It's Fry-day, Fry-day, gotta get down on Fry-day.

I'm so sorry about that title. My mind is full of kitchen-based puns (look at my Twitter if you really want to know @tomcastle12) and...no excuses for RB. 


I've been working some stupid hours in the last week, which as a lazy student means I have been: knackered and unable to conjure up anything more complex than things on toast. 


I'm going home today, and so I shall therefore be privy to a kitchen that actually contains THINGS! Makes a change. So I'll get cooking again soon x

Free Graze box on me!

Graze are this lovely little company who send out boxes containing 4 different snacks, from fruit to nuts to flapjacks and oatcakes, to get you to snack more healthily - they are also pretty damn tasty. I've been getting them for a while, and given that it's more appropriate to this blog, I have a code to get your first one free!


So just go to www.graze.com, type in TYKNB8G where appropriate, et voila. Choose your snacks and get them delivered. 

Rocket, Pepper and Herb Pasta!

A simple 'un. I did this one because my original pizza-themed dinner plans failed. So I just went for something straightforward that was quick and delicious. You don't need many ingredients or much time; it takes as long as it takes pasta to cook.

Ingredients:

• 75g* pasta (pick a shape, any shape. I had penne)
• Tomato puree
• Handful of rocket leaves
• Half a medium orange** pepper
• Handful of sesame/pumpkin seeds
• Pinch of oregano
• Grated cheese to garnish

How to:

1. Boil some water in a medium saucepan. Water should be lightly salted/contain a drizzle of olive oil. Either or, not both.
2. When water comes to the boil, lob in your pasta and simmer on a medium heat for about 10-13 minutes. You can always do the texture test to see if its cooked; stab a piece of pasta with a fork, run it under the cold tap and then eat and judge to your personal standard how well its cooked.
3. While the pasta cooks, dice up the pepper half into medium sized pieces, maybe 1cm squared. 
4. When the pasta is cooked, turn the hob heat down (but not off), drain the water (leaving a very small amount still in the pan) and return it to the hob.
5. Quickly squirt in a good amount of tomato puree, then add the rocket, pepper, seeds and oregano. Mix it all in together, stir it round making sure everything's coated in the puree, and serve. Sprinkle your cheese of choice on top - cheddar, parmesan (which is actually non-veggie, so I'll stick to cheddar)...

You could replace the seeds with lightly toasted pine nuts, which are delicious. Just get some and stick them under the grill until they are lightly browned. 

*As with the quinoa in my last recipe, amounts here are largely guesstimated. This is for one person, but I always do more for a single portion because I'm a greedy bugger growing boy.
**Quite a lot of my cooking is often based on colour - I like making things purdy if I can. Peppers do vary in taste, but orange worked well here. Yellow, for colour and taste, would also work.

I failed at making a pizza base.

It went badly, and when I tried to wash up the mixing bowl, it ended up looking, well...

I had to scrape it off the kitchen counter before I scooped the mess back into the bowl before I even tried washing it up, hence the large knife. Next time I might just buy a pizza base.

Quinoa Stuffed Peppers!

So, here we go, my first recipe. Quickly running out of things left to make edible things out of, I remembered I had several large peppers and some quinoa (confusingly pronounced keen-wah). It's a seed-grain-type thing that is a carb source a la rice or pasta, and you cook it in much the same way. Anyway, enough blather, read on, and enjoy this delicious roughly-4-portion-of-vegetable meal!

Ingredients:

• 1 large pepper, preferably green
• 150g quinoa*
• Tin of chopped tomatoes
• 1 medium red onion (white will do though)
• 50g sweetcorn
• 1 lump of frozen spinach
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• Grated cheddar cheese, to garnish
• OPTIONAL: 1 teaspoon maca powder

So, here's what you need to do.

