My husband really enjoys those ice pops you can get in a any number of unnatural colours from the corner store. This year, I thought I would try my hand and learning to make my own healthier versions of those frozen ice pops. Also, with a little imagination I thought I might be able to come up with some interesting varieties to keep the idea fresh throughout the summer.

Not only will they be far better for both of us but they don’t actually require all that much effort or money to produce. The ice pop molds are available at any number of supermarkets at this time of year. I picked my set up at Ikea for just over a pound. Apart from the molds, the cost comes down to whatever you decide to put into your ice pops.

For my first attempt at making my own frozen ice pops I went for a kiwi and lemon ice pop recipe. My mother in law had recently been staying with us and left behind several kiwi fruits. I didn’t want them to go to waste and I was sure I could work them into the recipe. For the lemon, I went with a diet cloudy lemonade.

For any American readers, in the UK lemonade means a carbonated drink such as Sprite. However, the cloudy version is much closer in taste to what Americans think of as lemonade. The only difference is that it is carbonated. However, I am sure this kiwi and lemon ice pop recipe would work with non-carbonated lemonade too.

It really couldn’t be much easier to make these kiwi and lemon ice pops and the great thing is that a total of three ingredients goes into the recipe. I can’t even begin to think how many chemicals go into the ones we had been buying!

I am looking forward to a summer of trying out new ice pop varieties. I am sure the possibilities are endless. I am even thinking of “adult” cocktail varieties that could be done.  There is some ginger wine in my fridge that is begging to be used.

Kiwi and Lemon Ice Pops

Kiwi and Lemon Ice Pop Recipe

Ingredients:

80 grams kiwi flesh
1 tablespoon runny honey
1 cup cloudy lemonade

Directions:

1. Purée the kiwi flesh. You can use a traditional blender or a stick blender to do this. I went with the stick blender.
2. Stir in the honey.
3. Pour in the cloudy lemonade and mix everything together until well combined.
4. Pour into the ice pop molds and freeze overnight.

Makes: 6 ice pops

I have a huge stack of cooking magazines and recipes I have printed out from the internet sitting on my desk as I try to widdle them down to decide what exactly I will be cooking and baking for the Christmas period. You would think after all that foodie focused research I would be settled on a menu by now. The problem is that the more I see the more I want to make but I want to be careful of not biting off more than I can (literally) chew.

One thing I do know is that Christmas cooking period is going to be one of those times where I won’t be sticking strictly to a vegetarian diet. However, I do really want to try as much as possible to be cooking and serving mostly vegetarian Christmas recipes.

The good thing though is that it really isn’t very hard to do that. When you think about it, most of the Christmas cookies and cakes we will munch over the holiday period are vegetarian by their very nature. Then, the normal Christmas dinner trimmings are also largely vegetarian. At least that is the case if you skip doing your roast potatoes in goose fat. Frankly, even when I wasn’t so focused on vegetarian cooking that never appealed to me anyway.

As I make my way through a largely vegetarian Christmas, I will check in and share my vegetarian cooking adventures. Hopefully, it will give some of you also trying to eat mostly vegetarian over the Christmas cooking period of bit of inspiration.

For now though, it is on to finally forming a solid Christmas cooking schedule. So, time to settle down with that stack of Christmas cooking magazines and make my mind up. At least until I change it again.

Of course, I can’t do that research without having a good hot beverage by my side. This month for the vegetarian swap I participate in over at Recipezaar, I picked out this Mayan Hot Chocolate recipe posted by Recipezaar member the80srule.

spiced hot chocolate recipe

It turns out this hot chocolate recipe is the perfect partner to planning my vegetarian Christmas cooking. Firstly, the big sell for me, is that it is actually made with soy chocolate milk. I am lactose intolerant so whenever I make a creamy drink like hot chocolate I have to weigh up the consequences. I could make a normal hot chocolate recipe with water, I suppose, but any lover of hot chocolate knows that is simply never the same. Amazingly though, I had never thought of using soy chocolate milk as the base of a hot chocolate recipe but it really did work.

