WIAW - Deconstructed Burritos

Happy What I Ate Wednesday everyone! I hope you're all enjoying the day - I love seeing what everyone eats on WIAW - such a great idea by Jenn!


This post is based on yesterday's food, as I write most of my blog posts in the morning when Toby has his nap - by the time evening rolls round I'm usually way too tired to do anything more than read other people's blog posts so this works better for me!

Yesterday, I woke up in the mood for chocolate. Not that that's particularly unusual, but yesterday I decided to properly do something about it. Enter, Oh She Glow's Chocolate Cake Batter Smoothie for breakfast!

Mmmm, this was a fantastic start to the day!

I've been eating my breakfast quite late recently - around 10.30am - as I've been waiting until Toby has his nap so I can enjoy my breakfast in peace. His nap time is my "me time", so this breakfast was immediately followed by taking photos of my Strawberry Coconut Muffins, which of course involved eating the one I bit in to...

Not really necessary as I was still full from my bowl of chocolate breakfast, but these muffins were so tasty I couldn't resist!

It worked out ok though as lunch ended up being a late one. I decided to wait until Liam got home at 2pm to eat, as I'd already eaten so much late morning, but we then ended up chatting so didn't eat until almost 3pm! Ugly photo, but delicious lunch - Vogel's sunflower and barley bread + Pure spread + tomato ketchup + Linda McCartney sausages = quick, easy, tasty lunch!

I don't really like Quorn products or many of the other fake "meat" items you can buy, but I do like the products I've tried in the Linda McCartney range, so I keep a box of these sausages in the freezer for when I'm wanting a quick sausage sarnie!

An hour or so after lunch, I got a text from my Mum who had been catching up on my blog & therefore fancied a muffin! So she came round and I ate a muffin as well...

The children both had one too. I wasn't surprised that Toby gobbled his down - he eats anything - but Izzy is normally not the biggest cake fan - she usually just eats the icing and leaves the cake, so I wasn't really expecting her to like these. However, she loved it! She ate hers faster than Toby (normally unheard of!) and immediately asked for another!! Haha, no go, but I'm glad she liked them!

Dinner was something I'd been looking forward to for a few days, but kept forgetting to take the wraps out of the freezer. A deconstructed version of these sweet potato and kidney bean burritos. I served everything separately so we could all make our own wraps. Kidney bean mix (which I accidentally added a bit too much chilli powder to), grated cheddar, guacamole (just two avocadoes fork mashed with lemon juice and chilli powder), baked sweet potatoes and sour cream dip (grabbed from the fridge to compensate for the spicy kidney bean mix!)...

plus seedy wraps. Izzy loves making up her own meals so this worked great - she could avoid the spicy kidney beans, I could avoid the cheese (must find some non-dairy cheese!) and I thought Liam would avoid the guacamole, but actually he loved it! Toby just picked at some wrap and sweet potato, he wasn't too keen on this meal. I had two wraps with everything but the cheese...

Delicious, I loved how vibrant all the colours were!

These tasted amazing, but I made a mistake. I have been avoiding dairy for the last few days or so as I realised it was possibly the cause of the agonising stomach pains and other tummy troubles I've been getting. So when I planned this meal, I deliberately made it so that I could avoid the cheese. But then when I made the bean mix too spicy by mistake, I grabbed the sour cream from the fridge without even thinking about it being dairy. Unfortunately my tummy didn't forget - I spent the rest of the evening in agony after this meal, so that was the last of the food for my WIAW post.

Question: for those of you with intolerances to food, how long does your tummy/any other symptoms usually take to react after eating something?  Or, for anyone, after you eat something slightly 'dodgy'? My tummy started playing up within 10 minutes of finishing eating, so probably about half an hour after I started the meal. Liam reckons that is too quick, and my tummy must have been reacting to something I ate earlier in the day. But I'm sure it was the sour cream and/or the spicy kidney bean mix - everything else I ate yesterday was fairly 'safe' I think. Grrr. Annoying either way, I want to be able to enjoy my food without worrying about the consequences! :( Thankfully I've woken up this morning and my tummy is fine, but still, not pleasant while it lasted last night.

