Batcat nachos

s found a kids comic book series in the library about a character called Batcat (half bat, half cat), by Meggie Ramm - and it really caught his imagination! I think when we first found it, there was only one book, but now there are three. The third one just came out, and it's all about food - Batcat loves to eat, and his roommate Al loves to cook. In the book, Al enters a cooking competition at the Nightfest harvest food festival, and everyone loves Al's entry, especially the griffin kids (and of course Batcat). 

Brilliantly, a recipe was included, so we gave it a whirl... s loves these nachos! And, amazingly, I like them too (I am not usually that into nachos). The genius is in the layers, and in the personalisation of the toppings - s likes his with tons of sour cream (or creme fraiche - we've not yet found sour cream in DK) and some lime, I like mine with toasted pumpkin seeds, skyr, avocado, chopped coriander, lime, and a little bit of hot sauce. Also brilliant is that once the butternut squash is prepped (nb I have been chopping into quite small dice and roasting at 200C for about 30-40 min) you can make as much or as little nachos as you like within about 15 min - so as long as you have all the ingredients including the squash ready to go - so it is perfect for a quick dinner or snack - only downside is that nachos don't really keep. 

Avocado grapefruit salad

If S is out in the evening sometimes I watch queer eye and shell walnuts at the same time. One time the food dude made an avocado and grapefruit salad, and I guess I took a mental note - I like both, don’t think I’d had that combination before, but it sounded good. Some time later, s insisted on grapefruit purchase but then remembered he doesn’t like them much, and it sat in the fruit bowl for a while until some ripe avocados arrived too, and I remembered about the avocado and grapefruit salad…

1 pink grapefruit
1 ripe avocado
Lettuce 
Chopped almonds
Honey
White wine vinegar
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Segment the grapefruit and remove all the pith and membranes. Do it over a bowl and keep the juice. Peel and chop the avocado. Put the lettuce (anything mild is good - little gem, spinach etc) in a bowl, add the grapefruit, avocado and chopped nuts. Add the vinegar, olive oil, honey, salt and pepper to the grapefruit juice and  whisk together to make a dressing. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss.

It was a great combination, why have I never eaten this before?!

Guacamole

Guacamole is kind of too simple for a recipe, but there are lots of different schools of thought on it, and I do have a favourite way of making it...

c. 2 ripe avocados, peeled and destoned

1 small tomato, finely chopped

c. 1 tsp finely chopped onion

juice of one lime

1-2 tsp coriander, finely chopped (optional) 

few drops of hot sauce (optional)

pinch of salt

Mush it all together with a fork. Nice if the avocados are still a little bit chunky.

Brown rice, kale, tempeh, sesame and ponzu

I wanted to try ponzu sauce - citrussy, sweet, salty, sounded like something we would like. But they all seemed to contain either HFCS or fish (maybe I should just make my own?). Then I found the Kikkoman Lime one is all clear, and brought some home.

This combination is nothing fancy, but it is really, really good.

1 cup Japanese brown rice cooked in 1 1/2 cups water
~6-8 big leaves kale, washed and shredded
olive oil
1/2 a packet of tempeh, crumbled or ~1 cm dice
4 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
salt+pepper
ponzu sauce
~2 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted
sliced avocado (optional)

Put the rice on first. Then blanch the kale in boiling water for 1-2 minutes. Heat 1-2 tbsp olive oil in a large frying pan, add the tempeh and fry until golden brown. Add the garlic and fry til lightly coloured. Add the blanched kale and stir-fry til warmed through. Season with a little salt and pepper (ponzu is salty - don't add too much salt). Put some rice in a bowl, add kale-garlic-tempeh mixture, ponzu, sesame seeds, avocado if you want, and eat.

Sometimes Summer rules: simple tomato-avocado-basil salad

Right now I have three kinds of beautiful tomatoes (yellow zebra, chocolate cherry and Japanese black trifele) from my pot garden, and they are all different, delicious and perfectly ripe. I also grew some really tasty basil. Combined with a perfect avocado and just a little good extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. This salad made me really happy. Even had some awesome bread to mop up the juices at the end.

