Low Fat Broccoli Pesto

Maybe you have planted your own basil this year? Maybe you dream of making pesto from your own basil? Maybe making pesto with your own basil would leave your plants totally naked and depressed?
I have this problem and that's why I made a pesto with less basil and more green vegetables. The good side effect is, that you won't need any additional oil for this pesto. The only fat in there comes from the pumpkin seeds.


Low Fat Broccoli Pesto (Serves three)

200 g ( 2 1/2 cups) broccoli, chopped
140 g (1 1/3 cups) snap beans, chopped
1 clove garlic
1/2 tsp oil
30 g (4 /2 T) pumpkin seeds
10 g (1/3 cup packed) fresh basil leaves*
2-3 T water
1 T light miso
1 T nutritional yeast (optional)
200 g ( 2 1/2 cups) broccoli, chopped
140 g (1 1/3 cups) snap beans, chopped
salt & pepper to taste
your favourite pasta

* I used a mixture of Thai basil, regular basil, and red basil.

Cook broccoli and beans in a small amount of water until soft. Rinse and set aside.
Heat oil in a small pan and cook garlic for a minute until slightly browned.
Grind pumpkin seeds in a food processor, add water, garlic, and basil. Pulse for 30 seconds, then add miso, nutritional yeast, and vegetables. Pulse until creamy. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serve with your favourite pasta and decorate with some pumpkin seeds and red or green basil leaves.

Biscotti di Amaretto

the second and perfect version

Every time I order espresso at a bar or restaurant I move over those cute little cookies it comes with to P. Biscotti di Amaretto or Amaretti are Italian cookies that are made with Amaretto and egg whites. The next time I order some espresso I am going to hand over those cookies to P. and replace them with my own. If you want to do the same, here is the recipe.

As I said, usually these contain eggwhites which make the cookies - that are very similar to macaroons in texture - light and crunchy. I think the best way to imitate this texture is to use a combination of starches like corn or tapioca starch, silken tofu and soy flour. When I started experimenting with these I left those ingredients out (using soy pudding instead of tofu) and the result was a light but too soft cookie which also didn't have the cracked surface the original versions have.

the first version

My second batch already came out perfect, but I tried a third version. This time the cookies came out too soft again, so I stick with the second one. The first and the third version didn't have soy flour in them, so this seems to be the most important ingredient (next to the silken tofu which adds the fluffiness).

the third version

When making this cookie it is important to make it small. This helps the crunchy texture a lot. I used a pastry bag and piped the batter onto a baking sheet and after experimenting a bit I think that they shouldn't be bigger than two centimetres in diameter. (0.8 inch - If you go for one inch that will still be fine)

I made these without almonds, getting the flavour from the Amaretto and bitter almond extract. If you would like to have some ground almonds in them, feel free to replace some of the flour with it.

Biscotti di Amaretto (makes 90 - yes why, these are small!)

1/4 cup silken tofu
75 g (1/2 cup + 2 T) granulated sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil (I used sunflower seed oil)
80 g (1/2 cup + 2 T)whole wheat flour
25 g tapioca starch (3 T)
1 t baking powder
2 T Amaretto
3/4 of a small bottle (1/2 t) bitter almond flavouring essence*
1 T soy flour
*These flavouring essences are a common ingredient here in Germany, they are made from oil and flavourings or extracts. You could substitute pure almond extract, but I can't tell you how much you would need as these pure extracts aren't very common here in Germany. [So far I've only seen vanilla] But I think it would be in the range of 1/2 to 1 t


Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F) and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
In a blender combine tofu, oil, sugar, and almond essence and blend until creamy.
In a bowl combine the dry ingredients, mix and add wet to dry. Mix until no lumps are left. (I usually use a hand-held mixer for this)
Fill a pastry bag (fitted with a decorating tip of your choice) with the batter and pipe small amounts onto the baking sheet. try to make them not larger than 2 cm. (0.8 inch. If you go for an inch that will be fine too) Bake for 7-9 minutes until golden brown and try to check them often as they might burn soon due to their size. Let them cool completely and store them in an airtight container. Their taste improves over the course of a day, so try to be patient before you have your espresso with some of your own, vegan Biscotti di Amaretto.

