Food Friday - Strawberry Curd

It is time for another recipe my dear readers. I haven't posted a recipe in ages!

I recently spotted strawberry curd in our supermarket, and I don't mean the one you buy in the dairy section of the super market but self made stuff. They sold it for 2 € per 200g and I thought that was quite a lot, although I did want to try it. So I thought I would buy strawberries some curd and try to make it myself.

Here it is:

Ingredients

10 Strawberries

6 frozen Strawberries

200 g Greek Yogurt

250 g Curd

1 tbsp Agave Syrup

Blend both the frozen strawberries and the normal strawberries till you have a strawberry mush. 

Then mix it together with the yogurt and the curd and enjoy :)

Really easy to make but so so so good.

x

J.

A healthy Breakfast never killed nobody

Hi everyone :)

The ones of you that follow me on Instagram will have seen that I posted a picture of my breakfast on Tuesday and promised a blog post with a recipe. So here it is:

Ingredients:

3 tbsp curd

2 tbsp yogurt

1/2 tsp agave syrup

2 tbsp porridge oats

1 small handful of cashew nuts (chopped)

1tbsp honey

1 tbsp apple sauce

2 strawberries

a couple of blueberries

This breakfast is really easy to make and wont take long at all. Mix the curd, yogurt, and agave syrup together in a bowl and roast the chopped cashew nuts and the porridge oats in a pan. 

Don't use any oil or butter and stir until they start to turn brown. You have to really stay on that otherwise you might burn them. 

As soon as they start to turn brown you add a tablespoon of honey and mix it together thoroughly, then take it off the hob to let it cool down for a bit.

After that you only have to chop up your strawberries and your are practically done.

Get your curd and yogurt mixture into your breakfast bowl and pour the apple sauce on top as well as your roasted ingredients.

At last add the strawberries and the blueberries and you are good to go :)

don't you just love that evil little smirk that my bowl got going on? :D

I would recommend drinking a smoothie with it but I might just be a bit obsessed with those. If you, however, feel the same: here are a view smoothie recipes!

Enjoy your breakfast :)

x

J.

Healthy Breakfast

Hi everyone :)

Last Friday I introduced you guys to the world of smoothies and their deliciousness. If you haven't read that yet you definitely should: here.

This week I want to continue with healthy food starting off with breakfast.

I am a bit obsessed with freshly cooked meals and various sorts of salads at the moments. Healthy food isn't only healthy but most of the time tastes even better than any fast food you can find. And it leaves you without a guilty conscience which is always a bonus.

I am subscribed to Niomi Smart and her last video was about healthy breakfast foods so I thought I would share it with you guys. 

All these things are really delicious and now you can have a bot of a variation since always eating the same things gets a bit boring :)

x

J.

Smoothie-licious

Hi everyone :)

As promised here are some more very very delicious smoothie recipes that I have tried myself and deemed tasty.

I hope you like them and can maybe enjoy them as much as I do. I have at least one a day at the moment because I like experimenting with them so much but also because I have a bit of a sweet tooth and smoothies are my sweets right now.

Maybe I should think of names for them as well. Just so it is easier to tell them apart. Let me tell you they all are absolutely dumb. Literally the first thing that came to mind so don't judge.... :P

Obviously you will have to cut all the ingredients up just a bit because although I do have a great blender I don't think it could handle a whole apple :D

Green Monster

1 green apple

1 peach

1 kiwi

50 ml passion fruit juice

(for slightly sweeter version add 1 tsp of maple syrup)

Purple Delight

1 handful of blueberries

1 peach

4 tbsp yogurt

1/2 banana

50 ml blackcurrant juice

Kiwi-Berry

6 strawberries (fairly large)

1 handful of blueberries

50 ml blackcurrant juice

1 peach

1 kiwi

They all make for around a glass of smoothie, depending on your glass size really.

Enjoy!

x

J.

My Smoothie Life

Hi everyone :)

It is getting warmer and warmer and summer is nearing. 

At least that is how it is supposed to work, so I am just going to forget about the bad weather and pretend that I am preparing for summer. Which I am it's just that the weather hasn't quite gotten that yet, most of the time anyway. 

