Sourdough Pancakes

One of the suggestions in my sourdough group on facebook was things to do with leftover sourdough starter (or discard). This is because sometimes when you have bulk fed your starter to make bread you have extra leftover. I’ve tried brownies (they were nice but a little weird), and then discovered these pancakes.

Good lord were they yummy! Continue reading

FOOD!

Ok so thanks to my amazing sourdough experiments I have put on 3kgs (might also be all the wine and cake and sweeties…) and my wonderful neighbour also got me a subscription to Olive magazine for my birthday, which is packed with amazing recipes that I just needed to try immediately!

None of this is going to help my waistline, but oh my god I do love trying new things in the kitchen, AND some of these are slow-cooker recipes which is encouraging me to use mine a bit more and also helping me manage my transition back to work as I can slow-cook dinners while working from home – all kinds of win!

Here are a few things I have tried out:

Continue reading

Blue Cheese Gnocchi

Another new recipe, this one courtesy of the Co-op free recipe magazine.

It was nice, though next time I would cook the spinach a little longer as it was a tad bitter, and I would be less liberal with the lemon juice, and it rather swamped the other flavours. Also I misread it and only used one punnet of mushrooms instead of two (which seems excessive!), but may have affected the flavour overall.

Ingredients:

  • 1 packet of fresh gnocchi (400g)
  • 400g Chestnut mushrooms, sliced
  • 1 tbsp Olive Oil
  • 1 bag of baby spinach (approx 125g–200g)
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 40g Walnuts, chopped
  • Lemon juice and zest
  • 60g Stilton
  • 50g half fat creme fraiche

Steps:

  1. Heat the olive oil and cook the mushrooms and garlic for 3-4 mins (the first time I cooked this I just used 1 packet of mushrooms and hadn’t realised the recipe required 2 packets of mushrooms!)
  2. Add in the spinach, cover and turn down the heat for a bit (I didn’t cook the spinach long enough so make sure it’s nice and wilted)
  3. Cook the gnocchi as per packet instructions
  4. Stir gnocchi into the spinach and mushroom mixture with the lemon juice, (not too much lemon juice – just a little then flavour to taste later) blue cheese, creme fraiche – add in a little water if it looks too dry.
  5. Sprinkle with parsley and walnuts and salt and pepper.

It’s yummy…..

Curly Girls

Ok, so recently I’ve decided to play around with my hair and see if I can follow the “Curly Girl” method, and see how curly I can get my hair to go naturally.

Now this is mainly due to the fact that I am still, after 11 months, trying to learn the best way to manage my mixed-race daughter’s amazing luscious curly hair. It has grown an awful lot in that time, and gotten so much thicker and longer. I didn’t want to just experiment on a two-year old with all these new methods and thought I would experiment on myself as well just to see what happens. 

Given the current events worldwise in support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, I wanted to explain a bit more about why and how my curly hair journey is so interlinked with discussions on race happening around the globe. It sounds ludicrous to put those two things together, but hear me out. Continue reading