Stewed Rhubarb with Walnut-Coffee Crumbs

The recipe I'm about to share is a beautiful healthy dessert and I'm sure it can become one of your favourites, too. It's really quick and easy to make, requires ingredients availavle in any kitchen and tastes like heaven, what more can you dream of?

Not only can you serve the dish as a dessert but also add to your granola, yoghurt or toast for breakfast and even serve with roasted meat.

Here you have sour rhubarb balanced by honey or maple syrop and spiced with ginger, and walnut-coffee crumbs are a wonderful rough addition which makes the whole dish perfectly composed. Definitely a must-try, beautiful light dessert.

Ingredients (serves 2):

4 rhubarb stalks about 25-30 cm length

2 tablespoons honey or maple syrop

1 tablespoon olive oil

5 walnuts

1 teaspoon good-quality ground coffee

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

a pinch of nutmeg

optionally yoghurt, granola or toasts to serve

Directions:

Wash your rhubarb and cut the stalks into 5 cm length pieces. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a pan over low heat and add rhubarb. Stir for half a minute and add honey or maple syrop, half a teaspoon ginger, half a teaspoon cardamom and a pinch of nutmeg. Cover with water (you will need 100-150 ml), cover with a lid and bring to the boil. Now remove the lid and let simmer for 5 minutes over medium heat: half of the liquid will evaporate and you will get tender spicy rhubarb in a thick sauce.

Meanwhile grind the walnuts into crumbs in a blender adding to them a teaspoon groud coffee and 1/2 teaspoon ginger.

Serve the rhubarb over yoghurt, granola or toasts, garnish with these walnut-coffee crumbs and enjoy, your lovely healthy dessert is ready!

Beautiful Roasted Fennel and Garlic Soup

Being a huge fan of garlic I had been willing to make a simple roasted garlic soup for months and couldn't make myself just go and do it putting it off and off. Until I thought that roasted garlic could make a nice pair with fennel - both are rather sweet and creamy when roasted, and the idea looked so interesting that I made this soup almost immediately.

No surprise, the dish turned out to be incredible! No milk, just veggies and a little bit of olive oil - and you get such a beautiful tender creamy texture that you can hardly believe the soup is actually so light and simple! This one definitely goes into my favourites list!

Ingredients (serves 2):

2 garlic heads (about 35 cloves), cloves washed but unpeeled

2 garlic heads (about 35 cloves), cloves peeled

1 fennel bulb (about 200 g)

2 yellow onions

10 green olives, unpitted

a good pinch of nutmeg

1 bay leaf

300 ml boiling water

good quality extra virgin olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 180ºC/350°F.

Wash and cut your fennel into equal segments and place them into a baking tray.

Add washed and unpeeled garlic cloves to the fennel, season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and generously drizzle with good quality olive oil. Toss well, cover with foil and place the tray into the oven for 40 minutes.

In 40 minutes put the tray out of the oven and let the vegetables cool a bit. Meanwhile heat a little olive oil in a pan over medium heat, thinly slice 2 onions and add them to the pan along with peeled garlic cloves. Add a bay leaf and a good pinch of nutmeg and cook stirring occasionally until the onions soften for about 10 minutes.

When our baked vegetables become cool enough to handle squeeze garlic cloves and add the mass along with fennel to the pan. Add 300 ml water, bring to the boil, turn down the heat, cover with a lid and let simmer for 10 more minutes.

Transfer the soup to the bowl of your blender and puree. Season with more sea salt and black pepper if needed.

Take 10 green olives, smash them, pit and chop finely.

Pour the soup into the bowls, add a couple tablespoons chopped olives into each bowl, drizzle with some more good quality extra virgin olive oil and serve. This is a beautiful creamy vegetable soup, absolutely light and healthy, you will love it.

Bon Appétit!

Best Snacks Ever: Crispy, Tasty and Healthy

This recipe adapted from My New Roots is my personal food revolution concerning snacks, healthy foods, fast foods and joy of food at the same time.

When you deside to switch to wholesome foods - no matter how you do it, of your own free will or by force - the first thing you have to do is to give a lot of things up. You give up chips, sausages, mayo, cookies and other prosessed foods and this is so hard mentally - on one day to review all your habits which you developed during your life. It's sad and it's logical that you indulge from time to time and your weight goes up and down and you finally face the necessity of starting over or at least another completing the steps that you have already once completed. All right, here is where I stop talking the sad stuff because I am going to write about the victory of health over useless snacks without prejudice to taste and even to texture!

