Category: Salads and Vegetables

Salads and Vegetables

Fried Coloured Peppers in Olive Oil

7shasha7

OK, I invented this dish by chance. Really. It happened on one Sunday morning when I was still pregnant with #2 and had one yellow pepper (or capsicum) and one red one. I thought I’d make a nice little brushetta-like dish. I cut up the peppers into small squares and fried them with slices of garlic in olive oil. As I cooked the peppers, I was wondering when it would be done. They were already quite ‘done’ but I thought what would happen if I were to cook them longer? So I fried them really long, careful not to burn the garlic crisps and then I noticed the peppers had turned really soft and that my olive oil had turned a wonderful reddish-brownish hue. I tasted one right then and they were so wonderful! I served them with foccacia bread for The Hubby’s breakfast and he loved it. More importantly, the baby was kicking inside with joy.

So one day during one of our potluck breakfasts at work, I made a batch and my colleagues loved it. I’m not trying to brag here but one of them actually made this dish for her family for dinner. 😀 Just be careful not to burn the garlic crisps like I always tend to do. But then again, I love eating even burnt garlic.

 

Salads and Vegetables, Sides

Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries

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Apparently, eating 500 g of sweet potato at every main meal will make you lose weight. Hmmm…and sweet potatoes are good for diabetics as it controls the blood sugar level in the body. Double hmmm. Motivated at the idea of losing weight by eating lots and lots of sweet potato, I decided to have them for breakfast. Well, breakfast is a main meal. :p

Using Australian sweet potatoes, I cleaned the potatoes and cut them into strips with their skins on. I then sprinkled some turmeric powder, chilli powder, salt and a little bit of olive oil. I put them in the baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. Pop them in the oven at very high heat and use the grill setting. Fifteen minutes later, crispy on the outside and very soft in the centre sweet potato fries. They were addictive because of the heat. I’m making these as snacks once work starts. My partner at work will love them too. Well, unless she doesn’t like sweet potatoes.

Salads and Vegetables, Sides

Creamed cottage cheese potatoes

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I invented this dish. Hee hee. I believe I’m the only one, or very few in the world, who has thought of combining cottage cheese into pulverised potatoes. It tastes delicious too. The Little Girl loves it. I love the food processor for being able to process the potatoes to a smooth, creamy, baby food like consistency.

Recipe

1. Boil two large potatoes.

2. In a food processor, dump potatoes in. Add half a packet of cottage cheese, a little bit of olive oil, salt, lots of black pepper and a half teaspoon or garlic paste.

3. Whizz, whizz, whizz.

The result?

Creamy, velvety potatoes fit to serve in any health-conscious restaurant. Or not. Mmmmm….even The Little Man loved it and ate a bowl.

So much for my diet.

Salads and Vegetables, Sauces and Sambals

Italian Tomato Sauce

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On the last week of term, some chef came to the school to conduct a cooking workshop for teachers and their children. It sounded interesting so I signed up for the course even though it would end at half past eight. The menu for the day was …

The other was chicken piccata which I’ll post. What interested me most was the tomato sauce. It really was delicious. The spaghetti dish itself was so-so. He used Italian canned tomatoes, olive oil, very finely chopped carrots, onions, cabbage I think? And loads and loads of garlic. The result was really good and he said we could use this to serve with breaded calamaris. Mmmmm..that got me even excited. Such a simple recipe yet I was too lazy to make my own tomato sauce, preferring to buy bottled or ready canned ones instead. 

Sausages (it was supposed to be turkey breast. hmph), zuchinni, chicken thigh
Pour two cans of Italian peeled tomatoes and mash with a fork till, well, mashed.
In a rather large saucepan, add in a lot of olive oil. Add finely minced garlic and fry till golden brown. Add in very finely chopped vegetables and fry till fragrant. Pour in the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes. Season with salt and pepper. At this stage, you can season with any Italian herbs you want or throw in a bay leaf etc.

The sauce was the bomb. Then, we had to cook that spaghetti dish. Simply boil spaghetti, add them into the fried sausages and zucchini and then pour about half of the tomato sauce in. I didn’t like the dish. It tasted insipid. Bleah. But the rest of the teachers were so famished (it was half past eight before we could eat our dinner!) that I didn’t get a chance to ask what they thought of the dish. However, you’ve got to try the sauce. And serve it with fried calamari or mushrooms! Yums!