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!!

Leftover Turkey = Yummy Curry!

After yesterday's 2nd "Christmas" Dinner, Liam and I spent most of the evening stripping the rest of the turkey for leftovers! We got lots...

I bagged this up into portions for the fridge/freezer (was clearly feeling organised for once!) and it made enough for 6 family size meals, plus there were already some slices in the fridge for sandwiches...yum...I love leftovers more than the actual roast! :)

On to this morning though and back to routine :( Liam starts work at 7am on Sundays and baby got woken by the alarm so it was an early start for all of us! After sorting out the kids' breakfasts I needed some fuel of my own to keep me going! I decided to do a repeat of yesterday's "pink porridge" with oats, Kara coconut milk and frozen black forest fruits...

topped with some dried papaya and a much needed blob of peanut butter!

to be honest the papaya was a bit unnecessary but the peanut butter was definitely a good addition...delicious! :)

Unfortunately an early breakfast meant I failed at the first hurdle with regards to no snacking. I need to buy some more fresh fruit to try to stave off the hunger/munchies! As it was I tried to prevent too much damage by having a Nak'd Cocoa Mint bar...

and then finished off the Nutella (luckily hardly any left!) and ate a whole 60g bag of dolly mix sweets...

bleurgh, I felt so sick after all of this junk! I've been really good at resisting the Nutella recently - admittedly because it's been so cold in our kitchen that the Nutella was solid until today so required chipping off and microwaving if you wanted it on toast!!

I bought this biscuit tin for Liam for Christmas, think it's more appropriate for me though!!

I filled it with Boost chocolate bars (his favourite) when I gave it to him and it's still more than half full...he has way more willpower/self-control than me!!

Anyway, back to today's food. I had no idea what we would be having for lunch as we were going over to my Grandparents to see my cousin who is visiting from Australia. They'd put on a buffet...

my main plate...

the mushroom quiche/tart was from Waitrose and really good, egg mayonnaise sandwich (I had another of these later), sausage roll (another couple of these found my way into my mouth later too!!), smoked salmon blinis and carrot sticks with dip. I also had one mince pie for pud and picked at some more of the carrot sticks and grapes. Lovely to see my cousin and nice food, only problem is that quantity of food wasn't huge but full of calories in form of pastry etc!

I had been looking forward to dinner all day...leftover turkey curry! :) I have to admit to cheating and letting curry paste do the bulk of the work for me. These were the ingredients...

2 small red onions, tikka masala curry paste, about 320g leftover turkey, tin chopped tomatoes and 2x 150g packs of mangetout, plus brown rice to serve with it. I have 5 more bags with the same amount of leftover turkey in for future use, so was pleasantly surprised to see how much turkey it contained once chopped up...

yum, can't wait til all the turkey inspired meals!! Anyway, back to today's curry! I first fried the finely diced onions in a little oil, added a couple of tablespoons of curry paste and the turkey, stirred all together then added the chopped tomatoes and another can's worth of water to get to this stage...

to finish the curry off I added the mangetout and once I'd taken the curry off the heat I stirred in a big-ish splash of double cream. This made a lot! I ended up having a bigger portion than I'd planned as I was worried about re-heating it again when it had already used re-heated meat, so had to eat it all up instead!

this was gorgeous, I do love turkey curry! :) does anyone have any suggestions for me to cook with some of my other turkey leftovers?? I have 5 more bags...I will definitely be making one batch of coronation turkey, and probably another turkey curry...so that leaves 3 more meals to come up with. Rest of the leftovers are in the freezer though so I have time for inspiration to strike!!

Once the kids were in bed, Liam and I couldn't resist some chocolate. We received a ridiculous amount of chocolate for Christmas, although worryingly a lot of it has now been eaten! Our baby "gave" our daughter a huge box of chocolates from Thorntons...

she had already opened them and eaten quite a few but tonight I had 4...or 5...must save the rest for her, although really I'm doing her a favour - her 4 year-old stomach would be sick on all that chocolate!!!

Liam and I then treated ourselves to a pud, he had his in a bowl but I had mine straight from the tub...

chocolate sponge pudding on top of half a tub of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream...

this was so good! :) the chocolate pud stayed warm the whole way through which was great, made the ice cream all lovely and soft :)

I started off today trying to be healthy...it rapidly went downhill though and by this evening I was kind of thinking "may as well eat up the treats now so I can have a fresh start on Thursday"...we have so much rubbish still left in the house from Christmas! We gave quite a few boxes of chocolates away to people we've visited since Christmas but it doesn't seem to have made much difference...I will just have to learn to ignore it all I guess!

On the plus side I managed more than half an hour's reading this afternoon while the kids were playing happily together, so that's one resolution completed for the day! I was given a Kindle for Christmas which is great, has got me back in to reading and makes it so much easier to get back into a book whenever I get a spare 5 minutes. I used to love reading before baby #2 came along but don't usually manage to find the time these days!!