Fruit Scrolls

Posted on June 13, 2012 by theLABkitchen

I have a confession to make… I have been hoarding some Christmas fruit mince at the back of the fridge for… well, since Christmas. I just couldn’t bring myself to cook it, it was likely letting go of the last bit of Christmas magic and I wasn’t ready for that. If I held onto it a few more weeks I could have had it for Christmas in July.

Eventually I decided that it’s time to let this little fruit mince go from my apron strings out into the world of baked goods, but making fruit mince pies at this time of year would just be crazy (well at least more crazy than counting down the months to the next fruit mince batch – 5 months, if you’re interested – and that’s the current level of crazy I’m accepting in my life. So I made fruit scrolls for a morning treat. I get to enjoy the fruit mince that I love so much, but in a more seasonally appropriate form.

Everything tastes better in a circle?


If you haven’t got Christmas hoarding issues, you could use jam, or cheese and ham, or vegemite instead of fruit mince. This would be good to do for kids lunchboxes so you know what’s in their sweet treats and they freeze well so make a batch on Sunday to send to school throughout the week.

This post is on a special day, my Dad’s birthday. Happy birthday Dadio. Dad and I love fruit mince, we each make 5 litres of fruit mince for Christmas and just about eat our own body weight in dried fruit by the New Year. So it seems fitting to have a fruit mince based recipe for today. Enjoy Dad, this one’s for you!
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Posted in Dessert, Frugal Foods, Morning Tea, Snacks, Vegan and Delicious, Vegetarian | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Olive and Rosemary Bread

Posted on June 12, 2012 by theLABkitchen

I just love homemade bread at the moment. It smells so good and tastes so much better than store bought. The no knead sandwich bread from 2 weeks ago is so versatile it makes it easy to make different flavours whenever your feel like something a bit more exotic.

I’ve just made a wholemeal with fresh thyme which smells amazing, but on show today I have for you olive and rosemary bread.

Olive with rosemary is a match made in heaven, if heaven is somewhere near the Acropolis. Give this a go and try it with some avocado smeared on top, delicious!

Good enough to eat straight, just like this!


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Healthy Chicken Strips

Posted on June 11, 2012 by theLABkitchen

When you start eating more healthily, there are some foods that you should just forget about except maybe as a once a year treat and other foods that can be brought back to their essence and made healthy and tasty. Chicken chippies/chicken nuggets are one such food.

Get rid of the horrible processed chicken filling that’s mainly salt and fat and get some lean chicken breast, give it a light, tasty coating and bake – don’t fry it. Then you have a healthy grown up version of junk food.

This is good for kids so they get fun food that tastes as good as it is for them, or as snacks for adults when watching a big game.

Tasty snacks and no horrible processed food in sight!


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Olive Basil Dip

Posted on June 8, 2012 by theLABkitchen

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve walked through the shops, seen something and thought “I could make that,” actually I usually think “I could do BETTER than that.” Clearly I’m not afraid of making things at home that others would just buy (e.g. bread and yoghurt), and often I find that dips are overpriced and just filled with mayonnaise so I figure out how to make my favourite flavours at home.

This dip was actually invented because we wanted something to go with a glass of wine one night when the shops were already closed. We had limited ingredients in the house (of course it was the night before the markets!) but sometimes limitations drive the best of inventions.

I think I should change the blog name to “ugly but delicious”


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Posted in Dips, Frugal Foods, Snacks, Vegetarian | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Egg White Omelette with Capsicum, Leek and Mushroom

Posted on June 7, 2012 by theLABkitchen

I was challenged to find fillings for an egg white omelette that made it delicious, but made sure it stayed super healthy, so no pile of bacon and cheese 😦

If it wasn’t for being challenged you wouldn’t be getting an omelette recipe as generally I find omelettes pretty gross. I like poached eggs but when they’re fried I don’t like the flavour as much so I wouldn’t usually eat omelettes. I’m really glad I was challenged because I really enjoyed this breakfast. If you like omelettes already, give this a go because you’ll probably love it!

My go to ingredient for flavour is as usual paprika, added with some tasty vegies more herbs and a tiny teaspoon of parmesan (lots of flavour from a small amount – better calorie value than cheddar) it turned into something wonderful, like a holiday romance.

I thought tasty omelette was oxymoron, but clearly I proved myself wrong.