Pasta in spicy lentil tomato sauce

When I was at my parents' place I cooked for my father. He usually eats huge amounts of food. Because I am not used to his ability to burn 3500 calories a day I often end up with an empty pot and a disappointed and still hungry father. But this time I was able to work it out! I chose a dish that included lots of complex carbohydrates in the form of grains and lentils. And I cooked a meal that served four people (one serving for me, three for my father). My father ate those three servings I had planned for him and this was the first time he didn't walk out to search for a slice of bread or something else to eat!
Now that I am home again I made the recipe again, this time serving only me and my small stomach. If you have people around you who eat as much as my father does you can easily triple the recipe.


Pasta in spicy lentil tomato sauce (serves one)

50 g (1/4 cup raw) red lentils, cooked according to package directions
50 g (1/2 cup dry, approx. 2 oz.) pasta of your choice, cooked according to package directions
1 tsp. oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 tsp. chopped ginger
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 small red chili, chopped
1/2 tsp. ground cumin
200 g (3/4 cup) chopped, canned tomatoes
20 g (3/4 cup chopped) fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in a pan and sauté onion over medium heat for two minutes. Add ginger, garlic, chili, and cumin. Cook for one minute. add lentils and tomatoes and simmer for 10 minutes over low heat. (Add some water if necessary)
Add fresh parsley and simmer for one more minute. Add pasta, mix thoroughly and serve.

Mice!

After a week of cooking and baking for my parents (Yes, that's what I've been doing most of the day) I am back with some pictures. But before I share what I have baked, I would like to introduce to our newest family members. They live in my parents' garden.

My mother discovered that a mouse dug a hole and she started feeding it. After a couple of days she discovered that there were actually two mice.

Aren't they just absolutely adorable? My mother calls them Frida and Theo. She feeds them nuts every day and these cute little animals aren't afraid of us any more. They look out of their hole whenever they see my mother and wait for their lunch. And Frida is a real cutie. She loves to be photographed!

Before I forget...

I am going to visit my parents for a week, which means no internetz. (I know)

So before I forget I am going to post the recipe for the Pepper Cream Cheese I was talking about the other day. It's a really delicious spread which is good on a slice of bread, but also works great as a topping for tortillas, wraps and on pizza.

Red Pepper Cream Cheese

1 block of firm tofu (200g) crumbled
1 red pepper, roasted*
1 small red chili, chopped
2 teaspoons dark miso
juice of half a lime
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup Thai basil (regular or a mixture of both works well, too)
2 tablespoons water
1 pinch nutmeg
salt and pepper to taste
*preheat oven to 200°C /400°F, slice pepper in two halves, place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, roast until skin turns black, transfer to a bowl and cover with a plate until cool. Peel of skin)
Place all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse until smooth.



I also made a second version using smoked tofu. I used this to make cream cheese rolls. Because I used smoked tofu these came out with a meaty taste. P called them Hot Dog Rolls. For the dough I used this recipe, rolled out the dough into a 20 x 30 cm rectangle , spread the cream cheese on top and rolled the dough into a log. Then I followed the instructions for shaping Finnish Cinnamon Rolls.

If you now want some cinnamon, try Susan's Cinnamon Swirl Muffins. They are delicious! She said she found them a bit bland. I don't, I totally love them. The only change I made was to substitute some silken tofu for the soy yoghurt and I used only a pinch of nutmeg.

Cookbook glee

Some weeks ago Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's new book, The Joy of Vegan Baking, finally found its way to our house. My first impression was, that it's a beautiful cookbook with a lot of nice pictures. Besides the beautiful pictures it also includes metric measurements (yay!) and Colleen has added a lot of information to her recipes, explaining the origin of certain desserts, the meaning of words like waffle, including a glossary of terms and so on. I learned a lot of new things while reading the book and it is so much fun to read.

