cooking

Capers on a train

Recipes

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This summer I shall be spending most of August on the train.
Last weekend it all began when I headed out of London to join my parents, my brother and my sister-in-law at a holiday cottage in Hereford.

Despite somelousy weather we have had a wonderful week, exploring, cooking and playing board games together.

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I’m now headed to a wedding in Derbyshire and decided that as I was booked on a train at lunchtime I would make the most of it (and test my nerve) and see if I could cook on the train.
Deciding what to make was fairly simple. I figured it ought to be a play on words from the film “Strangers on a train” but I initially had great difficulty thinking of an ingredient to rhyme with strangers. A quick text message to my good friend/frighteningly good scrabble player Tom, solved the puzzle almost instantaneously with “capers”.
My thoughts then turned to beef carpaccio and then it was just a question of how I would logistically prepare and then serve the dish on a train.
I’d read a Jamie Oliver recipe recently where he seared the beef beforehand and recommended serving it at room temperature and from there everything started to fall into place.
I packed up my prepared ingredients and seared the beef in a frying pan before I left. I placed it in a tiny plastic pot with a good lid to marinade in my handbag ready to be snipped into slices with a pair of kitchen scissors mid-journey.
When I came to serve up; laying out the salad and caperberries on the plate was fine but I must admit I was a bit nervous that fellow passengers would start to at least raise their eyebrows when I started cutting up a block of rare meat. I decided to just plough on and hope that a ticket inspector didn’t walk past. I briefly wondered whether carpaccio was an offence which could lead to being forcibly expelled from the train and a 6 month public transport ban but I soon calmed down once it was all served (and photographed of course!).

After this weekend in Derbyshire I shall rejoin my family in Nottingham and then off to Edinburgh to see Richard perform at the underbelly. Then it’s back to Nottingham once more before I finally return to London. My first train cookery experience was rather successful so it’s quite possible that in-carriage cookery will make another appearance on my travels. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Capers on a train
Serves 1

100g (small piece) of good quality beef fillet.
Black pepper
1/2 teaspoon of olive oil

For the marinade:
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 teaspoon of olive oil
Black pepper
Few chives cut into small pieces
Few strands of lemon zest

To serve:
Small handful of watercress
30-40g of hard goats cheese or parmesan
6-7 caperberries

At home, start by searing the beef for just a few seconds in a very hot pan with the 1/2 teaspoon of oil. Make sure you season the beef with black pepper on both sides.
When the beef is still raw in the middle but is just starting to pick up some golden/caramelised colours on the outsides then take it off the heat and leave on a plate whilst you make the marinade.
In a small pot, preferably with a tightly fitting or clip-lock lid, add the lemon juice and gradually whisk in the olive oil. Add the chives, zest and pepper and when cooled slightly, add the beef. Place the caperberries on top of the beef and close the pot until you are ready to eat it.
To serve lay the watercress out on the plate then shave the goats cheese into long strips with a vegetable peeler.
Arrange the caperberries onto the plate and the use a pair of clean scissors to cut up the beef. Lay the beef on the plate and add a little of the marinade to finish.

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Pre-Payday Pepper Pesto!

Recipes

I have this rather odd notion that I am generally quite good with money. A delusion I entertain for the first 3 weeks in a month. Week 4 arrives and I gingerly peek at my bank statement from behind the sofa…it’s as I feared, not great.
After letting out a high pitched squeal I start to steady myself, starting by circling “payday” on my calendar in pink highlighter. This (and a few deep breaths into a paper bag) helps me to conclude that it’s not too far away and if I just stay indoors for a week I’ll be ok.

Don’t worry, it’s not all bad, in fact there are positives to me being grounded by my finances; the kitchen has never looked cleaner, I built a couple of temporary shoe racks, cut my own hair and I may even get around to making some cushions.

Obviously there are implications for cooking when on a drastically reduced budget, I can’t just pop down to Waitrose for a few mangos, a sourdough loaf and box of nasturtium flowers this week. Nope; it’s time to see what’s in the back of that cupboard.

Pesto is a good one. Plenty of variants, very few fresh ingredients and you have a tasty, thrifty meal in minutes.

Red Pepper Pesto

Ingredients
1 Red Pepper
50g of nuts, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds or a mixture
4 tablespoons of olive oil
35g of parmesan cheese (or any other hard cheese you like)
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon of honey, 1/2 teaspoon of smoked paprika, pinch of chilli flakes (all optional)

Method
1) Cut the pepper in half and remove the seeds and slice into thick strips. Place in an oven proof dish with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and a little black pepper.