1. Stick the quinoa in a sieve and wash it under cold water, before sticking it in a small-ish saucepan. Cover it with water in the pan - the water should be maybe half an inch above the level of the quinoa - and bring to the boil. Then turn the heat down from high to medium so it simmers, and stick a lid on it. Stir occasionally.
2. Next, chop up the onion and fry in a high-sided pan (frying pan or saucepan, no matter) until it begins browning. 
3. While you wait for the onion to brown, chop the pepper in half and de-seed it. Put the oven on about 180 degrees/Gas 4.
4. Lob the spinach and sweetcorn in with the onion, let everything defrost down, and if necessary, pour a small amount of cold water over the top to speed up the process. 
5. When the vegetables are all defrosted and cooking nicely, add the tin of tomatoes and stir it all in. Add the cayenne (and the maca) at this point, stir it in, and let the whole mixture simmer for a bit. Put the pepper halves in the oven.
6. The quinoa should take 15-20 minutes to cook - if the sauce is done and the quinoa isn't, don't worry, just allow it to continue simmering. You'll know the quinoa is done when it's absorbed all the water and has a fluffy texture. 
7. Remove the pepper halves from the oven. Mix the quinoa and sauce together and stir through thoroughly. 
8. Finally, spoon some of the mixture into the pepper halves, and really pack them as full as you reasonably can, then sprinkle some cheese on the top and stick them in the oven for another 15-20 mins. Et voila!
9. Serve with some salad or something; it's a bit Spartan on its own, but I'd run out of any garnishes, as you can see on the photo.

*I've struggled to find a quantified measurement that isn't in cups, so this is a guesstimate, as I mostly guess anyway. This should be roughly a single portion, but I always cook too much so I can have lunch the following day.

A quick word on the ingredients and things.

I will happily confess that I am turning into a health food 'freak', if you will. Partly to blame (although I love them for it) are my housemates, who for my birthday bought me: 

• Maca powder; a Peruvian root vegetable, that is ground up into a fine powder, and is supposed to be a superfood. Contains all sorts of carbs and fibre and all sorts, great for energy. I put it in nearly everything now, but doesn't mean you necessarily have to. It does make things delicious though.
• Rooibos Chai Tea: more just a demonstration of my health-foodyness; I've started drinking herbal teas. They're great though, rooibos is fantastic before bed, it's caffeine-free. I may experiment with infusions...

Not typical gifts, but I love them. I also put pumpkin/sesame seeds in a lot of things, but (while I recommend getting hold of some, because they make things tasty and are chock-full of good things) they are often not essential.

What I'll try and do is when I put recipes out, I'll add an 'optional ingredients' segment to the ingredient list, so it says what I use, but not what is essential to the recipe.

I still love you guys: Dom, Owen and everyone for the healthfood birthday, and Hannah, for getting me on the seeds. 

Welcome to the Diaries Of An Amateur Veggie

Greetings to y'all.


I love food. Cooking it, particularly, ever since I did Food Technology waaaaay back in Year 7 (then carried it through GCSE) although since I started university it kinda fell by the wayside a bit and I fell into the pasta - chili con carne - curry routine; all very easy to make (I nearly always make stuff from scratch - it's a rare day when you see me even using a jar of stir-in sauce) and tasty, but quite dull and repetitive after a while. Skip forward to about 3 or so months ago, when I decided to become vegetarian, largely for the hell of it. I've never eaten that much meat anyway, so it wasn't much of a change to make. But, after my 'trial period', I realised I really enjoyed it, and it's encouraged me to experiment so much more and try new things. 


So, the point of this blog is for me to share my culinary inventions. I'll pop up a photo and my recipe, as closely as I can, with the intention of trying to give a bit of inspiration into healthier eating. Because it's bloody easy, and this is the healthiest I've been in my life.


I take inspiration from (the gorgeous) TV chef Gizzi Erskine, and in particular her show Cook Yourself Thin, which I find compulsively watch-able. But mainly, I just want to make things and share them with people. I hope you enjoy it, and I'll always take suggestions and tips.