Tag: healthy

Italian Pine Mushrooms and greens poelee

This italian pine mushrooms and greens peolee is quick and simple.  It combines great flavours and texture. A pity the mushrooms season is short.  A poelee is a French word that is probably not used much in the world of cooking downunder. It is a sauteed dish.  The word sauteed being another french cooking world.  In brief, this dish is made in a frypan and is designed to be done reasonably quickly and bring together a range of flavours.

Italian mushrooms can be found around Sydney between late February and late March. The season may vary with the weather. Pine forests in the area of the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands are renowed for it.  I was inited years ago to go on a foraging expedition, it was a great discooery, finally a mushroom foraging that did not see me frustrated because I could not see them. Those are bright, orange, big and normally quite plentyful.  See that recent press article if you want to know more. You an find the mushroom at your local fruit&vegetable store sometimes during the season. I found it twice at Harris Farm this season.

Here I did it with what was available in the fridge and served them with a grilled pork chop.  Combinations are plenty.

Serves 4

Ingredients:
  • 4 large pine mushrooms
  • 1 head of broccoli
  • 2 cups of peas (I used frozen ones)
  • 3 garlic cloves
  • 5 chestnuts
  • 20 g of butter
Method:
  1. Cut a incision through the chestnuts shell and place them in a low baking dish in the oven (220 deg) or under the grill until the shell is quite dark and a pointy knife inserted in the cut makes its way easily though the chestnut (about 15 minutes).  Once cooked, remove from the oven/grill and peel.
  2. Steam the head of brocoli until the heads are just tender.  Remove from the steamer, cut the heads off and set aside.  Slice the stem in half to allow it to cook through and return the pieces of stem to the steamer. Cook until tender.
  3.  For the mushroom, wash gently under fresh water. Cut the bottom of the mushroom foot if a bit old. then slice lengthway about 7 mm thick.
  4. Mel the butter in the frypan, add crushed garlic and mushrooms, season with salt and blak pepper. Allow to cook at mid-heat. Do not stir too frequently. Cover with a lid.  When the mushrooms are half tender, add the peas and cook for another couple minutes, then add the brocoli, reduce the heat to low. Check for seasonning. You shouldn’t have much liquid at the bottom of the fry-pan, if you do, remove the lid and let evaporate.  Before serving add the chestnut broken into pieces.

You can serve the poelee with an omelette, a pork chop or a white fish filet.

peas brocoli pine mushrooms
Poelee of italian pine mushrooms, peas and brocolis, here served with grilled pork chops

 

Two simple fish dishes for a light meal

Here are two simple fish dishes for light meals you can make at home very easily. And here the story goes…

Ben came home with some fish a couple of days ago, hooray!! I have been pushing off driving to the fish market to replenish our home stocks.  We do trips to the Sydney fish market every few weeks, but the idea of driving two hours (one each way, I reassure you) and missing out on a quiet day at home and a nice swim in the bay has deterred me to do the trip recently…

In the fish basket, I got some deep seabream fillets and some salmon fillets.  If you want to know more about the fish from our waters, the Sydney Fish Market has a published book which is quite good and a lot of information on species online.

The seabream is a very soft fillet and has a very delicate flesh.  The fillets are single serve most of the time.  The salmon is rather well-known, its cooking is more versatile.

Simple fish dish # 1 – Poached deep seabream with carrots

The idea of this dish is “keep it simple”! As I do not plan my meals, I had a look at what was in the fridge and those carrots were really tempting.  We had dutch baby carrots and your normal carrots.  The carrots are cooked slowly in a frypan with a little butter, a drop of water and a bit of salt (to taste) while the fish is poached separately in two centimetres of water with a little olive oil, rock salt and fennel seeds. We served it with a side salad (just lettuce and tomatoes with a balsamic vinaigrette.  The whole is ready is less than half an hour (including setting the table).

The details of the recipe can be found HERE.

fish meal

fish meal

 

Simple fish dish # 2 – Salmon with hot and cold  mix vegetables salad

This one was tonight’s dinner.  There were just three of us, so one piece of salmon was enough.  Again, here I am thinking of something light. To be honest I had no idea when opening the fridge door.  I look into the vegetables drawer and – as we all do – rediscover its content. I then pull out a little piece of red cabbage, one Brussel sprout, a sweet potato and a few more things like herbs and a piece of a pomegranate requesting to be finished soon.

There were two cooking stages, but this time all in the same roasting dish. First, the cauliflower and sweet potato first, then the fish and a little chickpeas. And finally herbs, a few crumbs of feta and some cherry tomatoes.  Over that, a dash of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, a splash of lemon and dinner is ready. A table! To my surprise the children finished it all off.