As I was saying: It is going to be summer soon and us girls now that this means getting your beach body ready. Yes there is no beaches in Augsburg but that is not the point. We want to look our best but at the same time we don't want to be missing out on the good stuff. 

Which is why I have some pretty simple things that you can do that will keep you from gaining weight which is all I think we need really. I am not a big fan of changing your whole body for summer I just like to keep it the way it is :)

Lets begin:

There is 3 things I like to do.

Firstly I like to stay away from sweets completely which is a lot easier said than done, I know. But I am not just saying stay away from sweets no I am giving you an alternative that you can get creative with and that is even more delicious than sweets. 

SMOOTHIES 

They are tasty and healthy at the same time. I have one recipe for you now but I will make a whole post about it on Friday, since I have been having one for breakfast every morning this week and will continue to experiment with them.

All you really need for smoothies is a blender and fruit so that is quite handy as well. 

Ingredients

75 ml apple juice  

4 tbsp yogurt

6 strawberries (fairly large)

half a banana (a big one)

If you feel like having a real refreshment add 3-4 frozen strawberries. 

That all goes into a blender until all the fruit pieces have turned into a liquid, slightly thick mixture. 

And there you have your sweet treat :)

Secondly I like to drink a lot of water and there is a reason for that. Not only because you need to stay hydrated in summer but also because your body stores water if you don't drink enough. That means that if you drink more your body will loose the water it has been storing and you will actually loose weight without loosing weight :D Did that make sense?

And the third thing: Try to avoid eating anything other than vegetables after 8 pm. Meaning salad, cucumbers, peppers and stuff are fine, but no potatoes. So just vegetables that consist of a lot of water. That goes together with the second thing in a way, because lots of water is good. Or fluid in generaöl

And with these three things, looking good for summer really isn't so hard. Also what doing this will include is better skin. Because eating healthy and drinking a lot actually does have an effect on your skin. 

x

J.

Food Friday - Easter Brunch/ Cake Pops

Hi everyone :)

So I have been getting my baking on again lately. Quite a lot to be honest and I thought there were some good enough things produced so I should really not keep them from you. 

I wont put up all the recipes today and spread them out over the weekend Maybe you can find some things you would like to try :) I always feel inspired after reading blogs about food :D

I tried making Cake Pops and by tried I mean I got so annoyed at one point I just wanted to through them all out haha.

Maybe not my brightest hour of baking but hey....

Take your time with these cake pops and do plan with 2 days because the cake needs to cool down over night. If you don't have that kind of time just put it in the freezer for maybe around 15 minutes, that has always worked for me so far. 

Ingredients:

145 g soft butter

80 g sugar

1 sachet of vanilla sugar

a bit of finely ground lemon zest

2 eggs (medium sized)

150 g flour

1 tbsp baking powder

2 tbsp yogurt

60 g cream cheese

30 g icing sugar

as well as

400 g white chocolate coating

Other things you need:

cake pop sticks

20 cm loaf pan

rotary cutter (whichever you like best really)

Preheat the oven to 180°C 

Mix 125 g of the butter, the sugar, vanilla sugar and lemon zest into a bowl and beat till it gets foamy. Now I know that is what it says in the recipe but to be honest: My mixture has never looked anything close to foamy so don't worry if it doesn't as long as it looks something like this you are fine!

Add the eggs one after another and finally finish off with adding the flour, baking powder and a dash of salt.

Add the two tablespoons of yogurt but don't use the electric mixer instead take like a spoon or something. 

Grease the loaf pan and pour the mixture in and off it goes into the oven for around 50 minutes. 

Let the cake rest over night or at least 2-3 hours. If you don't have that kind of time about 15 minutes in the freezer will do as well. 

After that take your cake and roughly crumble it into smaller pieces so you can grind it to fine crumbs in the food processor.

This was the hilarious part: We didn't have a food processor so we just thought why not do it with a blender? Bad idea I can tell you, it took forever :D

Cake crumbs, cream cheese, icing sugar and the rest of the butter are to be knead together so you have an even mixture.

With your finished mixture you want to try to roll it our and cut out pieces with any form of rotary cutter you like. We made hearts.

That is where it kind of turned into a mess, because the hearts we had were really small so we got like a thousand out of the mixture we had. 

