recipes

Sweet Potato Fries

1 Comment Posted on January 15, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

I cannot believe how easy this was to make, and how awesome it was to eat! Where have these sweet potato fries been all my life?

Oh, I know where. The regular white potato has overshadowed all other forms of potato. Now, I know better..

All I did was cut up some sweet potato, coat them in extra virgin olive oil, then used the salt and pepper shaker on them. Baked for 20 mins, flipped over with the tongs, baked for another 15. Done!

Update on all things Paleo – Saturday was my first day of eating paleo – or a slightly modified version of it. There has been some dairy in the form of yoghurt. I have a huge tub of it to finish off, and I have been eating it for breakfast with fruit.

The main thing I am worried about right now is cutting out added sugar. If there is sugar on the ingredients list, I’m not eating it. And there is sugar on a lot of ingredient lists, found in unexpected places. Like tinned beetroot, tinned tomatoes, vegetable chips – which would otherwise be a perfect thing for me as they have a sweet potato flavour. And stock! Chicken, beef, vege.

I have only found one brand which is sugar free in the health food section of Coles. Please carefully note, it is NOT with the other stocks, but with all the gluten free super healthy foods area. Why make things logical when you can make people wander the supermarket like ghosts unable to leave the planet earth until they find the one thing they are looking for in all these different sections?

So anyone searching the internet as I did for “where can I find sugar free chicken stock in Australia” will hopefully find their way here and know which packet to look out for.

There is one teaspoon of coconut sugar in my daily coffee. That is all. I will eventually cut that out as well.

The second concern is avoiding grains. I have always been somewhat meh about bread – I can buy it and eat a shedload of it as a surprise, or I can buy it and forget to eat it. But I do love my Hot X Buns. I had a packet of them last week as a kind of goodbye to grains.

I am hesitant to say this now because who knows, there could be dark days ahead. I was concerned there would be side effects of cutting out the sugar. As it stands right now, I feel ok. Possibly better than ok. I’m not craving sugary foods nor am I craving foods in general. I’m less hungry than I have been for a long time. Partly that is thanks to the lite n easy teaching me to eat less more often, partly that would be because of all the proteins.

Basically the eating looks like this right now –

Breakfast – plain sugar free yoghurt with fruit

snack – almonds and cashews (bought loads of these from Costco in bulk)

lunch – chicken in coconut cream sauce (recipe to come as a surprise eventually, I made this one up myself and I made a lot of it yesterday)

snack – olives stuffed with almonds or marinated olives

dinner – another chicken in coconut cream sauce

snack – an apple or an avocado

It seems boring but it turns out it is not. I can’t believe how much flavour everything seems to have now. I had an apple today and it was the sweetest thing I have eaten in centuries. It was like an appley can of coke. Is this what happens when you cut out the fake sugar sweetness?

food, paleo, Paleo Recipes, recipes

Coconut Mango Chicken

2 Comments Posted on January 11, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

So easy, so awesome. Recipe here.

I didn’t have any chipotle and I am not the greatest fan of hot chilli in any case, so put in some Paprika instead. It didn’t really need much in the way of spices – the mango reduced into this awesome almost buttery sauce. There were still chunks of mango which were so soft and incredible..

More than likely I overcooked it. It will take some getting used to, these insane tiny cooking times with the pressure cooker. It was trying to tell me it needed to cook for 4 minutes or some such nonsense. I took the safer way out and cooked it for 30. I doubled the recipe as I had plenty of chicken however it made a lot of mango coconut juice left over. Probably should have used 1 can of coconut milk and one of coconut cream to thicken it.

food, paleo, Paleo Recipes, recipes

Zucchini Update

Leave a comment Posted on December 13, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Sorry have been a bit busy this week, will have some other updates soon..

But for now, here is an update on my Zucchini! They are enormous!

Little kitty checking them out – they are nearly as big as she is, and she is pretty rotund lol.

The patch is looking a little ratty now but there are plenty more enormous friends growing in there.

Made a Zucchini soup with these two, plenty of herbs and a few potatoes.

garden, recipes

Enough Healthy Food!

Leave a comment Posted on November 10, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

How about something completely awesome yet very bad?

Inspired by Sydney Shop Girl who posted about finding the Ghirardelli Chocolate Brownie Mix at Costco, I made sure to pick up a box the last time I was there – which hilariously was the day before starting Lite N Easy a few weeks ago..

And what a box it is. Weighing in at a mammoth 3.4kg, it contains 6 premix brownie mixes.

I made two packets – one for my work, one for the Other Half’s work. I substituted the vegetable oil for coconut oil. I am a big fan of the coconut oil and will try to get it into any recipe where possible.

I don’t have a picture of the finished product – these must be baked for 45 minutes and by then I completely forgot to take a photo. By the time I thought of it today at work, they were *all* gone. I got emails about these brownies and people were dropping by my desk to ask me all kinds of questions about the recipe, so they must have been pretty darn awesome.

