Quick Fix: Every Occasion by Alyce Alexandra

It has been a while since I trawled through a cookbook. Blame it on a busy life with too many commitments, or perhaps I needed to coast for a while. But now I have the perfect book to refocus my attention.

 I am reading Quick Fix:Every Occasion by Alyce Alexandra with recipes specially designed for the Thermomix. I love the concept of a quick fix as it ties in so neatly with simplifying my life. This cookbook is sure to help as many recipes can be completed and on the table in less than 30 minutes.

First cab off the rank has been the Zucchini Cupcakes recipe which encouraged me to play with extra flavourings. All I bought was a zucchini as I had the remaining ingredients or easy replacements. A little too much kefir yoghurt in lieu of sour cream made the mix a little too moist but resulted in delicious cupcakes with the addition of pecans contributing to the richer flavour.

After the nice light taste of the zucchini cupcakes, next I played with the Spicy Pork Balls recipe. Despite careful weighing, I managed to add a titch too much liquid again which led to a fortuitous discovery. While the pork balls were in the oven, I cooked some leftover mix in a frying pan. I have made rissoles in the past with limited success because they never held their shape. But this recipe mix worked beautifully in the frying pan which means that I can now add rissoles as an option for my dinner. Eating the balls with a dipping sauce was a pleasure with the herbs and other condiments combining to produce a tasty treat.

I have often enjoyed some cooked quinoa with fruit for breakfast. So imagine my delight when I found the Quinoa Salad recipe and realised that I had all the ingredients on hand, with the slight adjustment of replacing parsley with young celery leaves. My taste test went down well with the addition of nuts and dried fruit providing bursts of flavour along with a refreshing tang from the mandarin segments.

The cookbook is a delight to browse through with recipes grouped in three different ways at the beginning of the book to assist with meal planning.  All angles are covered with special symbols used to highlight dairy free, gluten free, vegetarian and vegan options. Clear instructions along with a photo opposite each recipe help make the decision to indulge. Alyce’s recipes provide a memorable taste sensation while combining familiar foods. This cookbook is a keeper.

For more details about Alyce's cookbook, visit the website: Alyce Alexandra Cookbooks

Beetroot and Chocolate Mini Muffins

Beetroot is so versatile. I first grew to love boiled beetroot in a salad. No vinegar was needed. I even pilched it from the container in the fridge as a tasty treat.

Once my Thermomix arrived, I found new ways to enjoy this vegetable: as a pudding with chocolate both cooked and raw, as hummus, and even served to me as coleslaw.

My latest version is beetroot and chocolate mini muffins achieved with minor tweaks to my simplified mini muffins recipe as below. Another difference in this recipe is that I now use spelt flour in my muffin recipes. Of course, the type of flour used is a personal choice.

Recipe Ingredients:

1 cup spelt 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.

1 1/2 cups combination of beetroot chopped, chocolate pieces and orange zest

1 egg

3 tbsp olive oil

5/8 cup orange juice

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. 

Process beetroot, chocolate and orange zest in Thermomix on speed 5 for a few seconds.

Sift flour, cream of tartar and baking soda into a separate 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.

I just can’t get enough of the beetroot and chocolate combination. If I have over calculated the beetroot and chocolate quantities, it’s not a problem. The resulting mix makes a tasty dessert in its own right.

Carob Fudge

I have just made my last batch of Raw Shortbread. While I have enjoyed eating these sweet balls, I am not sure that I’ll buy any more lucuma powder after paying more than $20 for 250 grams in 2009. So it’s just as well that I have some carob powder languishing in my pantry which has combined with the leftover almond meal to make balls tasting just like fudge.Since making the raw shortbread was such a breeze, I used a similar approach for the carob fudge. 

Recipe ingredients:
1/2 cup almond meal
2 tbsp carob powder heaped
2 tbsp honey

Instructions:
Blend in the Thermomix on speed 6 for 30 seconds.

As the time reached the 30 second mark there was a distinct change in the sound of the blades processing the mix which indicated that the mixture was close to being ready. The sound comes from the mix starting to clump together. To test the mix I tried forming a ball from a small handful which worked perfectly.   

In the past I have ground up any nuts required for sweet treat recipes. While I am still happy to do this, I was able to buy some ground almond meal at my local Flannery’s and have enjoyed making both the raw shortbread and almond fudge with fewer steps.

I have always had a sweet tooth which is sometimes satisfied by purchased health bars. In the past week reaching into the fridge for a raw shortbread ball a few times during the day has hit the mark. Each ball has a rich enough taste for me to only want one at each sitting. I’m hoping this new habit will stick around.

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.

Curry Sauce, Honey Soy Sesame Dressing, Fruit Nut Slice, Citrus Dressing and Raw Flax Crackers

This is catch up time. I’ve been checking through the list of recipes in the Rawlicious booklet and have noticed the Curry Sauce recipe from the Rawlicious booklet that I made a while back but haven’t yet mentioned in this blog. Fortunately I took a photo of it at the time.

I’m not sure why I didn’t post about it. I must have been a bit busy. But I certainly do remember cutting up the ginger, turmeric and galangal. The turmeric powder that I’ve used in the past seems to be a much deeper colour than the real thing, but that didn’t worry me as the combination of all three produced a very satisfying sauce that was all used up on my lunches over the next few days.

Yesterday I made the Honey Soy and Sesame Dressing recipe again from Rawlicious. This was easy to produce in just a few steps although I did vary it a bit by not including the raw chilli sauce because I finished that off a while back. I also didn’t include the rice bran oil as I didn’t have any on hand. Again today my lunch-time salad benefited from the lovely tangy taste. I even had some raw broad bean seeds on top which were a real treat.