Of course I had a hard time to decide what to make first. Colleen includes not only traditional American or English desserts, but also Mexican, Polish, French, and German to name a few. The German recipes include an apple cake and an apple strudel and there is also a variation on the black forest cake: the black forest strudel.
I started with the Light Lemon Bundt Cake. I didn't have any egg replacer and so I substituted some corn and tapioca starch for the egg-replacer. I also used coconut milk for the soy milk (which made this cake not so light any more). The recipe was easy to follow and the cake batter was mixed together in a couple of minutes. I put it into the oven and left the kitchen. When I came back after the baking time was over, I was received by a perfect cake that smelled so good so that I immediately had to try a slice! And I wasn't disappointed. This is the perfect lemon cake!

Last Sunday P. made the Fall Fruit Crisp which is also pictured above. The recipe calls for apples and optional blueberries and raisins, but P. chose apples and rhubarb instead as the first rhubarb appeared in the store that weekend. We couldn't believe that this dessert would be so tasty! We both never had a crisp before and because it was so easy to make it was the perfect lazy Sunday treat. It was so delicious, we ate all of it instead of lunch!

I have two vegetarian cookbooks which I still use very often. Most of the recipes are easy to veganize and there are also some vegan ones. The patty pictured above is a soy patty which comes from the book called Das große Buch der Vegetarischen Küche, also available in English as:
The Essential Vegetarian Cookbook
In Germany this book can be bought for a couple of Euros in nearly every bookstore and I have owned mine for years. The patties call for an egg but you don't even have to think about how to replace it because the recipe also calls for oats and chickpea flour. They are seasoned with cumin so the taste is similar to falafel. I fried them in a non-stick pan so I only had to add a few drops of oil. They are a good snack and freeze well so I'm definitely making these again.

The next thing I tried was the Banana Bread from the book Alternative Vegan. This recipe calls for only five ingredients, bananas peanut butter, flour, nuts, and baking soda. (I left out the nuts) Unfortunately there weren't any notes about how long to cook this and at which temperature. I chose 350°F, and after 30 minutes the bread was already done. As the peanut butter and banana sandwich lovers among you will know, both of these flavours go together very well and I enjoyed several pieces of this bread over two days.


You may recognize these guys. They are the bean balls from Veganomicon. The first time I made them, I made the "traditional version", with spaghetti and tomato sauce. They were so good that I decided to make them again but use them in a different way. This time I substituted soy beans for the kidney beans and added small hot red peppers. I served them with tomatoes and spinach which was also very good.

A very special cherry treat!

I called these Black Forest Truffles.

Close up. Can you guess the secret ingredient?

Do you remember the chocolate mousse I made for the torte a while ago? Well, I made it again and changed the recipe a bit to make this candy. Black Forest bliss, I assure you. And the filling isn't that high in calories and fat.
These truffles are easy to put together: Make the mousse, let it chill for a couple of hours and then melt some chocolate to cover the mousse.
I don't know how many this makes, you can use leftover filling as a cupcake frosting or just eat it all by itself.

Black Forest truffle filling

55 g (1/4 cup) vegan margarine, room temperature
50 g ( 1/2 cup) Dutch processed cocoa powder
50 g (1/2 cup sifted) powdered sugar
160 g silken tofu, puréed ( 1/2 cup puréed)
150 g sour morello cherry jam (6 tablespoons)
2 tablespoons Obstwasser (A brandy similar to kirsch. You can use kirsch or any other clear liqueur distilled from fruit. Or substitute some cherry juice / extract if you're not into alcohol)
50 g (1.75 oz, half a bar of Ritter Sport chocolate) chopped chocolate, melted

200g (7 oz.) additional chocolate for covering
secret ingredient (follows)

Cream together margarine, cocoa and sugar. Add tofu, jam brandy and the melted chocolate. (I used my mini food processor). Transfer to a bowl and let chill in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. This filling will still be soft and mousse-like after it has chilled. But that is okay and will result in a crunchy truffle with a very soft centre.
To make the truffles, take out a piece of parchment paper and melt half of the remaining chocolate (100 g /3.5 oz). (You won't need all of it for the bottoms. I made around 30 and had some leftover chocolate.)
Use a teaspoon to drop some chocolate onto the parchment (about the size of a grape):

Let the chocolate dry. Enter the secret ingredient:

Hibiscus flower leaves! I drink hibiscus tea all the time (or hibiscus-peppermint, hibiscus-lavender, hibiscus-rosemary) and always have a bag of these leaves. I have been experimenting with them some months ago to make muffins but that didn't go so well. Here, they worked much better. They intensify the cherry taste and add a sour component to the truffles. If you have whole flower leaves, grind two tablespoons in your food processor until they look like in the following picture. Or use the same amount of already ground leaves from a tea bag.