2) Cook under a hot grill or in the oven until they start to caramelise.

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3) Leave the peppers to cool slightly whilst you grind the nuts and/or seeds (I used walnuts, sunflower seeds and almonds because that’s what I found in the cupboard). They want to be like breadcrumbs not dust or a paste.

4) Put the ground nuts in a bowl and add finely grated Parmesan. Blend the now slightly cooler peppers to a fine dice and stir into the nuts & cheese with the rest of the olive oil.

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5) Taste. If it’s lacking in sweetness add a dash of honey. I also threw in a little smoked paprika and chilli flakes. Season.

20120719-141516.jpg6) I folded my pesto through cooked wholewheat spaghetti tossed in a squeeze of lemon juice. To serve I added a bit more grated cheese and a garnish of chopped fresh tarragon and parsley but basil, oregano or chives would be great too.

As a side dish I made some of my flat bread dough and used it as a sort of pizza topped with garlic, sliced onion, rosemary, olive oil and parmesan.

What are your favourite thrifty recipes? Is there anything lurking at the back of your kitchen cupboard you don’t know what to do with?

Total London

Events, Recipes

I use greek yoghurt loads, it’s a fantastic hero of an ingredient which I use in all sorts of recipes…off the top of my head, right now, I can think of about 10 different recipes. I think that’s pretty good. Well, turns out 10 is rubbish; the people at Total Greek Yoghurt have come up with 1000 recipes using their product! Hats off indeed as they launched 1000 ways to love your total this week.

Greek yoghurt panna cotta

As well as uploading all these ideas to their website they had time to host an event at La Cucina Caldesi (which is a lovely little italian cookery school in central London). I was very excited to be invited and Chef Paul Merrett expertly guided us through making Salmon Rillette, Butternut Squash Tagine and a Semolina Sponge cake.


Salmon Rillettes

Tagine

Semolina Sponge

So, Total have come up with 1000 recipes, arranged an event (where I got to cook, eat, drink wine at lunch time and hang out with super food bloggers like Filipa Kay, Phillipa Moore, Alice Langley and Lynne Clark) and they gave me a whole bunch of yoghurt to take home….I feel utterly lazy in comparison.

To pay homage to my Total experience I decided to come up with a really special dish, something pretty to celebrate their efforts and a recipe not already covered by the 1000 ways campaign; tricky stuff. Scoffing one of the complimentary honey split pots I had a sugary epiphany and an idea started simmering in my brain.


My Total Dessert

Apricots poached in a cardamon syrup with crushed pistachios & honey, greek yoghurt quenelles (oh I love a quenelle) in a walnut shortbread sandwich with turkish delight pieces. (serves 2 with leftover shortbread!)

Ingredients
1 tablespoon of coarsely ground pistachios (plus a little extra for decoration)
1 Total Greek Yoghurt Honey split pot
1 quantity of Delia Smith’s Walnut Shortbread dough (see here for recipe)
10-12 whole cardamom pods
1 orange
200g of caster sugar
6 fresh apricots
1 teaspoon of rose water
icing sugar
2 pieces of rose turkish delight
Method
1) Mix the coarsely ground pistachios with the honey from the split pot & set aside.
2) Make the shortbread dough following the instructions in Delia’s recipe, roll out and cut into rectangles (approx 12cm x 5cm) and place on a baking sheet lined with a sheet of baking paper. Bake for 15-20 minutes, they should just start to turn pale golden at the edges. Leave them to cool on the tray until you’re ready to assemble the dish.

3) To poach the apricots heat 300ml of water, the cardamom pods (slightly bashed to release their fragrance) juice & zest of one small orange and the caster sugar. Bring to the boil then carefully add the whole apricots. Cover them with a piece of baking paper and let simmer for 8 minutes.
Gently remove the apricots from the syrup and set aside to cool.
Allow the syrup to reduce for another 8-10 minutes then turn off the heat and add the rose water.

4) When the apricots are cool enough to handle gently split them in half and remove the stone, cut each half into 3 wedges
Dredge 2 pieces of the shortbread with icing sugar on one side, these will become the lids.

5) Lay an un-sugar dusted piece of shortbread on each plate. Top with teaspoon quenelles of the yoghurt with small amounts of the pistachio honey in between.

6) Then add a layer of the apricot wedges, a little of the fragrant syrup, more pistachio honey and then the sugared lid.