After you have cut them out, heat up your chocolate and then dunk the cake pops sticks in there and impale a heart. 

You can either let that cool down on it's own for a bit or use the freezer option again. I recommend the freezer.

You are almost done now: Just dunk the hearts or whichever form you chose in the chocolate and have them cool down standing up. You can use a egg carton for that like we did or anything else you can stick them into really.

Now you are good to eat them :) They were a s*** load of work because of the small hearts but absolutely delicious nevertheless.

Also do have some fin while baking. We had different kinds of fruit lying around and decided why not have chocolate fondue while we are baking.

That's how sexy I looked trying to eat a chocolate strawberry:

Don't judge, you know you would have done it too :D

Have fun trying this recipe and also making a mess of your kitchen :)

x

J.

Food Friday- Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese

Hi everyone :)

Wow we haven't done one of these in a while have we? I don't even get why, I love cooking and baking so much but I tend to get so carried away with it that I forget taking pictures.

Last Monday, when I was cooking for my boyfriend I didn't forget though. So here is a slightly changed recipe from a Jerusalem cook book that my mum bought my grandma but somehow ended up on my bookshelf. 

Ingredients:

4 small sweet potatoes (1kg)

5 tbsp olive oil

40 ml balsamic vinegar

20 g sugar

8 spring onions

1 red chill

6 fresh figs 

2 about 1,5 cm thick slices of goat cheese

2 tbsp honey

a bit of Parmesan

sea salt, pepper

Preheat oven to 240°C.

Wash the sweet potatoes, cut in half lengthwise and slice up each half into 3 pieces. 

Mix 3 tablespoons of olive oil with 2 teaspoons of salt and a bit of pepper in a bowl. Add your sweet potato in and spread the spiced oil evenly. 

Put the slices with the skin on the downside onto a griddle (I would advise you to use baking paper, so the sweet potato doesn't stick to it).

Roast all that in the oven for 25 about 25 minutes. The sweet potato should be soft but not fall apart.

Heat the balsamic vinegar in a small pot and add the sugar. Let the mixture boil up and cook for about 2-4 minutes on a lower heat. It should get slightly thicker in it's consistency that's when you know you can take it off the stove.

sorry for the dirty stove. I do live with 3 guys :D

 It will still get thicker while it cools down so don't worry if you are not sure if you took it off to soon. If it doesn't turn out to be a sirupy texture then just add a bit of water when it's to thick or heat it up again (there really is no way this can go wrong).

Chop up your spring onions into ca. 4 cm long slices.

Next chop up the chili, don't chop it into too small pieces as you won't be able to avoid it in your food then. Cause with this dish you will be able to taste the chili, so if you have people that don't like it to spicy they can take them out. 

Put the rest of your olive oil, the spring onions and the chili in a pan and roast them gently for about 4 to 5 minutes.

After that only your goat cheese is left and you have to bear with me on this one as I can promise it will be delicious although it will probably not look like it :D

Heat up a bit of olive oil and the tablespoons of honey in a pan and roast your goat cheese in it. 

After that you just have to slice your figs in quarters and you are all set. Put the sweet potato on your plate and arrange them with the fig in any artsy way you can come up with. Or just stack everything on your plate that works too, especially if you are hungry :D

Add the spring onions and chili with the oil from the pan and sprinkle it with the balsamic vinegar sirup.

Grade some parmesan over the top if you feel like it :) 

Now find a free space for the goat cheese and you can get stuck in!

I didn't have the figs in there on Monday because they didn't have any at the store but it is good with or without them :)

Enjoy your meal.

x

J.

Food Friday - Porridge

Hi everyone :)

Who loves breakfast?

I have to admit I am the biggest fan of breakfast, that being pancakes, yogurt with cereal and fruit or eggs on toast with Marmite.

I just love breakfast in every shape and form it comes in, but lately and generally during the winter months I have been enjoying porridge.

I usually go traditional and have it with some sugar and cinnamon but I thought I would show try some different ones to give you guys a bit of an option :)

Since I am not actually a chef (sadly, but true :D) I have been looking around for some good recipes and have come to find one on a platform we all know: YouTube.

