Homemade Sushi

This is probably the tastiest sushi I’ve ever made. It is full of lettuce from the garden and my secret ingredient!

This is what my secret ingredient looks like:

This a homemade garlic-mayo dip. Remember the garlic dip/spread made with garlic tops? Well I took veggies and dip to a friend’s house (along with some other stuff) for dinner; I was going to take the garlic dip/spread, but the batch I’d made was particularly potent, so I added 3 tablespoons of mayo to 1 tablespoon of garlic dip/spread. Fantastic! Now I’ve been eating it on everything, including sushi.

So this dip is my secret ingredient. I spread the rice on top of the nori, spooned on some garlic-mayo dip and put three huge leaves of lettuce along the edge and rolled the whole thing up. Because the garlic was spicy I just dipped in soy sauce, no wasabi, and it was delicious.

Garlic Tops

This picture shows my raggle taggle garlic. I have taken off the tops – scapes or scrapes, whatever you like to call them. I like to call them garlic tops!

Here is a great recipe to use up the tops:

1/4 lb garlic tops
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 cup of olive oil
1 cup of Parmesan cheese (I used a soy version and added a little salt)
Blend the garlic tops, the lemon and olive oil, then stir in the cheese. There you have an amazing garlicy dip/spread. Put it on any and everything!

Lemon garlic pasta

My 13 year son made dinner tonight! Yipee! He’s getting to be a really good cook (I’ll never let him leave home). He tried a Dreena Burton recipe from her cook book ‘Eat, Drink and be Vegan.’

So, as you’re waiting for your pasta to cook, you blend up the sauce which consists of: lemon juice, garlic, agave nectar, mustard, walnuts, basil and oil. The sauce is then poured over the pasta and is lovely and creamy.

Miso sauce

This miso sauce is actually a salad dressing, but we had some broccoli and brussel sprouts that needed a little something to liven them up this dinner time. We used the sauce like ketchup; I was going to put it over the veggies in the pan, I’m glad I didn’t because it turned out to be quite strong. I think if it’s used as a salad dressing you water it down to make it thinner, but we really enjoyed dipping our veggies and spring rolls in it.

No sugar: scones and carrot cake

The other afternoon, I was really wanting something sweet. So I did a little search online to find some no-sugar recipes: I found two amazing ones. This first one is called a scone, though I’d call it an oat-cake. I made some changes to the recipe as I didn’t have some of the ingredients and it was great. It is basically: flour, oats, egg, soy milk, apple sauce, baking powder and raisins. Oh – and a little cinnamon sprinkled on top. After I’d baked (and eaten some of it) I felt brave enough to make the no-sugar carrot cake.

This is the carrot cake. I never usually make carrot cake as I find lots of recipes have too many ingredients, but as this was no-sugar, I had to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised; it was easy, healthy and tasty. It is sweetened with maple syrup and raisins, but I think carrot itself is quite sweet so that helps too. This recipe is definitely one I will repeat many times.

Apple

 

Ahh, the lowly apple. An undervalued piece of fruit in my opinion. When you think ‘fruit,’ exotic images come up, like kiwi, strawberry, mango; apple is not your go-to type of fruit if there is an option. How many times have you been in a hotel and looked at the sad excuse for a bowl of fruit (apples, and if you’re lucky an orange), and picked up an apple to eat? I think because they are so available they have lost their appeal.

Well, no more! I read an article yesterday that said all the usual benefits of eating an apple: fibre, vitamins, etc. But then they also mentioned that apples lower bad cholesterol and raise good cholesterol – how amazing is that?

This is my favourite way of enjoying an apple: Chopped, tossed in a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice. (The apple in the picture is a Pink Lady, one of my favourite types of apple.) It all started when, one day, I had chopped up apples and put them in lemon juice so they wouldn’t go brown, for the breakfast program at my kids’ school. A child came up and told me he loved the apples in lemonade! I thought, do they really taste like they’re in lemonade? Yes, they do! Try it, you’ll love it, the apple’s sweetness turns the lemon juice in to lemonade.

A Tangy Snack

Sorry about the photo, beets and pickles are particularly un-photogenic under flourescent light. Who knew!

I was looking for an evening snack when I thought I’d love some vinegary pickles and beets. I’m being extra careful to look out for and avoid sugar and I had a funny feeling the beets would have sugar in the ingredients. So I looked – yes, there it was, third only to beets and water. Hmm…to eat or not to eat, that was the question. Well, I decided this would be my last taste of pickled beets, and as I ate them, I didn’t really enjoy them that much: I prefered the pickles anyway. Who knew!