, add the juice, I get about 400mls from 12 limes, you can strain the juice if you don’t like the pulp, but I like it!

The recipe I use then calls for 1 teaspoon each of tartaric acid, citric acid and epsom salts.  I have made with all three, with tartaric and citric acids (when I couldn’t find my epsom salts) and then just with citric acid, and it has been fine, you need to store it in the fridge and at our house it seldom lasts longer than a week!

And that’s it, easy, you have a concentrate, dilute it to taste with ice, a ring of lime and enjoy!

We love it!

I made these to-die-for Oreo Cheesecakes for a high tea today.  I thought I’d share the recipe, because you ought to make them and then have a sugar high headache like I have now.  Here are some more photos, they’re super quick and easy, using a cookie for the biscuit base saves loads of crushing-mixing-chilling time.

See?  There’s the cookie.

I’ll share the recipe, as I adapted it a little, using less eggs and cream cheese, fewer cookies and made it all metric.  Also, as my stick blender died, I mixed it all by hand.  I have found using a fork to work up the cream cheese, alternating with a whisk makes a good smooth cheese filling, so don’t let not having a good mixer stop you!  Sooo, adapted from the above link, here’s what I did…

Cookies ‘n’ Cream Mini-Cheesecakes

Ingredients

• two boxes of Oreo cookies, I used 20 for the cup cake bases, and chopped the rest to add to the filling
• 750gms cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten
• 1 cup sour cream
• Pinch of salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 140 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Place 1 cookie in the bottom of each lined cup.
2. Beat cream cheese until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Gradually add sugar, and beat until combined. Beat in vanilla.
3. Drizzle in eggs, a bit at a time, beating to combine and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Beat in sour cream and salt. Stir in chopped cookies by hand.
4. Divide batter evenly among cookie-lined cups, filling each almost to the top. Bake until filling is set, about 22 minutes (mine took about 30 minutes). I always let my baked cheesecakes cool in the now switched off oven once set, this seems to prevent the tops splitting.  Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Refrigerate at least 4 hours (or up to overnight).

Voila!  I usually get all over the top with cheesecakes, sprinkling on flaked or grated chocolate, but ah, these are already unbelievable rich.  You could crumble cookie bits on top if you bought extra cookies if you wanted to really go all out.

Do you need to see another photo?

Last one, now go make them!

I picked up a copy of Sugar-Free Toddlers at my La Leche League group.  I have browsed through the recipes, none I have tried, but it gave me some ideas.  I go off and on with my regular baking, at the moment I do dairy free scones whenever their called for, this time, I thought I’d make some cookies.  I found the recipes called for dried fruits or fresh pureed fruits instead of sugar, so I used 250 gms of Olivani, to which I added about three good handfuls of raisins.  It took a good 10 minutes to cream the mix with my trusty stick blender, raisins take more effort than sugar and butter!
The mix was a caramel colour and there were smallish chunks of raisins in it, then I added three cups of flour, about a teaspoon of baking powder, mixed it through, rolled into balls, squished down with a fork and popped it in the oven!  To these ones I added a half cup of cocoa powder, I like really rich cocoa choc cookies, so add less if you prefer.

I usually bake half the mix, and roll up into balls the remaining mix, which I place in a zip bag to grab and bake when I need a quick plate of goodies for a coffee morning.  It works really well, I just take them out to defrost, about ten minutes or so.  I bake them as I do the fresh batch, about 10 minutes on 180 degrees.  Yum!  They taste different to cookies with refined sugar, more fruity and rich, but Luna loves them, and so do I.

With the arrival of baby imminent I decided to have a go at making a ‘groaning cake’, a delicious spicy apple cake perfect for new mammas.  Check out the recipe here.