Roasted cauliflower with thyme and garlic

Roasted cauliflower is something very simple which you absolutely don´t expect to come out so divine! It sounds really…boring. But trust me and give it a try, it´s not as plain as it sounds. Especially if you do what I did and toss the cauliflower florets with some olive oil to coat,  salt, 1 or 2 finely minced garlic cloves and a generous sprinkle of dried thyme, oregano and basil, and let it sit in a bowl in the fridge overnight (or 24 hours, like in my case… :-D). The smell is quite overpowering, but worth the final effect. Roast the cauliflower on a baking tray lined with baking paper (or a silicone mat), for about half an hour on 180°C, turning the florets mid-way.

Served with quinoa mixed with chopped fresh parsley leaves and gomasio, and a salad of shredded leaf lettuce, iceberg lettuce and diced carrot, with a simple dressing of olive oil and ume plum vinegar.

Quinoa pilaf with carrot-apple-sauerkraut salad

Pilaf is something I make when I want a light, easy, quick, one-pot meal. I like to also make it from lighter quick-cooking grains such as quinoa.

Sautee onion with salt on a bit of water until translucent and then add matchsticks of carrot, sautee for a bit more. Add thoroughly washed and drained quinoa and water (for one cup of grain use two cups of water), cook for 15-30 minutes on a low flame under a lid until water is absorbed. At the end mix in chopped fresh parsley, wild garlic, spring onion and a teaspoon (or more) of ume plum vinegar.

The salad is also very simple: mix equal amounts of grated sour apple, grated carrot (both were finely grated) and sauerkraut, mix well.

 

Simple wok veggies on a quinoa bed

I´m posting this recipe more for showing the presentation of such a dish, because otherwise it´s pretty basic and you can really play around with all different kinds of veggies -pretty much any can be wok-ed, even though I tend to favour leafy greens and not so many hearty root veggies when it comes to wok cooking…but even root veggies make a nice contrast!

I mixed chopped up: celery root and celery stalk, carrots, chinese cabbage, white cabbage, curly green cabbage, green beans and daikon radish. As a sauce/dressing I used shoyu, mirin and lemon (in a 1:1: 0,5 ratio). Plus some sesame seeds. I served this as a big pyramid on top of a bed of soft quinoa 😀 Reeeeally quick meal!

6.1. Lunch, dinner and dessert :)

For lunch I could re-cycle the black bean dish from yesterday (see previous post), it was very nice mixed into water-sauteed vegetables (paksoi, leek, pointed cabbage and two types of green beans – flat and pointed ones), seasoned with a tablespoon of tamari. As a side I had sweet millet cooked together with chunks of hokkaido pumpkin (my favourite sidedish just after brown rice!) and fresh rucola (arugula) and olives to compliment the meal.

For dinner I decided to bake a fish in tin foil (since we have a wonderful big oven now :-D). I seasoned the slices of codfish (I buy only MSC certified fish) with a bit of salt and an organic herb mix which is sold specifically for seasoning fish. On top I sprinkled a generous amount of thin sliced onion and fennel, wrapped all inside the foil and baked for 30 minutes covered and then 15 more minutes uncovered so the fish and veggies could get a bit of a “tan”.  I served the fish with blanched greens (paksoi, pointed cabbage and mixed in raw rucola) and quinoa mixed with fresh parsley leaves (they add a nice colour contrast). It was really yummy!

I even made a decadent dessert…very quick and easy rice crispie dessert! In a saucepan over a low flame I liquified 2 parts of tahini with 1 part of maple syrup and 1 part of rice malt, stirred in a handful of cashew nuts and a cup of brown rice crispies (puffed rice). I spooned the sticky creation onto a wooden cutting board covered with baking paper and evened it out a bit, something like this…

It´s best to let this dessert cool in a fridge before attempting to cut neat squares with a sharp knife. But to be honest the dessert didn´t become as solid as I would have wished, making it hard to cut slices which don´t fall apart. There is lots of room for improvement but the taste was great! 😀

31.10.