What really makes this hot chocolate recipe special though are the spices that go into the mixture. First in the pot, is a bit of cinnamon which gives a real Christmas feel to the hot chocolate recipe. Then comes the real surprise, a pinch of cayenne pepper. You would think that would make it hot and spicy but really it just adds a back ground warmth to the hot chocolate.

So, make yourself your own mug of this spiced hot chocolate and pull up your own pile of Christmas recipes and join the foodie December ritual of planning your holiday baking and Christmas cooking. Let the games begin!

Time for us to end this cycle! Folks, pumpkins aren’t just for Halloween!

Joking aside, there really are many recipes that can be made with pumpkin rather than simply carving funny patterns in them. Even if your only purpose for buying the pumpkin is to to carve it you can still preserve its dignity as a food item by making good use of all those seeds you have to scoop out.

Learning how to roast pumpkin seeds, or in this case toast pumpkin seeds, really is very easy and can take very little time at all. Toasting pumpkin seeds only requires, a pan, a tiny bit of oil and some seasoning.

Once you have the method for toasting pumpkin seeds down, you can experiment with all sorts of seasoning combinations. The only limit is your sense of adventure. I have found that most combinations that work with nuts will usually work with toasted pumpkin seeds too.

Since, I was making this particular batch of toasted pumpkin seeds for Halloween, I decided to make them nice and spicy. Now, I am a spice wimp. What I think it spicy is usually barely even hot for real lovers of hot food. So, by all means feel free to add more chilli powder if you really like things hot and spicy.

Spicy toasted pumpkin seed recipe

spicy toasted pumpkin seeds recipe

Ingredients:
3/4 cup pumpkin seeds, freshly removed from the pumpkin
1 teaspoon chilli infused olive oil or olive oil
1/2 teaspoon dried chilli flakes
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder, I used mild but go with your own spice comfort levels
1 hearty pinch, sea salt

Directions:

1. Rinse off the pumpkin seeds trying to remove as much of the pulp as possible. Pat dry.
2. Put the pumpkin seeds in a bowl and toss with the oil.
3. Heat a skillet until very hot and then turn down to medium.
4. Add the oil-tossed pumpkin seeds and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly. They are ready when they have started to go golden brown but they can quickly burn so be careful to watch.
5. Remove from heat and carefully transfer the pumpkin seeds to a bowl.
6. Add the chilli flakes, chilli powder and sea salt to the toasted pumpkin seeds and toss to evenly distribute.
7. Let the toasted pumpkin seeds sit for a couple minutes just to allow them to crisp up and then serve.

Serves: 4

My spice and herb cabinet is overflowing. I am always buying stuff to try and use it a few times before it moves to the back never to been seen again. I would love it if you could just buy a spice by the pinch or the tablespoon for those times when you just need that little bit for one recipe. Recently, I have decided to challenge myself into finding ways to use some of those herbs and spices which have been lurking unloved for far too long.

The other day, I had a sudden craving for flatbreads but didn’t really want to do anything that involved yeast and letting things rise. I just never plan my cravings far enough ahead to factor in the time for yeast to do it’s thing. In the back of my head, I recalled a quick flatbread recipe that didn’t involve yeast. I used that as a base and decided to experiment.

The first combination I tried for the flatbread recipe was garlic and cumin. In both cases, I used the powdered variety of the garlic and the cumin to that it would mix smoothly into the dough. I ended up really liking this version of the flatbread recipe. They were especially nice with some hummus and they reheated really well the next day. I stored them in the fridge in some foil and simply stuck them in the microwave for 30 seconds and they were back to true form.