Purple noodles with purple carrots and chickpeas

1 pack of purple yam noodles (thickness of spaghetti)
1 bunch purple carrots, scrubbed, trimmed and roughly chopped
2 purple spring onions, cleaned, trimmed and chopped
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped
1-2 tbsp tahini
2 tsp honey
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp mirin
1 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tsp sesame oil
3/4 cup chickpeas, defrosted and mashed roughly with a fork
1/2 an avocado, peeled and roughly chopped 1-2 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted
1-2 tbsp fresh coriander, chopped

Put the carrots on to steam until just done. Refresh in cold water immediately. Put the purple noodles in a pan of boiling, slightly salted water and cook until just tender, about 10-15 min. Run under cold tap to stop cooking. Put the spring onion, ginger, tahini, honey, soy, mirin, vinegar and sesame oil in a serving bowl and mix together to make the dressing. Add the noodles and toss to coat. Add the mashed chickpeas, steamed carrots, chopped avocado, coriander and toasted sesame seeds, toss, taste for seasoning and eat.


I like the coriander, avocado, sesame, carrots and chickpeas together, and the noodles, but the dressing is not quite right - it needs to be brighter and cleaner, and the tahini creaminess is wrong here. Still, all the purple stuff is awesome.

Wasabi guacamole

Avocados in the fridge door needing eating. A few minutes to make food before going out. Avocados beside green paste that looks a bit like guacamole = wasabi. Wasabi in guacamole? Would save me chopping chilli, could be interesting...

1 1/2 small ripe avocados, peeled and destoned
1/2 tsp wasabi paste
1/2 a medium tomato, finely chopped
1 tsp light miso
1 tbsp coriander, chopped
juice of 3/4 lime

Put all ingredients in a bowl together and mash with a fork. Taste and add more lime, salt, wasabi accordingly. Eat immediately. To keep, make surface area as small as poss and squeeze a bit more lime juice over the top.

Avocado cake

I had this avocado cake on my mind for a while, after seeing it here (originated here), but never had the reason and the quantity of ripe avocados to make it. My labmate P is taking a leave of absence to start a business, his favourite food is avocado, so we decided to have an avocado-themed get-together before he leaves.

Reason had arrived! All I needed then was lots of ripe avocados: I put six avocados into intensive ripening school (in a bag with a plantain and a banana, in the warmest place in our apartment) and they qualified, just about, just in time...

(ended up needing 4 small-medium avocados in total, although didn't use all of the fourth)

For the cake:
3 cups plain flour
6 tbsp cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 cups sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil (avocado oil or light olive oil perhaps better)
1/2 cup soft avocado, well mashed, about 1 medium avocado
2 cups water
2 tbsp cider vinegar
2 tsp vanilla essence

For the icing:
8 oz avocado meat, about 2 small to medium, very ripe avocados
2 tsp lemon juice (used lime)
1 lb icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence (used more lime juice instead)

For decoration:
(a tiny model avocado, made of pseudo marzipan)
approx 4 tbsp ground almonds
approx 4 tbsp icing sugar
1/2 tsp ground linseed mixed with 1/3 tbsp boiling water
few drops rum
few drops green food colouring (or green+yellow mixture)
2-3 tbsp cocoa for rolling

(a little bit of orange-tinged icing):
1 avocado stone, finely chopped and soaked overnight in 2 tbsp water
3 tbsp icing sugar

Heat oven to 350F. Grease and line the bases of two 8 or 9-inch cake tins.

In a large bowl, mix with a fork all of the dry ingredients except the sugar. Mix all the wet ingredients together in a separate bowl, including the mashed avocado. Add sugar into the wet mix and stir.

Add the dry to the wet, and beat with a whisk (by hand) until smooth. Pour batter into a greased cake tins. Bake for 30-40 min, until a skewer comes out clean.

Let cakes cool in the tins for 15 min, then turn out onto cooling racks to cool completely before icing.

While the cakes are baking and / or cooling, make the icing. Peel and pit the soft avocados. It’s important to use the ripest avocados you can get your hands on. If the avocados have brown spots in the meat, avoid those spots when you scoop the meat into the bowl.

Put the avocado in a blender with the lime juice and pulse til completely smooth and lightened in colour (nb a different machine eg food processor with whisk attachment would have been better - it took a long time to get it smooth as it wasn't catching in the blades properly).

Decant the smooth avocado into a bowl and beat in the icing sugar a little at a time with a whisk. Add vanilla essence (if using) and whisk until combined. If not using right away, store in the refrigerator*'.

