Rhubarb!

I had a new dilemma to solve when some rhubarb arrived in my Food Connect box as I haven’t had any contact with rhubarb apart from possibly eating some in a restaurant dessert.

But first I wanted to know what I could call it – a fruit or a vegetable - and it appears that I’m not alone in my confusion. Wikipedia tells me that rhubarb is normally considered to be a vegetable, except in the United States which counts it as a fruit for regulation and duties purposes.

Next I wondered if it could be eaten raw and an online search brought up the perfect solution. I varied the recipe a little to suit the Thermomix.

Recipe ingredients:
275g rhubarb
100g honey
50g sultanas

Instructions:
Mix all ingredients in the Thermomix on speed 5 for a few seconds.

The tart flavour came through in my taste test just after making it. However the taste mellowed as I sampled the mix and after two days it was delicious. I’ll certainly repeat this performance next time some rhubarb arrives in my home.

Simplified Mini Muffins

I’ve made muffins, pikelets, waffles and bread, and the enduring habit seems to be making mini muffins.  My mother has always been a fan and has even started making her own. 

My favourite version of this recipe is Sultana Mini Muffins, but in the past sultanas have easily been replaced by coconut, carrot, banana, pumpkin, or any other item that takes your fancy and feels like it would work within a mini muffin recipe! I suspect the variations are limited only by one’s imagination…

I use rye flour because I seem to have developed intolerance to wheat flour but have not yet been diagnosed as celiac. If self-raising flour is your preference, then don’t include the cream of tartar and baking soda.

Sultana Mini Muffins

Preparation time: 15 mins

Cooking time: 15 mins

Makes 24 mini muffins

Ingredients:

1 cup rye flour

1 1/3 tsp cream of tartar with 2/3 tsp baking soda

1 tsp mixed spice

3 tbsp sugar

--- The above ingredients can be stored together in a container in the fridge for days or weeks before you need them. If you prefer to sift the flour, cream of tartar and baking soda then do this before adding the mixed spice and sugar.

¾ cup sultanas - or other filling of choice: desiccated coconut, grated carrot, banana or cooked pumpkin etc…

1 egg

3 tbsp olive oil

5/8 cup water

Method:

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease mini muffin tray(s) – one large tray for 24 mini muffins or two smaller trays for 12 mini muffins each. 

Sift flour, cream of tartar and baking soda into a bowl. Mix in all other ingredients until combined. 

Spoon mixture into the muffin pans

Bake for 15 minutes or until cooked through. In a non-fan forced oven turn the muffin trays around in the oven after 7 or 8 minutes. Cool in pan(s) for 5 minutes and then turn out onto a plate or wire rack.

This recipe works well for mini muffins and would most likely work (with 25 minutes cooking time) for a 12 muffin tray as well.

Snake Beans; Raw Beetroot and Chocolate Pudding; Beetroot Hummus

You know, I’ve been growing beans for the past few years and while I’ve heard of snake beans, I had never seen a photo of them. So when they appeared in my Food Connect box this week I was completely bamboozled. These things looked like beans but were unlike any beans I’d ever grown or seen. So I rang Food Connect and they quickly filled me in. Now that I know what I’m working with, some sliced snake beans have contributed very nicely to my lunch-time salads.

Another item in my box this week has been a beetroot. Considering my interest in becoming more raw, I just couldn’t see my way clear to cook it. So I googled beetroot and found a recipe for raw beetroot dip that looked really nice but had a long list of ingredients. Perhaps there really is something to the popularity of the “4 Ingredients” books.

Then I remembered that I had soaked some chick peas overnight with the thought of enjoying them on my salads. Perhaps a beetroot hummus would work. I knew I had already made a raw hummus some time back and figured that it would be easy to add some beetroot to it.

But dessert was tugging at my brain cells and I kept thinking of the beetroot and chocolate puddings that I had made. So I decided to experiment but not with all of the beetroot so I sliced off a small section of the beetroot for later inclusion in the hummus. It probably goes without saying that a little bit of beetroot goes a long way.

It had been a while since I had bought chocolate, but I just happened to this morning. Even better it was Rawganic chocolate so my experiment would be completely raw.

I also knew that I needed some sort of binding agent as the beetroot and chocolate on their own would probably be too crumbly. Banana or avocado seemed like possibilities and I decided to go with banana. 

Raw Beetroot and Chocolate Pudding Recipe Ingredients:
100g peeled beetroot
30g raw chocolate
Half a banana

Instructions:
Grate beetroot in the Thermomix on speed 8 for 5 seconds, scrape down the sides and then repeat the step. 

Add raw chocolate and grate the mix on speed 8 for about 10 seconds.

Add the banana and blend it on speed 7 for 20 seconds. 
Use the remaining banana to decorate the dish.

I really enjoyed this. The texture of the beetroot and chocolate mix wasn’t smooth but quickly melted in the mouth. This will be a quick way to satisfy dessert cravings in the future and certainly goes into my list of how I can use beetroot when I receive it in the box.

So I still had the small piece of beetroot to use up in the hummus.

Beetroot Hummus Recipe Ingredients:
65g chick peas sprouted for 1 day
35g peeled beetroot
75g tomato
1 lemon juice ice cube 

Instructions:


Place the chick peas, beetroot, tomato and lemon juice ice cube into the Thermomix bowl and process on speed 4 for 5 to 10 seconds.

This all went down very well. Well, to be really honest, it wasn’t as good as the beetroot and chocolate dessert from earlier in the day but for a dinner option it certainly presented well. I tossed up adding some basil but thought that the beetroot would overshadow anything I tried to add so stayed with these basic ingredients.

I sampled the beetroot hummus on bread and with zucchini sticks, and then finished it off with some tinned fish and avocado from the fridge, enjoying it right up to the last bite.