Garlic and cumin flatbread recipe

garlic and cumin flatbread recipe

Ingredients:

250g strong white bread flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon sea salt (use the sea salt if at all possible..it makes for a really nice texture within the flatbread)
1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
125ml warm water
2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions:

1. Put all the dry ingredients into a large bowl and create a hole in the middle.
2. Mix the water and the oil in a jug.
3. Slowly pour the water and oil mixture into the hole in the middle of the dry ingredients. While doing that, you want to be slowly pushing the dry mixture down into the wet to incorporate it.
4. Once finished pouring in the water and oil mixture, gently mix with your hands until it comes together as a dough.
5. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for about 5 minutes. You don’t need to add extra flour unless it is really, really sticking. Otherwise just go with it until it feels like a proper texture.
6. Divide the dough into eight equal sized balls.
7. Roll each ball out until they are about the size of a pita bread.
8. Heat a pan until it is really hot and then turn down the heat to a ‘high low’. You could use a griddle pan if you want put I don’t have one.
9. If you wish, you can lightly oil the pan at this stage but mine turned out fine without adding any extra fat.
10. Put a few flatbreads at a time into the hot pan.
11. Cook for about 3 minutes on each side and then transfer to a serving dish and enjoy. Seriously..that easy!

Serves: 8

With that flatbread recipe having worked so well, I got a tad more adventurous the second time around. For what feels like forever, I have had a container of the Middle Eastern dukkah spice blend hanging out in the cupboard. I first had it at a food fair where olive oil covered bread was then dipped in the dukkah before eaten as a snack. It really was tasty!

However, once I brought it home I just didn’t really know what to do with it. Since I associate flatbread with Middle Eastern food, I wondered if I could make use of it in this recipe. I think it worked out pretty well. It certainly has a different texture to the first batch but in a good way. Plus, I rolled these out thinner to make them bigger and feel like a different sort of bread.

I suspect, that how much dukkah you would need in the recipe will depend on a number of factors. Firstly, as it is a blend rather than an out and out spice, different blends are going to taste different. Secondly, my dukkah has been sitting around for a while and no doubt has lost a good deal of the potency it had when originally purchased. So, when making your own version of this flatbread recipe, just keep that in mind and go with what your instinct tells you.

Dukkah spiced flatbread recipe

dukkah flatbread recipe

Ingredients:

250g strong white bread flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon sea salt (use the sea salt if at all possible..it makes for a really nice texture within the flatbread)
3 tablespoons dukkah
1/2 cup fresh coriander, finely chopped
Zest of 1 lemon
125ml warm water
2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions:

1. Put all the dry ingredients and the coriander and lemon zest into a large bowl and create a hole in the middle.
2. Mix the water and the oil in a jug.
3. Slowly pour the water and oil mixture into the hole in the middle of the dry ingredients. While doing that, you want to be slowly pushing the dry mixture down into the wet to incorporate it.
4. Once finished pouring in the water and oil mixture, gently mix with your hands until it comes together as a dough.
5. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for about 5 minutes. You don’t need to add extra flour unless it is really, really sticking. Otherwise just go with it until it feels like a proper texture.
6. Divide the dough into 6 equal sized balls.
7. Roll each ball out until they are about the size of a small tortilla.
8. Heat a pan until it is really hot and then turn down the heat to a ‘high low’. You could use a griddle pan if you want put I don’t have one.
9. If you wish, you can lightly oil the pan at this stage but mine turned out fine without adding any extra fat.
10. Put a few flatbreads at a time into the hot pan.
11. Cook for about 3 minutes on each side and then transfer to a serving dish and enjoy. Seriously..that easy!

Serves: 6

If you wanted to make this flat breads three ways (ooh, I am so trendy..lol) you can just take out all of the seasoning apart from the salt and make the base flatbread recipe. They plain ones are good too and taste much like a pita.

The base flatbread recipe is great because not only is it very low fat but it also qualifies as a vegan recipe. On top of which, it takes just over 10 minutes from start to finish. Perfect for when you have that craving for some bread but can’t be bothered waiting for yeast to do that yeasty thing it does.