Sorry to end the post on a miserable note! You can tell me about your favourite Mexican food instead if you like! :) I'm loving Mexican food recently, but don't like the texture of beans, so meals like the above - where the kidney beans are mashed - work well for me. It would be great to get some new ideas for meals as well!

Strawberry Coconut Muffins

When I was younger, it was my sister, Sarah, who did the baking.

I didn't really cook at all until I was pregnant with Izzy, and then I focussed on learning how to cook savoury meals.

I only started baking a year or so ago (according to my photos it was June 2010), and I started with muffins. Muffins are so easy to make, and should be impossible to mess up. Except the first time I made them, on a whim, with no pre-planning. I decided to make rhubarb muffins with Izzy. I didn't have any butter, so for some reason decided apple sauce would be the best replacement...not the oil or margerine that I also had on hand. My baking powder was years old. And I didn't have a muffin tin so I just used paper cake cases on a baking tray.

Yeah, they were flat.

Luckily, after trying to force-feed her one of these muffins, my Mum took pity on me and lent me her cook book...

...and I never looked back! (or gave her the book back, sorry Mum, at least you can see it's well-used!)

I've since graduated to making cupcakes, birthday cakes etc, and whilst I do love butter icing, muffins will always have a special place in my heart. They are sooo quick and easy to prepare.

These muffins took just 10 minutes to make up last night, and after 20 minutes in the oven they were ready, yum!

Strawberry Coconut Muffins
(adapted from Susan Reimer's Summer Fruit Muffins in the above cookbook)

Makes 12

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes

• 280g plain flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 0.5 tsp salt
• 140g sugar
• 50g coconut (plus extra to sprinkle on top)
• 1 egg
• 250ml Kara coconut milk (or any other milk)
• 80ml oil
• 1 tsp coconut extract (optional)
• 170g fresh strawberries, chopped into bite-sized pieces (I quartered most of my strawberries, unless they were exceptionally large)

1. Pre-heat oven to 190C.
2. Line a muffin tray with 12 paper muffin cases.
3. Sieve the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a large bowl.
4. Stir in the coconut.
5. In a smaller bowl, whisk the egg.
6. Add the oil, milk and coconut extract, and mix.
7. Pour the wet bowl into the dry bowl and stir to combine. Don't overstir, the batter will still be slightly lumpy, but there should be no visible flour.
8. Add the chopped strawberries and mix in with just a couple of strokes.
9. Put the batter into the cake cases (mine came to about 5mm below the top)
10. Put into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, until a cake test/skewer comes out clean (this took exactly 20 minutes for me, in a fan oven at 170C).
11. Enjoy! :)

These are delicious. I love the coconut on top, and the soft juicy fruit inside. If only the weather outside matched how summery these muffins are!

It seems that us bloggers do like our themes. I often find that people make similar things at similar times, and it turns out that these muffins are no exception! After making these muffins last night, I read Maria's blog and saw that she'd made coconut brownies, and then this morning I noticed that Kate had posted about strawberry coconut filled muffins. Her muffins use jam rather than fresh strawberries, but still, slightly spooky!

Strawberries are such a summery fruit, and as summer is coming to a close I do like to bake with the last fruits of the season to store in the freezer...plus, Waitrose have got a special on big trays of strawberries at the moment so I have lots to use!! :)

What is your favourite muffin variety? Or your favourite type of baked good? Looking back at the photos from those first, not so successful (!), rhubarb muffins, the next muffins I attempted - from the cookbook - were pear and ginger. Those were really tasty, and I got some pears in our veg box this week so they might be next on my list. I need to clear up some space in our freezers first though!