Sprinkle the truffle bottoms with some of the ground leaves, spoon some truffle filling on top and sprinkle some more hibiscus over it. Melt all your remaining chocolate and cover the truffles. Let cool completely and enjoy!

Sourdough adventures II

The main motivation to make my own sourdough starter was rye bread. A decent rye bread can only be made with sourdough as a yeast starter doesn't work properly in rye breads. Rye doesn't have the same strong gluten as wheat, and it's the wheat gluten which makes the dough elastic. Rye dough is much harder to work with. Because there is not so much gluten present, rye dough is dense and sticky. To produce a rye bread with a good crumb structure and a nice texture, you can either mix the flour with high gluten flour or you can use some acid. Sourdough starter contains bacteria which produce lactic acid and this is why sourdough starter is such a good leavening agent for rye bread. And it's the sourdough starter made from whole rye flour which produces the characteristic taste of a whole rye bread.


My first rye bread is pictured above. Because I have had so good results with it before, I used the ciabatta recipe again but used half all purpose and half whole rye flour to make the bread. This was a good start, because of the all purpose flour and the wheat based starter, the dough wasn't as sticky as expected and the bread came out great. It did already have some of the distinct taste of a rye bread but had a lighter and fluffier texture.


After these good experiences I finally tried a "real" sourdough bread made from rye sourdough, whole rye flour, and whole wheat flour. The recipe can be found here. I didn't have high gluten flour, so I mixed some all purpose and some gluten and I also halved the recipe. This dough was very sticky to work with and had too much water in it. The first bread had a nice crust when baked but it came out way too moist, almost half-baked. Because I wanted some rye bread so badly and because I thought that the recipe was great all together, I gave it a second try and halved the amount of water. This time the result was a perfect sourdough rye bread! Taste and structure couldn't have been better. Indeed, I was very surprised to get such a good bread! It had a strong rye flavour, the sourdough taste was present too and it had the perfect texture and crumb!

When you bake with sourdough you always have to feed the starter. This means a growing amount of starter every day and if you don't bake bread that often your starter will soon take over the kitchen. So I decided to use some of the starter to make a pizza crust with the rye starter. Although I mixed the starter with equal amounts of all purpose flour and even let it rise for some hours, the crust was still a bit too crunchy and crisp bread like (I'm talking about a not very flat crisp bread here) in my opinion. Rye crust is a great idea as it adds a lot of flavour to the pizza but next time I will make sure to add some additional yeast to the dough.
By the way, the pizza was topped with some home-made pepper cream cheese (recipe coming up soon) and a new batch of veggeroni. I was finally able to buy some smoked salt as liquid smoke seems totally unavailable over here. I also added more dried chipotles than last time and I let the veggeroni sit for two days at room temperature before slicing it. Well, even omniman P. couldn't resist and put it on his pizza too!

A little bit of this and that...

...before I return to my adventures with my new friend the sourdough starter.

It's ramsons season again. I've blogged about this great herb before and this time I didn't bake it into my bread, I made a soup with it instead.

The main ingredient of this soup was pumpkin, sweet peppers, and potatoes. I also added berbere, an Ethiopian spice mix which I ground myself with my mortar and pestle.

Pralines for my father. It was his birthday and I sent him some truffles. The first one is filled with chocolate fudge (adapted from Isa and Terry's penuche frosting from Veganomicon. I just added some cocoa. Try it, it works great! Totally gooey stuff.). The second has a chocolate, rum, hazelnut filling, the third almond/coconut, and the last has marzipan and Viennese nougat (which I talked about before). All were coated with some dark chocolate. My father called me after the package arrived and his mouth was full of these!

