Sunday December 5, 2010

Today's Food Diary

Breakfast: Rolled oats with pear, wheatflakes and linseeds

Lunch: Spaghetti with harissa mustard tomato sauce

Dinner: Scrambled egg, toasted carrot bread

Baking: Sugar free oat fruit cookies, wholemeal carrot bread

I ate way too much cookies yesterday so today was a clean up day:) Healthy breakfast as always, followed by a simple low fat vegetarian lunch to help the internal organs recover from yesterdays madness. Well thats the theory anyway.

For my spaghetti I prepared a simple tomato sauce base by cooking the following ingredients on low heat for about an hour: tomato puree, toasted mustard, crushed garlic, harissa, sliced onions and reduced soya pork stock. Basically I threw everything into a pot, covered and cooked on low heat, checking and stirring occasionally. Before serving I added olive oil.

I had a craving for sweets so I decided to bake 3 sugar free oat fruit cookies, yes just 3 regular sized cookies. I used frozen cookie dough. What I usually do is to freeze part of the cake or cookie dough otherwise if I don't freeze it, I will probably eat everything:) The dough freezes pretty well.

Back to sugarfree cookies, I converted a regular oatmeal sultana cookie recipe into a sugar free version by simply increasing the fruit content. And it worked really well, the cookies were addictive like most cookies are. I used raisins and bananas, which I find to be a really nice combination. The smell of baking banana's is quite pleasant. Banana's also made the cookies moist on the inside while the outside was crispy. 

I used pieces of frozen bananas, I found it easier to work with. However I don't think using fresh banana's would do any harm since the bananas become soft during baking anyway. A nice caramelisation formed at the bottom of the cookie since the softened banana, melting butter and oil all found each other at the bottom of the cookie. I am glad they did because it elevated the cookie to another level.

After the successful cookie baking mission, I decided to continue the baking streak and made wholemeal carrot bread. Its the first time I attempted carrot bread. The regular recipes for carrot bread is almost like carrot cake except its a slightly lighter version. I did things different - I simply added grated carrots to a plain wholemeal bread dough. So it was wholemeal bread with grated carrots. I probably won't be making carrot bread again anytime soon. It wasn't bad but it wasn't great either. However it was healthy which is the most positive thing I can say about it.