Bank Holiday Sunshine

I hope everyone in the UK has been enjoying the bank holiday weekend? We've had fun the last two days, enjoying the sunshine. Saturday was a bit miserable (which I solved by making caramel sauce!) but yesterday and today have been wonderful!

Despite my sweet tooth, I've been waking up fancying savoury breakfasts recently, specifically eggs. Yesterday I had two slices of seeded toast with raspberry jam, plus two scrambled eggs...

This morning I also had two scrambled eggs, with one slice of seeded toast + pure spread, and an avocado nectarine 'salsa'...

These were both delicious, I love the egg-jam combo, and this morning's avocado was so creamy, delicious!

Lunches have also been great. Yesterday, Liam had a long shift at work so had requested a "light" lunch as he's usually too tired to eat much. I aimed to please with a summery salad (plus it meant I could spend more time in the garden before starting to cook!) - spinach, quinoa and basil tofu, plus mozzarella for the others...

This was really tasty, warm quinoa with cold spinach and tofu was a great combo, and it was filling without being too heavy. I also drizzled a little sesame oil in the quinoa for extra flavour, yum!

Today Liam had the day off work, so we went out for lunch. I had a sweet and sour vegetable stir fry with noodles...

...plus a bowl of sweet potato fries for everyone to share...

The sweet potato fries were, of course, amazing! The stir fry was nice - the vegetables were really fresh - but there was a bit too much sauce for my liking.

After lunch, the others had ice creams on the seafront...

but I went to Costa instead and got a iced vanilla soy latte...

Mmm, real coffee! I switched to decaf coffee a week or two ago as every time I had a latte I was getting horrible making-me-double-over stomach pains. However, when it started happening after some of my meals as well, I started to realise that it usually occurred when I had a lot of dairy. So the last few days I have been using non-dairy milks, avoiding cheese etc (although still eating trace amounts of dairy in cakes and chocolate chips!) and I am pleased to report that, so far, I've had no stomach pains. And (more importantly!!!) this coffee caused no problems, so I can start having caffeine again, yey!! :-D

I haven't really eaten proper "dinners" the last couple of days - yesterday I had lots of snacks during the afternoon. Including, but not limited to, several coconut cakes topped with raspberry jam...

and an Alpro Soya vanilla dessert with pb & chocolate chips...

So I ended up having dinner pretty late, and still fancied something sweet. Enter porridge made with a mashed banana and peanut flour, topped with Julie's peanut butter granola...

I think I should have cooked the granola for a minute or so more as it didn't get very crunchy, but it was still so addictive - I ate the whole batch over the course of the evening!

Delicious, I want to try baking lots of different types of granola now - so easy to make, I can't believe I haven't done it before!

This evening, I haven't actually had any dinner yet. We didn't end up eating lunch until 3.30pm as Izzy was awake at 4am so had a 2.5 hour nap in the middle of the day! I have made muffins this evening, but I will wait until I can take photos in better light to share that recipe tomorrow. I ate one of those straight out of the oven though, and will go and get more food once I publish this, I just don't know what I fancy/can be bothered to make!

We have made the most of the sunshine to go to the play park lots over the last two days. Izzy had been desperate to go for days but the weather kept preventing us, so as soon as we saw the sun was out yesterday, we knew what we had to do! Yesterday, my sister and her boyfriend joined me and the children - we went at 9.30am on Sunday morning, so the park was still nice and quiet!

Today, Liam and I took the children to the park twice. Being a bank holiday, it was much busier, but we still had fun. We first went this morning...

We had then planned to go straight for ice cream, but both children were very tired (aka grumpy!) so we went home for them to both have naps. We came back to the park on the way home from lunch later on...

I'm so glad we managed to fit in lots of fun this weekend! I doubt the sunny weather will be around for that much longer (it is already quite chilly even when the sun is out) and Izzy goes back to school next week anyway. She's really looking forward to going back, but I'm a bit sad - it's been fun to have her around more and not have to stick to the routine of the school run!