Not only do I quite like porridge but I also am a little fan of Jamie Oliver, so it's a good thing those to things go very well together :D

I am not only showing you these though, I have obviously tried all of them and the banana one is to die for. 

But being the creative person I am and having this need to not stick to recipes, caused me to mix the chocolate into the banana porridge, since we all know chocolate and banana is a excellent combination.

Let me tell you that makes the whole thing even better. As another option you can just eat some banana with the chocolate porridge, if you are not as happy to try out new things as I am. 

I can also imagine the fruit thing to be really good with fresh fruit. I used fruit from my grandma's garden that she had frozen cause she couldn't eat it all in summer. 

It wasn't fresh but still really good. And if you fancy your breakfast with a lot of calories you can eat the fruity one with whipped cream, heavenly!!

Enjoy your breakfast :)

x

J.

Food Friday - Ultimate Breakfast

Hi everyone :)

I hope everyone is well and enjoying the beautiful weather outside as those my quite possibly be the last sunbeams we will get this summer. 

I however wasn't lucky enough to spend my days outside over the last week since I have been in physiotherapy for my scoliosis which is a result of the car accident I have been in. 

And although my physiotherapist is amazing with his hands and has really been helping my back now looks like I have been  and is completely bruised. It almost looks a bit like a giant hicky :D So well no running around in a bikini for me :)

Which is why we had to do something else that was equally as great as lying around in the sun getting a tan and nothing other than food can achieve that haha.

So on Sunday, as you already know if you are not here for the first time or follow me on Twitter or Instagram, I made the best breakfast ever :) You could call it the ultimate breakfast because that is what it was for me and my flatmate.

Al the way through the week he had been bugging ma about making breakfast on Sunday and on Friday I finally had enough and gave in. 

So him saying: We should make some epic breakfast on Sunday turned into me going grocery shopping on Saturday and getting up at 9 am on Sunday to make breakfast. 

The things I do for my flatmates, I should really win an award for this! 

Don't get me wrong I love to do these kinds of things even though it means I have to get up fairly early on a Sunday. 

Ingredients:

250 g     flour

2 tbsp     sugar

1 tsp     baking powder

1/2 tsp     baking soda

1/2 tsp     salt

500 ml     buttermilk

60 ml     sour cream 

2     eggs

3 tbsp     melted butter

Mix flour, baking powder, sugar, baking soda and salt together in one bowl and the buttermilk, sour cream, eggs and melted butter in another. Slowly stir the two mixtures together but don't stir for to long. It is okay if it is not a even mixture. Let the dow expand for about 10 minutes.

Melt a bit of butter in a pan and heat it up on a medium temperature. Depending on how big your pan is make 3 to 4 pancakes leaving them to bake for 2-3 minutes (or until the edges are baked) on one side. Flip them round and leave for another 1-2 minutes. This also depends on how brown you want to have them so just experiment with it a bit. 

Next thing you do is eat :D

Preferably for me with maple syrup and banana but you can have it with whatever suits you best :)

Or you can add blueberries to the finished dough if you like that!

I also made some hot orange-ginger-drink thing. I have no idea what it was called :) 

For two glasses you need:

6 oranges

1/2 tsp of grated ginger

Squeeze the oranges and heat them up in a pot with the ginger. You can then either drink it hot or wait till it is cold. It is tastes good either way and is actually very healthy. 

To change it up a bit you could also add the juice of a lemon and 1 tbsp of honey. If you do that though drinking it hot is way better :)

As you can see we also had hot chocolate but I don't think that I need to explain how that is made to any of you :)

It tastes a lot better though if you heat the milk up and add real chocolate instead of cocoa powder and a bit of cream. Also makes it a lot less healthy but who cares, right? It is breakfast so I don't really care how many calories it has. I can eat healthy the rest of the day :D

x

J.

Food Friday- Chicken Curry

Hi guys :)

I have just realised that there is a pattern to this Friday posts but it is not intentional :) I didn't intend it to be about a restaurant one week and then about a recipe I tried the other. That just happened.
Following this pattern it's about a recipe again this week :)
Yeah I love cooking.

This week I made chicken curry and a delicious dessert with a friend.
You might recognize the kitchen as it is the same friend :)
Both recipes are actually from Jamie Oliver but since we never tell each other what we are making till we actually start making it, I did not know that beforehand either. 
He chose the main course and I did come up with a dessert.

