Dips for dinner

After a good work out, there's nothing like chilling with friends around a table of dips for a good chat and relaxing evening. Healthy food with good flavour is just the cherry on the top! On the menu: beetroot, hummus, and avocado dips.

Beetroot dip

Ingredients

One can on sliced beetroot
1/3 to 1/2 a cup of Danish feta (to taste)
2 Cloves of garlic
Fresh lemon juice from 1/3 lemon (add to taste)
Salt and pepper to taste

Optional:
3 tbsp Pine nuts or chopped walnuts

Hummus

Ingredients

One can of chick peas, skin removed (removing the skin doesnt take too long, they easily pop off)
Fresh lemon juice from 1/3 lemon (add to taste)
1 Spring onion, chopped
1/8 cup Sour cream
1 Clove of garlic, halved
1 Green chilli, pips removed (you can either put this in the with all the other ingredients or finely chop and mix in afterwards)
Salt and pepper to taste

• For the betroot dip and hummus: Pop all your ingredients in a food processor with a metal blade, plate up, and it's ready to serve.

Avocado dip

Ingredients

1/2 cup Cream cheese
1/2 Avocado
1 cup Greek low fat yogurt (or plain yogurt)
Fresh lemon juice from 3/4 lemon (add to taste)
Salt and pepper to taste

Optional:
Tabasco
Spring onions

• Take your cream cheese out a little earlier to soften.
• Mash your avocado in a bowl using a fork.
• Add the cream cheese and yogurt, mashing the ingredients until thick and smooth.
• Mix in the lemons juice and salt and pepper (and Tabasco or spring onions if wanted).

Serve with your choice of fresh sliced vegetables for a healthier snack/meal, such as zucchini, carrots, cucumber, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, or baby radishes.

The picture above shows the dips served with carrot slices, rosemary bread stick, lightly toasted pita bread (sliced and poped in the oven at 180 for approx 5 mins), and tequila lime olives, with lemon infused water. I had abit of the sun dried tomato dip left over, which I served aswell.

A new leaf - Sun dried tomato dip

During my disappearing act, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life now that I've graduated. So after returning to Perth from beautiful Mauritius, Eirik and I decided to scout the East of Australia to possibly spend the next two years working somewhere new within Australia. We had an amazing time in Sydney and Melbourne, great food experiences as well!!! Which I will share and recommend. Right now, the most amazing date pudding I could ever imagine is coming to mind and building a craving.... When in Melbourne, this is a must! I'll share soon.

Though I am still not sure what I'll be doing over the next few months of my life, the next step is moving to Norway, in two and a half weeks. So lots of packing ahead, and making sure I visit a few favourite places before leaving.

Today was a relaxing day with a delicious snack and a delicious meal. For dinner, fresh salmon with the skin on, a nice salad, lemon wedges to squeeze, and sour cream topped with a sprinkling of spring onion. A tip for cooking salmon with the skin on: make your pan very hot, pop your salmon in skin down for a few minutes to crisp the skin, and then turn the heat down to cook the salmon through.

After tasting this flavorful dip at a friends birthday I knew I had to try it for myself, so today I made a sun-dried tomato dip and had with a baguette fresh from the bakery. Mmmm does that dip have flavour! I found a good recipe, which I'll share below with my tweaks.

Ingredients

Sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained and chopped (approx 15 pieces)
225g Cream cheese, at room temperature
1/2 cup Sour cream
1/2 cup Mayonnaise (I might replace this with sour cream next time as the mayonnaise flavour was quite obvious and I would have preferred stronger sun-dried tomato flavour)
10 dashes, Tabasco or similar
1 teaspoon Salt
3/4 teaspoon Freshly ground black pepper
3 Sliced spring onions

It takes about 10 minutes to prep, and yields 2 cups.

Puree the tomatoes, cream cheese, sour cream, mayonnaise, tabasco, salt and pepper in a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Add the spring onions pulse just into they fold into the mixture. Serve at room temperature.

It's great with fresh vegetables (especially carrots), savory biscuits, or fresh baguette.

Tip: It gets even better after its stayed in the fridge for a while, the flavours infuse well over time, so I would suggest making this a few hours before you intend to serve it.

Ginger bread

Yesterday I took my first attempt at ginger bread. At biscuits in general actually! I made the pieces to a ginger bread house and cookies with the left over dough. Unfortunately I didn't get to taste them, my mom took out the last batch after I left and said that the flavour was quite delicious. I found a 5 star rated recipe online and tweeked it to suit the ingredients I could get my hands on. The dough was such a pleasure to work with.

Ingredients

1/2 cup Brown sugar
1/2 cup Maple syrup
1 1/2 tsp Ground ginger
1 tsp Allspice
1 tsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Ground cloves
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup Margarine
1 Egg, beaten
3 1/2 cups Flour

• Heat the sugar, syrup, ginger, allspice, cinnamon, and cloves to boiling in a pot, stirring occasionally.
• Remove from heat and stir in baking powder.
• Stir in margarine until melted.
• Stir in egg, then flour.
• Knead the dough on a floured surface until mixed.
• Divide the dough in half and use a rolling pin to roll it to your desired thickness (suggested slightly less than 1/4 inch).
• Cut to shape with a knife or cutters.
• Bake at 165 C for 12 mins.
• Cook on wire rack.

