Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Curry

This morning was yet another morning of Liam going in to uni really early, I'll be glad when this project gets handed in on Thursday! Once everyone was where they should be (school, sleeping in cot) I treated myself to a Vanilla Chai Latte...

I haven't had this before - someone recommended it to me in Waitrose - it was so tasty! :) full of sugar and other cr*p no doubt, but delicious all the same!

Then it was time for breakfast. You'd think after all the chocolate oat cookies yesterday, the last thing I'd want would be chocolate porridge! When I was comparing the tastes in my post yesterday however, I realised I hadn't had cocoa porridge since I switched over to this blog at the start of January! (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I couldn't find a post on it anyway!) With the wind howling and the rain pouring down outside, chocolate porridge sounded perfect to me! I sweetened it with a little Sweet Freedom and topped it with a coconut sauce made of 10g coconut flour, 60ml Kara coconut milk (I was surprised how coconutty this flour smelt/tasted, basically like ground up desiccated coconut...I don't know why I wasn't expecting it to really) and fresh raspberries...

This was perfect! The cocoa porridge was lovely and rich, but the coconut sauce and raspberries lightened it up so it wasn't sickly, yum!

Unfortunately I can't say the same for lunch. I was finally going to make Socca. I decided to go with the same toppings as Laura, so I got my kale, mushrooms and courgettes...

and my chickpea flour...

and my tahini based sauce...

so what went wrong???

This is why I normally leave the pancake making to Liam!! I was so disappointed! :( completely my fault as everyone else seems to have great results with socca. I'm planning to try the oven baked socca next - hopefully I'll have less chance of messing that up!!

I tried to eat the vegetables on their own with the tahini sauce...

but bleugh, I think they'd been waiting so long for the socca to be ready that they were completely over-cooked to the point of inedible... I hate wasting food but I could not eat this :(

Lunch instead was a satsuma with 3 of Mama Pea's dough balls...

and another chai latte...

all delicious, but a bit sweet for a normal "lunch"...I was a bit worried it would lead to me eating everything else in sight, so I had a nap when baby did instead...any excuse to catch up on sleep! :)

Mid-afternoon our Asda order arrived. Nothing particularly exciting (I save that for my health food shopping trips!!) but the fridge...

and cupboard (with baby at the bottom trying to grab the tinned pears!)...

and indeed the unpictured freezers, fruit bowl etc are now full...I need to have a good sort out tomorrow!!

Whilst sorting out the shopping I also had a slice of seeded toast with peanut butter.

Then it was time to make dinner, one of my favourites. Sweet potato and cauliflower curry. Vaguely based around this curry recipe.

Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Curry
(serves 2-4)

• cauliflower (I usually use approx 400-500g)
• sweet potato (approx 500g)
• tsp oil
• 1-2 tbsp curry paste
• 1 can chopped tomatoes
• some kind of coconut addition! I usually use a can of coconut milk or coconut cream, or a sachet of creamed coconut depending on what I have in the cupboard

First chop (or in my case, get Liam to chop!) the sweet potato and cauliflower...

and grab the curry paste (lazy option, you could obviously make it with diced onions, ginger, garlic spices etc instead...I sometimes do but have tended to go for the paste since having the baby a year ago, oops!), tinned tomatoes and coconut milk...

No photos of the cooking process as the steam messed up the photos, but in short...

• Heat pan/wok
• Add a little oil
• Fry off a couple of tablespoons (or more/less to taste) of curry paste
• Then add the sweet potato and cauliflower and stir to cover in curry paste
• Add tin of tomatoes and tin of coconut milk (plus extra water if necessary) and simmer until vegetables tender

 This took me about half an hour, with lid on the wok, but just check to make sure the sweet potatoes are nice and soft before serving.

This doesn't really need rice with it, but I had a little anyway...

Yum, I love this so much! It's not normally quite this orange in real life!! Liam brought home a "posh" camera from uni that he is borrowing until Thursday to photograph his projects. The quality of the photos is great but not sure what it's done to the colour!

The camera - a Nikon D40 SLR - also took great photos of the chocolates I ate this evening. Booja Booja banana truffles...

time to try one...

Yum. I loved the texture of these, so soft and squidgy!! I'd hoped they would have had more of a banana-y taste, you could definitely taste the cognac but the banana didn't really come through. Delicious though...I managed to eat the entire box in about 10 minutes, oops! Love this photo too - I wish my camera could do the focus on foreground with blurry background thing! I also wish I'd had use of it yesterday to photograph the chocolate oat cookies - I couldn't get my camera to focus on the close-up to show the texture properly. The camera is very bulky though, wouldn't be much good for slinging in my bag when going out and about!

I'll just have to take extra care over the presentation of tomorrow's dinner to make the most of having another opportunity to use the camera before Liam has to give it back to uni!

This post reads back a bit disjointedly - an accurate reflection of my mind today perhaps - days when I don't have enough contact with other adults, I tend to just spill lots of random thoughts out at the first opportunity! Sorry, hope you managed to make some sort of sense of it!! Tomorrow is toddler group, and a chance to catch up with other mums, so hopefully I'll be sounding a bit more "normal" tomorrow!!