Chicken Curry:

Ingredients: (serves 4)

6  cloves of garlic

7 cm peeled ginger

2-3 fresh red chillis (without the seeds)

1 tbsp mustard seeds

1 tbsp paprika powder

1 tbsp Garam Masala (Indian spice blend)

2 tsp ground cumin

2 tsp ground coriander seed

Olive Oil

200 g plain yoghurt

4 medium-sized chicken breasts, skinned and chopped into pieces

1 tbsp butter

2 medium-sized onions, peeled and chopped into thin slices

2 tbsp tomato purée

1 small hand full of cashew nuts (chop up small)

sea salt

100 ml cream

1 hand full of fresh coriander, chopped

juice of 2 limes

How to do this :


Chop up the chillis as thin as possible and mix with the finely grated ginger and garlic. 



Heat up some oil in a pan and roast the mustard seed till they start bouncing then mix them with the paprika powder, ground cumin, coriander, 1/2 tbsp of Garam Masala and your chilli-ginger-garlic-mix.
Take half of your mixture and add the yoghurt (set the other half aside).
Marinate the meat in your yoghurt-spice-mixture for half an hour.

Melt the butter in a pan and sweat it with the onion slices and the other half of your chilli-ginger-garlic-mix for about 15 minutes. After that you can add the tomato purée, 1/2 liter of water and 1/2 tbsp of sea salt and let it simmer for another couple of minutes. Set aside afterwards.


Fry the marinated chicken till it's done. Take the sauce, add the cream with the rest of the Garam Masala and season it further if needed. 
Your almost done now. Just add the chicken into the sauce with the fresh coriander and the lime juice and your good to go.

We decided to have it with rice but it would also be really good with naan bread. And Jamie Oliver recommends you have a cool beer with it :D Since I don't drink I had sparkling mineral water with some more lime juice which was also very good although it doesn't sound that exciting :)

Enjoy your meal.

DESSERT!!!!! As you might have guessed by now: I'm obsessed with desserts! There is nothing in this world that is better then a good dessert :)

For our dessert we had something called Banoffee sundae which was sooooooo good I don't even have words to describe it. But it takes quite some time to make, since part of what you are making is ice cream, yeah!!! It's a great summery dessert though.

Ingredients: (serves 6)

• 6 medium bananas
• 200 g full-fat Greek yoghurt
• 1 good pinch ground cinnamon
• 2-3 tablespoons honey, depending on how ripe the bananas are
• 50 g raisins
• 3 tablespoons dark rum
• 50 g good-quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
• 50 g hazelnuts
• 4 tablespoons dulce de leche

Slice 4 of the 6 bananas and whiz them up in a food processor with the cinnamon, honey, raisins and rum until smooth (if you have more time you can let the raisins soak in the rum for a bit beforehand). And off in the freezer it goes for about 5 hours. 

           

When your ice cream is done you can start with the rest. Grate the chocolate and roughly chop the hazelnuts, then toast them in a pan till they are golden.
Heat the dulche de leche in a small saucepan until it is runny and, while it warms up, slice the remaining 2 bananas.








Take your dessert glasses or whatever you wanna have the dessert in and start with a layer of your sliced banana. Top with a scoop of banana ice cream, drizzle over the runny dulche de leche and finish off with the hazelnuts and your grated chocolate. 

 
























Sadly ours did not look like Jamie's lol. If you want to have a look at the original recipe: jamieoliver.com


And the most important thing: Have fun cooking :)

Yes we are silly enough to make faces with cooking spoons and our food :D

x
J.