How has your weekend been? Did you do anything special today if you had a bank holiday? Oh, and I wanted to say 'have a great time' to all of you that are meeting up in Manchester tomorrow - I've been reading all your tweets and wishing I could be there...if only it wasn't so far away/so expensive to get there! I look forward to reading all about it on your blogs though! :)

Condensed milk plus butter equals...

...amazing caramel sauce!! (well, after about 5 minutes over a low heat)

Liam had this on top of an already saucy chocolate sponge pudding, but I went for the "healthier" option and chopped up two nectarines and some strawberries...

Yum, this was a good choice as the caramel 'sauce' was so thick and sticky that Liam found it too rich with the chocolate pudding, whereas it was the perfect balance with lots of fresh fruit...good Saturday evening snack! :)

Other eats today have included a messy but delicious fried egg sandwich on soda bread for lunch...

breaded courgette "fries" with houmous for dinner...

and lots of snacks! A few weeks ago I ordered a box of chocolate brownies and malteser traybake for my sister and her boyfriend, from KitschnBake. We were on holiday when they received them, but my Mum saved one of the brownies for me. Even after 3 weeks in the freezer, this still tasted amazing!

So fudgy, and with chunks of white chocolate in it, yum, thanks M-J! Liam wants us to order a box for ourselves...I know I could make brownies myself, but I never usually do, so ordering from KitschnBake is a great solution. Think we'll have to wait until a special occasion before I feel we 'deserve' to order a box though!!

I did a big shop in Waitrose this morning. Liam took the children to his parents house while I went, so I got to shop in peace, bliss! Although it did of course mean I spent more than usual! We were already fully stocked with fruit and veg from Friday's veg box, but I stocked up on non-dairy milks, pasta, tinned beans, frozen fruit etc etc, plus a few treats that caught my eye...

Clearspring brown rice noodles in a miso ginger soup that I saw on Laura's blog, rice noodles, Rude Health multigrain thins that I saw on Maria's blog, Vogel's sunflower and barley bread (I usually get the soy & linseed version), and some little coconut cakes that were on offer 2 for something, so I got a chocolate pack as well for the others.

The coconut cakes are delicious, especially spread with raspberry jam...

ugly photo, but tasty cake...a few of these have already been consumed today! :)

How have all your Saturdays been? I don't feel we've really done much today (apart from shopping and eating!) as we'd planned to go to the park this afternoon, but it started pouring with rain just as we were about to go out. Poor Izzy has been desperate to go for the last few days but the weather hasn't allowed it. Luckily my sister was around to take the edge off the disappointment! I did go swimming yesterday though, yey, my first exercise in over a month!!

Congratulations Sarah and Mike!

On Saturday, Liam and I went to our friends' wedding. I'd already been to Sarah's Hen Do the week before, and now it was time for them to get married! Liam's Mum had the children overnight, so Liam and I stayed in a hotel for the night...bliss!

The wedding was at 1.30pm, with the first food being served about 3pm, so I didn't really know what to do about meals beforehand. In the end, I had a couple of cranberry and date hot cross buns (resurrected from the freezer) for breakfast...

and then had an apple doughnut on the drive down...

Yum, my favourite!

We got to the hotel three hours before check-in, but luckily our room was ready so we were able to check in early to get ready for the wedding. The room was really cute...

Unfortunately it wasn't exactly swimming weather...

We were all so worried, on Sarah's behalf, about the weather as it was absolutely horrible in the morning. It turned out to be really lovely though - it dried out just before the ceremony, and by the time they were married and wanted to go outside for photos, it was glorious sunshine, such a relief! :)

We got to the venue a little early...

 to catch up with some university friends...

and then it was time to go into the ceremony room. The bride was about 20 minutes late because of traffic, so Mike had quite a lot of time waiting at the front...

but Sarah was definitely worth the wait :)

After the ceremony, we did some more mingling with Pimms (my favourite!)...