I made another yeast bread. This time it was Celine's salsa bread, which is oh so yummy. I cheated a bit and made it turn sort of read with the help of achiote colouring.


This burger was made of focaccia from one of my favourite (vegetarian) cookbooks. (Also available in English) I use it quite often and most of the recipes can be veganized or are already vegan. For this recipe I used soy milk powder instead of milk , although I think that theere is no powder necessary at all. Ha, and the patty was made of roasted eggplant and rye berries seasoned with yellow Thai curry paste and shredded coconut. It's still a work in progress but I hope to present you the recipe one day!

The same paste was used for this curry without coconut but with tofu, eggplants carrots and Thai basil. What do you think?

Sourdough adventures I

There are a lot of recipes and techniques that I have tried since I became vegan. I started to make a lot of things myself and from scratch too. There's one thing I became totally obsessed with and that is baking bread. When I started to make my own breads, I made regular yeast breads. My first attempts turned out a bit disappointing because I didn't stick to the rules. If instructions in the recipe read like "knead for 10 minutes" (and the instructions would ALWAYS call for that step) I would still think that two minutes would be fine. Or I wouldn't bother much with letting the dough rise enough.
When I finally did stick to the rules my results got better. Especially bread rolls came out totally fine. When I still wasn't quite satisfied with the texture and taste of my breads I bought a bread machine. I let it do all the work and was very pleased with the results. As long as I used wheat flour and yeast. One day I wanted to make a rye sourdough bread, but the machine couldn't cope with the sticky rye dough. Because I couldn't cope with it too I was quite disappointed and switched back to wheat.
About half a year ago the wonderful Bazu blogged about her sourdough experiences. (She did it again here and here.) At first I was a bit confused about sourdough pancakes and semolina breads, because to me sourdough means rye bread. All the sourdough starters I have access to at the health food store are whole rye starters. I guess it's because most rye breads over here are leavened with sourdough instead of yeast. A sourdough starter made from whole rye has a very strong sour taste and you can definitely taste it in the finished baked good. I thought this rye starter would be the perfect starter for a recipe that Bazu posted in the last blog entry I mentioned above. I modified the recipe a bit, used whole rye and whole wheat flour and my sourdough starter (and, shame on me, didn't take a picture).
But this store bought starter didn't work that well. I left the bread to rise for 12 hours and when I came back nothing had happened. I added some yeast and let the dough rise again, which worked. I shaped and baked the bread and the finished product was a absolutely delicious rye bread, exactly what I was looking for!
But, because this store bought starter didn't do his job (he added a lot of taste though), I switched back to yeast breads and forgot a bit about sourdough.
I was reminded of it when I made Ethiopian injeera bread some weeks ago. I found a very easy to follow recipe in this cookbook. It calls for wheat flour, water and some yeast and after three days, the injeera batter can be prepared.


When I was about to prepare some injeera I reserved some of the batter. This was sort of a sourdough starter, wasn't it? Okay there was yeast in it and a real sourdough starter shouldn't be made with yeast. (It's considered cheating.) But this was a beginning. I thought I could experiment a bit and then make my own real starter from scratch.

In her first entry about sourdough, Bazu included some great links and on one of these pages I found a lot of information on sourdough and recipes for all kinds of baked goods. I had a look at them and decided I would go for the sourdough ciabatta. For this bread, you need to mix sourdough starter with flour and only some water to make a fresh "thick starter". I did that and let it rise for 12 hours. When I came back, my thick starter was finished, it had almost tripled in size. You can imagine how exited I was to find out that my "cheater starter" worked. I added the rest of the ingredients, formed the ciabatta breads, let them rise again and baked them.
They came out of the oven absolutely beautiful!

I let them cool and sliced them only to realize that this bread had a PERFECT ciabatta texture and it hat the right taste, too! There was no additional strong sourdough taste.

This way I learned that there is a HUGE difference between a rye and a wheat sourdough starter. The wheat starter cannot be tasted in the finished baked good, which results in a much milder taste of the finished product. Now I could in fact imagine to make sourdough pancakes and to use the starter for sweet breads too!