7) Decorate the plate with left over pistachio-honey mixture, small pieces of the turkish delight (cut up using scissors) and drizzle the plate with a bit more of the cardamom syrup.

Crab cakes and updates

Cooking, Events, Recipes

I think I may have finally found a way to survive the dreaded “so what do you do?” question and the inspiration came from the depths of my childhood; the TV show Blue Peter.

I always find it difficult to say “I’m doing an assortment of food-related and profile-boosting activities with the sole purpose of one day opening a restaurant” it’s a mouthful, and generally sounds a bit odd. Then I remembered that when the Blue Peter team wanted to reach a goal they used a totalizer. On the show, every time they reached a milestone in their charity campaign the totalizer would light up a new level. I can’t build anything quite so impressive (and I probably shouldn’t as it might be disrespectful to their charity work) but I can draw a career plan with a picture of my restaurant at the end and post it on my about page. I’ll update it with each step along the way until I get there, by that time the internet will have advanced and there’ll no doubt be a widget to make it light up and fling out confetti.
Now when people ask me what I do I can say, “Hi, I’m a food blogger please read my about page”…

… and then I can leg it 🙂

The rehearsals for my TV pilot are going well too; am coping ok now with the whole talking into the camera thing by pretending the lens is that Johnny five robot from the 1980s film Short Circuit, I’m not sure why this helps but I’m gonna go with it.
As soon as we get a location confirmed we’ll start filming so watch this space for updates!

The second big collaborative project is the events company, Taylor & Nice which my new business partner Bradley and I are starting up. We had loads of fun launching our website at the weekend. We hit the shops early on Saturday and spent the rest of the day (and evening) churning out countless canapés and cocktails to liven up the PowerPoint presentations. I would definitely recommend giving your focus group booze and nice food they are bound to love you idea!

One of the best things about hosting a launch party/focus group for a catering venture is that the fridge is full of leftovers for quite a few days afterwards. This has led to a string of easy dinners and last nights Crab Cakes were no exception. In fact the tinned crab and curry paste were surplus items from filming rehearsals and the chilli jam and salad were from the bash. It was lovely to pull together ingredients from these two projects, an edible reminder that I have actually started making good use of my time by working and watching a little less of our Fraiser box set!

Crab cakes

  1. Take 4 medium sized potatoes and boil for 12-15 minutes or until soft.
  2. While the potatoes are boiling chop a handful of flat leaf parsley and put it in a mixing bowl with a tin of crab meat chunks, a tin of dressed crab and a little lime zest. I also added a tiny bit (about 1/4 teaspoonful) of Thai green curry paste but that’s optional.
  3. When the potatoes are ready mash them till smooth and then fold them into the other ingredients.
  4. Shape into 4 fishcakes and coat in breadcrumbs before shallow frying until golden brown
  5. Serve with chilli jam, green salad and mashed avocado.

As Taylor and Nice is just starting out we would be really grateful for your ideas and feedback, if you have a few moments please do fill out our short survey on what makes a good night out in London. xx

Faster Flatbread!

Recipes

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I first made these because I couldn’t be bothered to go to the shops and buy bread, but they tasted so good I started whipping up batches of homemade hummus, baba ganoush or smashed avocado to serve with them at dinner parties!
They take almost no time at all and the mess is minimal (which is always a bonus.)

Here I use wholemeal flour because that’s what I prefer to eat and I have found it harder to find wholemeal wraps or flatbread in the shops, but do mess about with the recipe and try different flours or perhaps a mixture of plain and wholemeal.

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Wholemeal Flat breads
makes 4 (which is probably enough for 2 people)

Ingredients

1 cup of wholemeal plain flour, plus extra for dusting & rolling
1/2 cup of water
1 dessertspoonful of oil (any vegetable oil is fine)

Method

1) Stir all of the ingredients together in a bowl.
2) Dust the chopping board with flour
3) Knead the dough just enough to bring it together
4) Divide into four pieces and roll out into side-plate sized circles, about 2-3mm thick
5) Dry fry each flat bread in a non-stick frying pan on a high heat. Cook for a few minutes, turning regularly, until they turn a slightly paler shade and develop golden brown blotches.
6) Serve warm, sliced with dips or leave to cool and use as wraps (although they are slightly more brittle than the shop-bought ones so they may snap). I had mine with a poached egg – delicious!

