Weekend Carnivore

If you are anything like me, you can often find yourself with a fridge littered with jars and tubs with just a little bit left in them. There isn’t enough to actually use it in a meal but too much to think about throwing it away. Especially, when we all know we have to be careful about food wastage.

My default in these situations has become to figure out how I can combine some of these little bits and bobs and put them on toast. After all, just about anything can go okay on toast – just about.

This time I really lucked out and found a pairing that turned out to be a culinary marriage made in heaven – ricotta and pesto. I had just a couple tablespoons left of both and just spread them both on toast. It was *so* good that I was seriously tempted to run out and get more ricotta and pesto right there and then just to have an excuse to make it again.

Ricotta and pesto toast recipe

Ingredients:

2 slices bread
2 tablespoons ricotta cheese
2 teaspoons pesto, fresh is best

Directions:

1. Toast the bread.
2. Spread each slice with one tablespoon of ricotta cheese.
3. Smear a teaspoon of pesto over the ricotta on each slice and enjoy!

Serves: 1 to 2

Hello, my name is Sarah Jayne and I am a hummus addict! Seriously, I can’t get enough of the stuff. If I had the choice between really good hummus and chocolate, I wouldn’t have to think twice about snatching the hummus out of the hands of the person asking such an odd question. However, until recently, I have usually been guilty of buying hummus from the store rather than trying my hand at making my own hummus recipe.

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

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!)

The morning before I go grocery shopping it is never certain I am going to have any of my normal breakfast foods still kicking around. On these days, my breakfast choices can get more than a bit experimental. Usually, I take a look at what odds and ends I have left over from the last week and attempt to put together a vegetarian breakfast recipe that can hopefully claim to be at least a bit healthy.

The day that I came up with this recipe, I really had just about nothing left in the fridge and what was there wasn’t jumping out as working well together. I had once slice of wholemeal bread, one egg and half an avocado. Ack! I decided not to give into defeat that easily though and crossed my fingers as I attempted to make this breakfast recipe work.

You know, it wasn’t bad at all!

I have had a mashed avocado mixture on toast before but usually I would have mashed it with a bit of lemon juice and garlic. I was totally out of any sort of lemon or lemon juice though. So, I reached for some garlic infused white wine vinegar I bought at a craft fair in Wales a few months ago and used that to mash up the avocado. I think I will do that again for another avocado recipe because the slight sharpness of the vinegar worked well with the creamy avocado.

I felt like I needed a bit of something else on top of that toast and avocado recipe. With just the one egg around and not wanting to add a ton of calories onto the recipe, I poached the egg and put it on top. When the poached egg yolk spilled out over the avocado it really was yummy.

Not only did it taste pretty good for a recipe put together with such haste, but all of the good fats going on in the recipe meant that just the one slice of the avocado toast filled me up and kept me full until well into the afternoon. Tons of time for Tescos to deliver my grocery shopping and make lunch so much easier!

Avocado toast with poached egg

Ingredients:

1 slice wholemeal bread
1/2 of an avocado
1/2 teaspoon garlic infused white wine vinegar or white wine vinegar and 1/2 clove crushed garlic
1 poached egg

Directions:

1. Put the bread into toast.
2. Meanwhile, scoop the avocado flesh into a bowl.
3. Add in the garlic vinegar and mash until it is roughly mashed and everything is combined.
4. Spread the avocado mixture on top of the toast.
5. Place the poached egg on top and enjoy.

Serves: 1

Every month, I take part on a vegetarian recipe swap over at Recipezaar. The basic idea is that everybody interested in the vegetarian recipe swap puts their name in and at the start of the month you adopt one of those chefs and somebody in turn adopts you. Over the following month you agree to make two vegetarian recipes from that person’s Recipezaar recipe collection. I love this because it is a great way to discover new vegetarian food and you don’t at all have to be a vegetarian to take part. In fact, I think that most people that are involved aren’t actually vegetarians but are just enjoying learning how to cook vegetarian dishes. That can never be a bad thing.

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 .

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.