The next thing I tried was to make prezels. I used the ciabatta recipe again, using whole wheat flour instead of white flour. These came out perfect too, although they were a bit harder to cook in the lye solution. But this was only because the ciabatta dough has a lot of water in it and is softer than regular bread dough. Still the result were some perfect lye pretzels:

These great results made me come to the conclusion that I cannot live without home-made sourdough bread any longer. Everything I made has been so much better than the stuff I made with yeast. Seriously these breads taste like good quality bakery bought bread and they even have their texture! Whole rye breads turn out great too. (I will write about them in my next entry, stay tuned!)

And thank you Bazu for introducing me to sourdough and thanks for sharing your experiences, recipes and great pictures!

Multigrain Bagels

These bagels were created because I was lacking an important ingredient: whole wheat flour. There was only a tiny bit left but I had lots of other flours and flakes.
So I threw in a lot of different things to make up for it. These came out as perfect bagels. Make them if you've got some flours to use up and don't hesitate to substitute some of the ingredients with what you like.

Multi-Grain Bagels (makes 14 small)

4 tablespoons toasted pumpkin seeds, measured and then ground in a food processor or chopped
120 g barley flakes (= rolled barley) (3/4) cup, ground into a course meal.
150g whole wheat flour (1 1/8 cup)
3 TB gluten flour
120g whole rye flour (1 cup)
135 g wheat flour (all purpose) (1 cup + 1 tablespoon)
1 pkg. active dry yeast
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon sugar beet syrup (or corn, maple, agave)
420 ml water (1 3/4 cup)

In a bowl, mix together all the ingredients and knead until your dough gets soft and elastic (maybe you need to add a little bit more flour or water). Knead for ten minutes by hand or with the help of a bread machine, hand held mixer, food processor...

Put the dough back into the bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled (1-1/2 hours).
Bring a large pot with water to a gentle boil, add some salt.
Preheat oven to 200°C/400°F, line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Lightly flour your working surface.
Knead the dough for another minute and divide it into 14 balls. Shape the bagels by poking your thumb through the centre. Stretch the dough into a ring and place it on a floured surface. Cover and let rise for another 20 minutes.
Cook the bagels in hot water for one minute then turn them around and cook for another minute. Depending on the size of your pot, cook only one or two bagels at a time.
Bake them for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool completely and serve or freeze them.

One year blog anniversary

I have been tagged by Liz², Coppe and missblueberry to reveal five random things about me. Well maybe it's against the rules but I am not going tell you anything random about me. (If you still would like to know something random, it's here.)

On April 1st was my one year blog anniversary. I can't believe that I've been doing this already for such a long time! So instead of something random, I would like to tell you five things I learned about veganism and blogging.



1. Before I finally decided to go vegan, I started to search the web for vegan nutrition, animal rights, and recipes. That way I discovered blogs and blogging. Reading food blogs by vegans helped me a lot with my decision to go vegan myself. I found out that going vegan was easy and that it was totally possible to live well on a vegan diet.

2. By blogging I found a way to communicate with vegans from all over the world. I've enjoyed meeting people from all kinds of places and in different situations my whole life. I remember having around fifty pen pals from all kinds of countries when I was still at school. Through blogging I had the chance to meet a lot of really nice, intelligent, funny, caring and very interesting people. All of them with amazing cooking and baking skills.

3. I started blogging shortly after I became vegan and I've learned so much about food, about techniques, substitutes and new recipes, new cuisines. I also learned a lot about nutrition and how to make the right food choices. I think through blogging I do now know much more about food than the average omni next to me. I know that veganism doesn't only save animals, it's also good for me.

4. I learned that there is absolutely no need for animal products whatsoever and I learned a lot about animal rights. I learned to cook my daily meals without any animal products and I also learned to impress omnivores with my cakes and cookies. The only sad thing is that they still don't get it. Even after having a vegan cupcake most of them say. "Yes, but I can't give up cheese." You can, but you don't want to. So I also learned not to expect too much.

