Winter Salad Inspiration

For a crisp, sunny winter's day.

Ingredients:
1/2 of a medium roasted butternut, peeled
1/3 wheel of feta
A few salad leaves
Some watercress
1 tsp sunflower seeds
1/4 tsp linseed
1 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp olive oil
Salt
Pepper

Method:
Lay out the salad leaves on a plate and lay the roughly chopped butternut on top.
Next, break up the feta over the butternut. 
Mix together oil and lemon juice, adding salt & pepper to taste. 
Then gently pour this dressing over the feta and the butternut and top it off with the seeds.You can even roast the sunflower seeds in a dry pan beforehand if you would like them to have a more toasty flavour.

Gourmet it: 
Add in squares of roasted beetroot, chopped pieces of fresh orange and maybe even some ripe avocado.
Perhaps a touch of chilli and a teaspoon of Bulgarian yoghurt in the dressing will go down well too.

Breakfast Idea

Chicken and Mushroom Pasta (with some avocado)

This is more of a supper-inspiration post:

Sautéd mushrooms and fried chicken mixed into some al dente penne makes a great meal. Since it's still avo season, add some chopped pieces of that and sprinkle over some black pepper and blue cheese for a kick.

Guaca mole

You might have noticed that if you mash an avocado and add salt and pepper you have a pretty good mole. Then you need to add some lemon or lime juice to stop it from browning. And that would be good and you'd be done.

But what if you wanted to make a really good guacamole, how would you do it? Well, this is my suggestion:

Ingredients:
1 ripe avo
Lemon or lime juice
1/2 red pepper
1/2 tomato
1 red or green chilli (optional)
1 cloves of crushed garlic
1 tbsp of sour cream (or greek yoghurt if you must)
1 rasher of bacon
Tabasco sauce
A few stalks of dhania / coriander
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:
Fry the bacon until crispy and then remove it from the pan and chop it up into tiny bits.
Finely chop your chilli, tomato & red pepper and fry that in the bacon pan. Afterwards you can also fry the garlic a little bit.
Mash your peeled avocado and mix in some lime juice to preserve the green. Add in the sour cream and the bacon pieces. Add the tomato, chilli and red pepper. Tabasco can be added just for the flavour if you already used a hot chilli.
Salt and pepper can add a great dimension, so do add that as well.

Go and enjoy that with some crumbed fish or a burger.

Fact: Avocados are also called "alligator pears" and they are classified as berries.

Avocado, the friend of Pasta

Oh, this poor, poor blog! I have dreams, aspirations and so many good intentions of making this blog something compatible with the Food Fox. You laugh, mock, and think I can't hear you. 

I imagine myself carefully styling a dish and moving a colourful serviette just the right amount of millimeters and getting the focus on just the right glossy part of my carefully dished up meal in a hand-made ceramic bowl. That's not real life. Well, not at the moment. Various choices in life have left me spending my time elsewhere and the only space to create good-enough-to-pass-and-look-edible photos, is in my mind. In real life, I make something different for breakfast, lunch and supper almost everyday (if I cook) or my husband does and then in a moment of triumph and finality, I gobble down what I have just cooked, famished and tired. 

The moral of this short story is that people with nice food blogs do not cook on an empty stomach. Maybe one day I will have the time and discipline to do that. Here's to good intentions.

Guacamole can go on a pasta because it can go on a pizza. Here's how:

Serves 3

Ingredients:
For the guacamole
1 finely chopped tomato
1 finely chopped red pepper
1 finely chopped clove of garlic
1 mashed ripe avocado
1 tsp chipotle Tabasco
Juice of one lemon
Salt
Pepper

For the pasta sauce
(200g cooked spaghetti or whichever pasta you like)
2 chicken breasts
A sprinkle of dried chilli
A sprinkle of dried herbs
1/2 tub of crème fraîche
Salt
Pepper

Method:
Fry the tomato, red pepper & garlic with some olive oil until soft and saucy. Add a touch of water if necessary to de-glaze the pan. Take that out of the pan & let it cool.
Mash the avo with the lemon juice and Tabasco sauce. Season with salt & pepper until it's tasty enough.
Fry the chicken breasts with the salt, pepper, herbs and chilli. Once cooked, chop them up into bite-sized pieces and mix in the crème fraîche. You can use Greek yoghurt as well I would think. It's definitely cheaper, but also less cheesy.
Now that the tomato and red pepper is cool, add it to the guacamole. If it's too hot it could cook your avo and make it go a strange colour or make it taste bitter (depending on the variety) as it could get cooked by the heat.

Serve your pasta, layer the chicken pieces over it and top with the guacamole!