Tag Archives: red pepper

#435 – Quinoa Salad Lunch

#436 - Quinoa Salad

Last week a group of friends and I had dinner at Keenwä, a newish Peruvian restaurant situated on the Cape Town fan walk in Waterkant Street. We where one of a handful of tables in the restaurant that evening and thus got to speak with the hostess and owner at length about the menu and general intricacies of running the first Peruvian restaurant in South Africa. An interesting example being the two staple and readily available ingredients in Peru, limes and quinoa, are the two most expensive ingredients for them to source in South Africa.

We tasted dishes including Cerviche, Tiradito, a reinterpretation of Aji de Gallina and of course quinoa. Today’s lunch is inspired by the quinoa salad we shared, although I used the vegetables I had on hand instead of trying to recreate the dish we had that evening.

Today’s Lunch:

  • Quinoa with mixed salad leaves, red peppers, spring onions, pomegranate arils and mange tout.

#414 – Broccoli Blue Cheese Soup Lunch

#414 - Broccoli Blue Cheese Soup

Awhile back Sigrid from Cooking and Eating with Polkadotcupcake and Marisa from The Creative Pot where chatting about Mexican food on Twitter.  Their conversation escalated into a cheese slut confessional and the creation of the #cheeseslut tag. Soon bloggers started coming out of the woodwork (including myself) declaring their love for all things cheesy.  Check out Browniegirl, Cook sister! and My easy cooking for more #cheeseslut posts.

#cheeseslut

This soup was my contribution to a weekend #cheeseslut cooking challenge and also to Mothers’ Day lunch. I made sure I had some leftover for lunch the next day too though.

Today’s Lunch:

  • Broccoli and blue cheese soup,
  • an avocado sandwich with red pepper and lettuce and
  • an apple.

Here is my recipe for the soup

Ingredients:

  • 1l vegetable stock,
  • 300g broccoli florets,
  • 2 small potatoes peeled and cubed,
  • 125g creamy blue cheese,
  • 125ml milk

Method:

  1. Place vegetable stock, broccoli and potato in a pot, bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes or until potato is tender.
  2. Crumble blue cheese into pot, add milk and blend till smooth.
  3. Serve immediately with warm slices of toasted bread or croutons.

#405 – Risotto Lunch

#405 - Risotto

I have plenty of leftovers from this month’s daring cooks challenge, so you know some inevitably land up in my lunch box.  Both versions seemed more tasty after sitting over night letting all the flavours mingle.

Today’s Lunch:

  • Mushroom risotto,
  • sausage, pea and red pepper risotto and
  • a salad with lettuce, cucumber, baby tomatoes, red pepper and spring onions.

Daring Cooks March 2010 – Risotto

I can’t believe it’s been more than a month since my last blog post. I’m quite upset with myself for allowing this to happen, but I won’t go into all my reasons and excuses for not posting. Instead I’d like to share with you my submission for this month’s Daring Cooks challenge.

Daring Cooks - Risotto

The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of MelbournefoodGeek and Jess of Jessthebaker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.

I have made risotto many times before so for me (and I hate to admit this) the real challenge was making the requisite stock from scratch. I used the chicken stock recipe supplied with our challenge and must say was really impressed with the end result. Once I had the risotto base completed I divided it into two and flavoured one half with a combination of sautéed portabellini and oyster mushrooms and a little Geo Watkins Mushroom Ketchup. The other half I flavoured with spicy sausage (debreziner), red pepper and peas. They both came our really well and there where lots of leftovers, some of which found it’s way into my lunch box the next day.

You can find all the recipes for this month’s challenge here.