Me, I tried a tiny piece when they got taken out of the oven last night and they were still warm. Very tasty! Sorry I have lost the last Costco receipt so no idea on how much the box cost me – I know it seemed very cheap for the size of box. :)

Even though I did not buy a lot of food at our last costco visit we still spent $400 there. I did get some Christmas pressies for the nephews and nieces, though.

food, recipes

Mineral Water With Orange

Leave a comment Posted on October 21, 2011May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

I’ve been nowhere near any kind of regular soft drink in over a year now. It may even be longer than that, I can’t be sure.

I made the switch to mineral water. This was not an overnight love or even like. It took effort and determination on my part to learn to like it. Now, when I rarely end up with a soft drink as a surprise, it is far too sweet for me and I can’t drink it.

One of the things that helped me to learn to like it was adding fresh fruit to it. I often added slices of lemon or lime but then one day I added strawberries and that soon became my favourite. Then I tried slicing up an orange the way I like to slice them up – this is also one of my favourites. I put all the orange slices into a cup and then add mineral water.

So how do I like to cut up an orange?

Cut the top and bottom off the orange. This will make it so you can easily sit the orange on the chopping board, ready for the choppery!

Start trimming the peel off the orange. This is a delicate process because you want to keep as much of the orange as possible.

Continue trimming off the peel and pith. Keep going until you have done the whole orange. Then flip the orange over, you will likely have left some extra pith/peel on the bottom. Trim off any extra pith/peel

Halve the orange, being careful to cut in between the sections.

Quarter, and trim out the central column. You can then put the orange pieces into your mineral water – I like to make them a little smaller so I can fish them out in bite size pieces with a fork.

This way you get a serve of fruit with your drink.

orange

It is awesome, it tastes fantastic. I highly recommend it. Great summer drink!

food, recipes, yay

Bacon and Avocado Grills

10 Comments Posted on April 17, 2009May 30, 2015 by Snoskred

1. Toast Bread.
1a. You can butter your bread, or use cream cheese. I do not like to do either, myself. Any of these options will work.
2. Place enough bacon to cover your bread under your grill – however you do it. Or, you can cook it in a frypan but that will take longer I suspect. I have an LG Solardom so I put it on the top shelf of the microwave for 5 minutes, turn it over, and do the other side for 4 mins. When you have done that, it will look like this.
cado2
3. While the bacon grills, once you have toasted the bread, cover it in avocado. I like to slice mine and arrange it creatively on the bread. Some like to mush theirs up. Either way is fine. Mine look like this.
cado1
4. When the bacon is grilled, arrange it prettily on top of your avocado covered toast. Like this.
cado3
5. Cover the bacon with a slice of cheese. I like the Aldi vintage sliced cheese for me, but for you feel free to use any cheese you like.
cado4
6. Place grills back in the oven until the cheese is melted how you like it.
cado5
7. Eat!

food, recipes

Challenge for Sephy.

1 Comment Posted on May 23, 2007January 11, 2015 by Snoskred

My good friend Sephy just reached 200 posts today. Congratulations! I know it hasn’t been easy for you but it is worth the hard work in the end.

What many people don’t know about Sephy is that he is quite a good cook. Some time ago I was looking for a Jamie Oliver recipe. He managed to find it and cooked it and then blogged about it here.

So here’s a recipe for you to cook and blog about. It’s one of my favourites. I’ve made it twice in the last week. What you choose to have with it is up to you – because it is getting cold here I’ve been making potato dishes to go with it, but in summer I would eat this with lots of fruit cut up nicely, or an avocado/greek style salad. It’s getting warm where Sephy is so those might be options. ;)

I usually mix the marinade together in a mixing bowl, mix it well with a fork and then add the chicken to that, cover and put in the fridge for 20 minutes. But you can try the bag thing if you like. You may need slightly more oil, I usually put 1/4 of a cup and keep a little bit of that aside for the frypan.

INGREDIENTS

* 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
* 3 teaspoons crushed garlic
* 3 teaspoons ground ginger
* 1 tablespoon olive oil
* 4 limes, juiced

DIRECTIONS

1. Pound the chicken to 1/2 inch thickness. In a large resealable plastic bag combine the garlic, ginger, oil and lime juice. Seal bag and shake until blended. Open bag and add chicken. Seal bag and marinate in refrigerator for no more than 20 minutes.
2. Remove chicken from bag and grill or broil, basting with marinade, until cooked through and juices run clear. Dispose of any remaining marinade.

Do you accept the challenge Sephy? ;) If yes, when he blogs the recipe I’ll link to it so we can all enjoy it.

If you like this recipe – it is very simple – you can try using other citrus juices instead of limes. Orange is nice, lemon can be good too, I’ve tried them both. Lime sets off the ginger perfectly but limes aren’t cheap here right now.. I paid $3 for just one lime earlier this week. I’m getting a lime tree. Speaking of trees, my lemons are finally ripe! ;)

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