CSA and Strawberry Sauce

I’ve signed with Food Connect, a community shared agriculture (CSA) enterprise that provides mostly organic seasonal fruit and vegetables that is sourced from local farmers around Brisbane.

I heard about Food Connect a few years back and liked the concept of eating food that has been grown locally with a minimum distance to travel to reach my plate. At the time I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. However recently things changed and I signed up and received my first box earlier this week.

There were all sorts of concerns running through my mind before I signed up. Would there be too much in the box? Would there be enough choice? The feast/famine mentality was certainly there. Wouldn’t I be better off buying as I need so I could get exactly what I want? This question really resonated with me as I pondered how I could test and blog about recipes when I was receiving seasonal food. Clearly I’ve been spoilt over the years by the ready availability that mass transport allows.

It turns out that my concerns were unfounded. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the variety of vegetables that I’ve received. There are vegetables that I have stir fried, some that I can steam and some that contribute very nicely to my salad at lunch-time. The fruit that I received can and has contributed to my breakfast or else added to my salad or made up into a nice dressing as I mention below.

This is all really helpful as with the arrival of summer I am no longer producing very much on my patios which led to my thinking that this was the right time to participate in this system.

In preparation for the arrival of my first box, I checked through my Thermomix cookbooks to see what I might like to try. And I found a couple of variations of a strawberry sauce – strawberries with lemon juice and sugar (Everyday) or with juice and zest of an orange along with honey (Quick Dessert Syrup in the Gluten Free Wheat Free Cooking book). I decided to simplify a bit further and blended a punnet of strawberries with the juice of an orange. To be honest, I bought an orange in order to try this sauce which I’m fine with as I’ve accepted that I might need to supplement what I receive from Food Connect occasionally.

It turned out so nicely that I was then inspired to make some waffles to go with it, and then the rest decorated my salad the next day. I’m not normally drawn to strawberries but this sauce really hit the spot – twice.

Beetroot and chocolate pudding

I have just made a mess of my Thermomix along with my dinner and my kitchen, and I don’t care. I found a neat recipe for a beetroot and chocolate pudding at Thermomixer's blog – admittedly not raw but that didn’t worry me as I decided long ago that I wouldn’t be 100% raw and had been on a little break for a few days.

So I started mixing everything together and wasn’t prepared for how well beetroot and chocolate would go together. The fingers got a lot of licking while this was being prepared, along with other more solid objects that I’d rather not admit… Just as well I was in trial mode!

Fortunately trial mode only happens once with every recipe and trial results never get offered to anyone near and dear… I just have such fond memories of being in my grandmother’s kitchen and being allowed to lick the spoon so I need to designate such a time for myself.

I decided the little pots could be steamed the same time that I steamed some vegetables for dinner. The recipe said that I didn’t need to clean out the Thermomix before I put the pots (and vegies) in for steaming. Perhaps that’s how my dinner got a little messy. Next time I’ll clean out the Thermomix if I want to steam vegetables as well.

Needless to say, my vegies were slightly flushed along with a delicate flavor – which I found absolutely charming. It was the residue from the steaming that made them look not quite right. However, in much the same way that I’ve scraped burnt toast, the vegetables looked pretty good after a little intervention.

Then I really enjoyed the beetroot and chocolate pudding. Who would have thought! It’s amazing how well the two main ingredients go together!

This is the first time I’ve used the Varoma, which is a big steaming basket that sits on top of the Thermomix and is very easy to use.

I still believe in being mostly raw. But I also accept that I need to cut myself some slack sometimes when a particular type of food beckons. And that’s happening right now. My grandmother used to make a lovely steamed plum pudding and I have often thought of making it but haven’t wanted to go through 2 plus hours of steaming on the stove. So I think there will be a few trial sessions – not that I’m complaining – working out how I can reproduce her recipe using the Varoma.

Favourite raw recipes

I googled “favourite raw recipe” and found some inspiration from others’ successes.

A lot of the ingredients of the Raw Creamy Zucchini Salad are what I often use in my own daily salad, but not necessarily in the same way. I tried a simple combination of some grated zucchini over sliced avocado together with a shallot, some lemon juice, salt and pepper, then added some green beans and a not so raw flax cracker, and it all tasted lovely.

Not that simple combinations are unknown to me. Mango and avocado are a long-time favourite of mine, which conjures up a familiar image of both sharing a plate with prawns and crusty bread. Tomato and cucumber salad or cabbage and apples both seem popular on Google. Next time I have a vegetable or fruit that I don’t know what to pair it with, I’ll google its name followed by “and” just to see what comes up.

And then it was time for desert again, which I didn’t mind.

I was intrigued when I found this Raw Shortbread Recipe. So I bought some Lucuma powder from Flannery’s. It’s not cheap at $25 for 250gm. The recipe is very vague about quantities so I decided to put roughly the same amount of each ingredient as a first pass. I used ½ cup almonds ground, 2 heaped tbsp lucuma powder and 2 heaped tbsp raw honey blended for about 10 seconds until the mixture started forming clumps. And it’s very nice and does remind me of shortbread with a tinge of apricot in it. It would be interesting to find the original fruit that the powder is made from. It was an easy dish to make, particularly since I just rolled the balls as I took the mix out of the Thermomix and placed them straight into a Pyrex container.

And then the pièce de résistance…

The little pies are truly decadent and well worth making. I might experiment a little with the crust, but won’t change anything with the filling as it was very nice. I'll be making this for friends or family next time I need to take a dish.

Despite having a sweet tooth, my favourite out of these three recipes is the avocado and zucchini salad. I am starting to find some deserts to be a little too rich for me. Perhaps the more I delve into raw eating, the more my taste buds are acclimatizing to simpler fare.