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Vegan in the house

Recipes

Richard is rehearsing for Kin right now and we have the stage manager, Liam staying with us. He arrived straight from Heathrow airport on Tuesday night after spending the last 18 months travelling. It must have been a bit of a shock to his system to be thrown straight into a busy London theatre schedule only hours after stepping of a plane from a very extended holiday in India. Richard had made some pork and lentil stew with some boiled grain mix so there was plenty left over to heat up when he arrived, but on the realisation that Liam was Vegan I quickly began frying plantain, toasting sunflower seeds and slicing avocado in blind panic. I have never cooked Vegan food before because I know so few. Luckily he seemed happy enough with the strange plate of grains, seeds, vegetables and salad I handed to him but I felt that I really should come up with some proper food to give him next time.

I asked a few leading questions to find out what sort of food he likes and last night, after consulting a handful of vegetarian cook books and a whole host of vegan blogs I decided to try and make him a decent meal.

I found it extremely hard at first because it seemed to me that almost every thing I like to make included egg, yoghurt or cheese somewhere so I really had to concentrate and not finish sauces with butter or add a splash of milk to anything. I chose to make these Vegan Bangers and Mash and a Carrot cake recipe I found online and I think, for my first attempt at Vegan cookery it wasn’t too bad.

Vegan Sausages

Ingredients

1 punnet of mushrooms, weighing around 400g, finely diced

2 small onions finely diced

1 clove of garlic, crushed

100g of oats

1 tbsp of wholemeal flour (plus extra for coating)

1 tbsp of peanut butter

dried thyme

tsp of fresh herbs like savoury, chives or flat leaf parsley

salt and black pepper

Olive oil

Method

Fry the mushrooms in a little olive oil until cooked through. Place in a large mixing bowl and then fry the onions. When they start to soften add to the mushrooms. Into the mushrooms and onion mix add the flour, oats, peanut butter, herbs garlic and seasoning. Stir really well squashing and mashing everything together. (I blitzed mine in the hand blender very very slightly so that it stuck together a little better but still kept lots of chunks of mushroom and onion, I won’t lie, it’s not a pretty mixture but it will turn out ok).

Leave the mixture to cool until it is cold enough to handle. Put about 2 or 3 tablespoons of flour onto a plate and dust your hands with flour too – the mixture is sticky – and shape the mixture into 9 sausages. Roll them in the flour and then shallow fry in a little more olive oil until golden brown.

I served mine with mashed potato (made with soya milk and olive oil) with spinach and nutmeg folded though it and a splash of onion and rosemary gravy.

For dessert we had this Carrot Cake from the Permaculture Magazine website. Although, I didn’t have any maple syrup so I used honey which was still really nice…big slices got eaten so I suspect that is a good sign.

When Jack came to stay.

Cooking, Recipes

Jack is my sister-in-law’s brother…or my brother’s brother-in-law . . . surely there has to be a shorter way of saying this.

Anyway, Jack has been asking for my help to prepare for his new university course in digital games design. His background is in engineering which, excitingly, means all his digital designs of trains and cars would actually work if made in real life. The other students on the course are likely to have come from art courses and Jack wanted to hang out with me and try and get up to speed on arty fartiness! I found a timeline of art history, selected some examples of key pieces I like and why, and came up with this analogy to help him evaluate works of art.

“Lashings of Orange Juice & Lemonade”

The best thing I could come up with was “orange juice and lemonade”. Normally this is a mocktail, perhaps chosen by designated drivers down the pub or anyone in need of a quick thirst-quenching sugary hit.

I use it to explain art (I promise there is method to this madness):

  • The orange juice represents the conceptual integrity of the work, the idea, story or message that the artist wishes to communicate with the viewer.
  • The lemonade is representative of the aesthetic quality or the level of technical skill required to produce the work.

And finally:

  • The glass in which these liquids are poured is my perception of the piece.

For example; I feel that a painting like John by Chuck Close would be a full glass of lemonade – this is because of the incredible photorealistic quality requiring enormous technical skill. Fountain by Marcel Duchamp is a urinal (which he didn’t make himself, basically he just chose it to exhibit to challenge the art world). In its historical context this is a brilliant and humorous thing; a big glass of orange juice for me! Another of my favourite paintings is Empire of Light by René Magritte. In my opinion this is a large glass of both orange juice and lemonade in equal quantities. Check it out if you haven’t see it before.