  

Christmas fun

After a good break of relaxing, socializing, and wrapping presents, I'm heading back to the kitchen to make some Christmas treats. I will also be hosting Christmas lunch for the first time, so I'll be sure to fill you in on my plans and how everything turns out. I'll have the time and space to get creative with sides as my mom will be bringing ham and making the turkey. She has a great recipe, I'll share it soon. At this point, I'm really excited to make a ginger bread house. I found a great video with tips on how to decorate it :o)

Mauritius

After an 8 and a half hour flight from Perth, I arrived in hot, humid Mauritius on Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, I've been sick with a fever and all since Tuesday! So I haven't been up to much but sleeping and recovering. I have, however, had one of my favourite mauritian meals; rougaille of salt fish with rice and orange lentils! With of course a side of masavarou. And tomorrow, farata is on the menu, which is another must try if you're on the island. Farata is a type of Indian wrap, usually served with curry and a chutney, for example, white bean curry and tomato chutney. If I can contain myself for a few seconds, I'll take a photo before digging in.

Rougaille is a tomato sauce that can be used as a base for many meats. In Mauritius it is commonly served with rice, and either sausages, or beef, or salt fish are mixed in the rougaille. In Mauritius you can buy fillets of salt fish (fish preserved in salt) a bit like in the picture below (grabbed from google images), usually snook if I'm not mistaken. The bones are removes and the fish is broken into small flakes and eaten on its own, in a rougaille, or fried with onion and chili as in the picture below with rice ect, or even as a seasoning sprinkled over mashed potato. In Norway that have a similar dish to salt fish rougaille called bacalao. If I. However, they soak the salt fish in water for several hours and break the fillet into larger pieces, cooking it within the tomato sauce.

For the next few days I plan to get better! Hehe, and if I am better by Saturday go and watch a surfing competition closer to where the waves break, on a little boat with a few friends. I the meanwhile I'm going to educate myself with acting lessons from the legendary Michael Caine. I've found a few videos on youtube, and have heard that he has written an amazing books bout acting techniques, so I'll see as I go, and let you know :o)

Back to the kitchen - Fresh fruit juice and vegetable juice

Hey guys, I'm back from the deadly load of the end of four years' work! I'm finally free and have time to attack the many passions I've been pushing aside for way too long! After doing a two short films and a music video at the beginning of the semester, I realized how much acting was distracting me from Uni work. After my last exam I finally got the chance to start checking auditions and acting classes again. So far I've done two video auditions, and went to my first audition in person as a follow up from one of the videos, it was a great experience, and I'm loving it more and more. Besides that I've done some Christmas and birthday shopping, went to the movies, and started a twilight marathon for the release of Breaking Dawn part 2 and watched it's premiere at the cinema.

I've also been given the chance to be creative with colored paper for a good cause: raising the awareness of teenage sex trafficking, by making posters and taking a film and photo holding them up. It's such a great initiative, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it. I'll post the video here when it's out and it'll be great if you could share it too. It's so important to get the word out, what people go through in those situations is extreme, disgusting. And helping others avoid it just by spreading the word is the least that we can do.

On a lighter note, I just bought a new kitchen gadget that I'm loving to bits! Stick master plus which includes a stick mixer with whisk and chopper attachments. So far I've made gazpacho, smoothies, fruit juice and vegetable juice.

Strawberry and banana juice

                                            Gazpacho                                          Gazpacho, fresh fruit juice, and avocado toast

The avocado toast and gazpacho were delicious together

Celery and tomato juice with a hint of cayenne pepper

Saturday omelette

There's nothing like a good work out followed by a satisfying breakfast on a Saturday morning. Before getting back to work of course. After getting home from a tiring Konga work out, I decided that an omelette would be the cherry on top of a good morning.

Ingredients
(Serves two)

4 Eggs
1 Tomato diced
A few slices of ham diced
1 teaspoon of my seasoning chilli mix (garlic, ginger, chilli, and onion diced very small, in some olive oil and salt)
The chilli mix can be replaced with dices onion if preferred.

• Separate the whites and yolk, setting the yolk aside and putting the whites in a mixing bowl. Beat the whites until fluffy and light.
• Add salt, pepper and the chilli mix to the egg yolk, mix in.
• Mix the egg yolk into the fluffy egg whites, add the ham and tomato.
• Pour into a warm pan over a bit of olive oil or butter, on a medium heat.
• After bottom layer has set and turned golden, flip on half over and let it cook a little longer.
• Half the omelette, flip each part over, let it cook a little more, and you have a delicious little breakfast. I enjoyed it with a slice of whole grain bread, a bit of butter, and a cool glass of orange juice.

Bon appétit!