To make the tiny avocado out of marzipan, mix the sugar and ground almonds, mix the wet ingredients separately, then rub the wet through with your fingers to evenly distribute the colour before bring it all together into a ball. Shape it into an avocado shape and then roll it in cocoa powder. Poke all over the surface with a toothpick or knitting needle or similar point to make it look more like avocado skin. Cut in half lengthwise with a sharp knife. Hollow out the middle of each half to make the space for the stone. Shape the stuff you hollowed out into a stone shape and roll in cocoa before replacing in one side. This is your tiny avocado.

To make avocado stone icing, chop an avocado stone finely and soak overnight in just enough water to cover it. Mix a few drops with icing sugar until a good spreading consistency is achieved.

To assemble, layer the cake with half the avocado icing in the middle and half on top. Arrange the orange icing and the tiny avocado halves on top.


It's weird, but good. The icing is interesting: definitely tastes like avocado, also like lime, also really sweet - kind of a sensory double-take, then it's like, OK, this is good. It has a strange, almost slippery texture - some modification (adding firm silken tofu?) might be good. The cake is fine but a little bland - could do with some more intense flavour going on - the chocolate taste is kind of half hearted. It looked great though - the visual impact was wicked.

There are various modifications I might have made if I hadn't been tired / on autopilot / so grateful for having a recipe where everything was spelled out and I didn't have to think about it:

*'the icing did not go brown on storage, but it did turn kind of off-green - ideally it would be made as close to the time of eating as poss
* cake was massive - 2/3 recipe quantity or even half would have been sufficient
* avocado oil or a light olive oil would have been better than the veg oil I used
* like the idea of making it a lime and rum cake as well as / instead of the chocolate
* if sticking with the chocolate, think more would have been better
* if ever making an avocado cake again, I might try this one instead

Winter Salad II: watermelon radish, edamame, avocado and quinoa

A handed me some CSA veg in a hurry yesterday - I saw these and said 'turnips?' and he replied 'they said watermelon turnips, I don't know what's different about them'. I googled quickly and found they were watermelon radishes, a special variant of daikon. I kind of wished I hadn't peeked, because it would have been a wonderful surprise to cut into one of these unawares... They looked like muddy turnips on the outside, but inside they are a spectacular hot pink with slight rays of white. I can definitely see where the watermelon in the name comes from now!

(nb I think the quinoa, edamame and avocado suggested themselves because of the stories in the news about ingredient origins and S+I having a long ongoing conversation about the ethics of buying things from far-flung places... I guess it made me want to eat them (and we had them all in the house anyway, would be the most unethical thing of all to waste them, right?).)

1 medium watermelon radish
~3/4 cup frozen shelled edamame, defrosted
1/2 an avocado, peeled and roughly chopped
1/4 cup quinoa, cooked til tender, drained and cooled
1-2 tbsp chopped fresh coriander
juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp cider vinegar
1/2 tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp red chilli flakes
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp salt

Peel the radish and shave it into thin slices using a peeler or a mandoline. Put in a serving bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients, toss, taste for seasoning and eat.


Also really good, I was on my salad making game last night. I realised when eating it, it's quite reminiscent of this one. Got beetroot to eat up too, perhaps that's on the cards soon...  Only problem with this type of salad is that making thin slices of beetroot or radish is somewhat time-consuming / a pain (sometimes literally).

Cold peanut noodle salad / chickpea avocado salad

Reinventing leftovers - to make something interesting.

We had some wonderful asparagus (from the farm shop on the way to Bboro) - really fresh and tender.  Even the shoots as big as my finger were super tender.  I just steamed them for 5-10min then we ate them with a little 'butter' and salt and pepper.  Soooo good - could have eaten them forever.

Cold peanut noodle salad

We had noodles and some leek flower with dried tofu left from yesterday's dinner so I decided to make it into a salad.

~500g cooked green ribbon noodles
1 cup mixed fried dry tofu and leek flowers

~1 1/2 tbsp coriander, chopped
~1 1/2 tbsp mint, chopped

For dressing:
2 tbsp unsalted peanut butter
1 tbsp miso paste
1 tbsp umeboshi plum vinegar
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tbsp lemon juice

Put the dressing ingredients in bottom of medium bowl and mix well together - taste to check balance (the plum vinegar is quite sour and the miso quite salty).  Tear the noodles into manageable sized pieces and add.  Mix well together.  Add tofu / leek flower and herbs and mix.


