LET'S GET COOKING

Finally I am back in the swing of things when it comes to cooking. For a while I'd throw a sweet potato and some peppers or an avocado in my bag for lunch and on more than one occasion I would place a bowl of porridge in the microwave for dinner. I guess that what happens when you're busy! However, since starting to regain my mojo (see previous post) I've really started to enjoy cooking and searching for new recipes. Over the last year or so I have bought a few new cookbooks and some of them have been ones that I have very rarely looked at due mostly to the complexity of the recipes and when a recipe has a million ingredients including stuff like bee pollen or some expensive, impossible to find ingredient that are only sold in that one health food shop a hundred miles away then it makes things hard!

However, two recipe books that I've been really enjoying recently are Ready Steady Glow by Madeline Shaw & The Art of Eating Well by Hemsley and Hemsley. Granted both of these books sometimes ask for difficult ingredients, the majority of the recipes however are made using ingredients that you most probably already have in your cupboard.

Over the last few weeks I have slowly been making my way through both of these recipe books making everything from big meals fit for a feast to delicious cakes and biscuits (I have't got pictures of all of these meals as basically I ate them too fast and I forgot to take pictures!). From the Hemsley and Hemsley book I have made dishes such as baked broccoli fritters and avocado dip, courgette fries, lentil stew, ginger & cinnamon cookies, banana bread (favourite), lamb meatballs and cauliflower tabbouleh & black bean brownies.  From Madeline Shaw's Ready Steady Glow I have made delicious meals such as the chickpea curry and the most delicious curry I have ever tasted the lamb and spinach curry (although I made it with beef but will definitely be making it with lamb next time).  I also recently made a Jamie Oliver chocolate and beetroot cake which was actually delicious.

I know that wellness and these types of books have been gaining a bad rep recently with articles such as this one from Vice questioning how actually healthy this type of clean eating is, but I can honestly say that these meals are delicious and filling and I feel much more energetic having eaten them in comparison to just eating porridge and sweet potatoes!

I have also been looking for new cook books and have a few waiting to be bought in my amazon basket including Fearne Cotton's Cook Happy, Cook Healthy and Sirocco: Fabulous Flavours From the East.