The nice yellow soup in the picture is pumpkin soup – cooked up hokkaido pumpkin, blended in a blender with added shiro miso (white, shortly fermented miso) and some ginger juice to taste – I personally think pumpkin soup just needs ginger in it! 😀

For grain I had brown calasparra rice mixed with red thai cargo rice and quinoa – all pressure cooked togethe for 45 minutes, served with a sprinkle of gomasio. I got a bit addicted to mixing different grains together, makes cooking much more interesting. But I must admit that I am not so fond of pressure cooking the quinoa with the rest – normally I cook quinoa without pressure for just about 15 minutes, a longer cooking time makes it too slimy and tasteless 😦

I sauteed pointed cabbage with green beans together with some mirin and ume plum vinegar – pointed cabbage rules!! So tender, compared to round cabbage.

And the beans are black hokkaido beans – first rubbed in a wet kitchen towel (instead of washing, so that their skin doesn´t “fly off” during roasting), then dry roasted for a few minutes until their skin cracks and becomes a bit golden, then pressure cooked with a double amount of water, for 45 minutes. When they´re done I added some kuzu to their leftover cooking water to make a sort of thick sauce (and a nice glaze on the beans), tamari (instead of salt) and rice malt – lovely combination!

My typical breakfast

Since starting my MB studies, I transformed my breakfast meal from a sweet porridge with a looot of nuts and seeds (I used to sweeten it with stevia or raisins or rice malt, and always used rice milk as well…) to a much healthier savoury version.

I always start my day with miso soup – honestly this has been the best step for me as of lately!! Such a great food to get you started. I make it less salty in the morning (just using half a teaspoon of miso per bowl). I try to use some form of daikon to induce discharge (either dried daikon or fresh, as in today´s soup), I always add wakame as is traditional in miso soups (I add a poststamp of it just a minute before turning the soup on low to simmer, that´s when you add the diluted miso). I often add carrot or onion, but not today – instead I finely chopped some ginger to give me extra warmth on this cold day. I add a garnish of chopped leek greens, or spring onion (as you can see in the pic).

Then I make a savoury porridge from leftover grain (today it was leftover quinoa/buckwheat mix), sprinkled with roasted seeds, with some pickle (sauerkraut and pickled gherkin are nice in the morning, they give extra live enzymes). Plus today I added a spoon of the arame dish from yesterday.

I don´t even miss my sweet breakfasts!!

10.10.

Yesterday I was cooking a whole lot – I gotta practice now that I´m doing the macro school!!

For lunch I had cooked sweet millet (more sticky and creamy than regular millet), with steamed veggies (red cabbage, onion, daikon, carrot, cauliflower, rapini/mizuna), and dry-roasted tempeh with sauce made of tamari, mirin (sweet rice wine) and lemon juice (add after the tempeh is roasted and let evaporate). I burnt my tempeh a little bit, so no picture! 😀

For my dinner I cooked a mix of buckwheat and quinoa (which is truly awesome, the light texture of the quinoa makes the heavy hearty buckwheat less heavy and hearty :-D). I also cooked adzuki beans with kombu (helps soften the beans) and some time before the end added a few chunks of hokkaido pumpkin, mmmmmmm…..

I also had a sidedish of arame (which I presoaked for a bit and used the soaking water) cooked with sliced onion, roasted sesame seeds and corn kernels, and seasoned with tamari. I cooked it long enough to make the water soak in or evaporate. Arame is my favourite seaweed, with a very gentle pleasant taste – good for seaweed beginners!

Garlic mussels with veggies and quinoa pilaf

So yesterday I chose to boost my B12 resources again and went to the vishandel (fish and seafood shop) to get a few mussels. They sell them already cooked, ready to use. I fried some garlic with leek, green beans and cauliflower on a bit of rice bran oil (one of my favourite oils) and added the mussels to warm them up and roast them a bit. As a sidedish I had leftover quinoa pilaf made of these ingredients cooked together for about 20 minutes in 1 big pot:

1 cup of quinoa

2 cups of water

salt

sliced leek

grated carrot

sliced curly cabbage

chopped up green beans

Usually I don´t mix the grain with the veggies in one pot to cook, but it actually is a good idea!