Conquered the Green Dip!

This weekend my friend Lina & I decided to make something we certainly like to eat, but never really thought about cooking it ourselves the whole way through - Why, when everything stands in front of your nose on the supermarket shelves, right? But no, we accepted the challenge and made it happen: The DIY Avocado-Dip, Guacamole.

The original recipe was in German, which first needed to be translated because my friend only knows English:

Recipe for traditional Mexican Guacamole

Ingredients

- 2 very ripe avocados
- 1 big or 2 small limes
- 1 little red onion
- 2 – 3 cloves of garlic
- salt, pepper and chili-spices

- (2 vine tomatoes)

- (1 chili-pepper)
- (parsley / coriander)
- (2 tablespoons of yogurt)

Our Tip:

When buying ingredients for something you’re about to cook for the first time, you better precisely read what’s required (in our case we didn’t pay much attention to the very ripe avocados …).

How it’s done:

What it should look like

1. Peel the onion and the garlic cloves, chop them as small as possible and give the pieces in a medium-sized bowl. If you like it spicy, you can cut a jalapeño or chili-pepper and add it to the mix, but it’s not a must.
2. Now halve the ripe avocados, extract the core with a spoon and scrap or scoop out all the green flesh (any brown spots removed previously).
3. Mash the flesh of the avocado into the bowl and mix it with
   the onion and garlic pieces till it forms a creamy mass. Then instantly squeeze the lime juice over it, so that the avocado paste doesn’t get brown.
4. Season the paste with salt, pepper, chili-spices and taste it. The DIY Guacamole is finished!
5. Serve it in a small bowl and garnish it with little leaves of parsley or coriander and a small slice of tomato.

Everything went fine until step 3: The avocado was obviously not as ripe as it should have been and refused to get mashed. “Find the blender!”

We still stuck to the recipe and added all the spices except the chili-pepper, because it already had an intense smell and we were "sort-of-afraid" of the taste after that one chili :). In addition we also poured a little extra lime juice over it and yogurt, threw in some tomatoes, gave it another spin in the blender and voila …

… We made a smoothie. Cheers!

Vegan Nut Wedges

When I was younger, my mother used to buy nut wedges nearly every weekend as a special treat. It is a typical German dessert that consists of a sweet dough and a nut topping with chocolate edges. I always loved them but as I left my parents and moved to Austria I couldn't afford to buy them that often. Moreover I went vegan last year and it is nearly impossible to find vegan nut wedges anywhere.

Therefore I decided to change the basic recipe, replacing eggs, milk chocolate and butter. After some tries and some errors, now I know the perfect ingredients for delicious vegan nut wedges. The main trick is to replace the eggs with a mixture of flax seed and water. It provides a perfect consistency and doesn't falsify the taste. Moreover flax seeds are very healthy as they contain a huge ammount of omega-3 fatty acids. You can buy them in any supermarket.

I made a video in which I present my recipe for those vegan nut wedges. As you'll see they're very easy to make. If you decide to try this recipe let me know how you liked it and what the result was like. Did you notice a difference to regular nut wedges? All the ingredients are listed below the video.

Ingredients:

for the dough:

300g flour

80g sugar

1 package vanilla sugar

2 Tbsp flax seed

3 Tbsp water

150g margarine

1 tsp baking powder

for the topping:

10 Tbsp apricot jam

150g sugar

200g margarine

2 packages vanilla sugar

5 Tbsp water

100g whole almonds

300g whole hazelnuts

for the chocolate edges:
100g baking chocolate

How to make French crêpes

Hello everyone!

Since I am French, I wanted to share with you a very simple recipe of a common and traditional dish from France: crêpes! Many of you probably already know this dish as it exists in almost every country, but it originally comes from France. Anyway, to get started, you need to gather all the ingredients you need to make some crêpes. To make around thirty crêpes you will need:

- 500 g of flour

- 6 to 8 eggs

- 5 cl of oil or of butter

- 1 liter of milk

- a pinch of salt

Alright, now that you have all your ingredients prepared, let's get started with the cooking!

So first, you have to mix the eggs and the flour together with a whisk or with a blender. To avoid to make some lumps of dough, you should add the flour gradually.

Then, add the milk little by little while you are adding the rest of the flour. Once you have finished incorporating the milk and the flour into the mixture, add finally the butter and the salt. Keep stirring all the ingredients until the mixture becomes homogeneous. You need to leave the dough in the fridge for two hours.

Okay, now it is time to make things ready! Take out a frying pan and put a little bit of oil on it. Let the oil heat for a couple of seconds and then start pouring the dough on the pan. Try to make thin crêpes, so do not put too much dough on the pan, otherwise you will have American pancakes as a result! Leave the crêpe on the pan until it gets light brown and then flip it over to cook the other side of the crêpe. Do as many crêpes as you want! You can eat them either salty with cheese and ham or sweet with for example jam, Nutella, honey or sugar. You have many other alternatives, so just do whatever your imagination tells you! 

