Mini black cherry (almost dairy-free) clafoutis and Happy New Year

I was first introduced to the clafoutis back in Australia when Hubs and I just moved in together. Having never tasted it myself back then, Hubs used to rave about his mum’s clafoutis aux cerises (cherry clafoutis) until I could almost smell it baking in the oven. As it was just the beginning of our relationship, I wasn’t quite ready to ask my ‘potential mother-in-law’ for her clafoutis recipe, so I went on the hunt for my own.

8 years later, I don’t hear Hubs going on about his mum’s clafoutis anymore (as good as it is)! Hehe!

Anyway, as Hubs is now dairy-intolerant, I had to adapt the original recipe to an almost dairy-free recipe (except for the butter for greasing!). I was a bit unsure of how it would turn out using a ‘soya cream’ but I didn’t hear any complaints from Hubs.

This super-easy-1-bowl recipe is adapted from Donna Hay’s Modern Classics 2. I usually just make one huge clafoutis but as we now have a mini-fridge, I had to make mini-clafoutis as it’s easier to store the leftovers.
This is what I used:

Butter for greasing
Caster sugar for dusting
1 can (425g) pitted black cherries (drained)
1/3 cup plain flour
1/3 cup caster sugar
2.5 teaspoons vanilla extract (I added more vanilla extract to hide the “soya” taste in the batter! The original recipe only uses 1 teaspoon)
1 cup dairy-free (soya) cream or single cream
3 eggs

The original recipe suggests preheating the oven to 180C but I found that was too hot and so preheated to 150C.

Grease an 8 cup capacity ovenproof dish with butter, and dust with sugar to prevent sticking. I used a muffin pan (holds 18) to make the mini-clafoutis.

Put the flour, sugar, vanilla and cream in a bowl and whisk. Add the eggs and whisk till smooth.

Pour the batter into the muffin tray then add the cherries. Or you could add the cherries first then pour the batter over (original recipe).

Bake for 35-40 mins and voila, easy-peasy clafoutis for a cold winter’s evening.

Dust with sugar and serve.

Happy New Year!

Wakame salad topped with smoked salmon

Even though it feels like an eternity, it’s only been about 2-and-a-half-weeks since I started trying to eat a little more healthily (is that a word?). Why the healthy eating? No, I’m not one of those women who live perpetually on rice cakes and salad, and for whom “diet” is a lifestyle not some tortuous ritual.

However, I am heading home to Melbourne for a holiday in August and expect to be eating up a storm then! Plus, I’m not willing to incur any of the “oh you look so….healthy” type remarks from my relatives when they see that I have been enjoying all those German beers! (Ok, my relatives are not that tactful. They usually just get right to the point and say “oh, you’ve put on weight”!)

Anyway, it’s definitely been a pain challenge trying to come up with healthy yet interesting meals. All I want to do is eat lots of rice, fried noodles and cookies!

On top of that, I already lacked creativity in the kitchen before the healthy eating thing! Take away the rice, noodles, oil, fat and sugar….it doesn’t leave much for me to play with!

Anyway, luckily, I found a lifesaver: wakame. Wakame is basically a type of edible seaweed. It’s usually the green stuff that’s floating around in your miso soup at Japanese restaurants (well, in Parisian“Japanese” restaurants anyway).

According to Wikipedia, wakame is supposed to be pretty good for you but I just like it for its semi-crunchy consistency, which gives a little texture to boring ol’ salads. Plus, it’s also pretty easy to prepare (extra points there!).

I buy dried unsalted wakame in packets and all I need to do is soak a handful in water for about 3 minutes then drain. My Japanese friends tell me that in Japan, wakame is also sold fresh.

Anyway, here’s what Hubs and I have been eating for 2 days in a row: Wakame salad topped with smoked salmon. Yum.

To prepare the dried wakame, I soaked it in a bowl of water for 3-5 minutes then drained. I then lightly squeezed the wakame with my hands to remove the water. Be careful not to over soak the wakame otherwise it becomes too soft and loses its crunch.

The time that the wakame needs to soak in water tends to depend on the brand. I’ve found that while one brand only took about 1-2 minutes, another brand took 5 minutes.

This is what I used for the salad:
Cucumber
Rocket
Wakame (I used roughly 1/3 a cup of dried unsalted wakame for 2 people)
Cherry tomatoes
Dried cranberries (left over from those cookies!)
Sesame seeds
Smoked salmon (store bought)

For the salad dressing, I just made a simple and commonly used Asian-type dressing:
1 tbs soy sauce
1 tbs rice vinegar
1 tsp brown sugar
a splash of sesame oil
½ tsp ginger
½ tsp chilli flakes (I love my chilli)


And ta-da – dinner for 2! I found that the sweetness of the dried cranberries went really well with the salty smoked salmon.