5. This said, I also made the experience that people are interested in veganism if you have some food to share. After they found out that I still get my protein, iron, calcium (they never ask about b 12) most of the people I talk to are open minded. Even if I am not able to convince people to go vegan I am able to convince them that vegans are no freaks. (Even if Jenna and Bob Torres say so :) ) And maybe this will change their mind some day.

So maybe this was still a little bit random?

Two kinds of spread

Spreads are always easy to make and very versatile. Most of them keep in the fridge for quite some time as well. Here are the recipes for two that I made recently. I can't decide which of them tastes better, I really like both.

Eggplant Dip (or spread)


You can spread this onto your bread or eat some tortilla chips or rye crisp bread with it. Or you can mix it into your salad (goes really, really well with chickpeas, peppers, and cucumbers).

1 eggplant (about 350g)
10 g parsley, chopped (2-3 tbsp.)
1 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 tsp. salt or less
2 tsp. cumin, whole
2 tsp. onion powder
30 g (1 oz.) tomato paste

Preheat oven to 200°C (400°F). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Slice the eggplant lengthwise into halves, place them onto the baking sheet with the cut side down and roast until soft (30-45 minutes). Let cool and then peel. Place eggplant and all other ingredients in a food processor and pulse until creamy. Serve immediately or transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate.

Easy Bean Spread with Walnuts


1 can pinto or kidney beans (1 1/2 cups)
140g (1/2 cup) hot salsa
30g (1/4 cup, 10 halves) chopped walnuts
2 tsp. apple cider vinegar
1 clove garlic
1-2 Tbsp. chopped parsley.

This one is even easier. Place the walnuts in a food processor and pulse until they turn into a course meal. Add the garlic, pulse again and then add the remaining ingredients. Pulse until the spread has the consistency of hummus.

A little bit of Easter baking

Happy Easter everyone!


When I was visiting my parents for Easter last year, I picked up this recipe for an Easter-Almond Ring in a supermarket leaflet. I cut the recipe out and took it with me on my way back to Dresden. I put it onto the wall in our kitchen, because I wanted to try it out soon.

In this case, soon is one year later. I modified the recipe a bit and I changed the shape. I wasn't very interested in the ring, I wanted to make some individual servings and found a great way to shape my baked goods over here. It's in German, but you just have to follow the pictures if you want to shape e. g. your next batch of cinnamon rolls like this, too.

Oster-Mandelöhrchen (makes 12)
Easter Almond Ears (Öhrchen actually means "little ears")

300 g (2 1/2 cup) all purpose flour
125 ml (1/2 cup) warm milk
150 g (3/4 cup) sugar, divided
1 package active dry yeast
80 g ( 1/3 cup) margarine, divided
zest and juice of one organic lemon
200 g (2 cup) ground almonds*
6 tablespoons soy milk
50 g (about 10 deglet noor)chopped dates**
*I had only 100 g of almonds, so I used 100g (2 cups) breadcrumbs from a sweet bread. Worked totally fine!
**I didn't have the raisins the recipe called for
The recipe provided the additional ingredients for a sugar icing, but I skipped that.

In a bowl mix together flour yeast, milk and 50 g (1/4 cup) sugar. Let proof for 15 minutes. Add salt and 50g (3 1/2 tablespoons) margarine. Knead for a couple of minutes until your dough is smooth and elastic. Put back into the bowl, cover and let rise for 1 hour.
In a second bowl combine lemon peel and juice, almonds, remaining sugar and margarine, the remaining 6 tablespoons milk and dates. Stir until the mixture is well combined.
To form the dough into ears, roll out a rectangle, spread the almond mixture on top and roll into a log shape. (Start with the longer side of the rectangle). Then click the link mentioned above and follow the steps in the pictures.
Prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper or grease it and preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F) . Bake the ears for 20 minutes until golden brown.

And now have a look at these Kahlua Rolls. Another great recipe from Celine.
Mine look completely different from Celine's, but they were a huge hit! I am definitely going to make these again. They freeze well and are a wonderful snack. And of course they satisfy every sweet tooth.