My advice when switching to healthy foods is not to give anything up but to add healthy wholesome foods to your shopping list. The right grains, green smoothies, organic vegetables and fruits will redirect your body to a completely new healthy way of life and finally on one day you will sipmly stop craving for this fat burger and those sugary pancakes. If only I was given a bag of these healthy snacks when I just desided I wanted to be healthy and beautiful both inside and outside! How easier and happier my way could be!

Ok, these are definitely the healthiest snacks ever. The base is brown rice, quinoa and flaxseeds. The rest is natural flavourings that can be whichever you want: herbs, poppy seeds, olives, nuts, onion, garlic, chia seeds, etc. My favourite is ground cumin: the snacks with this flavour taste exactly like falafel-flavoured Israeli "Bissli" snacks - awfully chemical small "cookies" which I adore to my shame but absolutely can't eat because of my clean stomach :) No more rancid oils, modified potatoes and questionable starches!

I am also posting this as a part of the monthly link up party Our Growing Edge, an event aimed to connect food bloggers and inspire us to try new things. This month is hosted by Chandler from The Chef With The Red Shoes.

And now I will be happy to share with you this simple but wonderful and necessary recipe!

Best Snacks Ever

Ingredients (serves 4-5):

1 cup boiled brown rice (I had a mixture of brown and wild rice)

1 cup boiled quinoa

1/4 cup raw sesame seeds

1/4 cup flaxseeds

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

Toppings and flavourings: walnuts, dried paprika, dried basil, chia seeds, hemp seeds, garlic, ground cumin

Directions:

Cover your flaxseeds with 1/2 cup boiling water and set aside for 15 minutes. Meanwhile toast sesame seeds in a pan to open their flavour.

In a bowl of your blender mix rice, quinoa, flaxseeds with their liquid, salt, balsamic vinegar and olive oil and blend them all together.

You may blend the mixture into a smooth dough or you can leave the texture of the ingredients - it will not affect the taste. The aim is to get a rather viscous and sticky mixture. In the end you'll just have to add toasted sesame seeds and mix without blending.

And now begins the creative part: you choose the toppings and flavours and start to roll the dough. If you are using some ground spices or herbs (like I used paprika, basil and cumin) then you first have to mix the flavour into the dough, and if you use a topping (like nuts, garlic and various seeds) then you just roll the dough and then top with what you want and press a little to let it stick to the base.

To roll the dough you will need to place it between 2 sheets of non-sticking parchment paper. Roll it into a very thin layer, then remove the upper sheet of paper and with a knife score the dough into the shapes of your future snacks.

This time I had 7 different flavourings and took 2 heaped tablespoons dough for each of them.

Bake the snacks at 170ºC for 25-30 minutes until golden and crispy. If the edges are already done while the middle pieces are not - just remove the cooked ones and return the rest to the oven until done. Cool the cooked snacks and break them into separate pieces.

Hereby you get absolutely guilt-free snacks with great health benefits of brown rice, quinoa, flaxseeds and your chosen toppings. You can eat these while keeping any diet, sticking to healthy foods and even once a week during detox! You can eat them in the evening and not be afraid to gain weight, you can take them with you to the country side, for a trip, for a walk and for work as a healthy snack! And it's so easy to vary the flavours depending on your personal taste!

Basil-flavoured snacks get a traditional Italian hint, snacks topped with chia or hemp seeds are the richest sources of health benefits, walnuts give a very mild and pleasant sweet taste.

Snacks with paprika are the most beautiful due to their bright red color, snacks with garlic are the most "brutal" ones for those who like it hot, cumin-flavoured snacks remind of Mediterranean cuisine.

No matter what flavour or topping you choose - you get a beautiful crispy texture which will make you forget about store-bought crackers made of white flour and chips in unhealthy oil. You have to definitely try these ones and this will make a huge step forward to your new healthy life!

Green peas, chickpeas and a lemon

I have a folder of nice pictures of a regular but lovely dinner that I made some time ago. This is not a super creative recipe or a brand new combination of flavours but it tastes really really good and I would love to share it with you - perhaps it will inspire you to make something like this and have a pleasant time with your family!

Green peas, chickpeas and a lemon

Ingredients (serves 4):

1,5 cups green peas (fresh or frozen)

1,5 cups boiled or canned chickpeas

1 big red onion

1 bunch flat-leaf parsley

1 big lemon

olive oil and sea salt

Directions:

Heat a little olive oil in a pan over medium heat and add roughly chopped parsley.

In a minute add green peas, squeeze over the whole lemon, add a couple tablespoons water, bring to the boil and cover with a lid turning the heat down to minimum.

In a couple of minutes add thinly sliced red onion and chickpeas, some sea salt, turn the heat up and stir for a few minutes until the onion is soft and the chickpeas are warm.

This is it, a lovely, quick and easy to make delicious dish is ready!