I feel I’m on the downhill slide with only seven recipes remaining to try in the Rawlicious booklet. So I’ve been energetic late this afternoon and have tried two more recipes.

The Fruit and Nut Slice sounded appealing. I modified the recipe a little and just made a mix of soaked dates and almonds which were then rolled in sesame seeds. I really enjoyed this. I’ve found that I prefer simpler tastes and this isn’t too rich for me. Plus it was really easy to make. This is certainly a keeper.

Then dinner time came around and I started saying “yum” again just after the first spoonful. I made the Chilli Citrus Dressing although there was no raw chilli sauce for the same reason I gave a few paragraphs back – I finished it all some time back. However I faithfully used all the other ingredients and poured the dressing over some avocado, asparagus and zucchini. And the word “yum” just kept coming to mind. The only thing I’ll change next time – and there will be a next time – is to leave out the garlic. I’ve never really liked garlic and using it multiple times while toying with Rawlicious hasn’t changed my mind. I imagine there are lots of people who don’t agree with me but all I can say is “Vive la différence”.

So then I had five recipes left in the Rawlicious books and all of them require dehydration in some form. But as I looked at the instructions for each recipe, I realized that I had basically tried the Raw Flax (Linseed) Crackers as my earlier rendition used similar ingredients and was cooked at the temperature suggested in the recipe. So I consider that I now have four recipes to go.

The only problem is that I’m not ready to start playing with dehydration whether driven by electricity or solar. So I imagine I’ll hold off on the Buckwheat and Mushroom Quiche, the Ginger Pecan Cookies and the Muesli Bars until I’m ready. Now the remaining recipe is the Chocolate Mousse Tart which only needs some nuts to be soaked and then dehydrated. I reckon I’ll try it sooner rather than later and just not bother soaking/dehydrating the nuts

I’ve been marking off the recipes that I’ve completed from the Contents page on the inside cover of the Rawlicious booklet and would you believe the item I see placed on the inside back cover of this booklet? It is “Raw Recipes in other Thermomix Publications”. I already know that the Thermomix book “A Taste of Vegetarian” has some raw recipes but when I turn to the back cover I find 27 of them! The back cover also mentions that the Everyday Cooking along with the Gluten Free, Wheat Free Cooking books have raw recipes in them. This is all very helpful and I will appreciate it later on. I have said “yum” so many times. So I suspect that I’ll be back sooner rather than later as I want to compare any differences between the Rawlicious and Vegetarian recipes so I can work out which ones I’ll try. Plus I still need to prepare three meals a day and it is more fun trying new recipes. Wish me luck!

A Raw Surprise

Any time can be dessert time as far as I’m concerned, especially when I’ve found inspiration in the form of Raw Brownies at thermomixbimby.com, a fan site for the Thermomix machine in Canada.

This recipe was so easy. It took me longer to buy the ingredients than it did to make the brownies. I used some cacao nibs sitting in the pantry rather than cocoa powder and varied the recipe by processing the nibs for 10 seconds on speed 9 before proceeding with the given steps. After adding the dates and vanilla, I let the machine run a little longer to allow the mix to clump together.

This mix presents well as brownies or balls, and was finger (and bowl) licking gooood… I’ve added this recipe to my palm held computer so I can pick up the ingredients whenever I feel a need to indulge.

Carrot Ginger Soup and Apricot Butter

I think I’m a sucker for a sweet taste. Perhaps every meal I eat should have some fruit in it – which would be bliss! Hang on, I think I’m doing that right now. Piece of fruit with a cooked grain for breakfast. Some mandarin or strawberry jam with my salad at lunch. And in the past month as I’ve played with raw food, a piece of fruit merged in with dinner.

And this Carrot Ginger Soup made from a Rawlicious recipe certainly fits the bill with the inclusion of a green apple to the obvious ingredients from its title. I added some water to give it a more familiar consistency and heated it to 37 degrees Celsius and my palate enjoyed it immensely.

Then it was dessert time the next day with Apricot Butter again from the Rawlicious recipe booklet, which went very well with both my breakfast and salad at lunch time.

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.

Cinnamon Bars, Pink Coconut Shake and Living Fudge

I have never really thought about where vanilla essence comes from. I needed one vanilla bean for the Cinnamon Bars and 4cm of a bean for the Pink Coconut Shake, both recipes from the Rawlicious booklet. So I looked for the beans in the herbs and spices aisle in the supermarket. No luck. I scoured the shelves at Flannery’s – again no luck. Then I found a bottle of them at Wray’s Organics at Newmarket.

They’re not what I expected. For some reason I thought they’d look like other dried beans such as pinto or kidney beans, but vanilla beans are the dried form of the pod with bean seeds still inside and are shown above next to the Cinnamon Bars. And they’re pricey – close to $20 for the bottle of what looks like 20 beans.

Jamie Oliver’s forum has a discussion about vanilla beans. As at January last year, they are grown in Australia and exported, and have been found in David Jones food hall in Sydney, delis and some supermarkets. Buying vanilla beans grown in Australia sounds great, but the ones that I’ve found have come from Mexico. After I use up the ones I have, I’ll be checking in my local David Jones to see if they stock Australian vanilla beans.

I’m sure it’s just me. I found there were too many distinct tastes all rolled up into the Cinnamon Bars. I think I mustn’t like anything that includes two or more dried fruits. But I had no such problem with the Pink Coconut Shake, which I finished right to the last drop… I’m beginning to understand what people see in smoothies.

I found a recipe for Living Fudge in “The Raw Food Gourmet” which I thought might work because it didn’t include any dried fruit. I rolled the fudge into little balls and then proceeded to really enjoy them… too much! I’d classify them as addictive but will make them again for sure!