Now all I have to do is find something interesting and low-fat to make for the next 4 weeks!

Poivrons farcis

Ok, that’s just a fancy name for plain ol’ Stuffed Capsicum. I just wanted to make it sound more exotic by using French!

Anyway, it’s not easy coming up with healthy meals when all I want to eat is fat and carbohydrate-laden stir fry noodles and chips! Big fat golden chips glistening with oil and lightly sprinkled with salt…to be precise!

Basically, I had a bit of leftover rice and wanted to use it up, while having a healthy meal at the same time. So I dug out 3 whole red capsicums (or peppers – is that what you call it in the US?) that were starting to get a bit wrinkly and old (things get pushed to the back of the fridge and then I forget about them!), stuffed them and stuck them in the oven.

The result came out better than I thought! The only problem was eating them! There is no easy way to eat these things. No matter how you try, it ends up being a big (but yummy) mess on your plate!

Here’s what I used:

3 red peppers
3/4 cup cooked rice (I had leftovers!)
250g canned tuna
1 egg
1/4 tsp salt
1 onion lightly fried
2 tsp mayonnaise
1 tsp sweet chili sauce
1 tsp garlic
sesame seeds

1. Mix the rice, tuna, egg, salt, mayonnaise and sweet chili sauce in a bowl.
2. Lightly fry the onion and garlic before adding them to mixture.
3. Mix the ingredients well.
4. Remove the stalk, top and seeds from the capsicums. Also slightly trim the bottom of the capsicums to make the bottom level so that they stand up.
5. Oil a baking dish and stand the capsicums in the dish.
6. Stuff away with the tuna-rice mixture!
7. Top with sesame seeds.
8. Bake for roughly 20-25 minutes (or until cooked) at 220C.


Quick and easy!

Spicy Asian tofu burgers

While I did enjoy the German spätzle, I wasn’t too keen on eating it as a main dish, smothered by cheese as they serve in the restaurants here. So, inspired by Melting Wok’s tofu burgers and having just enough left-over ingredients, this seemed like the perfect accompaniment to the spätzle (or was the spätzle accompanying the burgers?).

These are extremely healthy (I’m still trying to be on a diet!) semi-spicy tofu burgers which are much easier to make if you have an electric mixer thing and not just a handheld fork powered by chocolate carrot sticks as in my case!

Ingredients
1/2 onion diced
250g plain firm tofu mashed
1/2 cup flour
1 egg
2 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tbsp rolled oats
1 tbsp fresh coriander chopped
1 tsp ginger minced
1 tbsp garlic minced
1/2 tsp salt
pepper to taste
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp red curry paste

I mashed the tofu with my handheld fork, mixed in all ingredients, shaped the patties and popped them into the freezer for 5-10 minutes. The wonderfully healthy patties were then grilled (with very little oil!) and served up with the not so healthy spätzle!

This dish probably best reflects my beliefs in yin-yang eating…combining the fat and not-so-fat on 1 plate ;-)

Ps.
I didn’t serve any buns with the burgers; I figured there were enough carbohydrates in the spätzle!

Vegetable-tofu bake crumble

I’m on a diet.

Well, at least I’m trying to be on a diet. But it’s not really working. Well, take last night for example. Having lots of carrots left over, I figured I’d make a low-fat vegetable bake.

So I started chopping away, carrots, a bit of broccoli, cherry tomatoes, onions, and garlic. I then lightly stir fried the vegetables to give them a little flavour.

I then decided I’d make it a curry vegetable-tofu bake. So I added curry power mix and about a cup-and-a-half of water to the baking dish. And then topped it all off with tofu. Only problem, I had only what was a sliver of tofu left! So the baking dish looked a little bare on the top.

Anyway, I decided to make a topping to make it look a little nicer. A crumble topping. I had wholemeal flour, butter and sesame seeds. I mixed the sesame seeds and flour, added a bit of salt and rubbed in the butter, then whacked the mixture onto the bake and stuck the whole thing into the oven. And there you have it: a vegetable-tofu curry crumble!

So much for my creativity as Hubs said it was just a curry that I stuck in the oven!
Taste-wise, it was yum although the crumble topping was a little weird. Sort of like eating pastry with your curry.

Calorie-wise, all that butter didn’t help my diet!

Ingredients:
Lots of vegetables!
Onions
Garlic
Salt

Curry Powder mix:
1 tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbs ground coriander
½ tsp chilli powder