I use this analogy because it reminds me to split my evaluation into an analysis of the concept and of the aesthetic quality. Also, it’s a little less risky to go around a small gallery whispering to your friend “barely a drop of orange juice in this one, no lemonade either” rather than “that’s a rubbish painting, the message it is trying to convey is weak and it’s not very well drawn”.

We spent the rest of the day loading up on coffee and creativity. We discussed conceptual art in the Tate Modern, grabbed a quick lunch from the stalls at Borough Market and then went sketching in the V&A. We arrived home with sensory and caffeine overloads and completely drenched from a downpour.

After a quick change I took a look in the kitchen cupboard to see what I could do for dinner. We were due at a party that evening; a fundraiser for the production of As You Like It which my boyfriend Richard is currently performing in – catch it quick before it ends on the 19th of May!

The party was 1920s fancy dress and aptly named Jazz You Like It! Knowing there would likely be a number of cocktails (and we all still needed time to get dressed up) a speedy-stomach lining meal was required. Manwiches seemed the only answer!

Manwiches

  1. Roast a selection of your favourite root veggies, garlic and onions in olive oil or cold pressed rapeseed oil.
  2. Toast some thick slices of bread and spread both sides with hummus (store bought is fine)
  3. Pile in the roast vegetables, sprinkle with zahtar mix and some crumbled feta and form the sandwich with the other slice of toasted bread.

Scrummy! If you are about to go out on the tiles I suggest you scoff these before you get your glad rags on- they’re mighty messy!

The party was brilliant, there was a raffle and Jack won an hour of personal martial arts and fitness training! We donated a dinner party for 4 which we shall be cooking in the winner’s house…a blog post for another day I predict.

Happy cooking!

Sugar Free Easter

Cooking, Recipes

When you’re trying to stick to a new healthy eating plan celebrations and holidays can make huge demands on your willpower.

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I’m trying to make a permanent change to my eating habits to balance out some dodgy hormones. In a nutshell I realised I wasn’t getting anywhere near enough fibre and was consuming far too much sugar.
So far it’s going pretty well. I have been able to swap my firm favourites with very similar whole grain alternatives and am eating plenty of fruit. It’s almost easy, and I’m already feeling the benefits which is brilliant.
But now it’s Easter bank holiday weekend and I can’t have an Easter Egg, slab of simnel cake or a hot crossed bun. I figure if I’m struggling with this; how on earth am I going to get through Christmas?!
The only reason it’s been easy so far is because I’ve been switching things I can’t have (like butter) with things I really like but I can have (like avocados). In order to beat my Easter Blues I have decided to try and make a cake out of the things I can eat, but make it look like something I shouldn’t. Make sense?

Somehow Simnel Cake sounded like the easiest thing to mock up. Plus, I’m staying with a friend in Birmingham at the moment so this seemed like a recipe which wouldn’t leave the kitchen too messy.

I can’t really have cake because it contains refined sugar but I found this recipe for banana bread online. It seems there’s enough sweetness in the bananas so that you don’t need sugar- brilliant.
I substituted the plain flour for wholemeal because I thought I might as well make it as good as possible and I baked it in a round cake tin to further trick my brain. When it came out I let it cool and then sliced it in half through the middle. I sandwiched it back together again with a scrummy paste made from about 25-30 dried dates softened with around 4-5 tablespoons of boiling water (keep adding a splash and mashing them until they are the consistency of thick lemon curd). Add to the date paste half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a dessert spoon of cocoa powder. This made a really sweet chocolate filling ideal for this cake, but it’s also good on toast if you miss the occasional chocolate spread.
Obviously the marzipan was going to be the next hurdle, but i winged it and soaked some dried apricots in the same way as the dates (and about the same amount). Using a hand blender I processed 150-200g of whole almonds into the apricot mix. It turned out like a pale peanut butter. It tasted quite pleasant but I think next time a drop of almond essence would give it a more convincing marzipan flavour.
Finally I lightly grilled the cake to make it look authentic and that was it. Simnel Cake.
It was like eating cake, without the headache inducing sugar rush and probably at least one of my five a day; result!

Happy Easter xxx

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Gnocchi o’clock!

Cooking, Recipes

About a month ago a friend of mine posted this entry on facebook: “1st attempt at gnocchi making and it’s gone very badly wrong”. Underneath this statement was a photograph of a saucepan filled with the offending yellow paste and a wooden spoon which looked like it might never return. I invited her round for a gnocchi masterclass.