Chickpea avocado salad

I prepped a whole load of chickpeas and blackeyed peas at the weekend - this is chickpeas, combined with some stuff out the fridge that needed using (incl a beautifully ripe avocado from TJs - I bought organic because it seemed to be cheaper that day - is it worth buying organic more often?)...

2 cups cooked chickpeas
1 small ripe avocado, roughly chopped
3/4 a small yellow bell pepper, roughly chopped

1 1/2 tbsp coriander, chopped
1 1/2 tbsp mint, chopped
good squeeze of lemon juice

olive oil
salt+pepper

Put all ingredients into a bowl, toss and serve.

Green and white bowl

Another quick weeknight supper.

1 cup white quinoa (this makes about twice as much as needed for leftovers)
alfalfa sprouts
1/2 an avocado, diced
~50g firm tofu, diced
1 spring onion, finely chopped
handful of sugarsnap peas
1/2 tbsp coriander, chopped
1/2 tbsp mint, chopped
1/2 tbsp sesame seeds, lightly toasted

1 quantity of tahini lime sauce

Boil the quinoa in 2 cups of water for about 12 min / til cooked / with a little bite left / water absorbed.

Steam the peas for 3 minutes, until green colour intensified but still with some crunch.  Refresh with cold water.  Chop into pieces of desired size.

Toast the sesame seeds in a frying pan, and prepare the sauce.

Mix the quinoa, sprouts, spring onion, herbs, peas, avocado and tofu together in a bowl and then add sauce and sesame seeds to taste.

Seb birthday cake ideas

He demands nuts (specifically pecans) and maybe coffee.

I am thinking maybe this one: 

maple pecan turtle cake

(it looks amazing, I am interested in trying a salted caramel (and seb loves salt so I think it would be a hit), and was also thinking maple syrup would be a good combination with pecans...)

Also looking at this recipe for pecan pie:

pecan pie

(like the sound of the crust)

Got looking at that blog... Also keen on trying something like this - love the sound of the guinness and avocado mix - have enjoyed stout cakes before, and wanted to try an avocado cake.  That blog is beautiful.

Finally, I bought some green tea powder at the weekend, so am keen to try and make some kind of green tea cakes (probably kitschy cupcakes or fairy cakes).

And I want to buy some agar agar or pectin and experiment with jellies.  That's probably enough to be getting on with...

Beetroot, avocado and edamame salad

Staying up all night to catch a flight.  Thought I may as well use the time to fill in some recipes I've cooked in the last little while and will definitely be doing again.

This one is basically from here.

Serves four to six.

4 medium raw beetroots (around 350g in total)
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
3 tbsp red wine vinegar
4 tbsp olive oil, plus a little extra to finish
½ tsp sugar (or sub sugar and chilli sauce for sweet chilli)
1-3 tsp savoury chilli sauce or paste (Tabasco type thing - or sub sugar and chilli sauce for sweet chilli)
1 tsp salt
black pepper
2 medium avocados, peeled and thinly sliced
10g coriander
10g mint
20g pea shoots (or lamb's lettuce)
150g broad beans, blanched, refreshed and skinned (or frozen edamame, quickly blanched and refreshed)

Peel the beetroots and slice them very thinly, around 2-3mm thick – if you have one, use a mandolin. (If your beets are large, halve them after peeling, then cut into slices.) Put the beetroot in a pot with plenty of boiling water and simmer for three to five minutes, until semi-cooked; it should still be crunchy. Drain and put in a large bowl.

Add the red onion, vinegar, oil, sugar, chilli sauce, salt and pepper to the beetroot bowl and toss everything together gently. Leave for 10-15 minutes, then taste and see if you want to add more sugar, salt or vinegar.

Finally, add the beans, pea shoots or leaves, herbs and avocado and serve/eat.


I have adapted and made various variations.  Usually use edamame beans, slice beetroot with a peeler (like the texture better thinner), substitute sweet chilli sauce for the sugar and chilli... Any kind of salad leaf for the pea shoots and any combination of mint/basil/coriander/parsley for the herbs.  Made quite a lot - half would be plenty but I guess more always gets eaten...