Shiny face much??!

before going outside for some photos...

We then went back inside to have our delicious three-course meal. The venue looked great!

We listened to the father of the bride, groom and best man do speeches, and then it was time for the food! For my starter, I had the 'trio of melon cocktail served with ginger syrup'...

This was so refreshing. I don't think I'd ever had watermelon before, and to be honest I wasn't overly keen, but all the other melons were delicious and the ginger syrup was lovely and subtle.

For my main course, I had 'pear, goats’ cheese, leek and tarragon in creamy sauce served in a filo parcel'. I was sat on a table of 8, and I was the only vegetarian, but two other people had chosen the vegetarian for their main course as well. It was a good choice - so pretty!

We all loved the presentation of this - edible flowers - cute! Sarah, the bride, is a vegetarian, so I figured she'd choose a good vegetarian option :) As well as looking great, the taste was fantastic too. I've had vegetarian food in filo before where the filo pastry is really soggy, but that wasn't the case with this at all - lovely and crispy. There was so much goats cheese in it as well - the texture was almost a bit too meaty for me - I had to get Liam to check it wasn't chicken! But it tasted wonderful, and I adored the creamy leek sauce too.  It also came with an individual portion of side vegetables which were really tasty - we all especially loved the mashed potato!

This course was so filling, I left a lot of the top layer of pastry, but I still managed to fit in dessert...

'Summer pudding served with berry sauce'...

Yum, as I mentioned in my Oreo Cheesecake post, summer pudding is one of my favourites, and this didn't disappoint!

I was so full after all this food! Luckily, there were then a couple of hours 'free', and as the weather was still so lovely we spent most of it outside drinking Pimms/cider, and chatting. It was really nice to have that time in the day to relax. First though, the confetti (and bubbles) throw!

Sarah and her bridesmaids arrived at the wedding in a camper van, and after the confetti, she and Mike sat there for a little while posing for the many people with cameras!

We then headed round to the back of the hotel, where several rooms and a bar had been reserved specially for the wedding, as well as an outside space with picnic tables.

Sarah and Mike appeared on the balcony of their hotel room, and were persuaded to give us a 'royal kiss'...

Awww! :)

In the evening, there was a DJ and a buffet. Before we could eat though - the first dance. The first dance was the one part of our wedding that I really didn't enjoy - I felt so awkward dancing with everyone watching! Sarah and Mike seemed to be having fun though...

I wasn't really hungry after our huge, late "lunch", but Liam and I still went to investigate the buffet...

This was my plate - an egg mayonnaise roll, potato wedges, breaded mushrooms and nachos...

I also had another egg mayonnaise roll when Liam got a second plate...I love egg mayonnaise! :)

I then did some dancing (I persuaded Liam to join in for one dance, but apart from that it was just girls dancing!)...

And then Liam and I hit up the wedding cake - we shared this plate between us...

vanilla sponge and chocolate sponge, both were delicious! The wedding cake also had a layer of fruit cake but we both prefer sponge.

We went home soon after this - it had been a wonderful day. Thanks so much Sarah and Mike for inviting us to share it with you :)

The next day, I woke up at the hotel with an appetite - I always make the most of buffet breakfasts when we stay at hotels!! First I had a bowl of muesli, lots of toast, coffee, and lots of glasses of orange juice...

and I finished the meal off with poached eggs on toast...

Yum, a great end to a great (short) weekend. We then headed back to the children - it's nice to have a little time away together occasionally, but we were glad to see them when we got back! :)

Phew, this was a long post! I'm now doubly glad I'm splitting up my own wedding photos into lots of different posts!! I posted the most recent installment yesterday, in case you missed it - the 'Getting Ready' photos.

Have you been to any weddings recently? What is your favourite part of the day? I love seeing the bride make her big entrance, and love seeing how happy everyone is. But, true to form, I also get excited to see what the food is like...this wedding certainly didn't disappoint!! :)