Baking and Hot Chocolate

So like I said yesterday todays post is going to be about food.
For the last two weeks I liturally had no time for cooking or baking at all which I usually do a lot. I had no time for it cause I was studying real hard for an exam I had on friday. I epically failed last semester cause I would have needed only 0.5 point more to pass. Yeah so I had to retake it this semester which really pissed me off and since I wanted to make sure that never happened again I didn't do much apart from trying to get all the grammar of Middle High German in my head.
Not a very fun topic and in my opinion completly useless ( I think most of the people studying German will probably agree, if not let me know and we can have a heated discussion about it lol)
So yes there have been many things I wanted to try out before I would post them here but there was just no way I could spend 3 hours in the kitchen baking stuff. I know a cake doesn't take that long to make but when I do bake I like to get a really good result I'm a bit weird with that I guess. I get a little perfectionist now an then.
So there is 3 things I tried so far but the 3. isn't ready yet and to be honest I havn't got round to translating the recipe yet :D Apart from that: I havn't tried it either so I don't actually know if it is any good, even though it looks really good.
Back to the things I have made:
I spend all of friday evening in the kitchen making cinnamon rolls and me and my flatmate had them for breakfast this morning ( well not all of them :D)


So that's what our breakfast looked like. Yes we had some strawberries with it so we would have at least something that would make us feel good about this breakfast :D But whipped cream is just soooo good.....

Cinnamon roll, Strawberries, Hot White Chocolate with Raffaello

 Now to the 'How-To-Make-This'-Part :

Cinnamon Rolls

Recipe

Ingredients:

500g       flour

42g         yeast

60g         sugar

250 ml    milk

150g       soft butter

140 g      brown sugar

1 tbls      cinnamon ( you can use more if you want it'll just be more cinnamony haha)

50g         icing sugar

a view drops of vanilla essence

How to make them:

Warm the milk up a bit in a pot or you can just do it in the microwave for about 30 seconds. It doesn't have to be hot just so it's warm ( you should be able to still put your finger in ;) ). Put the yeast in the warm milk and mix it with a tbls from the 60g of sugar you have. After that you put the flour in and knead to a smooth dough. Put the dough in the oven at 50°C  and let it prove for around 15 minutes. 

After that put 100g of the soft butter in (not totally melted but soft enough so you can squish it easily with your hands) along with the rest of the sugar. Knead till it is a nice smooth dough. Place it back in the oven for another 20 minutes. 

Put some flour on wherever you wanna roll out the dough and unroll it till it's like 1 cm thick. Melt the last 50g of butter and let it cool down for a bit so it's not totally hot when you put it on the dough. Dab the dough with the butter and spread the mixture of bronw sugar and cinnamon evenly on the dough. Furl the dough (best if you start with the samll side) and then cut it into 2-3 cm thick slices. Get some backing paper onto  a baking plate and lay them on there with the cut face pointing downwards. 

And then back in the oven they go for another 20 minutes of proving. After that they are finally ready to get baked. Around 25 minutes at 160°C on the lowest rail of the oven.

Mix icing sugar with a bit of water and some drops of vanilla essence and spread it over you cinnamon rolls once they are cold. How much water you need depends on how thick you want your icing to be :)

You'll get around 16 cinnamon rolls out of this recipe.

Hot white chocolate with Raffaello:

Recipe
Ingredients:

Milk

Cream

White Chocolate

Raffaello

Whipped Cream

a bit of cinnamon

Basically how much milk/cream/white chocolate you need depends on how much of this drink you actually wanna make. For one mug you have to fill it half with milk and half with cream (for more than one just do it more than once :D). For every two cups you need one bar of chocolate and you need 3 Raffaellos for each cup.

How to make it:

heat up the milk and cream and always keep stiring otherwise it might burn in. As soon as it's boiling you can put the chocolate in, when all of it is melted your drink is almost ready. Just put 3 Raffaellos in your cup and pour your drink in then decorate it with whipped cream and cinnamon.

( I 'stole' this recipe from a German Youtuber called daaruum)

I had a lot of fun making both those things and it was an amazing breakfast this morning. Another reason why we had strawberries with it is, that both the cinnamon rolls and the hot chocolate are really sweet so we kind of neaded something a little less sweet to go with it.

 A little side not: I can just hardly advice you not to make cinnamon rolls if you want others to think your an amazing cook because they look so good. Or if your just like me because you will go mental I can tell since that's what happened to me. Don't get me wrong they taste amazing but they just don't look anything like the once you can buy in shops. I tried to make them look like it but I gave up and decided that them tasting good had to be enough :D So it's not gonna look like art but it sure tastes amazing :)
And if you can get them to look like the ones in a shop: Tell me how you did it!!!! 


I hope you have fun making these things and especially eating/ drinking them 

x
J.