Showing posts with label fruit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fruit. Show all posts

Sunday, 1 May 2011

[product] bare crush fruit spread

In Perth recently, Emilly and I ventured up to Fresh Provs to provision our hotel room with deliciousness for the con+Easter weekend. Within Fresh Provs' delightful shelves we found this deliciousness: Bare Crush fruit spreads. I went for the mango and passionfruit, she picked the raspberry strawberry.

Fruity things


These spreads were totally delicious. They're not exactly jams; they're not rendered down as much as jams, and they start to spoil very quickly so they've clearly not been preserved in the way of jams. Spreading the raspberry strawberry across my bread the first morning (no toasters in five star hotels!), I found an entire strawberry in front of me! The flavours were delicious and not too sugary for an early morning start, and I think of the two I preferred the strawberry raspberry.

These are pretty expensive, but I would buy them again if I were in Perth long enough to finish a pot.

Saturday, 30 January 2010

blackberry cupcakes and strawberry cupcakes

For Tuesday's brunch, I made a whole lot of cupcakes. On Friday I'd picked up some strawberries and blackberries from the markets, unable to decide which sort of cupcakes I wanted to bake.

So I baked both, halving the batter in order to make six of each. It was awesome! Also they were gluten-free, and still light and fluffy (for the most part). Hooray!

blackberry cupcakes

various fruits in cupcakes

The soy flour is a new addition to my gf baking, and it worked a treat! Thanks to Johanna for the tip!

ingredients
2ish heaped cups of gluten free flour (plain; I used Orgrans)
2 tablespoons soy flour
half a cup of sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
80g nuttelex/vegan margarine (melted)
4 chinese soup spoons of apple sauce
three quarters of a cup of soy milk
50g blackberries
100g strawberries (diced)

method
Combine flours, sugar and baking powder together. Add in essence, nuttelex and applesauce, then gradually add soy milk, whilst stirring. As soon as thoroughly combined, half the mixture into two separate bowls.

Into one bowl, carefully mix the blackberries. Squish one blackberry carefully, in order to get some black berry juice in the mixture. Be careful not to break any other blackberries, as this will change the colour and flavour of the batter.

Into the other bowl, mix in the strawberries. Squish a strawberry in order to get some strawberry juice in there.

Spoon in to a twelve cupcake tray. Bake for 20 minutes at about 180C.

Wednesday, 20 January 2010

delicious fruit salad

A couple of weeks ago our good friends J + DB came over for dinner! Asked if they could bring anything, I answered, as I often do, with, "dessert, if you like!"

And they did!

fruit salad

I usually make a pretty plain fruit salad, with whatever I have on hand (preferably with lots of watermelon and oranges), so it was awesome to eat a fruit salad that was all exciting flavours and things I rarely eat!

The highlight of this fruit salad, for me, was the pomegranates. I'd not previously eaten one, and it was exciting to eat such a fun fruit! This salad also contained orange pieces, mint, lychees stuffed with crystalised ginger, and perhaps some mango.

It was delicious!

Tuesday, 16 June 2009

a weekend getaway of in-house noms

Went down South to Eagle Bay for the weekend, it was awesome.

The plan for the weekend was to hang out with fabulous friends, play games, and eat a lot of food, and that is exactly what we did.

We started our long weekend of noms on Thursday evening, with some pizza. Gilli made the pizza base in Perth, and it rose on the drive down. We ended up with four pizzas, two vegan and two not-vegan.
Our pizzas were delicious, I love a good home made pizza. Gilli had made two different types of base, one herbed and one plain, and we covered them with awesome things like pumpkin, fresh basil, and avocado. We also had this amazing tomato and cashew pesto that Greg had picked up from a craft fair earlier this year, it was a little spicy and delicious on the pizza, and as a spread on bread!

pizza

Friday’s breakfast was all vegan but for the ice-cream. I made pancakes, and Kandace made waffles, and Gilli stewed some apples, which was awesome. We supplemented with banana, golden syrup, and nuttelex. The waffle mix was new, and wasn’t quite viscous enough to work properly in the waffle maker, but it was still awesome!

breakfast #1: pancakes and waffles

At lunch we went to Samudra, a vegetarian restaurant in Dunsborough. Review to follow! (It was delicious) ETA review here.

Friday dinner was a roasted extravaganza, featuring roast pumpkin, roast potato, roast sweet potato, roasted carrot, roast mushrooms and roasted beetroot. Roasted mushrooms are amazing. Amazing! They were field mushrooms, stems removed, sprinkled with oregano and parsley and some other herbs, and I am absolutely going to roast mushrooms from now on. It also included beans, peas, carrots, and one of those Sanitarium roast things.

dinner #2: roast

On Saturday morning Greg and I baked jam thumbprint cookies and lemon and poppy seed muffins. Of course, this delayed breakfast somewhat, but it was worth it.

lemon and poppy seed cupcakes

We finally started cooking a massive fry up for breakfast, including hashbrowns, sausages (vegan and not), toast, tomatoes, mushrooms, and sweet potato hash browns. There was also tea, and jam, and more of the awesome pesto, which featured heavily throughout the weekend.

breakfast #2

The sweet potato hash browns were an experiment, and it wasn’t until I started googling that I discovered ‘hash’ means so many different cooking related things! But we wanted hashbrowns, delicious fried flat goodness, and they were fantastic, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The recipe needs some tweaking, but in general we boiled the potato (peeled and diced) until it was soft but not super soft, then roughly mashed with five tablespoons of plain flour, combined them into cakes and fried them in the frypan for a few minutes. Incredibly delicious!

sweet potato patties

Saturday dinner was nachos and tacos, simple and fun. I like seeing what toppings people pick.

dinner #3

In preparation for Sunday breakfast, late Saturday night I cooked a pumpkin saag and some dahl. The dahl was my usual recipe, which I know without looking and is so tasty, so my favourite. The saag was an attempt at the pumpkin saag from Veganomicon, but we’d left the recipe on the kitchen counter at home and so I worked from memory. I added a sliced chilli, seeds out, to give it some flavour, and forgot the cinnamon and whatever dried herbs go in it, and I added garlic and ginger. It was different, but still tasty. We served the curry with roti and rice.

breakfast #3

Before we left on Sunday afternoon, more baking was to be had, for the trip back to Perth, and I made a whole lot of sushi.

An awesome weekend of noms. D and I were also very appreciative of our friends, not just for their awesomeness in general, but for their awesomeness in ensuring strict separation between vegan implements and non-vegan implements, to minimise cross-contamination.

Warp speed, Mr Sulu

If you are interested in photos of other parts of our weekend, you can find them here

Tuesday, 4 November 2008

strawberries from the swan valley

strawberries from the valley

A present from my mum - less than ten dollars for the lot! <3

I believe these came from the Midland Farmer's Market, which has always been my favourite.