I say ‘masterclass’… I have made gnocchi before but that was ages ago and I cannot remember how it turned out. I think it went ok but I honestly have no memory of it either way. She seemed so disheartened that it hadn’t gone well that without thinking I invited her round to make gnocchi with me. I had been joking when I called it a masterclass, but I realise now that I haven’t actually known her for that long so she may have just assumed that I knew what I was talking about. (It’s probably better that I am concerned about this now and not on the day).

She arrived keen to get started and once the kitchen was free from coffee making housemates we got to work. I might not be a gnocchi expert but I know what it feels like when things go wrong in the kitchen. Usually this happens to me when I am being impatient or if I get distracted. It feels so much worse when it’s the mistakes you wouldn’t normally make; over-cooked veg, an undercooked casserole, burnt cake, in my case all of which are almost always followed by my flouncing off into another room dramatically exclaiming “I can’t cook” and “my career is a failure”. I hoped that if I helped my friend resolve her gnocchi nightmare I would simultaneously be sending a metaphysical drop kick to every failed flan, terrible terrine or that lumpy mashed potato I was sorry to serve to my boyfriend’s mother last year.

It was a really fun afternoon and I am pleased to say that we made some rather yummy gnocchi. It was a lot easier than either of us had expected/half remembered. We ate it in the garden until I noticed a hungry squirrel take a strong interest in the hazelnut butter so we ran in.

I really enjoy cooking with other people; sharing the labour of something which might normally be fiddly or complicated and swapping kitchen hints and tips.

If you want to make gnocchi too, here’s what we did:

  1. Take 750g of potatoes and boil them whole and unpeeled for 30 minutes
  2. Drain them, rinse with cold water and leave them to cool.
  3. Peel the potatoes and put them through a potato ricer.
  4. Gradually add 125g of plain flour stirring with a wooden spoon.
  5. Knead the mixture briefly and bring together into 3 lumps. Roll them into thin sausages and chop into small pieces (you’re aiming for boiled sweet size blobs)
  6. Press a fork into the sides to give small line indentations and drop a third of the gnocchi pieces into boiling water
  7. Once they rise to the top, give them about 10 seconds or so and then scoop them out with a slotted spoon and place in a serving dish.
  8. Repeat the process with the rest of the batches.

Add pesto or your favorite cheese or toasted hazelnuts tossed in melted butter. As you may know I’m trying to change some of my eating habits at the moment so I made mine with butternut squash in place of potato and used wholemeal flour. The mixture needed more flour than the potato version and I stuck an egg in too (for luck!) The butternut squash version is great with the hazelnut butter, mint leaves and feta and I served the classic version with a simple salsa verde made with mint, parsley, basil, capers, lemon juice and oil.

Sundays & Smoothies

Cooking, Recipes

Last weekend I went to visit my brother and his wife in Hampshire. We spent a sunny Saturday at the allotment getting the plot ready for their first crops and looking at creepy crawlies!

After a well deserved lie-in on the Sunday morning I woke to find my sister-in-law Em and her brother Jack in the kitchen making us all a big batch of blueberry pancakes.

They were really scrummy and made with blueberries and cornmeal they were superfoodtastic! Em used this recipe from Martha Stewart but made it even more exciting by laying out a great selection of toppings. We had maple syrup, honey, almonds, bananas, walnuts and seeds to choose from.

Blueberry Pancake Toppings

This weekend I’ve gone smoothie mad! Smoothies have always ended up being a bit of a fad for me as I’ve tried a few times to have one a day but I often end up finding that the effort involved in cleaning the juicer/blender/jug/processor always outweighed the yumminess of the end result.

This new wave of smoothie love started off badly with my 10 year old hand blender dying a death. With a sliced banana in one hand I hurled it into my housemate’s blender and haven’t looked back. It even has a smoothie setting and completely purees an orange in seconds. It’s easy to clean too, I just whizz up some hot water and a smidge of washing up liquid and then rinse it – hoorah!

This morning’s smoothie was really simple and made enough for 2 large glasses:

Blend 2 peeled oranges with 2 peeled bananas until smooth. Pour into tall glasses and top each one with all the innards of half a passion fruit!

Other smoothie combos I’m gluzzling at the moment:

  • Orange, banana, pear, fresh ginger, pinch of spirulina
  • Orange, carrot, ginger

To keep up my smoothie-enthusiasm I need to get experimenting, next up I’m thinking cucumber, mint, apple and limes. Maybe some herbs too; strawberries, lemon, basil and black pepper might be nice in the summer…would love to hear some of your suggestions or your trusted favourite smoothie combos. x