The details of the recipe can be found HERE.

fish meal fish meal

Butter-free chocolate cake

This is pretty much as guilt free as chocolate cake go: no butter and pretty low sugar. What I like with this butter-free chocolate cake is that it is also much easier to digest than a traditional chocolate cake.  Why? How?  Simply by replacing the butter by very (like very) thinly grated zucchini (a.k.a. courgette).  And if you are on a gluten-free diet, you could also replace the little flour in there by GF flour.

Before you start:

  1. You need a good quality cooking chocolate (in Australia, the 70% cocoa Nestle Plaistowe is suitable)
  2. The zucchini: 200 g of zucchini and no more (a bit less is fine). I have now done the cake a few times, trialing a few variations.  The last one used 180 g of zucchini and was fine! However, if you add more (which I also did), the cake loses some of its moisture from a denser texture.  Two hundred grammes zucchini is one average size piece of vegetable.  You need to peel it and remove the ends.  Then weight it. Grate it over a bowl and make sure to keep all the juice.  I was asked the question: can you use the blender. I tried, it works, just a bit much more washing-up than the grater for little saving, your choice.
  3. The flour: the flour weight is only 50 g.  If you go for a gluten-free option, you can either use cornflour but then you need to reduce it to 35 g as corn flour absorbs more moisture than wheat flour, or use one of the GL flour mix.

guilt free chocolate cake

Ingredients:
  • 4 eggs
  • 200 g dark cooking chocolate
  • 80 g caster sugar
  • 200 g thinly grated zucchini (see note above)
  • 50 g plain flour (see note above)
  • 100 mL milk (of your choice)
Method:
  1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.
  2. Butter and flour well a 20 cm round cake tin.
  3. Break the chocolate in pieces and melt with half of the milk.  You can either use the microwave on one minutes settings full power, repeat if not fully melted either with 30 second or another minutes (it depends on the power of your microwave). Once the chocolate is melted, stir until smooth and silky, add the remaining milk.
  4. In a clean bowl, separate the egg yolks from the whites.  Beat the yolks with the sugar until light and fluffy. Add the zucchini (juice included).  Add the chocolate to the mix.
  5. Finally, mix in the flour.
  6. Beat the egg white to snow and carefully fold into the chocolate mix.
  7. Pour into the prepared tin.  Place in the oven, reduce the heat to 160°C after 10 minutes.  The cake should cook in 20-30 mn depending on ovens.  Remove when the centre is no longer wobbly when gently pressed with a couple fingers. Allow to cool down in the tin for five minutes before transferring to the serving dish:  turn over a metal rack and then over the serving dish.

Tip: if you have a child helping you tell them to mix in the flour and cocoa starting from the centre, always touching the bottom of the bowl , let them enlarge the circle as the centre gets darker. This technique will avoid lumps. 

Tip: wondering what happens if you don’t reduce the oven? The cake will cook quicker and can lose a little moisture but not that much, it will still be quite moist. 

And if you are wondering about the taste brought by the zucchini, I will tell that if people don’t know about it, they are unlikely to guess. Once you know, you will possibly note a taste a little more “earthy”, but, to be honest, nothing preventing the cake disappearing in minutes and for zucchini-advert kids to take a second or third helping!

guilt free chocolate cake

Figs and nuts toasted muesli

If you want to control what goes into your toasted muesli (and also half the price of the supermarket box), you can make your own.  It does not require specific equipment: an oven and a small food processor, a chopping board and a knife.  You can even do without the food processor.

This recipe uses some dry fruits and nuts.  Feel free to adapt the ingredients, for example you may want more nuts of various kinds and no dry fruits, or you may substitute the apricots with shredded coconut.  I did not write down my first attempt to toasted muesli, it was a lot of nuts, chia seeds and coconut.  One guiding rule: use (based on weight) round 60% weight of rolled oats. Commercial toasted muesli are most often 80% rolled oats.

muesli homemade

Ingredients:
  • 750 g rolled oats
  • 150 g dry apricots
  • 150 g dry figs
  • 150 g pepitas
  • 150 g hazelnuts
  • 150 g raw macadamia
  • 1/4 cup olive oil (use any good vegetable oil of your choice)
  • 1/4 cup of liquid honey
  • 1/2 tsp salt
Method:
  1. With a large knife, cut the figs in strips and the apricots in small pieces up to 5 mm long
  2. Place the nuts (macadamia and hazelnuts) in a small food processor and blend to reach small to medium size. For example, you want each hazelnut cut at least in two and each macadamia at least in four.  I find that there will be some full nuts left and I will cut those with the knife on the chopping board.  There may be a few whole nuts left, that’s all right.
  3. In a large baking tray, place all dry ingredients, roughly mix.
  4. Put the honey and oil in a small bowl, heat up 15 seconds in the microwave and pour over the mix.  Using your hands, coat all the ingredients as much as you can.
  5. Then bake on 180-200°C. After 10 minutes, use a fork to move the muesli around. Repeat every 10 minutes until toasted.
  6. Once cooled down, transfer in a storage jar .

muesli homemade