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Posted in Breakfast, Brunch, Healthy and Tasty, Main Dishes, Vegetarian | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Lemon Ricotta Cupcakes with Pomegranate Cream Cheese Icing

Posted on June 6, 2012 by theLABkitchen

I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, certainly not for mass-produced sweets, chocolates or cakes. They’re way too sweet and it really masks the interesting base flavours like chocolate or fruit. So when I do eat something sweet it tends to be natural, either fruit or dried fruit, or a little square of very dark chocolate so the natural flavour of the chocolate is apparent.

Sometimes though you need a nice little cake, and so I took my first steps with cupcakes for a girly evening. Often I don’t like cupcakes because the icing is teeth-shatteringly sweet and the cake is dry and bland. Seriously, why do we pay $3 for something that is beautiful but lacking anything other than half a ton of sugar? I guess it’s the same reason people buy Vogue.

Inspired by Middle Eastern flavours, these cakes were not overly sweet and the icing was at least as tangy as it was sweet. The cake was moist because of the ricotta and tasty with zesty lemon, to top it off was a tangy pomegranate molasses cream cheese icing and pistachio sprinkles. No boring, expensive cupcakes for me.

A Middle Eastern cupcake?


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Posted in Dessert, Snacks | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Simple Pumpkin Soup

Posted on June 5, 2012 by theLABkitchen

It’s starting to get a little chilly in Brisbane now… ok… so our winter is like summer for many of you, but it’s still cold enough to enjoy a rich warming soup in the evening. The other thing at this time of year is… EXAMS…so food needs to be healthy, quick and full of vitamins.

Pumpkin soup (that’s squash to the North Americans) is one of my favourite soups, it is super tasty, unbelievably easy and I get to eat it all by myself! For some reason K doesn’t like pumpkin soup (but he likes pumpkin in everything else, go figure?).

Leek and sage are pumpkin’s natural companion flavours, with a little oil, salt, pepper and water, and that’s it! 6 ingredient soup (plus water, no need to be a pedant).

Pumpkin soup with yoghurt and a little fresh cracked pepper


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Posted in Frugal Foods, Healthy and Tasty, Main Dishes, Soups, Vegan and Delicious, Vegetarian | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

No Knead Sandwich Bread

Posted on June 1, 2012 by theLABkitchen

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and probably a hundred more times in the future: the smell of fresh bread is out of this world. Now this recipe gives you no excuse not to make fresh bread because it’s so easy and you don’t even need to knead it!

This is a super easy recipe: dump the flour, yeast and salt in a bowl, roughly mix through the water, sleep, pop the dough in the pan at 8am, bake at 10am, fresh lunch bread at 12pm. This works best if you set it up on a Friday/Saturday afternoon so you have fresh bread Saturday/Sunday lunch. However you could set it up one evening and then bake it the next evening if you are not home during the days.

Smells even better than it looks!


So this isn’t my recipe, I found it on Macheesmo, and Nick got it from a New York Times article, but the varieties you can make with it are endless and you can claim them as your own. I used this as the basis of my Perfect Hot Cross Buns and this version gives you the ability to determine the ratio of flour/water depending on the size of your pan (that’s my contribution to the no knead bread revolution).

After making elephant-man bread when I made too much, and a couple of rather squat loaves, I have found that a good ratio of flour to pan size is 1:2. So a 10 cup pan (like my large loaf tins) makes as big a loaf as possible with 5 cups of flour. Then the water is half the quantity (or a smidge more) of the quantity of flour, so for 5 cups of flour use 2.5 to 2.75 cups of water.
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Posted in Frugal Foods, Vegan and Delicious, Vegetarian, Yeasty goods | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Healthy Breakfast Fry Up

Posted on May 30, 2012 by theLABkitchen

While losing weight, K and I often had a massive fry up for breakfast on the weekend, sounds crazy, eh? There are a few tricks you can use to make your hot breakfast healthy, and that will be the content of this post.

You may ask “why post a Sunday breakfast recipe on a Wednesday?” Well to give you time to prepare for Sunday of course! No point posting it Sunday morning so you can’t have it until the next weekend.

Looks delicious, tastes even better


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Sidecar

Posted on May 29, 2012 by theLABkitchen

I am currently in the middle of an econometrics assignment (for those that don’t know, it’s worse than it sounds). So after work I head out to uni for a late night in the computer labs. There is not a lot to keep you motivated during these times, but coming home to a warm home and a little cocktail certainly helps me push through.

K and I really like traditional cocktails. The fancy modern ones can be fun for a night out, but at home the clean flavours of the old favourites are our preference. This is a super simple cocktail, but wonderfully balanced.

The Sidecar – perfect for budding econometricians?


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