We ended up at an upscale Indian restaurant called Zaika. Though, calling something upscale in the Kensington area might be a tad redundant. I am not usually much of a posh restaurant goer – I am more of a homecooking type of gal – but it was for their lunch menu and it wasn’t too snobby so I felt just fine. I am pretty sure it is the only Michelin star restaurant I have eaten at so it was great to not feel intimidated.  We both had a taster menu which turned out the be really yummy. I especially liked that everything was very well spiced without being all that hot. Just right for my taste buds.

By far the stand out dish for me, was a spiced mushroom soup we had as a starter. It really was amazingly good. I am generally nuts about mushrooms anyway but this was just extra great. We played the ‘guess what is in it’ game and I made notes because I knew I had to try to reproduce it when I got home.

Of course, I was never going to come close to their level of cooking but what I came up with in my own kitchen wasn’t all that far away and I have been making it ever since. What made me especially pleased was that I managed to put my own stamp on the recipe and made it really low fat and even though it tastes really creamy, there is no dairy in it at all. In fact, this is a vegan soup recipe but you wouldn’t ever taste it and think it stood out as being vegan. Over the past few years, I have learned that I can make a nice creamy soup simply by using potatoes with their skins on in the cooking. When the whole thing gets blitzed up it all goes very smooth without needing the extra fat to do it. That can’t be a bad thing.

Now, this low fat mushroom soup recipe comes out whenever I am short on spare calories but need something with volume to fill my hungry belly.

Creamy spiced mushroom soup

low fat mushroom soup recipe

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
7 1/2 ounces onions, chopped
4 teaspoons garam masala
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
13 1/2 ounces potatoes, chopped with skins still on
4 ounces carrots, chopped
7 ounces mushrooms, roughly chopped
2 pints vegetable stock
3/4 cup fresh coriander, chopped

Directions:

1. Heat the olive oil in big pan and then add the onion and cook softly for about 5 minutes to allow the onions to soften.
2. Add the garam masala and ground coriander and stir into the onions.
3. Add the potato and carrots and just allow to heat through for 1 minute.
4. Add the mushrooms and the vegetable stock and bring to the boil.
5. Reduce the heat, cover and cook for 30 minutes.
6. Add the fresh coriander and either transfer to a blender and blitz under smooth or use a hand held stick blender to whizz it up right there in the pan.
7. Return to the heat and add any salt if you think it is needed and just heat through again to serve.

Serves: 4

Just like with the pesto the other week, I just always thought it would be too complicated for me to learn how to make hummus. Once again, I was wrong. I stumbled onto an easy hummus recipe that I really love because the base recipe doesn’t even use olive oil. Which means that I don’t feel at all bad about using tahini on my diet. It is such an easy hummus recipe that ever since my discovery of it, I have been playing around adding all sorts of things to it to come up with new hummus recipes.

Lately, I have also been “suffering” from a bit if an olive addiction. The little green and black gems have been finding their way into just about every meal I put together. So, when it was time to put together my latest hummus recipe I couldn’t resist the temptation to throw in some olives and see what happened. I also had a bunch of fresh coriander – cilantro for our American friends – that needed to be used. So, I threw that in too.

Boy did this turn out to be a seriously yummy hummus recipe! So, good that I simply topped it with a couple more olives (told you I am addictive) and ate it with warm pitas and made that my entire lunch!

Coriander and green olive hummus recipe

coriander and green olive hummus recipe

Ingredients:
1 (400g) can chickpeas, drained but the liquid reserved
1/4 cup tahini
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 cloves garlic
1/3 cup fresh coriander
1/3 cup green olives, pitted
freshly ground pepper, to taste
sea salt, to taste

Directions:

1. Put the chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, garlic, coriander and olives into a blender or food processor. I use my mini chopper to make it extra easy.
2. Blitz in short bursts, pushing the mixture down when needed until everything is combined.
3. Add a little bit of the reserved bean liquid and blitz again. Add more if you need more to get to the hummus texture you desire.
4. Serve in a bowl topped with olives.

