Green Pancakes for Breakfast

Pancakes are are one the easiest things to make for breakfast. I have a basic recipe which I can easily modify. I often make pink (beetroot) and also pumpkin pancakes.

This is the first time I made green pancakes, and they turn out quite pleasing to the eye. And they taste nice too.

The green is from fresh spinach. Here's what the batter looks like:

I love the bright colour. We had them with butter and honey. 

Here's the easy peasy recipe. Enjoy!

Meatless Shepherd's Pie

I'm not a vegetarian. But nowadays I try to cut down meat consumption as much as possible. And although there's a Meatless Monday movement going on, "meatless" can be any day, especially when you have a suddenly inspiration to make Shepherd's Pie without beef or any meat product.

This was last night's dinner. I wasn't sure how it would turn out. Well, since I'm posting about it, of course it turned out great! The texture was lovely and the taste was yummylicious. I know I don't have great vocabulary when it comes to describing food. But I do have photos, and a recipe to share. (This time I actually took note of the amount of ingredients I used!)

I'm not happy with the shot below. Indoor, night time photography is such a pain! Ah well! At least the pie was all eaten up by the hubby and myself.

So, here's the recipe for those who would like to try:

Pink Pasta

Sometimes, you just have turn ordinary cooking into something a little extra-ordinary. (This reminds me of a quote I recently came across, which I will share at the end of this post.)

For me, cooking pasta is something I do when I don't know what else to cook, or when I'm pretty lazy but refuse to eat instant noodles. But then cooking pasta can be jazzed up by making it pink, without food colouring of course!



I would recommend this for those with young kids, especially those with daughters. Mine was absolutely impressed! Another good thing about this dish is that it's not only pretty but also nutritious.

I would love to share the recipe but when I cook, I don't normally follow exact measurements. It's more like "dump it in" method. So no conventional recipe, but here's a visual of how to make it. I hope you like it.

And here's the quote I mentioned:

A Smoothie Morning

Sometimes when I don't know what to make for breakfast, I blend. I usually make green smoothie for the hubby and I to take to work. But for weekends and public holidays like yesterday, I tend to try something different.

I've been trying thinking of an unusual recipe for a smoothie. And then it hit me: black sesame! I then googled it and found that it has been done by others but it's not that popular.

Anyway, here are two types of breakfast smoothies from yesterday. One fruity and bright coloured for Emma, and a black one for the adults.

The ingredients for the Mango, Banana Smoothie are:

1 mango
1 banana
some yogurt
a bit of honey
a splash of soy milk

Then you just whizzz.. everything in the blender.

Teddy likes it. It was Emma's idea to use him as a prop!

For the black sesame smoothie, the ingredients are:

2-3 tbsp of roasted and ground black sesame seeds
1 banana
soy milk

I roasted the seeds the night before and ground them in the morning. I didn't add any honey because the soy milk was the sweetened type.

If you notice the coloured paper in the photo above, it's actually done using ice-painting. Here's the artist for the paper, and the assistant art director for the photo-shots!

A Different Kind of Easter Egg

I was trying to think of a way of making Easter eggs that's doesn't include painting boiled eggs. Someone blogged about baking cakes in eggshells. That sounded great but could be a bit messy. Then there was another one where you put candies in eggshells and seal them up. Hmm... sugar high....

Then the idea of making jelly in eggshells came to my mind. So I started saving the shells whenever I cooked eggs or bake cakes and cookies.

I wasn't sure if it was going to work. I thought if it didn't, I'd just take photos of them and post them on Pinterestfails. Ha ha.Thankfully, they turn out great. 

My little one enjoyed cracking the eggs and removing the shells.

As for the pretty colours, I did not use any artificial food colouring at all. Here's what I used instead:

RED - Ribena concentrate
BLUE - Blue peaflowers (bunga telang, juice only)
Orange - Fresh mango (chopped super fine)

So I made clear jelly from agar powder, separated the liquid to three parts and added the above ingredients, and poured them into the empty eggshells. Then refrigerate.

I hope you like this idea. 

 

Pumpkin Bread

When we went to the Big Bad Wolf last year, we bought lots of books. However, most of them were for Christmas presents. I told myself I'd buy one cookbook for myself. There were plenty of recipe books with beautiful covers. But I end up choosing one with a rather plain cover, because I thought the recipes inside were great and a little different.
Commonsense Baking, that's the name of the book. And this is the first recipe from the book that I've tried.

My last post was on Pumpkin Muffins, which I guess is pretty common. This this pumpkin recipe however, is great and a just a teeny bit uncommon. It's real yeasty BREAD, not the cake loaf type of 'bread'. The end result is a lovely bread loaf with a nice golden colour when you slice it.

When you see something like this out of your oven, it makes all the hard work worthwhile. Also, when you bake your own bread, you get this lovely bready, yeasty aroma filling your whole house. It beats store bought bread anytime. Besides, I haven't such type of bread sold anywhere.

Here's how it looks like after the dough is risen, before baking:

And here it is, straight from the oven:

Finally, here's the recipe I'd like to share. I've simplified it from the original. I can't wait to try more recipes from the book. I guess what they say is right; don't judge a book by its cover!

 

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

Pumpkins. There are so many things you can do with them. I've used them in pilaf, pancakes, loaf cakes, muffins and yeast bread (which will be in my next post). Pumpkin puree also make a wonderful baby food.

Anyway, here I would like to share a recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins. These are really easy to make. I used steamed fresh pumpkin but you can also use canned pumpkins.



So this is a very short post. Life isn't so great right now. But cooking and baking is always therapeutic. And photography too, if I can get it right.

Here's the recipe.