Bon appétit!

Link to the original recipe in French: http://chefsimon.lemonde.fr/crepes.html

Food Diary Amsterdam

Hello everybody :)

As Lena and I have been to Amsterdam from Friday until today we decided to blog about the food we have eaten there. We were really excited to try some traditional Dutch food but unfortunately I didn't find anything vegan except fries. However, you can check out Lena's post to see what she has tried :)
We went by train and left on Thursday evening. On Friday morning we arrived in Amsterdam so I will start with lunch on Friday.


Friday, 27.03.2015

Lena has known from a friend that everyone eats fries all the time in Amsterdam but we weren't prepared to see a fries stall every four meters wherever we went. So of course this was the first thing we tried and they were way better than those at McDonald's ;)

In the evening we went to a little Italian restaurant. I had Spaghetti Puttanesca which are Spaghetti with tomato sauce and olives, artichokes, asparagus, paprika and capers. The dish was really good but the portion was quite small and therefore also priced too high with nearly 12€.

Later that evening we went to the Happy Hour at our youth hostel and decided to try out a typically Dutch shot called Dropshot. This is a shot of liquid liquorice. We didn't know that before however, because if we knew I think we wouldn't have tried it! It didn't taste that bad actually, a little bit like Jägermeister.





Saturday, 28.03.2015

We had breakfast at our hostel and there was a large buffet with quite a wide range of food to eat. I actually had two more slices of bread and a cup of tea after the serving you can see here but forgot to take a photo :D
I ate the slices of bread and the roll with strawberry jam, apricot jam, Zwergenwiese Paprika spread which I had brought from home and the last slice I buttered with margarine and sprinkled with chocolate sprinkles, which was my vegan version of Hachelslag.

For lunch we just bought a snack in a supermarket because we weren't that hungry after the huge breakfast. I had bulgur with chickpeas, radish, leek, raisins and goji berries. And yeeees, this is a spork! :D I was delighted when I found one in that supermarket!

Between the meals I had an apple and raw bite cacao bar while strolling through the streets of Amsterdam.

For dinner we went to a small Dutch cafe but as I said before, they didn't have any traditional dish that was vegan. So I ordered a tomato soup and a potato salad. The soup was delicious and also the bread tasted heavenly good.





Sunday, 29.03.2015

We had breakfast at a youth hostel again, a different one however, as there were no beds available for another night at the first one. I had toast with strawberry jam and raspberry jam, a cup of black tea and a glass of orange juice. I couldn't eat more because we got up really early to get into the Anne Frank museum and I can never eat much when I have to eat before 9 o'clock in the morning.

For lunch I had a big focaccia with tomatoes and spinach and a cup of tea because it was freezing cold. We bought this at a really nice restaurant and shop called la Place.

In the evening we went to an Italian restaurant again. I had ravioli ai funghi con tomato sauce and a chamomile tea. Again the Italian dish was pretty expensive, I think I paid about 10€ for it.






Monday, 30.03.2015

On Monday, our last day in Amsterdam, we had the same breakfast as on Sunday. I forgot to take a photo so I'll just show you that from yesterday. That time I helped myself to two more slices with orange jam as it was already half past nine :P

When we walked through the famous street market I couldn't resist this delicious looking (and tasting!) smoothie. It was a smoothie made of spinach, bananas, apples and oranges.

Later we had a quick lunch at an vegetarian fast food place called maoz. They had fries and falafel sandwiches there. Lena took the fries and I had a small falafel sandwich. These were definitely the best falafel I have ever eaten! I could choose between a white and a whole wheat bread and then there was a big buffet of vegetables and sauces I could put into the bread, without any limits. I ate a whole wheat sandwich with falafel, tomato and onion sauce, lettuce, carrots, cucumber, cauliflower and some unidentifiable violet vegetable.

Soon after that we already had to go to the railway station to catch our train to Düsseldorf. At the train station we had to wait a little bit so I bought some yummy grapes.

On the train I ate a muesli bar while reading Stolen from Lucy Christopher :)










Once we were in Düsseldorf we had to wait two hours until our train to Vienna arrived. We went to McDonald's where Lena had a salad and I ate this focaccia with olives that I brought from la Place in Amsterdam.

After that we had tea at Starbucks. I chose my favourite tea: Earl Grey with soy milk. Yummy :D





So that's everything I ate in those four days in Amsterdam :)
I hope you enjoyed reading and looking at the pictures. 

Have a nice evening,
Larissi ♥