Serves: 2 to 4 (or just 1 hummus addict like me!)

This month, I adopted January Bride. I must have been in a lemon mood because the two recipes I decided to make both had some lemon element to them. The first was the lemon garlic green beans that I blogged about earlier in the month. The second were these amazing Lemon Pepper Nuts .

lemon pepper nuts recipe

If I am honest, when I selected this recipe I wasn’t sure if it would work. I love candied nuts and have had salt and pepper cashews before which I enjoyed. However, lemon pepper on nuts was something totally new.

I am so glad that I tried them though because they were super easy to make – simply put the nuts, sugar and lemon pepper into a pan and heat and then cool down. On top of that, they were just incredibly tasty! There was a background of sweet heat that was perfectly balanced. I am glad I only made the one batch or I would have for sure eaten the whole nut recipe! It is even a vegan recipe so it doesn’t get much better when it comes to snack food recipes.

Lemon Dill Green Bean Side Dish Recipe

Not only is this a very easy vegetarian recipe but it actually passes as a vegan recipe too. However,even the meat eaters at your table are going to love this green bean recipe. Simply by using some dill and some whole grain mustard, the same old boring green beans become a really special vegetarian recipe with a whole bunch of flavour.

This low fat recipe will be as home on a plate next to some fish as it would be settled alongside your favourite vegetarian meal. So, really a great side dish for any Weekend Carnivore out there looking to ease their family into eating less meat.

Even though most recipes for potato salad are naturally vegetarian recipes, the one thing I tend not to like about them is that they also tend to be packed with fat. Plus, if you are a vegan you are going to have trouble finding a vegan friendly potato salad because of all the mayo and also because a lot of creamy potato salad recipes also have egg thrown in.

While, I am not a vegan myself, I do have to watch those fat grams if I am ever going to reach my goal weight. So, when I saw this dairy free Low Fat Warm Potato Salad recipe posted on Recipezaar by Annacia I knew I needed to give it a try.

Low Fat Potato Salad Recipe

I am really glad that I did too because this potato salad recipe is packed with flavour! There is a bit of olive oil in it but not enough for it to be much of a calorie counting concern. Then the combination of Dijon mustard, rice vinegar and red wine vinegar gives the potato salad recipe a wonderfully tangy taste. It truly makes a great alternative to the normal creamy potato salad recipe and you can enjoy it even if you require vegan recipes.

I was taking part in the Recipezaar world tour cooking challenge (if you love to cook you need to visit Recipezaar!) and one of my teammates, WiGal
posted a recipe for homemade macadamia nut butter. I have always loved the creamy indulgent taste of macadamia nuts but I had never before thought of making them into a nut butter. I had considered trying to make other nut butters in the past but always thought it would just been too complicated for me to attempt.

So, when I saw her recipe for the homemade macacamia nut butter and just how simple it sounded I knew that I had to give it a shot. Just how easy is it? Well, you put a bunch of macadamia nuts into a food processor and keep it running until the nuts start to form a paste. Really, that is all it took!

How much more natural can something get then just using the one ingredient. My macadamia nuts were natural and hadn’t been toasted, roasted or anything making them taste just of themselves. Which really is a lovely pure taste. I made mine into a lovely vegetarian breakfast by spreading the homemade nut butter over a toasted cinnamon bagel and drizzling it with honey.

homemade macadamia nut butter

On its own, the homemade macadamia nut butter is fine for vegans too. Just skip the honey and find something vegan friendly to serve it on.  I  love all the possibilities this technique for making homemade nut butter opens up. I would think the possibilities only end when you run out of a different type of nut to try. However, I am thinking my next attempt at making my own nut butter will be with raw cashews.  I think that would work just as well.

Go on and try your hand at making your own vegetarian nut butter by checking out the macadamia nut butter recipe on Recipezaar and when you do be sure to rate the recipe and let WiGal know what you think!